We have long known on this site that Bill Gates’ foundation underwrote every aspect of the Common Core standards. Mercedes Schneider has documented nearly $200 million in grants specifically for the writing, evaluation, review, implementation, and advocacy for the Common Core standards.
Jack Hassard, a retired professor of science education, has scoured the Gates search engine and concluded that the investment of the Gates Foundation in the Common Core is actually $2.3 billion.
Hassard notes:
Why is Bill Gates so concerned about those that have taken on Achieve’s Common Core State Standards?
The answer is that the Gates Foundation has invested about $2.3 billion into the Common Standards and related efforts. Please read ahead.
In public speeches, Gates has called out those who try to interfere with the implementation of the Common Standards. When Gates first used his billions to reach out to eduction, there was some glimmer of hope. The Gates Foundation idea of funding smaller high schools appeared to be a plausible conception. But things changed, and as we’ve seen, someone with a lot of money can influence organizations in ways that ordinary classroom educators can not.
Soon the Gates Foundation began to fund efforts that, in my view, undermined the work of professional teachers. Gates own simple conception of “measuring” student learning, has been accepted by many politicians and state education bureaucrats. Test the students when they come into your class. Test them when they go out to summer play. Subtract the scores, and there you have it. A measure of what student learned.
This idea that teacher quality can be easily measured by value-added has not worked out so well.
But then there are the Common Core standards, which the Gates Foundation has heavily funded as its biggest bet of all.
He writes:
I did a search of the College-Ready grants for 2009 – 2013 using the terms Common Core, and the search returned 161 results. The largest grant was awarded to the Kentucky Department of Education for $9,800,877, and the smallest grant was awarded to Benchmark Education Company for $25,000. Using an Excel spreadsheet of the 161 programs that focused on the Common Core, I found out that the Gates Foundation has awarded grants totaling $204,350,462. That’s $269 million for 161 programs. The average grant was for $1,269,258.
Then he finds another classification in the Gates search engine:
But the truth is that the Gates Foundation has provided much more money than the $204,350,462. This figure is based on only 161 of the grants from the College-Ready category of grants. The Gates Foundation awarded more than 1800 projects in the group of College-Ready grants, which is one of the main goals of the Common Core. I’ve not downloaded the data from the 1800 grants into Excel. You might want to go to the Gates website and take a look at the data for these grants. But we can do a rough estimate based on the 161 grants that were analyzed.
If we use the average grant of $1,269,258., then the estimated amount funded to support Common Standards and related education programs by Gates is $2,306,241,786 (that $2.3 billion).
And finally, he asks,
Is Gates and his Foundation’s influence what will improve education in the American democracy? Or has the influence of power and money brokers been accepted, with little criticism, by the general public? Is the unrest about the Common Standards in the interests of the future of education, or is it just a few people complaining? What are your ideas?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bill Gates and his foundation are not “money brokers” or power hungry. He is a private citizen who was wildly successful in business and is now trying to do some good. Why can’t people understand there are different points of view and that doesn’t mean one is deceptive. The readers of this blog seem to believe that A) Only experienced teachers have the correct approach, B) Any type of teacher evaluation via student progress is bad and C) Anyone trying to offer a new approach is a money grubbing, power hungry charter school advocate. The simple facts are this…the system does not serve all students well, some, but certainly not all blame, falls to the teachers and the current system, and some others outside of the teaching just might have a couple of good ideas. Open your minds and listen once in a while.
We aren’t being told to listen. A gun is being pointed to our collective temples and we are being forced to comply. That’s not the same as offering advice.
Gipper, if we were talking about voluntary, competing models here, that would be one thing. But we are not. We are talking about mandates made by a distant, centralized regulatory authority, an unelected Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. If a small group of private individuals, led by a plutocrat from the clothing industry, had manipulated things so that states had no choice but to adopt legislation telling you what clothing and accessories you WOULD HAVE TO WEAR, you would doubtless push back. This is not someone just putting forward his ideas for others to consider. It’s not someone developing a product and seeing whether people want to adopt it. It’s force. It’s violence. It’s totalitarianism.
The simple fact that Gates refuses to subject his own children to the CCSS and aligned testing, while ramming it down the throtas of 50 million less priveledged children, tells us all we need to know.
He refuses to engage in discussion; refuses the advice of experts in the field, refuses to believe that his entire premise is fundamentally wrong. I could live with him being stubborn about software issues. He has no credibility regarding teaching and learning. His stubborn and authoritatrin approach in a field he knows nothing about is the reason for our outrage. And by the way, he is WRONG. On every level.
Do you think Bill Gates is competent to come up with and enforce a system to evaluate doctors, lawyers or any other professionals? Why then is he competent to evaluate teachers?
Any type of teacher evaluation based on student “progress” *is* bad because teachers don’t have control over that. Students come to school hungry, stressed, fearful, and otherwise distracted. Some just plain old choose not to “perform”. Why should teachers be held accountable for those factors?
And finally, just how is it, you think, that Gates became “wildly successful” in business? The strength of his superior product???
Gipper:
It’s one thing to have an opinion and another to spend more than $2 billion to force that opinion on others while spinning propaganda and lies to influence the public.
Bill Gates may think he is doing good but how is that different from those who tortured victims during the Inquisitions starting in the 12th century who thought they were doing good too or the Nazis who murdered millions during the Holocaust believing they were doing it for the good of everyone else who wasn’t killed.
But I’m not surprised at your own thinking. After all you took a nickname from the President who launched this war on democracy and invented deficit spending.
Since 1945, GOP presidents added more than $10 Trillion to the National Debt while all the Democratic Presidents (not counting Obama because he’s still in office and inherited two wars and the biggest financial crises since the Great Depression from a GOP president) only added $256.5 Billion.
In rebuttal: A) No one thinks teachers have the answer exclusively. But teachers have been shut out of the process entirely. CCSS only needed approval from two state level political figures. K-12 teachers are nowhere to be found in many CCSS disciplines. For example: 11th / 12th grade CCSS Social Studies is all professors, testing company consultants and foundation consultants. We’re not saying exclude all non-teachers. We’re saying INCLUDE actual teachers.
B) How do you evaluate student progress? It’s bad because the way it is measured is wildly fluctuating or inaccurate. If student growth could be measured so easily then why does every state / district have a different formula? Seems there would be a somewhat universal method of doing so. And student growth excludes non-academic factors. For example, have any idea how many kids have left my classroom (or teams when I coached) better people and better students as a result of my individual attention? Quantify that.
C) Not everyone in this is money-grubbing but it has been noted that there are some people making a lot of money off this. How about CCSS without the high-stakes test then? Bad news for Pearson and others. Computer-adaptive testing? Good news for Gates and other data vendors. (We’re’ working with a vendor on our evaluation system and they’re so obviously into it for the money.) CCSS leads to inBloom leads to $$$$. Why does TFA charge money for placing teachers then? I don’t see a lot of non-profits running around. And those non-profits have high ranking officers who make a lot of money.
I don’t attribute sinister motives to everyone. But if you worked in education and survived all of the legislation that has seriously weakened and damaged the profession, skepticism and distrust are attitudes you would easily understand.
“trying to do some good”
You’re funny.
Keep em coming, my sides are splitting.
Ang: what oh what would we do without the shills and the trolls that periodically infest this blog?
There are a few regular posters with whom I almost always disagree—but at least I give them the benefit of the doubt that they are sincerely misinformed and find it painful to exercise good judgment in securing facts, using logic and coming to conclusions based on reality.
For the shills and trolls: their bizarre assertions and insults are good reminders of the unscrupulous folks looking to squeeze every last bit of $tudent $ucce$$ out of OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN with their mandated dumbing down of education —while letting the edupreneurs and edufrauds and educrats and edubullies send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to genuine institutions of enriched learning.
Dee Dee’s comment the other day—“Have they no shame?????”—makes more than a Rheetorical point.
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” [Ionesco]
And once the question has been posed—
No, Dee Dee, when it comes to “education reform” and the leading charterites/privatizers and their enablers and enforcers, they have no shame.
But when they show up here and spout their spurious claims of miracle schools and tortured stats and false claims of ad hominem attacks and the like, they remind us of what—no, not Mark Twain, but that eminent Doctor of Laughology said—
“A day without laughter is a day wasted.”
¿? Charlie Chaplin, of course.
So please, perhaps a thank you is in order for someone who didn’t permit us to waste this day.
😎
How’s the Kool-Aid, Gip?
Sorry, but we see what it’s doing around the country, and we’re not drinking it.
I see you’re quite the prolific writer, Gip. This one especially I’m sure will be greeted warmly around here: http://gippersblog.com/?p=31 – “Charter Schools are Under Attack”.
Yep, nice article isn’t it.
“What conceivable reasons are there for charter schools in NYC to be attacked other than to protect the teacher’s union?”
Wow, Gip is Captain false choice (post your referenced) and straw man (post here).
A real super hero of logical fallacy .
I know I am rethinking my positions bases on that powerful rhetoric!
😉
Gipper, few people here believe A-C. (I certainly don’t!) Those are straw man arguments.
You are crazy and probably on Microsoft’s/Gates Foundation’s payroll.
My point of view is you like Gates’ point of view.
A) Teachers are in the classroom everyday. Their opinion should count. Because I got my tonsils out doesn’t mean I’m a surgeon.
B) Not bad, just not practical. Far too much noise and bad model assumptions. Here’s a novel idea, instead of trying to punish teachers with evaluations, how about trusting teachers?
C) Offer approaches but judge them on merit, not the size of someone’s pocketbook.
The problem with the system is we’ve had a concerted effort for the past 25 years by the 1/2 the country using their considerable power and wealth to undermine and destroy public education. Perhaps it is you ignoring the obvious because it conflicts with your ideology.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Gipper, the point is not whether Gates is ‘trying to do some good’. It’s that his billions are able– thanks to laws voted & by you & me– to buy a ‘national common core’ of stds & the influence to get it made law. This is not democracy.
Gippy sauce, having looked at what passes for thought on your blog, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that your tin foil hat has worn thin from the inside out. Better add another layer, the truth is starting to seep through.
The rich are our shepherds — we shall not want.
Jack Nicklaus was “wildly successful” in a sport and his business. So by analogy he should be as expert on education as Gates.
But with a great difference: The product that built Gates empire is not exactly high quality. What built Nicklaus’ empire, his golf game, has never been matched.
There are reasons Gates gets no respect.
Way to bring the smackdown in 100 words or less, loved it!
Diane, We are fighting a battle again Common Core here in Tennessee. Thanks to Gates’ money, our TN Chamber of Commerce is doing its best to spread the propaganda via radio ads, glossy mail ads, and now emails such as the following one, sent to Tn businesses:
“Just a few days ago, the Tennessee House of Representatives adopted two amendments which delay further implementation of Tennessee’s Common Core State Standards and the corresponding PAARC assessment for two years, a dangerous gap of time when it comes to securing the workforce our businesses in Tennessee need.
The decision in the House is in complete opposition to the success we need to see in this state. As companies in Tennessee, you realize how dire an ill-prepared workforce pipeline is, and how essential a globally competitive, READY workforce is.
With every delay, on any part of full implementation of Common Core, comes more time our great state has to wait to bring our youth up to speed on the most crucial workforce development skills.
Time is of the essence! The Tennessee Chamber of Commerce & Industry urges you to immediately contact members of the Senate to oppose the House delay of Common Core implementation. Both phone calls and emails are encouraged.
Our state was just nationally recognized as the fastest-improving in education, with the strongest academic growth, on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress report. Much of this success can be credited to the implementation of state Common Core standards. We need to continue on the path of success as education and workforce development are the most important challenges facing Tennessee business.
We need to narrow the gap between what current graduates are learning and what they are expected to know by employers.
The Tennessee Chamber of Commerce & Industry stands with other chambers, business organizations, and thousands of teachers across our great state that have already learned and are teaching to higher levels of workforce development standards.
As an investor of the State Chamber of Commerce and State Manufacturers Association, please contact members of the Senate and specifically ask them to vote against the House changes to the bill by voting against “concurring” with House amendments added to SB 1266 by Senator Niceley.
Tomorrow, March 18, please take the time to attend the House Education Subcommittee meeting on Tuesday morning at 8AM CST in Room 30 of the Legislative Plaza (arrive at least an hour early, as the room is certain to be packed), to show your support of Common Core and your concern for a READY workforce. Spread the word!”
Please help us in this fight – we are contacting our legislatures left and right, but we are very concerned by this latest tactic. Thanks for all you do!
A little early for an April Fool’s joke, isin’t it?
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx “With every delay, on any part of full implementation of Common Core, comes more time our great state has to wait to bring our youth up to speed on the most crucial workforce development skills.”… “We need to narrow the gap between what current graduates are learning and what they are expected to know by employers.’
What a load of unadulterated crap. The nation has just watched Germany approach TN for a VW plant– pre-CCSS (as if they cared), only to find their German union-mgt style turn into a scrap between UAW & right-to-work interests; latest, anti-union interests are suing VW for ‘colluding’ w/UAW. Does TN think adopting CCSS will somehow attract other employers?
Gates donated the proceeds from his book The Road Ahead to the NEA. That money was earmarked for efforts to encourage the use of technology in education.
What is the road ahead in education? Bill’s answer, in one word, is “technology.” In The Road Ahead, written years ago, Gates explained that schools at the time were like the third world. Walking through the schoolhouse door was going into a technology-free zone. Bill has long believed that we should fix that.
His vision is this: You make up a list of what students have to do. You create computer-adaptive software that teaches kids the material on the list. That technology compares what kids have learned to the list and feeds them lessons accordingly. In that sense, the lessons are “individualized” or “personalized.” You test the students to see if they have learned their lessons. You fire the teachers whose students didn’t. And you pay for all of this by getting rid of the teachers whose students don’t do well on the tests, flipping classes, and increasing the class sizes of teachers whose students do well on the tests.
I’m pretty certain that Gates believes all this. And, incidentally, since Bill’s wealth comes from people using personal computers, this solution will also earn, for him, a great deal of money–billions via sales of operating systems, tablets, educational software, and database services. So, from Gates’s point of view, this solution is a win-win: it will improve educational outcomes AND make him even richer.
Notice that the whole plan, as Gates has conceived it, depends upon having a single set of national standards for educational software and tests and teacher evaluation systems to correlate to. So, this plan, simultaneously an educational policy blueprint and a business plan, depends upon that. Having a set of national standards is the sine qua non–the engine on which the entire plan depends.
That’s why he paid to have the national standards created. Arne Duncan, Gates, the CCSSO, the NGA, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute never tire of saying that the new standards were a “state-led” and “teacher-led” effort.
Yeah, and North Korea just re-elected its president via free elections.
Unfortunately, Bill’s plan depends upon creating a distant, centralized authority that dictates learning progressions, outcomes to be measured, and evaluation systems to be used to everyone else in the country, and the “standards” created with all that Gates money (and some money from Pearson) are, in ELA, extraordinarily amateurish and backward, and are, in mathematics, not significantly different from the state standards that we’ve had all along (and are arguably, in many cases, worse than those standards).
The centralization of power and authority that the Gates Plan for the Rest of Us requires ossifies, dumbs down, demotivates, enforces some curricula and pedagogical approaches and precludes all others that might be developed, undermines individual autonomy, prevents people from being able to adapt learning to differing students, and forces a backward, competition-based, extrinsic reward and punishment model of education on the country.
In short. It’s a totalitarian vision. It legislates THINKING. It creates a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth and, basically, renders irrelevant the ideas about learning progressions, outcomes to be measured, measurement systems to be used, and, to a large extent, pedagogical approaches and curricula to be used of every independent teacher, curriculum coordinator, curriculum developer, and educational scholar and researcher in the country.
The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] were the first step in a BUSINESS PLAN that also happened to be a tragically flawed model for education going forward.
It creates a monoculture.
Ecologies are healthier.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Thank you, Bob. Right as usual. Sad to see someone like Gates, who rose to riches as an innovator, double-down on the side of monopolistic centralizers.
Mr. Gipper,
Bill Gates is not merely “a private citizen who has been widely successful and is now trying to do some good .” Gates is a private citizen whose silly and ignorant notions about education would not even be considered were it not for his money. Instead, because of his money, private citizen Gates has been allowed to dictate policy over our most vital public institution, experimenting with the lives of millions of children and teachers. Gates ‘s dangerous fortune was built on predatory monopolist practices and, because of the degenerate state of our politics; he is continuing theses predatory monopolistic practices with impunity in education. You can rest assured, the founding fathers of this country are rolling in their graves over the anti-democratic actions of Gates and his ilk. Answer this question please: why should this unelected, unaccountable unsavory character have infinitely more say over my child’s education that I do?
My last sentence was meant to read: Answer this question please: why should this unelected, unaccountable, unsavory character have infinitely more say over my child’s education than I do?
YES!!!!!
So, why does Gates defend the Common Core?
HIS ENTIRE PLAN DEPENDS UPON IT.
The educrats who have bought into the Common Core, many of them otherwise quite bright, have been PLAYED. They have been used to advance a business plan that is also a totalitarian vision for the future of U.S. education.
Those who support the Core are collaborators in that. Some are unwitting collaborators, but they are collaborators all the same.
Without the centralized, nationalized standards, the totalitarian plan fails.
Gates understands that. That’s why he paid to have these “standards” created. And it didn’t really matter what the standards said. For his plan to work, the key thing is that there had to be ONE SET of standards nationwide.
That’s how we get the Microsofting of U.S. education. By standardizing it.
No different than ATT&T promoting/defending (pre 1984) the installation of telephone poles.
Actually, quite different. Telephone poles didn’t risk destroying the education of several generations and were purely technology infrastructure.
Common Core is a theory…untested…and being imposed via “foundation” onto a society that didn’t ask for it nor needs it.
ATT was building infrastructure for a society who demanded the service of telephones.
If you want to use analogies…pleased get them right. Unless you really means that Common Core is as dumb, lifeless, and inanimately inhuman as a telephone pole …in which case I agree.
Excellent point.
My ATT&T analogy was in reference to promoting the infrastucture (utility poles) necessary to lock up a monopoly.
Albeit a bit convoluted, not as bad an analogy as you suggest.
Gates is promoting and defending his infrastructure (CCSS/PARCC) in order to lock up a monopoly on personalized, computer adaptive instruction and testing. A monopoly in which 75 million students (K -12), along with their teachers, will be held hostage to this untested, unproven, and unwanted dream.
By the way, if you want to be critical of an analogy, try to make sure you understand it first.
I’ll defend my questions about your analogy… But only briefly because now that you explained what you’d intended I agree with your position – that this is Gates’ first step in establishing some version of what we might call an education monopoly.
I just disagree with the AT&T connection – because AT&T was actually an outstanding approach for the US.
But AT&T was a government sanctioned monopoly set up to ensure that quality phone service was available to everyone – something that wouldn’t have happened without a regulated monopoly (AT&T) or phones supplied via government (most of the rest of the world).
AT&T was restricted from many types of competition and the innovations from the Bell Labs research arm of AT&T have driven a tremendous amount of modern tech development (e.g. the transistor). I don’t remember all the regulatory specifics, but AT&T was prohibited from many businesses.
Was it a good monopoly? I’ll argue it was. Since the break up of AT&T, the US phone system, once the unquestioned world leader, has fallen behind the rest of the world. For example, our cell phone development was severely hampered by competition – because each supplier had to create it’s own unique standard & none of them could speak with the other.
Okay. Enough AT&T. Let’s get back to the fundamental that Gates is using CCSS to control…for some reason that I don’t think is entirely clear (money? happiness? a poor penance for past sins?)… Or what I’ve seen in some retired businessmen… Used to controlling the world by playing hardball they continue to do so in every endeavor because it’s their nature – and they lack the self awareness to know they’re doing it.
Lack of self awareness. No empathy. Inability to see any way but his owned. Works well for him. Doesn’t it? Rather like a bully, I’d say.
And it isn’t about good education, let alone excellent.
It isn’t about anything but profits and power.
For use on Twitter: Just copy, paste and then ReTweet anytime you see this on Twitter. The short link was created on Bitly ( https://bitly.com/shorten/ ) to make room for more content in the Tweet. The link leads to this post.
The Gates Foundation spent about $2.3 Billion
To force untested theory on public schools
That will destroy US Pub Ed
http://bit.ly/1hrZPV5
Now, can you realize the promise of educational technology and, in particular, of adaptive technology, without having a distant, centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth? Of course you can. But without that, the business plan fails.
The irony with Bill Gates is that there has always been one massive blind spot in his company – Microsoft with Gates leadership has never been able to do that kind of innovation that requires a deep understanding of humanity. They excel at technical innovation but not in crafting tech that meets human needs.
When he turns his attention to education, it’s clear that he approaches it with the same icy approach that makes great technology and bad human policy. Yet he has the money to impose this this assembly line organization onto education.
It’s sad. But we need to names Gates’ essential organizational flaw: inability to understand the truly human reality of society.
(That’s not to say anything about his personal being – but we can clearly see this from the results of his work over his 40 years in the public eye.)
Actually, Gates’/Microsoft’s success has never been based on innovation, but rather on monopoly.
Gates’ genius is as a monopolist and rentier, extracting money from consumers and businesses by controlling the choke points and access to computer use.
In fact, most of his technologies were not fully tested before release, with the company getting consumers to smooth out the bugs in their beta programs, sort of like his experimentation – the most polite word that can be applied to his efforts – on public school children, experimentation he would never in a million years impose on his own kids.
Couldn’t agree more. I look at MS as a great knock-off artist. They generally let someone else make the first thing…then they’d swoop in, knock it off, usually make it better, and use their incredible clout to make billions.
This is certainly a powerful business strategy. But it doesn’t translate to human issues where the ability to perceive is needed.
Some business tycoons understand their limitations. but most often they have success blindness that leads a guy like Gates to think he knows more than he knows.
Almost all of the billionaires are that way. They want it ALL.
Why are people surprised that there are many of us who believe that having millions of bright teachers, curriculum developers, curriculum coordinators, scholars, and researchers working on competing ideas about how education should work is preferable to having totalitarian approaches dictated to everyone?
This fight comes down to one between tyranny and liberty. Will you accept and collaborate with the creation of a distant, centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth? Or will you be on the side of liberty.
As for me, give me liberty or give me death.
Please, most of the meddling in education is being done for the simple aim of moving public money into private hands. No one should be profiting from k-12 ed. How do you get the money for the “profit” portion of a private company? By cutting what — teachers’ salary? Why should anyone BUT trained educators be trusted to solve the “problems” in our schools? Most of them are caused by such people outside of professional education — like ignorant parents, and greedy/arrogant corporate raiders. Inside the ed industry we have the school administrators who have been largely corrupted like everything else in America today. The only ones who are worth listening to ARE the teachers themselves, the least corrupted players in the mix.
A little too strong for me, Bill. There are too many people who don’t carry the label teacher who are involved in this fight as well, and there are too many teachers who still don’t get it and a few who never did care. Speaking as an unwitting victim, it really hurts to be attacked for something you have been told you do well, especially when the attack comes from “inside the walls.” It doesn’t make the abuse any easier to bear by turning it on everyone else indiscriminately.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I agree with you, against 2oldtoteach. 90-some% of my local ed budget is for salaries, of which some 75% is teachers salaries. Theirs is the voice to listen to, on what works on the ground.
I’m with you, Bob Shepherd.
Let’s see if Windows 8, a very unsuccessful Microsoft product, is used in collaboration with Pearson for some Common Core-related software.
When the CCS first were introduced teachers were asked in my high school to develop tasks relating to the Standards. For the next two years, further experimentation with largely teacher input and some Staff Development by PARCC occurred. Right before the tests, the entire thrust of the CCS changed as did the Professional Development. If we questioned anything we were told that we in a Title I school were relegating our students to a life on Riker’s Island instead of Harvard and I am not making this up. Also test-making companies, in this case Odells made lists of books without sense and teachers were suddenly shut out of the process. What began positively turned into an oppressive mandate.
cccccccccccccccccccc Hear, hear. On comment threads of mainstream articles, where teachers express positive experience w/CCSS ‘stds’ (those who say they’re just stds, implementation is the bogeyman) I always say, talk to me again when PARCC is at the door.
Even if the Common [sic] Core [sic] in ELA were not amateurish, hackneyed, backward-looking groupthink, I would oppose having one invariant set of standards for all children and forcing all curriculum developers and teachers to work within its constrictions.
Kids differ. These “standards” do not.
These “standards” draw dramatically restrictive boundaries within the design space for curricula and pedagogical approaches and tell people, you are allowed to think what is within these boundaries.
If you want innovation, then you issue a few voluntary, very general guidelines that allow for the degrees of freedom within which innovation can occur.
If you want to sell products “at scale,” then you issue a national bullet list.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Nu? That is the point. Mandates = control to an agenda. New guidelines can lead to innovation.
It’s not an April Fool’s joke, unfortunately. The TN Chamber of Commerce began sending out emails last Friday and has sent multiple ones today alone. Business-owners are being sold are Common Core as a way to get good workers. They assume this is good for TN business, or else the Chamber wouldn’t be behind it. With so many parents/teachers still uninformed or scared to make waves, I do not know how to fight something as big as the Chamber of Commerce.
As a businessman (albeit in marketing/advertising), I believe Common Core will lead to far fewer qualified employee’s – because I need employee’s that can think, can communicate, and perceive the difficult to perceive. Those who excel with Common Core’s academic linearity are exactly the people I don’t and can’t hire.
I hope most businessmen think as you do. Unfortunately, I know that some would RATHER hire workers who don’t have the ability to ask questions. That is what cc will create.
Sadly, businessmen as a whole are not the most thoughtful. But there are those who are clear eyed and exceptionally smart. And I’ve found that they generally have a far broader and deeper understanding of issues like this than the Chamber of Commerce – which is heavily influenced by the needs of the local car dealership.
In business myself for 25+ years and CCSS scares the heck out of me. I worked with countries and they were consistently in awe of our education system turning out innovated and rational thinkers. CCSS is a step backward. I never liked standards in my business work. Standards helped for simple interchangeablity and interoperability, but most had a very short life span except for the cash cows and simple items where growth was unimportant (think bolts). Innovators discarded standards with disdain (think high tech). CCSS cultivates mindless drones who never see the beauty of always striving for excellent and the unknown.
BTW – Car dealers are a protected industry long overdue for change – just ask Tesla.
Glad to hear there’s good company among businessmen. In a creative business, we fight the standards processes all the time. And generally, they give management in companies plausible reasons to make bad choices. “Why didn’t you make the smart choice” “It would have violated our departmental Efficiency Initiative rules.” “Oh, in that case it’s just fine. Carry on with the dumb choices.”
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx As I said in another thread where this TN propaganda was mentioned: huh? VW came looking for TN employees pre-CCSS (& no doubt could have cared less about local hs. curriculum stds– not realizing that pro-CCS = long-range plan to dumb down ed.) What they’ve gotten for proposing an auto plant is a UAW-v.right to work fight. And all they were looking to do was to implement the enlightened German labor-mgt collaboration. I expect they’re taking a second look at an area where it seems cheap to operate, but the locals are against any measures that would support hi-quality workmanship longterm.
There are actually some GENERAL notions in materials ancillary to the Common [sic] Core [sic] that I agree with–that kids should read substantive texts closely, for example, and that we should be careful not to substitute a prereading for reading.
But these are obvious notions. They aren’t some sort of great revelation brought down from the mountaintop. The defenders of the Common Core always trot out these general ideas as though they were revelations–as though teachers never had kids read texts closely before or support their ideas with evidence–and they don’t understand that they sound like someone saying, “Hey, I have an idea. What if doctors tried to cure people?” That they do this, routinely, shows how arrogant and disconnected they are.
And the Common Core is NOT those general ideas. It is a specific bullet list of some 1,600 outcomes to be measured–in ELA, a breathtakingly hackneyed, backward, amateurishly prepared bullet list full of ignorant presuppositions.
I am really sick of hearing people say things like, “You don’t support the Common Core? You mean, you don’t think kids ought to read texts closely and think about them carefully and provide evidence to support their conclusions about them?” What these people ROUTINELY do is SUBSTITUTE SOME TRUISMS for the actual bullet list. Why? Because the actual bullet list, in ELA, is an embarrassment, and no bullet list–NONE–is going to be the best that we could come up with.
Before Achieve and the CCSSO appointed David Coleman absolute monarch of the English language arts in the United States, there were MILLIONS of teachers, curriculum coordinators, curriculum designers, researchers, and scholars working in each of these domains of the English language arts and putting forward ideas about curricula, pedagogical approaches, learning progressions, and measurement. Now, we are supposed to say, FORGET ALL THAT. David Coleman and the Curriculum Commissariat will do all this thinking for you from now on.
So, free people thinking for themselves or the totalitarian bullet list? It’s not difficult for me to choose between those alternatives.
The freedom of curriculum developers to innovate had already been DRAMATICALLY CURTAILED by state “standards” that amounted to prior constraint on what could be thought. The Common [sic] Core [sic] is the reductio ad absurdum of that restriction of thought.
A free society does not mandate what can and cannot be thought. It allows free people to make these decisions for themselves.
Gipper, above, is surprised that people are so angry at Gates. News flash, Gip: People don’t like having their freedom of thought and action taken from them. They don’t like having amateurs come into their workplaces and tell them how to do their jobs.
I have news for David Coleman: He knows a LOT less about teaching literature, writing, grammar, vocabulary, thinking, and research skills to kids than I do. I have been learning about and thinking about these matters for many, many decades, and I would not DREAM of forcing MY APPROACHES on everyone else.
Gates’s presumption is breathtaking.
What a toxic cocktail arrogance and ignorance makes!!!
Gates speech registered 9.8 Colemans on the international scale of ignorance/arrogance.
LOL. Yes!!!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Right. I make this point often on mainstream article comment threads. You thought we had no standards/ methods/ pedagogy? At least in my area (which is all I care about– which relates to the point that local control is necessary)– we already had better, open-ended ELA stds which allowed selecting from a hundred-yrs’ worth of lit-crit methods; CCSS ELA narrows it all to obscure mid-20thc. methods that emphasize ‘close reading’ & ‘authorial intent’.
I always find myself thinking, when I hear some educrat defending the Common Core, “Are you really so ignorant of our field that you think these paint-by-number “standards” acceptable?”
I want to be more generous in my attitudes and less judgmental, but I feel EMBARRASSED for these people, the way one feels uncomfortable when someone starts talking about what a great writer Dean Koontz or Anne Rice or Ayn Rand is. Actually, I’m better at dealing with the latter sort of situation because I understand that there are some things that very popular, low-brow writers like Koontz and Rice and Rand do very, very well. In their own ways, they are brilliant. And I understand that not everyone has sophisticated literary tastes or has read widely enough to be turned off by purple prose, caricature instead of characterization, and endless cliches. To their credit, Koontz and Rice do not claim to have written The Great American Novel. They know the business they are in–that of churning out pulp fictions. Rand is another matter; I won’t get into THAT, except to say that Coleman and Gates ARE claiming that they have created “higher standards,” as Rand claimed to have been the greatest of American novelists, and when a fellow educator finds Coleman and Gates’s claim anything but ridiculous, I can’t help but feel embarrassed for him or her, as one feels embarrassed for the person who is giving a speech and mispronouncing some word throughout it.
I don’t like feeling that way. I take being generous with people and meeting them where they are very, very seriously. But it’s difficult to want to meet halfway those people who are not only ignorant but feel entitled to force their ignorance on others.
Bob Shepherd:
“There are actually some GENERAL notions in materials ancillary to the Common [sic] Core [sic] that I agree with–that kids should read substantive texts closely, for example, and that we should be careful not to substitute a prereading for reading.”
These aren’t just “obvious notions,” they’re front and center in David Coleman’s sales job for the Common Core, and they are RED HERRINGS. When you repeat his red herring by saying “we should be careful not to substitute a prereading for reading,” you are giving credence to the possibility that any teacher worthy of the name would ever do it. Even at the height of the comprehension strategy craze, no semi-aware teacher employed pre-reading as an end in itself. The purpose was to help students learn how to read better and more independently, and the strategies themselves were based on research on what actual readers did in order to comprehend the text in front of them.
I don’t know how long you taught school, or how recently, but in your entire teaching career, did you ever “subsitute a prereading for reading”? Didn’t think so. When you were writing teacher guides for textbooks, did you ever indicate to the teacher that the pre-reading activities were more important than the student’s attempt to make sense of the text? I doubt it.
Yet Coleman makes this very claim in his infamous speech addressing the “five shifts” of the Common Core in ELA (which contains his most egregious anti-democratic and inhumane sound bite–“people really don’t give a [bleep] about what you feel or what you think”). He says that the way teachers taught reading just before the Common Core included telling students beforehand what they were supposed to get out of a reading passage. I don’t know any teacher who ever did that. Do you? Coleman could safely make that claim because his audience didn’t have any teachers in it who could call him on all of his misrepresentations, distortions, and outright lies. Or his smugly derisive tone.
Every one of the “five shifts” he talks about in that speech is a red herring, a misrepresentation of teaching practice that serves to make the Common Core Standards seem necessary, more rigorous, and a potential “game changer.” The Coleman red herrings don’t deserve the slightest nod of credit. They’re designed to deceive his audience, an audience that is easily distracted from the real problems of education, and by the scent of money.
I’m glad you elaborated on those “general notions,” but please, don’t give credit to Coleman by agreeing with him that teachers shouldn’t “substitute a prereading for reading.” It sounds like an insult to teachers.
Even at the height of the comprehension strategy craze, no semi-aware teacher employed pre-reading as an end in itself.
Of course, Randal, you are right about that. I had in mind the gawdawful textbooks from the big ed book houses that WERE full of that kind of crap.
And Randal, I think that if you will reread my post, I was making precisely the point that you are making–that these are not revelations to teachers, that Coleman is saying the most obvious crap as though it were divine revelation. And that is, indeed, insulting.
What Coleman is talking about there is something one did see all too often in textbooks from the big publishers–prereading activities that substituted for the text some prejudgment that reduced the text to some blithering generality. That Coleman would think that teachers typically did that because of those prereading activities is, of course, insulting, but that sort of insult is what ed deform is predicated on. THEIR WHOLE TAKE is that teachers are ignorant and schools are failing and they need to tell us all how to do our jobs to fix those problems. And they draw these conclusions on the basis of–what? No classroom experience whatsoever and some faulty conclusions drawn from international test scores not corrected for SES level.
Bob Shepherd:
I read your post three times, and no, you aren’t making precisely the same point I’m making. My main point is that you’re giving Coleman way too much credit and you’re giving teachers precious little. What you are agreeing with in those Common Core materials represents the disinformation he used to sell the project.
I don’t believe for a minute that the big textbook companies or the “educrats” wanted teachers to prioritize pre-reading activities over the actual reading and understanding of a text. But you and Coleman seem to think so.
Reading strategies of all kinds are intended to do at least two things–to provide students with a framework for understanding new material and to help them become better, more independent readers in the future. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them. But even if the activities and strategies suggested by some publisher’s guide are deemed excessive, unnecessary, or inappropriate, the teacher decides which suggestions to use, which to adapt, and which to ignore. Unless the teacher is forced to follow a script or lose her job, teacher discretion is always there, and it’s a powerful tool.
When you agree with Coleman that “we should be careful not to substitute a prereading for reading,” you’re buying into the Coleman canard that teachers HAVE been subsituting prereading for actual reading (something no real teacher believes in). You’re buying into Coleman’s deceptive rhetoric, which is intended to denigrate both teachers and educational researchers.
This is one of his nastier sales tactics: by dismissing the results of valid educational research (represented by the supposedly failed practices based on that research) and by attacking a straw caricature of actual practices, he frees himself from the need to support the Common Core with any substantive research or pilot projects of his own, or input from practitioners.
By the way, what is an “educrat?” Do you mean a person who dedicates his career to finding out how kids learn? Or maybe a person who tries to use that research to help prospective teachers do a good job in the classroom? Would you be willing to call somebody like Jerome Harste an “educrat” to his face? Or David Pearson? Steven Krashen? Or how about Tim Slekar? That might be fun to watch.
Throwing around a contemptuous epithet like that doesn’t add anything to the discussion, especially when you’re effectively lumping the “educrats” in with the real culprits like Rhee, Kopp, Petrilli, Duncan, and the rest of the so-called reformers. If an education professor goes against principle and endorses the Common Core or some other shady initiative in return for a grant from Gates, Broad, or the Waltons, that’s another story. But the accusations play better if you talk specifics. (See Mercedes Schneider’s blog.)
Here’s what I said, Randal:
“But these are obvious notions. They aren’t some sort of great revelation brought down from the mountaintop. The defenders of the Common Core always trot out these general ideas as though they were revelations–as though teachers never had kids read texts closely before or support their ideas with evidence–and they don’t understand that they sound like someone saying, “Hey, I have an idea. What if doctors tried to cure people?” That they do this, routinely, shows how arrogant and disconnected they are.”
I wouldn’t exactly called that “giving credence to the possibility that any teacher worthy of the name would ever do it.”
My reaction to that speech was the same as yours. I found it “smugly derisive” and full of “misrepresentations, distortions, and outright lies.”
However, I do not judge ideas based on their source. That’s a genetic fallacy. I have long detested the sort of prereading activity, commonly found in literature textbooks, that presents what the activity’s author takes to be the theme of the text before kids have actually read the text. Long before anyone ever heard of David Coleman, I was arguing against doing that. I was getting sick of this sort of thing, and here I am using a real example from a widely used lit text: an activity, preceding “The Road Not Taken” that reads, “Have you ever faced a difficult decision? Have you made unconventional choices as a result? Why is it important for people to think for themselves rather than follow the common path?” That sort of thing became ubiquitous in literature texts for a time, and as in this case, such prereading activities often distorted and misrepresented the text. The same could be said of lots of so-called “higher-order thinking skills” questions about theme that follow texts–ones that encourage reducing the text to a blithering generality. And I have seen many a literature lesson in which someone conducted the lesson as a meaning hunt in which the child who hit upon the preconceived generality that the teacher was looking for got the gold star. It’s easy enough to fall into doing that because texts do have themes, but I think that that “reading as the meaning hunt” approach encourages people to think of poets, in particular, as peculiar folks who don’t just say what they mean but try to disguise it.
That said, if you have read my other posts on this blog throughout the past year, you will find that one of my recurring themes is the importance of background knowledge to comprehension. For example, I have pointed out here, on a number of occasions, that one of Coleman’s suggested texts is the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic and that most kids would find this incomprehensible unless a lot of work had been done, up front, to set up the questions being addressed in that allegory. To expect kids to engage successfully with that text without a lot of prereading work seems, to me, crazy. And, more generally, I think it important for us to subject our practice of doing prereading to particular scrutiny, to avoid hard and fast rules about this and to consider the text and the kids and so what the particular situation demands. You will also find, if you look back at my posts, that I have frequently made the point that texts do not exist in a world by themselves and that the New Critical approach espoused by David Coleman, while useful, is but one way to engage with a work. There are many ways in and out of texts.
And, I don’t think of these as hard and fast rules. I would never say, for example, that one should never “force one’s own reading” on kids. I think it’s valuable for readers of all levels of sophistication to watch a master present his or her reading of a text. One can learn from that. I know that I have, over the years, learned a lot from reading others’ “readings,” even when, in the end, I didn’t agree with them.
Now, let me defend my use of the word “educrat.” I have watched, over the past few decades, while local autonomy on the part of teachers–the ability of teachers in a given school to choose their own learning progressions, pedagogical approaches, curricula, and lesson designs–has been increasingly usurped by micromanagers, first at the district level, then at the state level, and now, with the Common Core, in a reductio ad absurdum of this trend, at the national level. Right now, there are MANY folks with degrees in education who are COLLABORATING WITH the education defomers by conceptualizing invariant lesson plan designs (LDC modules) and invariant tests (PARCC and SBAC), and there are many, many district- and state-level education bureaucrats who do similar work–who issue blanket proclamations about how teachers must teach because they have fallen in love with some theory. They have discovered the hammer, and they set about distributing hammers and telling teachers, in “trainings,” to treat everything as a nail. For example, all around the country, right now, there are collaborators with education deform telling teachers that their lessons shouldn’t contain prereading activities because that’s what they understand Coleman to be saying. Coleman did not invent reducing the study of literature and writing and thinking to mastery of the bullet list. There are lots of education bureaucrats in state departments already doing that before Coleman appeared on the scene, and the work that he did was, by and large, to collate and rationalize and choose his top ten from the groupthink that those educrats had already been doing. I use the word “educrat” to refer to education managers who issue regulations to govern everyone else’s teaching. A friend of mine who spent many years in the business world and then turned to teaching, which she has been doing quite successfully for years now, recently said to me, “I never saw anything like this in the business world. Every year, the state comes up with the new way that we’re supposed to teach writing and does all these trainings on it. And every time, this is THE WAY, and we have to sit through these trainings that tell us how everything they were telling us how to do is wrong.”
A case in point: For years, now, educrats have been forcing teachers to sit through trainings on “reading strategies” that reduce texts to vehicles for exemplifying main ideas and supporting details, sequences, cause-and-effect relations, inferences, and so on, and the reading of texts to hunting for the same. This sort of crap didn’t originate with teachers. It originated with education bureaucrats who latched onto an idea and thought it was a revelation and forced it on everyone else, just as Coleman has done with this revelations. The education bureaucrat is employed to make genera rules for others to follow, and so his or her modus operandi becomes overgeneralization that leads to distortion of pedagogy. Here in Florida, for example, the state was so successful at teaching teachers how to teach students to write formulaic five-paragraph themes in response to FCAT questions that now even the educrats have recognized that what they were doing was encouraging formulaic nonwriting, and so now the state is making an attempt to correct that.
In general, teachers take this crap from their “trainings” with a grain of salt and go about the infinitely more complex business of actually teaching real texts to real students. But that there are plenty of educrats in the world more than happy to tell everyone else how they must, at all times, do their work, is undeniable. That’s what “trainings” (Sit up. Roll over. Good boy.) typically do. Rarely have I heard a trainer say, “I am going to talk, today, about a useful technique you might want to employ in your classes.” More often than not, the training takes the form of, “Here is how the state or the district has decided you must do things from now on.” And that’s a mistake, but it’s what educrats typically do for a living.
And, those same educrats created the adoption checklists–pages and pages and pages of them–that only the big textbook providers could meet and so drove a lot of small textbook publishers out of business and led to the dramatic consolidation–the Walmartization and Microsofting–of the educational materials industry. Often they did this in outright collusion with particular publishers. I’ve seen that “up close and personal.”
I think that “educrat” is the perfect term to describe those who are conceiving of PARCC and SBAC, right now. These are professional education managers working within a bureaucracy to come up with the rules and regulations that everyone else must, invariably, follow.
So, Randal, it’s not a matter of “wanting” people to prioritize prereading over reading but of relieving the student of having to do the reading and dramatically influencing what that student will find in the reading. If I tell a group of students, at the outset, this is a poem about mutability, about how things inevitably change, then their reading will be influenced by that, and it might well be more shallow as a result, but that sort of placing a statement of the theme up front became COMMONPLACE in literature texts. I know, because I saw the specs from publishers requiring writers to do that.
And, I would never make a hard-and-fast rule that one should never do that. It’s valuable, sometimes, to choose a handful of texts about some theme and to tell kids, up front, that they have this similarity. I do exactly that, again and again, in this piece about philosophers’ and poets’ ideas about time:
However, I agree that Coleman seems to think that this practice is what literature teachers TYPICALLY do, and I think he’s wrong there. That’s not surprising. Coleman has spent very little time in classrooms and has never been a teacher himself, so these generalizations about how bad others’ practice is come very easily to him.
And, Randal, I blame the educrats who have, over the decades, usurped teachers’ authority in their classrooms for creating the conditions that made possible this Gates/Coleman power grab.
Back when the first George Bush floated the idea of having a single set of national standards and tests, he was hooted down by people left, right, and center. He QUICKLY withdrew that proposal.
So, what’s happened since then? Well, NCLB happened. People got used to having states dictate standards and tests and associated curricula and pedagogy.
There’s a boiled frog phenomenon occurring here. Teachers’ autonomy in their classrooms (and curriculum developers’ autonomy in pedagogical and curricular design) have been SLOWLY eroded.
And who did that? Well, a lot of education bureaucrats in state departments and district offices did that. They made Coleman and Gates possible by getting people used to having distant, centralized authorities make these decisions about learning progressions, pedagogical approaches, assessments, and evaluation systems for everyone else.
Bob Shepherd:
Life is too dang short to try to respond in detail to your voluminous comments. In any case, they don’t really address my point that good teachers aren’t easily influenced by nonsense. They will pick up and try whatever ideas or methods make sense to them and keep using whatever works in their classrooms. They will ignore the heck out a textbook author’s suggestion that is likely to spoil a lesson for students. And just because a valid idea is overused, misused, or distorted doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.
You did get more specific about what an “educrat” is. Florida. That’s says a lot. But not every school district is in Florida, or led by autocrats. Again, if the training is lame, the best teachers will resist it, subvert it, or ignore it. And you’re still painting with a broad brush. What about those horrible education professor? Are the researchers who invented “Whole Language” educrats? How about the researchers who pioneered comprehension strategies? Do they deserve to be vilified, too?
One of the greatest things about the “whole language” movement was that its advocates encouraged teachers to learn from their experience with their own students rather than rely on intermediaries to tell them what to do in their classrooms, just as they wanted children to be free to explore and express their own capacities for thinking and literacy. Right wingers and others tried to blow Whole Language out of the water, and they pretty much succeeded. And that pendulum swing to the right has brought with it the increasing lack of autonomy you describe. (It’s no accident that E. D. Hirsch and his belief in the uncritical re-transmission of received knowledge is suddenly relevant again.) Reading a book like Philip Lopate’s Being With Children would be an exercise in nostalgia today, now that personal writing is to be minimized and literary analysis has invaded the early grades. As you suggested in one of your earlier comments, third graders might be able to do something based on the new historicism!
As an English teacher, my approach to the job was to always be learning more about literature study, writing, teaching, and the world at large, from the best sources I could find–and using that learning in my classroom. I liked to make things up, too. There’s nothing stopping teachers from continuing to do this, even as the pressure mounts to give in to or be bought out by Coleman, Gates, Duncan, and Pearson Education.
As James Madison said, “The mind is free,” even if you’re under threat of losing your job. You can toe the line without buying the bad ideas.
It ain’t rocket science to know Gates’ motive. It’s money. It’s money to be made by forcing all public schools into online “academies” where there are NO teachers at all. Software is by Microsoft, and curriculum is by Pearson. Kids would just be parked in front of the computer all day while the elites will still send their kids to hoity-toity private schools with real, underpaid teachers and real classrooms.
Gates is one dangerous individual, probably worse than the Kochs and Waltons because he seems to come across as so benign when he is pure evil. That evil is a direct result of having way too much money when that money should have gone to the federal treasury.
I argue, above, that I think it’s both. Gates BOTH believes in his centralized, totalitarian vision for U.S. education AND thinks that it will make him vastly wealthier.
And there is no shortage of educrats and politicians happy to collaborate with him, given how lucrative it is to do so.
And then there are the ones who just aren’t very bright and who actually buy into the narrative that the Gates PR machine has created. There are a LOT of those doing trainings and workshops around the country, right now, and writing books about “unpacking the standards.” These are the folks who think that the hackneyed ideas in the CC$$ actually ARE revelations.
The CC$$ has been quite a bonanza for these ignorant, arrogant “rent-an-expert” types–our educational grifters and mercenaries, aka, consultants.
Need to unpack those standards? Need to help your students reach those new, higher goals? Just buy my book, workshop, software, magic potion. The perfect complement to Deformy Magic.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Unlike Bob S, I do not care what Gates’ intent is. There will always be a Bill Gates. We need to fix our laws– i.e., turn back the clock to 1979 when we began undoing every safeguard against monopolies-moneyed interests & began ushering big $ into every level of govt. What is happening in ed today has already been happening in banks, airlines, election campaigns, post offices, pharmaceuticals– you name it.
I guess, S&F, that I am just extraordinarily saddened that Gates has put his vast wealth to such damaging ends. I think of what Carnegie did by establishing libraries throughout the country and how much that meant to ordinary people, and then I think of Gates’s spending on education deform, and the gulf between the two is so enormous. I think of the good that all that money Gates is spending could be doing, of the opportunity costs as well as of the damage that Gates is doing. It’s tragic, really, and one wishes that he would have a change of heart and mind, a revelation, and epiphany, and stop destroying K-12 education in the United States.
As the scooter used to say….”Holy Cow” You are now comparing Bill Gates to the inquisition and the nazi holocaust? Have you no shame or sense of balance in your judgment?
Again, Gipper, you just are not getting it. When an amateur comes into your workplace and tells you that you have to do a lot of stuff that makes no sense at all, you get upset, and you speak angrily. This is completely understandable.
And, Gip, real harm is being done by these education deforms. They affect kids negatively in many, many ways. Teachers see this all the time, and that makes them angry.
Extrinsic reward systems are demotivating for cognitive tasks. One of the biggest problems leading to poor performance by low SES kids (though not the only problem by a long shot) is lack of motivation, and this whole standards-and-approaching, data wall approach acerbates that problem, makes it a LOT worse.
People see that kind of thing happening, being forced upon them and their students, and they get angry. And then they use the sort of language you are talking about.
And, what, exactly, about centralization in the hands of a distant, absolute authority with the power to mandate for all do you think is NOT totalitarian? Inquiring minds want to know.
I agree. It’s unfair to the inquisition and the nazi holocaust to compare them to Gates. Gates has far greater ability to know the error of his ways as is demonstrated by the way he so skillfully avoids any mention of fact based analysis of the problems and the associated research based solutions to them. For Gates, there is no profit to be had in acknowledging the truth.
The Nazis new what they were doing was wrong too and they did all they could to hide it from the world as long as possible. The only difference is that Gates hasn’t built any death camps but what he’s doing is destroying lives and will destroy millions more before he’s gone.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum says: The “final solution” was the Nazis’ code name for the deliberate, carefully planned destruction, or genocide, of all European Jews. The Nazis used the vague term “final solution” to hide their policy of mass murder from the rest of the world. In fact, the men at Wannsee talked about methods of killing, about liquidation, about “extermination.”
http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007712
How is that different from this:
NBCNews reports: Conservative high-rollers gather to plot strategy: Koch brothers laying the groundwork for a major ‘grassroots effort’ to push GOP candidates
“A phalanx of sheriff’s deputies with riot gear fended off protestors and blocked all access to one of southern California’s most luxurious resort hotels on Sunday as more than 200 conservative donors gathered inside to plot political strategy and raise an estimated $30 million for the 2012 election.”
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41348611/ns/politics-more_politics/t/conservative-high-rollers-gather-plot-strategy/#.UyhfAfldV2o
Or this one from Story Leak.com: Mini Bilderberg? Bill Gates, Bloomberg, and the World’s Richest Meeting on Gates SC Island
“it seems like this closed doors event is sort of a mini Bilderberg group meeting of sorts. One local CBS affiliate, one of the only news sources to be covering this since it’s a local issue, says that around 20 highly expensive jets were lined up at the Charleston International Airport on Johns Island, and that Bill Gates and others were at the Sanctuary Hotel on Kiawah Island. The attendee list, according to the CBS report, includes Jeb Bush, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Bill and Melinda Gates, Dan Gilbert (owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers), Warren Buffet, Oprah, and others. … CBS says that the meet concerns the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which apparently is hosting the Bilderberg-styled event that violates fundamental laws regarding the creation of policy behind closed doors.”
http://www.storyleak.com/mini-bilderberg-bill-gates-jeb-bush-sc-island/
This is how it starts. Hitler and the Nazis didn’t reach power in one step. It took years and you can bet there were similar meetings to “create policy behind closed doors” to subvert the democratic process that should involve every citizen who is informed from all the facts instead of cherry picking facts that support an an agenda.
Tony Benn has died. If you read this through to the end, I believe you will agree that he has developed the 5 questions to ask of the powerful…and he includes Bill Gates!
http://billmoyers.com/2014/03/17/remembering-tony-benn/
I liked the last question best.
How do we get rid of him?
How do we marginalize him?
How can we make him irrelevant?
OMG I just read the article about Gates investing about 2.3 billion $ on Common Core and why is he so adamant to stand up for those Cores? Well, even for Gates 2.3billion is a chunk of change. He has probably promised money into the future for his business cronies as in Pearson or other publishing cos. also. It really bothers me that money will buy anything especially my grand children’s love of learning. They deserves so much more. Now we give them a poor education and debt into their future. I hate it.
Read Henry’s Awful Mistake. This is what Gates and Rhee and Pearson are doing to education while ALEC, the Koch Brothers, Rove and friends are doing the same to the middle class and sucker punching the poor, old, and job seekers.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1293226.Henry_s_Awful_Mistake
The Gates Foundation “grants awarded” website is a treasure trove. Of special interest to me is the highest grant under College-Ready, to Hillsborough County Schools in Tampa FL. I attended these schools a long time ago. The grant was for $100,000,000. The same district received several other multi-million grants for participating in other projects
Hillsborough County Schools were/are among other with multi-million grants awarded to school districts, some of these under the banner of becoming “Intensive Partnership Sites.” This means that Gates purchased their cooperation for multiple projects, including for example, participation in the flawed Harvard-run “Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET).” The MET, lead by economists, was intended to show that VAMs are great for evaluating teachers, especially if students are randomly assigned to classrooms and then teachers are randomly assigned to those classrooms. That big game of random assignment did not work in real schools and for other reasons the whole study was deeply flawed. See
In addition buying the participation of the Denver Public Schools in the MET Project for $10 million, Gates paid about $2.5 to Hillsborough County Schools for entering this study, and about $1.5 million each to Charlotte-Mechlinburg (NC) and Memphis for letting their students and teachers be guinea pigs for the MET study. Other participants were drawn from Dallas ($900,000) and Pittsburg ($350,000). Find the full review at: http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013
Of course, most discussions of VAM do not address the use of “student learning objectives” (SLOs) and the variant “student growth objectives” (SGOs) for the estimated 70 % of teachers who have job assignments for which there are no VAM measures.
Writing up a SLO/SGO is exactly like setting a sales target for a year or course, only teachers are required to set targets for increasing student test scores from the start of the year/course to the end of the year/course. Teachers must use approved pre-and post-tests (usually at the district or state level). Teachers are first evaluated on: a) the completeness and accuracy of the SLO as a written assignment. A typical SLO/SGO requires the teacher to meet about 25 criteria, including citations of research in support of any instructional strategies they will use, the standards they will address, and so on. Typically, this SLO/SGO cannot be modified after an “evaluator” has approved it. Principals are not supposed to be the “evaluator” if they are being judged by the quality of SLO/SGOs their teachers prepare.
Then there is another step. At the end of the year/course the teacher is evaluated on whether their students’ test scores are within the range the teacher has set as a target. There is usually a minimum score for a target, such as 70% of all students will score above 80 on a test X, but this threshold is set higher if students’ pre-test scores are high. In Ohio, an undisclosed formula in a spreadsheet calculates the evaluation that a teacher has been given on “attainment” of their SLO, and this score counts as 50% of their evaluation.
Teacher who fail to meet their targets are branded ineffective.
There is NO solid peer-reviewed research that supports this evaluation system. It produces a stack ranking of all teachers in a district or state who have job alike teaching assignments (e.g., by grade and subject). See more about SLOs/SGOs in this just-published report:
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/projects/project.asp?projectID=380
cccccccccccccccccccc The key point of your post is in the first para, about the $. There will always be Gates-types attempting to skew things to their advantage. The need is to fix our laws so $ can’t override th public good.
Then read One Grain of Rice (exponential growth) and think.
http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT668/EMAT6680.F99/Martin/instructional%20unit/day4.exponential/excel/grainofrice.html
I want to repost something that MathVale said above:
CCSS cultivates mindless drones who never see the beauty of always striving for the excellent and the unknown.
Bob Shepherd: what you said.
😎
Has anyone forwarded this to Mercedes Schneider? I know she’ll see it soon.
Bill Gates can stick his billions where the sun dont shine…. this is what I’m fighting for – for kids who will keep KNOWING that flowers are not necessarily red: http://sahilachangebringer.blogspot.com/2011/09/flowers-are-red.html
Gipper,
Bill Gates profile, like many billionaires, politicians, celebrities, sports stars, rock stars, mega church preachers, and increasing numbers in the general US population, fits that of Aspergers Syndrome – Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This increasing disorder in society has resulted from decades of insecurity in the environment – our declining “American Way of Life” – Loss of Individual freedom and opportunity to thrive.
As an individual, we could blame Bill Gates disorder on having a “Jewish Mother, but in our current environment, all parents and teachers have become “Jewish Mothers”. Another name is “Smother Mother”. It is a result of the authoritarian “performance” focused reward/punishment poisonous pedagogy of our masses, especially in schools and families. It results from “fear”. Fear of failure = punishment. (Punishment is rejection). When our goal is unrecognized need to please critical authoritarian parents/teachers, no one ever feels they have accomplished success or measured up to those unrealistic internal demands that were programmed in childhood.
Bill Gates apparently grew up in a rigid family that emphasized “performance” and reward/punishment, without nurturing for the developmental needs of his emotional self. His stunted social/emotional development is obvious. He was a “trophy child”. He apparently worships himself and thinks he is omnipotent. Even though he may think he has “good intentions” by creating children who are all like him, he is not able to see the big picture because of his linear thinking. He thinks he is always right and refuses to listen to others. He is not able to recognize emotional distress in children because he lacks empathy. He apparently learned at an early age to repress his own emotions to perform in a way that pleased his parents.
In nature, when a mammal, such as a mother wolf, gives birth but senses danger in her environment, she will devour her babies. It sounds cruel, but it is mother Nature’s way of protecting the babies from a lifetime of suffering. In human nature, when parents have insecurity, they tend to “smother” their children by being domineering and overprotective, and not allowing them freedom to develop their own identity. They are forced to take on the identify of the domineering parent. Domineering Narcissistic parenting and Domineering Narcissistic learning environments in schools create Narcissistic children. This is our current psychological plague.
For Bill Gates, the dominance he demands by controlling all the children in the US, and making them in his image, may be perceived in his mind as a “good thing”; however, In reality, it is the most dangerous form of “terrorism” that has not yet been recognized by American society.
Social scientist predicted that when the Holocaust ended in Europe, it would be brought to America. Are we beginning to recognize this yet ?
Bill Gates is the Piped Piper.
Asperger’s Syndrome and Narcissistic Personality Disorder are not the same condition nor do they have the same causes. Asperger’s is on the autism spectrum and while autism can be acquired under extreme deprivation conditions that is not the typical reason for the appearance of autism which has a biological basis not linked to environmental causes.
2old2teach:
It is correct they are not the same condition, but they most often co-occur and are considered “comorbid”. Houston We Have a Problem listed them as 2 separate disorders. Asperger can be neurological, as in my family there is a genetic predisposition; however, any of the DSM V B Cluster disorders usually accompany ASD in adulthood, which includes Narcissistic, Borderline, Antisocial, or Histronic PD. The personality disorder is most often the result of environmental factors.
Children subjected to chronic stress, or chronic “traumatic” stress in the case of sensitive autistic children, are high risk for B Cluster.
I have not read much about Bill Gates’ childhood although what I have read sounds like some kids I have taught. I had not heard that he was subjected to chronic stress, traumatic or otherwise. Does the DSM give a percentage of adults with Asperger’s Syndrome with Narcissistic PD? Some sort of “narcissistic” behavior should be expected given their difficulty relating to other people. They tend to use themselves even more than “normal” people do as their gauge of how things should be. Not being to stand in other people’s shoes easily would make it doubly hard.
Reblogged this on Lead Me On and commented:
This story about the leadership (should we call it that?) behind the Common Core Standards is very interesting in its implications for understanding how power, money and corporate influence (however well-intentioned) create cultural movements, often almost invisibly! The Common Core standards make a test into manacles for teacher and student, and take away leadership from teachers. But they grew out of a concern for the need for skills and knowledge and more consistency across the US educational system. It’s a complicated puzzle now, because we see what doesn’t work, why it doesn’t work, and how it’s hurting our kids and our schools. Teachers lead in a small realm. Bill Gates is committed to an idea — and has no idea how to teach, but he leads from great influence. I am impressed at how this blog covers some of the ways teachers are stepping out of their classrooms into the courts, the streets, and their unions, to claim a larger voice in the debate.
San Diego Unified Schools was a big believer in Small Schools, and still has a few at the former Crawford High School site, and maybe at San Diego and Kearny Highs as well. The Stanford small school redesign network under Linda Darling Hammond produced the model and literature used in 2003/4 to bring the idea to San Diego.
There seemed to be a conflict between what the Stanford model described and what actually was implemented, and it wasn’t long before the Stanford literature disappeared altogether. For example, there was to be no administrative budget for the small schools, and a single administrative crew for the school complex, saving big bucks. What happened at Crawford was instead of one principal, there were five, plus the uber principal too.
Other progressive ideas (like tolerance of linguistic diversity in the classroom) first disappeared from the Stanford publication used to launch the reform, then as said, Darling-Hammond and the whole research-based model was deep sixed.
The equality inherent in true education isn’t what the reformers are after. I just applied for a teaching position that has a physical requirement that I be able to carry 50 pounds. I am 62, and weigh 112 pounds. What is happening to my profession? Please send me your ideas. We are not just a few people complaining. Tho we be many, the future of public ed, even of the planet as we know it, seem hostage to the interests of those who make money rather than sense.
I take it you are applying to be a paraprofessional? I will cheer if anyone hires you at 62 to be a teacher. Requiring that you be able to lift significant weights is typical and seems to be almost a stock requirement around here. It usually means working with physically handicapped students. I sub in a district that frequently doesn’t tell that a position is for a parapro when they are looking. They pay less for subbing as a parapro even though the work does not differ significantly between teacher and parapro.
I lost my job almost three years ago at 61. I have finally, I think, accepted that no one will hire me. In that entire time, I got one interview for a parapro position for which I was overqualified. So many teachers have lost their jobs that school districts have the nerve to say they prefer that certified teachers apply for parapro jobs.
Thank you for sharing your story with me. No, I wasn’t planning to try to be an aide, I am still thinking I can teach.
If ok, I would like my family to read your post. They don’t believe me and insist my failed career is my fault. I am facing a dire fate, and have lost everything. Maybe they will believe others, may I share with them?
Of course you may share with them. I pray that your experience will be different than mine. Unfortunately, we know that it takes older workers much longer to find new employment, and often, we end up taking jobs that require less skill. I am not nor ever will be ready to be a greeter at Walmart! (I refuse to shop there, as well.) If you have an interest outside of teaching that you can turn into gainful employment, I would start looking. Maybe you could get a gig as one of those educational consultants doing PD that we all love to hate. Maybe you could actually be one who is worth listening to!
Please publish the state-by-state estimated costs to implement Common Core – especially the costs of technology software and hardware which are likely major reasons Bill Gates is so interested in promoting Common Core.
…and costs for school districts to pay consultants to “train” teachers to use Pearson products wirh Microsoft programs even if they have Macs in the district. Most of the RttT money pays these consultants, not, he teachers who get rhw halftime or less “training”.