Mercedes Schneider recently wrote an open letter to Bill Gates. She is angry that he will be the keynote speaker for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Let’s face it: Bill Gates has never taught and most of what he knows about education is wrong.
Schneider calls on him to explain how teachers can hold him accountable for having the nerve to tell them how to teach.
She writes:
“Your money is philanthropic cocaine to the organizations accepting your dollars.
“Your millions appear to foster a quick addiction in which organizations bend their agendas to suit the stream of your continued millions– to the detriment of their constituents.
“It is time for you to be accountable, Bill. Toward this end, the best I have is to call you out on my free blog.
“In your 2014 NBPTS speech, break new ground by offering a plan for your own accountability regarding your education reform spending.
“Feel free to share your plan with Eli Broad and the Waltons.
“Perhaps you might form a philanthropic support group to help each other withdraw from the bored-billionaire addiction to purchasing democracy.”
Earlier, she participated in a debate in Louisiana about the Common Core standards. Two panelists favored Them. One joined her in opposition. She was the only experienced teacher in the debate. Actually, the only teacher.
Reading the claims, you do get the sense that advocates see CCSS as the very thing that will prepare all students for college and great careers and will lift up the state’s economy too. How they know this to be true is not clear.
Schneider mopped the floor against the advocates.
My favorite lines.
“As for business leader Barry Erwin, the other CCSS supporter on the February 4th panel, CCSS is the solution for filling those 21st-century jobs with qualified Louisiana graduates.
“It certainly sounds good– except that the Louisiana Workforce Commission (LWC) projects that in 2016, the top three available jobs in Louisiana will be cashier, retail sales, and waiter/waitress.
“The first job on the list requiring a bachelors degree for entry level is ranked eleven: elementary school teacher. What irony.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
My name is Caitlin Clark, and I am an undergraduate student at the University of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, Ohio. As one of your biggest fans, I have a challenge for you: start an education reform mission with the FUTURE teachers of America. Not current teachers, but the young, budding future of teachers in America. I am extremely inspired by your books, blogs, and statements on the betterment of education in America. I actually analyzed your writing for six weeks in one of my courses, Save Our Schools! But, I want you to inspire all the future teachers of America to start thinking about how they will impact education policy in the future, and that they can!
America has a very negative teacher culture. We’re stupid, underpaid, untrusted, and undereducated. How does America expect to get better teachers in the future if they are raising our generation in this negative environment? When I tell people I am going into education as a career I usually get snide remarks about being in debt for life, having an unfulfilling future, and being overworked. How will this environment effect America’s future generation of teachers? Little do they know that I would teach for free- that’s how much I love my future profession. Not only am I a University Honors student at UC, but I also carry a 3.8 GPA and am involved in the Ohio Student Education Policy Institute, fighting for education reform in Ohio Congress. I don’t consider myself stupid.
Stand up as a mentor, an expert, and an advocate. Inspire us to be better teachers, to beat this Reign of Error, and to avoid racing to the top. Gather your friends and your colleagues too, get them to help fight this negative teacher culture America has. Welcome our generation of teachers into the classroom, show us how to be better and how to fight the stereotypes, policies, and laws we will have to face. Show us how we can avoid staying in the 50 year rut education has been stuck in.
Change doesn’t only start in Congress or in education committees, it starts in the culture of America. It starts in the hearts of America’s driven undergraduates majoring in education. Help us make the change…we need some help.
Caitlin, the student group already exists
Google Stephanie Rivera or Hannah Nguyen
Perfect! Thank you. The University of Cincinnati would love for you to visit so we can show you how undergrads are fighting for educational change. Google Ohio Student Education Policy Institute.
It would be the smack-down of the decade. Gates has no answers.
Which is why Gates, Coleman, Duncan, Rhee, et. al. all refuse the invitation. Snake-oil salesmen that refuse to use their own medicine and could defend it in a public forum. Calling them cowards would be insulting to cowards everywhere.
could not defend it
“Your money is philanthropic cocaine to the organizations accepting your dollars.”
What a quote. A+.
Pitchmen pitch, they do not debate.
Awesome letter! She nailed it. This should be widely published!
the NBPTS was a member of ALEC until the spotlight was shined on them, they’re another
sellout organization to the likes of Gates et. al.
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/911658/national_board_for_professional_teaching_standards_leaves_alec's_educational_task_force
Jon Awbrey: few words, much meaning.
They’re shills. They don’t believe in the “power of their ideas” but in the “power of their infomercials” [aka ed reporting by the MSM] and the power of two or three or four against one [think of some of the “discussions” involving well known edufrauds with Diane Ravitch in the minority and a moderator favoring the majority] and anything else that gives them an overwhelming advantage.
When they actually have to take their show on the road and explain themselves to the general public, we have such confounding spectacles as New York State Education Commissioner John King saying that Montessori and Common Core are the same thing.
And when such super novas of the “Education Reform” firmament like Michelle Rhee and David Coleman assiduously avoid going one-on-one with Diane Ravitch, they unceremoniously cast aside even the appearance of dignity and honor in order to avoid being exposed as eduproduct pushers hyped up on $tudent $ucce$$.
If Bill Gates debated Dr. Mercedes Schneider I hope they invoke a variation of little league baseball’s mercy rule: if after four innings of play one team is ahead by 10 runs, they win.
I am not a cruel person so I must disagree with Bill Gates about his ‘ten-year rule’—we don’t have to wait that long to find out. If after the first ten minutes Dr. Schneider has already established a clear superiority in the four areas of facts, logic, numbers, and experience, then we should spare Mr. Gates the humiliation of continued exposure to genuine debate and discussion.
After all, there’s always his ‘happy space’ where he can play with all his billions and billions.
😎
Nah, let’s use slow pitch tournament rules, Fifteen after three. We’ll even let them start first and still call them the “home” team, that way they get three innings to our two. It’s not often a team (The Billy Goates) gets shut out in slow pitch softball. (although I did pitch a five inning slow pitch shut out once)
Q. How many Microsoft programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. None. Bill Gates will just redefine Darkness(TM) as the new industry standard.
The education deformers’ central argument is of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” variety. It makes extraordinary assumptions.
The central argument is this: we need to have better, higher standards like the CC$$ in order to maintain our economic effectiveness.
Visit the websites of Achieve, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Council of Chief State School Officers, PARCC (spell that backward), not-Smarter imBalanced, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and other members of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat, for variations on this foundational myth of the Rheeformation.
Or see the latest stuff from the education deformers’ new propaganda ministries, the AFT and the NEA. You will remember those entities. They used to be labor unions representing the rights and interests of teachers.
Now, notice this:
The central deformer argument already assumes a) that invariant, monolithic, centralized, top-down standards are a good idea in the first place, b) that those standards should be conceptualized and framed as the CC$$ were, and c) that the CC$$ are better, higher standards.
And all three assumptions are demonstrably false (especially in ELA, where the new standards can most charitably be described as an instantiation of a body of hackneyed half-truths, distortions, and outright misconceptions about the teaching of English).
So, before we even get to questions about a) how standards (and summative tests based on them) affect curricula, pedagogy, and learning, and thus learning outcomes and b) how learning outcomes affect economic competitiveness, there are enormously consequential questions with regard to the standards [sic] themselves that were never asked and are not being asked now.
Let me repeat: Those questions were never asked by the numerologists behind the standards-and-testing-based U.S. K-12 education deform movement.
Why not? Well, the deformers’ extrinsic reward theory of education (teach to the bullet list; test; then reward or punish based on the test results) is entirely FAITH BASED.
That theory, that breathtakingly backward theory, runs afoul of common sense, research, and the experience of classroom practitioners, but it is not open to question, and neither is anything else derived from it. These matters of dogma, like so much else in education deform, are not for us to think about. Ours is but to believe and obey.
Their argument for better ideas is like asking the man who is beating his wife to stop, and his reply is to ask for a better alternative.
Mercedes Schneider is a hero.
When a mere 5 corporations control 80% of the news that most people watch, it is VERY difficult to change public perceptions. One has to believe that in the long run truth will win but sometimes it seems like a long time till we get to that point. But as long as we have people like the aforementioned, we have hope. I just hope that truth prevails before it is too late.
This would be the debate of the century!!
Nah, it wouldn’t. It’d be over before it started.
Because the chicken$h!ts would pull a Rheetreat.
Duane Swacker: proper terminology, please…
It’s called a Rhee Flee. Coined after Michelle Rhee’s famous show of shrieking cowardice when, after petty dickering for months and months about terms, she frantically backed out of a February 6 public discussion with Diane Ravitch at Lehigh University.
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/02/03/i-am-bummed-out-rhee-will-speak-in-minneapolis-instead-of-debating-me/
This from the stern authoritarian that “grouses that her daughters have too many soccer medals and trophies even though ‘they suck at soccer,’ which is an example of the way in which ‘we’ve gone soft as a nation’” and “is not one for exquisite sensitivity.”
Link: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113096/how-michelle-rhee-misled-education-reform
Remember David “people don’t really give a **** about what you feel or think” Coleman?
Link: http://theline.edublogs.org/2011/11/02/common-core-director-to-you-no-one-gives-a-st-what-you-think-or-feel/
Well, just to prove that Rhee Flee is not gender-specific, he did one too.
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/04/update-my-health-and-my-schedule/comment-page-1/
So take a lesson from me, Duane, that when you see such battle tested hardboiled eggs beat a hasty Rheetreat…
Oh darn, I guess your term works just as well.
😕
Well, in any case, I guess we should take pity on such pearl clutching couch fainters because it must be exhausting what with all the bashing teachers and torturing kids and insulting parents and destroying public education. But they gamely keep on—
“By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.” [Mark Twain]
Why am I not feeling relieved?
😎
Hands down Mercedes is the winner!
“Pithy” and on target. Way to go Mercedes.