News flash! There is a national test that enables us to compare reading and math scores for every state! It is called NAEP. It reports scores by race, ELLs, poverty, gender, disability status, achievement gaps. This is apparently unknown to the Néw York Times and the Secretary of Education, who has said repeatedly that we need Common Core tests to compare states.
The New York Times, America’s newspaper of record, has a story today about Massachusetts’ decision to abandon PARCC, even though its State Commissioner Mitchell Chrster is chairman of the board of PARCC. True or Memorex? Time will tell.
But the story has a serious problem: the opening sentence.
“It has been one of the most stubborn problems in education: With 50 states, 50 standards and 50 tests, how could anyone really know what American students were learning, or how well?”
Later the story has this sentence:
“The state’s rejection of that test sounded the bell on common assessments, signaling that the future will now look much like the past — with more tests, but almost no ability to compare the difference between one state and another.”
What happened to the National Assessment of Educational Progress? It has been comparing all the states and D.C., as well as many cities, since 1992. Has no one at the New York Times ever heard of NAEP?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They are so clueless on education that I really can’t trust much of what they write on any topic.
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I would challenge the premise underlying standardization. Other than creating uniform markets, what is the advantage of students in all fifty states covering the same dessicated material?
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Beat me to it. Thanks.
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Right on! Have you all taken a look at the new text books? Or lessons written for teachers to use in LAUSD? These lessons direct the teachers in script format as facilitators’ to say….this or that. They are as ridiculous as the tests.
A strike or opt out of any of these tests is the only and best available method we have right now. Urge folks to use that right!
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Funny thing is…they do know about it.
They even reference it.
Willful refusal to connect the dots?
Massachusetts “children led all states in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation’s report card, and rose above all other countries, save Singapore, in science.”
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Christy,
Huh? Singapore administers NAEP? Is PISA the intended reference?
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Just shows how really clueless their education reporters are.
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So once upon a time, when there were no national tests, in what some fondly refer to as “the times when America’s schools were great”, kids weren’t learning because we couldn’t compare states. Darn, I feel uneducated.
Apparently we have stopped teaching logical thinking to journalists.
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It also seems to suggest that a large number of teachers were involved with writing the test:
“So the state joined in when the National Governors Association began drafting what became the Common Core, a description of the skills students should learn by the time they graduated from high school.
“Because of the state’s expertise, large numbers of its teachers joined in writing the standards. The state adopted them in 2010.
Was it this large number of teachers “joining in” or was it the National Governors Association that was behind writing the standards of “The Common Core”?
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Writing the standards, not the test.
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Massachusetts teachers were indeed involved in writing the standards, but that was in 1992-3, before ed “reform” of 1993, referenced in the article. The state board of ed was reorganized in 1993 and changed from a 15 member, non-political board to a 9 person board, with the majority appointed by the governor. A Democratic legislature handed this power over to Rep. William Weld, opening the door to the Pioneer Institute (early reformistas). Despite the law stating that multiple measures of student achievement would be used, we got one measure; high stakes testing, the MCAS. Teacher-written standards were discarded.
Also, under the guise of reform, principals could no longer be members of a union, teachers were required to obtain a Master’s within their first 5 years of teaching (no re-imbursement) and teachers who had previously held lifetime certificates were required to re-certify every five years, submitting evidence of continuing graduate education (on their own time and dime, of course).
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Another article with less facts and more bias from the NYTimes. It made it sound like PARCC was the best thing since sliced bread. It is not! Glad to see comments from MA trying to set the record straight. Then their are the references to the business community…Really????
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Diane… Perfect assessment as always!
It is more than an embarrassment that the “mass media” takes corporate education reform industry propaganda for truth. In fact, it is a dangerous confirmation that without the truth citizens cannot keep their government and leaders in check.
Of course, here in Connecticut we have a governor who not only dramatically increased the amount of standardized testing, claiming it was necessary in order to determine whether schools are making children “college and career ready” but explained,
“I’ll settle for teaching to the test if it means raising test scores” – Governor Dannel Malloy
[See Wait, What? Post, “I’ll settle for teaching to the test, if it means raising scores” Dan Malloy 4/9/12 – http://jonathanpelto.com/2012/04/10/ill-settle-for-teaching-to-the-test-if-it-means-raising-scores-dan-malloy-4912/%5D
So to the New York Times and all the other media entities that have become puppets for the “Education Reformers” remember this…
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right. . . and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, and indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.” John Adams (1735–1826)
Jonathan Pelto
What,What? http://www.jonathanpelto.com
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsiedle/2015/11/20/rhode-island-retired-teachers-association-turning-up-the-heat-on-pension-looting/
(On the subject of teacher pension looting. Thought this might be of interest.)
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Randy,
The biggest critic of public pensions is ex-Enron trader John Arnold. How many employees of Enron lost their pensions when it collapsed. That must have convinced John that people don’t need pensions. He doesn’t. He is a billionaire. I hesitate to mention his name because the last time I did, I was contacted by his PR person and warned that if I didn’t change my description of him, he would sue me. No one wants to be sued by a billionaire.
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How can this pension raiding be legal, and what can be done to stop it?
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Trump has threatened to sue Kasich. So much for free speech.
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Wall Street and politicians “working” together to fleece ordinary citizens. (On Wall
Street: if it’s not illegal, it’s good.)
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Have you written a letter to the editor and the reporter to inform them about the test? Can you make that letter public for the rest of us to use your arguments when the issue comes up in our areas?
Thank you. Susybelle Gosslee
Dallas, Texas
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Susybelle,
I think it likely that the Times will get the message
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It’s bizarre the hoops they’ll jump thru to spin these scores.
Here’s the Columbus Dispatch inexplicably comparing charter schools state-wide to Columbus Public Schools, although the state breaks out charter school scores by county, individually.
“Because most charter students come from the urban districts, however, a more apt comparison for charters might be with the state’s “Big 8” districts, where the comparison is more favorable. In math, 36.7 percent of sixth-graders in Ohio charter schools were proficient or better, compared with the 33.4 percent of Columbus’ sixth-graders who were.”
Why not just compare Columbus charters to Columbus public schools?
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/11/20/State_releases_PARCC_test_scores_for_school_districts.html
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NY Times has “selective hearing”… taken from the “ed reform” playbook!
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Say huuhh???
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Well, with all due apologies to Diane:
News Flash: NAEP SUFFERS ALL ERRORS, FALSEHOODS AND PHSYCHOMETRIC FUDGES AS ANY STANDARDIZED TEST-EXPERT PROVES ALL RESULTS “VAIN AND ILLUSORY”
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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This is an excellent post that needs to be read and re-read. The material found at the link posted in the comment will also be read.
I have to tell students over and over that their worth is not solely determined by standardized tests or whether their intellectual development of a person earning a C is really any less than one who earns an A. Some will do well in a particular subject area, some in others.. The important thing is that students learn as much as they can be learned within their particular capabilities and interests.
Teachers, at least once upon a time, were trained to help determine when a student’s ENTIRE body of learning was adequate to recommend them to universities, further technical training beyond high school, etc. There was a recognition that, just because some students were not at the top of their class, they sometimes possessed intellectual or physical skills that were important but difficult to evaluate given the limitations of test construction and evaluation.
As flawed as pre- and post testing is, I do like the fact that we now (at least in my subject area and in my state) can evaluate a student’s growth individually. Constructing such tests are challenging, since one wants to put a large variety of topics into the test so that everyone can show where they have mastered a particular concept or skill. For example, a student who gets a 25% on a pretest does not have to achieve the same score as one who scored a 50% on the pre-test to meet a growth standard.
It is still too arbitrary a system, but at least it gives everyone a chance. The problem is for many politicians and administrators, if all learning can’t be measured numerically, it has no value. We will continue to need some metrics, but they should not drive education.
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Dave thanks for reiterating the need for all to read what Wilson has proven!!
See below for my thoughts on the end of your post.
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In other words, doing the WRONG thing (testing), with a “good”
heart, is still WRONG.
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NB,
See below for comment on “Doing the wrong thing righter.
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Upon what standards and/or curriculum is NAEP based and aligned to?
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Standards, by definition, must exclude ideas and stifle innovation. Perhaps the NAEP standard is no standard..
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Tim,
Is your GOOGLE button broken?
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/mathematics/whatmeasure.aspx
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The most significant difference between the NAEP and NCLB/ECAA tests is “one of the most stubborn problems” to the Military Industrial Complex. It is that the NAEP does not collect individual student data. Disregarding the harmful effects of annual testing on the quality of public education, here are just a couple potential problems with data analytics:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/19/congress-blasts-u-s-education-department-for-vulnerabilities-in-data-bases/
http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-credit-system-20151122-story.html
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One huge, obvious problem with the Common Core standards is that the promoters have left the grade schools with the impression that teaching critical topics such as how to punctuate a sentence is unimportant.
If the Common Core folks would just focus on true basics, the standards might be awful but somewhat useful.
As it is, the standards encourage schools to turn out kids who seem on paper to have fine argumentative skills but actually need thousands of dollars in tutoring, and hours of knockdown fights over the need for the tutoring, to be functionally literate.
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The other day, I saw exhibit A of the cutting of social studies in elementary school. My class was discussing North America when a student sincerely asked, ‘What is this U.S.?” She didn’t know what U.S. stood for!!! I was horrified. The lack of any cogent history and geography content until 8th or 9th grade is truly showing.
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The NAEP is taken on this weird thing called paper, using old-fashioned writing implements called pencils. And since it’s been given for a while (I don’t know how long, but I think since the 80s), it hasn’t been re-written by a major corporation. Also, the biggest problem with the NAEP is it isn’t used AGAINST anyone! Schools, teachers, no one is punished by its results. So it’s totally outdated and no one is making money selling technology or textbooks. Really, what good is a test like that????
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
What happened to the National Assessment of Educational Progress? It has been comparing all the states and D.C., as well as many cities, since 1992. Has no one at the New York Times ever heard of NAEP?
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The starting date for the NAEP that I found on nces.ed.gov says 1969.
Sponsored by the Department of Education, NAEP assessments have been conducted periodically in reading, mathematics, science, writing, U.S. history, civics, geography, and other subjects, beginning in 1969. NAEP collects and reports academic achievement at the national level, and for certain assessments, at the state and district levels. The results are widely reported by the national and local media, and are an integral part of our nation’s evaluation of the condition and progress of education.
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/faq.aspx
In addition, it seems the New York Times is suffering from memory loss and/or dementia.
Here’s a pull quote from a NY Times piece published in May 21, 2010.
“The test, known as the NAEP, is administered to groups of students randomly chosen throughout the country every two years. It is seen by experts as an important way to compare student performance across states, which have their own standards and definitions of proficiency.”
In addition, the times said, “New York City’s fourth graders are doing significantly better in reading since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the schools, but eighth graders have shown little improvement, according to the results of a national reading test released on Thursday.”
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We were told the Common Core tests could be used by parents so we could “demand better schools” so that might be the difference. Parents can use the scores to measure schools and teachers. In theory.
That’s how it was sold anyway. I don’t go along with the basic philosophy of “demanding” better schools- I never approached it as a “demand/provide” issue. I consider my child a part of the school and the school is part of the community so he and I are not outside it “demanding” anything, but that is the ed reform talking point.
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I demand to look like Brad Pitt, dunk the ball like LeBron James, and be as intelligent as Galileo. Maybe if I just hold my breath and stomp my feet….
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Apparently NEAP is not hard enough and/or given often enough. It cannot be used to label schools as failures. It doesn’t assign blame.
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Reblogged this on stopcommoncorenys.
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Apparently, what the NAEP doesn’t do, is make billions for Pearson, Gates, et al. That is the true shame that the reformers feel–in their wallets.
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” . . .and how could anyone know what students
are learning [without PARCC testing]?”
By this metric, the 2014 – 2015 school year was the one and only point in their history that the citizens of MA had any idea what their students were learning. And that was limited to math and ELA achievement in grades 3 to 8. PARCC must be an amazingly enlightening test.
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…and based on the Parrc, wherever it was used, student achievement is abysmal….as was intended all along. I guess Pearson is going to have to try for a different revenue stream when common core and related testing make tutoring and remediation via Pearson products unnecessary.
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In an attempt to immortalize the Common Core standards, David Coleman has enshrined them in the new SAT. “Let’s see those schools try to wriggle out of this”.
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Quoted in the article is Todd Garza, superintendent of schools in Ludlow, MA:
“It was almost like extortion — if you want this money, you have to do things the way we want,” said Todd Gazda, the superintendent in Ludlow, near the western Massachusetts city of Springfield.”
See what else he had to say on the charter debate:
“I find it disturbing that the only educational policy coming out of the Governor’s office on how to reform public education continues to be the need for more charter schools. Governor Baker, Secretary of Education James Peyser, Chairman of the Board of Education Paul Sagan have no vision for public education in the Commonwealth other than to continue advocating for the need to increase the number of charter schools in the State. This is understandable given the fact that the only educational experience these individuals have is in working for, and with, the charter school industry. This proposal by Governor Baker effectively devalues the hard work occurring on a daily basis by our dedicated educators in public schools across the state. The underlying implication and theme of this legislation is that students must be saved from failing public schools and charters are the only way to accomplish that goal.”
http://superintendentlps.blogspot.com
Diane, I think he deserve a place on the blog’s Honor Roll.
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And here is the one parent representative of the MA BESE on the subject of testing:
“Why place the standardized assessment ahead of our needs for high quality professional development, student-family-community engagement, social-emotional learning, and teaching and learning? How can we move forward with an assessment system that’s not critically aligned with these in partnership with local districts?”
http://mastewartma.blogspot.com/2015/11/some-reflections-on-boards-vote-for-new.html
By the way, the vote by BESE to go with a hybrid MCAS-PARCC contains a “hold harmless” provision for the phase-in of new testing. It appears that schools will not be penalized by low test scores; unless they’re already at the bottom of the heap. Then the Chair, Mitchell Chester, reserves the right to take over schools by declaring them failures, thus ripening the charter market. Just guess which school systems those might be?
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From above response to NoBrick: Doing the Wrong Thing Righter
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
Former Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald Duncan (Viet Nam) did when he noted in Sir! No Sir! that:
“I was doing it right but I wasn’t doing right.”
And from one of America’s premier writers:
“The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
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Response to Dave from above:
“As flawed as pre- and post testing is, I do like the fact that we now (at least in my subject area and in my state) can evaluate a student’s growth individually.”
The concept of a beginning of the year screening/survey/assessment of what a student knows is not inherently bad. I would like to think that all true teachers do that in one fashion or another-assessing students’ needs, knowledge, etc. . . . But to formalize it into a standards/standardized testing situation is quite frankly, absurd due to the inherent limitations of those educational malpractices. Those “evaluations” can be many and varied and need not focus on “growth” (whatever the hell that means when it comes to the teaching and learning process. Here’s a challenge, Dave: In your subject area/grade give us a precise definition of “growth” in the student’s learning that has a measurable standards, a starting and end point, and then what are the measuring devices used to evaluate that growth?
“It is still too arbitrary a system, but at least it gives everyone a chance. The problem is for many politicians and administrators, if all learning can’t be measured numerically, it has no value. We will continue to need some metrics, but they should not drive education.”
It appears Dave that you are still trapped in the numerization mode of needing “metrics”, my guess because that appeals to your sense of fairness and justice by supposedly being objective. The problem is that even numerized, those metrics are still biased, short change students and everyone involved with a false sense of objectivity or scientificity.
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Another Response to Dave.
Since when did the high stakes tests linked to Common Core provide the kind of detailed information that helps parents know the academic strengths and weaknesses of their children?
All this test does is report if the child met some arbitrary line that can be changed annually on a bubble test and used to rank teachers, fire those who have too many students that fall below that arbitrary pass line that doesn’t reveal the details, and also close public schools that have too many students falling below that arbitrary pass line.
The rest of the results, the details that actually MIGHT reveal strengths and weakness in individual students, are hidden away in some digital vault as if they are vital to national security and no one is allowed sees them or even share any of the questions on the test.
These tests are copyrighted by autocratic, OPAQUE, for profit, and often fraudulent private sector corporations.
But, before NCLB, RTTT and the CCC—the era of test and punish, some states had standards and tests that didn’t belong to these corporations to profit from, and the results were published and released before the next school year with a trove of detailed information so teachers and parents could go over them to see where children were weak and strong and then teachers could plan accordingly. This is what was going on in California for more than a decade before the Common Core Crap (CCC) came along and was forced down the throats of a nation thanks mostly to Bill Gates and the hundreds of billions of dollars he spend to grease the wheals of this monster profit making machine.
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Duane Swacker & Lloyd Lofthouse: quite so.
And apart from evaluating the usefulness—or lack thereof—of standardized tests that produce numbers that purport to measure genuine teaching and learning, there is a very compelling practical and self-wounding argument made by the leaders of test-obsessed rheephorm.
Their ACTIONS (and often private words) don’t match their public WORDS and advocacy.
Just one example from this blog. 3-23-2014. “Common Core for Commoners, Not My School!”
[entire blog posting start]
This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.
[entire blog posting end]
Well worth reading the thread as well.
Bill Gates. Speech to Lakeside School, his alma mater. 9-23-2005. His children go there now.
Link: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/media-center/speeches/2005/09/bill-gates-lakeside-school
Read his remarks, go to the Lakeside School website, and note the obvious yawning chasm between his ferocious drive to rheephorm the schools that OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN go to—think Common Core and high-stakes standardized testing and narrowed curricula and increasingly starved public schools—and the school[s] to which he and his children and his peers send THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
This is a stark and disturbing example of the old adage “actions speak louder than words.”
Anticipated long ago by a very dead and very old and very Greek guy:
“Hateful to me as are the gates of hell, Is he who, hiding one thing in his heart, Utters another.” [Homer]
Thank you both for your comments.
😎
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