Paul Karrer, who teaches in Castroville, California, wrote this article for the local newspaper, the Monterrey Herald. Many of the children he teaches are English learners and special education.
He told me he wanted to title his article “Moon Made Jade Not Cheese and We Can Thank Bill Gates,” but the newspaper changed it to “Education’s Race to the Bottom.”
He writes that the super-rich have imposed their ideas on the schools for over a decade and have nothing to show for it but damaged lives.
Paul writes:
America is now dearly paying for letting the uber-wealthy inject themselves into, upon, and throughout our public educational system. I’m speaking of those non-educators who believe that because they have been successful financially they know what is best for education. There can be no doubt Bill Gates has changed the world with his vision of computers. But twice now he has financially imposed his vision for education and twice he has been wrong. Twice he has left a bloodied battlefield of educational corpses. It costs us much.
Microsoft dropped its harmful “stack ranking” system, but Gates imposed it on the schools, where it continues to demoralize teachers and warp educational priorities.
And he adds:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I love this article
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Gates poured tens of millions (hundreds of millions?) into his small schools initiative, after about 10 years he admitted it hadn’t worked and scrapped the idea.
Never mind the educations ruined, careers wrecked, and beloved community institutions destroyed by the failed small schools policy, Gates is on to his next hypotheses, and he said it will take 10 more years to see if his current ideas about education are working.
I suggest Gates take his own children out of their elite private schools and experiment on them, rather than treating the poor and middle class children who attend public schools like lab rats.
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I agree with his assessment of the involvement of plutocrats in education, but I’m less inclined to tie it to the advances in other countries. Why do we see the advances of other countries as our failures? There really is plenty to learn and do for everybody. It is more than obvious that the uber wealthy have their own agenda when it comes to education that has little to do with the welfare of the children. If they were concerned about the children they never would have advocated such a draconian system of test and rank. Why is the 99% listening to the 1% tell us how to live our lives? Nothing about their “success” prepares them to be leaders of educational reform. I’m tired of the experiments that demoralize children and destroy careers.
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Paul Karrer left out the fact that outside of the self-esteem obsessed Untied States, merit counts more in most other countries, and the competition to stay in school is fierce, especially in Asian countries where only the best students are allowed to move on—-for instance in China where to reach the senior level of high school at age 15 is fierce. One must compete to get a seat. It’s not guaranteed. There are critics in the United States who complain about China doing this to their kids but I don’t think we’re going to see China adopting self-esteemism over merit.
He also didn’t mention that in most of the world, high school has two tracks: academic and vocational and kids who don’t want to follow the academic track to college may graduate from high school on the vocational track and be job ready.
In fact, the US high school graduation rate has been compared to Japan’s by the critics of public education who don’t mention that only about 70% of Japanese graduate from high school on thee academic track. The other 20%+ graduate on the vocational track and go to work.
But in the United States, high school only has one graduation track: academic leading to so-called college readiness based on faulty logic. When we compare high school graduation in the United States with only academic high school graduation in other countries, the U.S. has the highest academic graduation rate in the world.
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An excellent point! In my upper middle class school over 75% of students go on to some amount of college but as we all know the graduation rate at college averages just above 50%. ( which oddly gets blamed on public schools rather than the college?) So we invest 13 years in our children and only 35% make it? “Justice for All?”. Imagine what a child thinks when the realize or believe that they will be part of the 65% who will get little from school except some failed collegiate debt? The cure for poverty is hope. Our current system only offers it to a few.
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