Archives for category: Gates Foundation

A Review of the Latest Gates’ MET Study

By dianerav
March 2, 2013 //
7

Jesse Rothstein, one of our premier economists and an experienced analyst of teacher evaluation studies, reviewed the latest MET study.

MET (Measures of Effective Teaching) is the Gates Foundation’s premier effort to show that someone has finally figured out a formula to measure teacher quality.

Rothstein says that the MET study did not succeed at its stated task.

Here is the summary:

The Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project was a multi-year study of thousands of teachers in six school districts that concluded in January 2013. This review addresses two of the final MET research papers. One paper uses random assignment to test for bias in teachers’ value-added scores. The experimental protocol was compromised, however, when many students did not remain with the teachers to whom researchers had assigned them; other students and teachers did not participate at all. This prevents conclusive answers to the questions of interest. The second paper examines how best to combine value-added scores, classroom observations, and student surveys in teacher evaluations. The data do not support the MET project’s premise that all three primarily reflect a single general teaching factor, nor do the data support the project’s conclusion that the three should be given roughly equal weight. Rather, each measure captures a distinct component of teaching. Evaluating teachers requires judgments about which components are the most important, judgments that are not much informed by the MET’s masses of data. While the MET project has brought unprecedented vigor to teacher evaluation research, its results do not settle disagreements about what makes an effective teacher and offer little guidance about how to design real-world teacher evaluation systems.

My hunch–and I may be wrong–is that the Gates Foundation will conclude in about 3-5 years that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on finding the right mechanism–standardized and predictable–was a waste of money and will move on to some other big idea.

The foundation dropped $2 billion into the mass-production of small schools before dropping that one.

Categories Gates Foundation, Teacher Evaluations

Good News: Pushback to Corporate Reform

By dianerav
January 23, 2013 //
9

Anthony Cody reflects on a year in which the voices of parents and teachers are at last being heard.

The foundations and the U.S. Department of Education and ALEC were having a field day, pushing untried and noxious policies without debate, until 2012.

Then things got interesting.

Reform hero Tony Bennett was upset by a National Board Certified Teacher in Indiana.

Cody spoke truth to power in his dialogue with the Gates Foundation.

Friends, we are finding our voice.

The public is beginning to understand.

Be strong.

Bad ideas eventually collapse, especially when they have no record of success and a long history of failure and demoralization.

Persist.

Categories ALEC, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Gates Foundation

Parents, Beware! Is Your Child for Sale?

By dianerav
January 19, 2013 //
41

This appeared on the New York City parent blog:

NYC Public School Parents
Independent voices of New York City public school parents
FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 2013

Parents beware! NY and eight other states plan to share your child’s confidential school records with private corporations without your consent!

New York is one of five states that have agreed to share confidential NYC student and teacher data in Phase I with the “Shared Learning Collaborative” or SLC, a project of the Gates Foundation.

The other states and districts in Phase I include North Carolina (Guilford Co.), Colorado (Jefferson Co.), Illinois (Unit 5 Normal and District 87 Bloomington) and Massachusetts (Everett). Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana are in Phase II, according to the Gates Foundation, intend to start piloting the system in 2013.

The data to be shared will include the names of students, their grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and likely race, ethnicity, free lunch and special education status as well.

These records are to be stored in a massive electronic data bank, being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation. News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch and has been found to illegally violate the privacy of individuals in Great Britain and in the United States.

Over the next few months, the Gates Foundation plans to turn over all this personal data to another, as yet unnamed corporation, headed by Iwan Streichenberger, the former marketing director of a company called Promethean that sells whiteboards, based in Atlanta GA.

This new corporation intends to make this confidential student information available in turn to commercial enterprises to help them develop and market their “learning products.” This new corporation is supposed to be financially sustainable by 2016, which means either states, districts or vendors will have to pay for its upkeep and maintenance. All this is happening without parental knowledge or consent.

There are serious questions as to whether this plan complies with the federal law protecting student privacy, called FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), which allows states or districts to disclose students’ personally identifiable education records without parental consent only in very limited circumstances and under stringent conditions, none of which apply in this case.
Moreover, we have learned that this confidential information is to be put on a cloud managed by Amazon.com, with few if any protections against data leakage.

After our press conference with our attorney, Norman Siegel in October, the NY State Education Department finally released its contract with the Gates Foundation. As we feared, it only reaffirmed our concerns about the lack of privacy for children, the weak protections against data leakage, and the denial of the parental right to consent. Here is a letter from our attorneys expressing our concerns.

We believe that any state that enters into an agreement with the Shared Learning Collaborative, or its successor corporation, should at the very least be obligated to:

Release its contract with the Gates Foundation, notify all parents of the impending disclosure of their children’s confidential records, and provide them with the right to consent;

Hold public hearings for parents to be able to express their concerns about the plan’s potential to risk their children’s privacy, security and safety;

Explain how families can obtain relief if their children are harmed by improper use or accidental release of this information, including who will be held financially responsible;

Affirm that they will respect the privacy rights of public schoolchildren more than the interests of the Gates Foundation, News Corporation, or any other company or vendor with whom this confidential information may be shared.

Please see below; video of Khem Irby, parent activist in North Carolina, speaking before the Guilford school board about this issue last week.

Here is a fact sheet with this information you can download and distribute. You can also leave a comment on the Gates website here, if you think parents should have the right to consent.

For more information, please email us at info@classsizematters.org or call us at 212-674-7320.

Leonie Haimson at 1/18/2013

Categories For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Parents, Students

The Ultimate Reform School!

By dianerav
December 28, 2012 //
11

Drop whatever you are doing, and read this. EduShyster serves up a delightful portrait of an award-winning school in Minneapolis that embodies every new reform strategy. And here is the best part: It hasn’t opened yet! It won’t open until next September and it is already a great success!

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Online learning, Privatization
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