Myra Blackmon, who writes for the Athens (Georgia) Banner, poses a question. What if Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, came up with an idea for a drug? Would we skip clinical trials and the FDA? Would we just dispense because he said so?
That’s what Bill Gates is doing to our children, she writes, and we shouldn’t stand for it.
But that is exactly what Bill Gates, another megabillionaire, has done with education. Gates is rich, he has purchased his bully pulpit and we are swallowing his “brilliance” hook, line and sinker.
Just because he has made a lot of money. Just because he is smart. Gates is suddenly the education expert, advising the president and secretary of education on what is “best” for America’s children. He funds the development and promotion of his idea of “good” education practice.
He has never taught nor studied education. His own children went to private schools that wouldn’t touch his ideas with a 10-foot pole. But he is Bill Gates and we let him get away with it.
Gates decided, for example, that the Common Core State Standards are a great idea. And he proceeded to pour mountains of money into bringing it to market with little or no research, no clinical trials and absolutely no evidence of efficacy. He gives organizations big money to push the Common Core, which was developed in virtual secrecy, with almost no input from real teachers.
Gates also espouses “data-driven” education, in which numbers and data analysis take precedence over what teachers and parents believe is best for individual children. Their scores on high-stakes tests trump any firsthand knowledge or special circumstances that might determine the educational course for any given child.
There is no evidence that Gates’ big ideas work. We are allowing him to experiment on our children, absent even the simplest protections we would expect for a new medication or a new infant formula. We believe that because he is smart and rich, he knows what is best for our children.
Where is the moral outrage? Why on earth do we accept what Bill Gates says and deny the research that tells us not only that data-driven, test-based education doesn’t work, but tells us what can best help our children learn?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Far better than easy answers are good questions. Thank you, Myra, for this very good question.
Agree. The questions are central, and they apply to all of those who are supporting this grand experiment on the nation’s children with the approval of more than one President and Congress.
Remarkably, the ethical code for research on human subjects that has been present in higher education is also becoming vaporware, a facade, no barrier to massive invasions of privacy. Ww are witnessing the “normalization” of toxic methods of undermining some very basic social structures, privacy and parental rights, the production and transmission of trustworty knowledge and transparent governance.
very, very well said, Laura!
I second that!
When an old dead Greek guy won’t do, a not so old but dead French guy will do quite nicely:
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” [Ionesco]
And to forestall unfair criticisms by the shills and trolls that visit this blog, I am not suggesting that the self-styled “education reformers” can’t be paired in a sentence with the word “question” in a notable quote. You just have to pick one of their “thought leaders” and voilà!
“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” [Ayn Rand]
And who says your local neighborhood KrazyTA isn’t fair and balanced?
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I am outraged. Melinda Gates is quoted in Real Simple magazine this month as an “expert” on empathy. I wrote a letter to the editor calling out Melinda Gates to take her own advice and examine what her foundation is doing to our public school children.
Thanks for writing the letter. I wrote to the AP to ask why the Gates Foundation’s recent international, disease-spending, got a quarter page of newspaper coverage but, I couldn’t find equivalent AP coverage for Gates-spending, on Common Core. I suppose it’s possible that newspapers rejected the CC$$-Gates story but, my guess would be it wasn’t written. It pays to have a media team.
The backlash against the Common Core seems to have left Gates unscathed…so far.
People have no idea that he spearheaded it. I wouldn’t know either if I hadn’t started to read this blog.
I think you have it right. Most people have no idea of the influence he has and is exerting over education reform. That is the story the media needs to write.
When people design airplanes, they employ a technique called Failure Modes and Means Analysis to investigate, thoroughly, the ways in which things can go wrong. Why? Because dire consequences ensue if one doesn’t. Well, the creation of the CCSS was characterized, instead, by utter heedlessness. In the case of the ELA “standards,” complete amateurs were hired to hack them together overnight based on the lowest-common-denominator-groupthink of previously existing state “standards,” and then these “standards” were subjected to no careful vetting by experts and no trials.
Why the rush? Well, that’s easy. Bill wanted a single set of national standards to key software to so that it could be marketed “at scale,” and he wanted it immediately.
The result? Well, the CCSS in ELA can most charitably be described as a partial compendium of hackneyed, prescientific, unexamined, misconceptions, or folk theories, about the teaching of English, organized, often, at random.
These “”new, higher standards” certainly don’t hold up to close reading. The most shocking thing about this whole affair is that the “architects” of these “standards” have not been hooted off the national stage by people who actually know something about teaching English and about how language is acquired.
Bill appointed Lord Coleman (by divine right?) absolute monarch of ELA instruction in the United States, putting this education theorist ex nihilo in the position to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, textbook designer, and scholar in the country with regard to what we should teach in ELA, when, why, and how, despite the fact that Coleman had no relevant experience and precious little knowledge of ELA practice, theory, and research in literature, hermeneutics, writing, speaking and listening, grammar, and vocabulary. The resulting “standards” are, predictably, riddled with howlers, but anyone who dares question Lord Coleman’s bullet list risks losing his or her job. Ours is but to obey.
Money talks. Sometime it talks gibberish.
cx: no comma after “unexamined”
And to build on your reference to quality control in engineering, we can notice a whole lot of posturing about back-mapping–reverse engineering what kids need to know and be able to do in order to be college and career ready.
The jargon terms of this era in education are designed to convey the idea that education is terrible unless it is perfect–100% will be proficient in reading by 2014. No achievement gaps. All tests must produce accurate, objective measures of student learning (except for the part about reliability and validity). Worst thing in the world is to have anything you do out of alignment with everything else you are doing. Only if we align everything with everything else, and “calibrate” this thing with that thing can we have quality control. Quality control requires endless “trainings,” and certifications of trainers and raters and on and on.
Yet one of the primary lessons of the quality control movement in industry was that it had to workers from the bottom up, not from the top down. That’s what quality circles and PDCA and Lean were all about–empowering workers to make decisions at the line level and moving away from target-based top-down authoritarian control, so these people don’t even understand the models that they are trying to apply.
Bad metaphors, all of these. Kids are not widgets. They are not items on a production line. The last thing that a highly diverse, highly complex society needs is a system that attempts to mill them into identical, interchangeable parts.
God help these people if they get what they want. God help us all.
cx: -s after “sometimes”
It’s such a horrible lesson to teach kids.
The public isn’t responsible for funding and supporting your public schools. Fifteen billionaires are, and you should be grateful! Why, just observe as all the adults in government bow and scrape, beg for favors and endlessly defer!
Yuck. No thanks. That’s a bad deal for the public. Nothing is free, and this isn’t either. We’ll pay for it one way or another. We’re already paying for it.
I get that school budgets are tight and no one wants to pay taxes anymore, but public schools might want to take a hard look at these “gifts”. Is it worth it? I looked at RttT in my state and I have no earthly idea why so many states went along with that. It was a BAD DEAL. It will cost way more to put these 5000 mandates in than they got from Duncan’s “grants”.
Little People and their kids are subhuman and expendable in the world of Reformers. Sacrifice the well being and lives of many to achieve an end goal.
Why do we allow Bill Gates to run our public education system? It’s his money, not ours. We have become a nation which wants everything on the cheap, no new taxes, and if a multi-billionaire wants to play with his money at no or little expense to the rest of us, the Republicans and Democrats are more than happy to let this be and go to the electorate with the message -no new taxes. So our public services, whether it’s schools, prisons, hospitals, utilities, armies, media -are privatized, and the band plays on. You get what you pay for.
Like Bill Gates is giving out $150 prepaid Visa gift cards to any student in Bellevue who will sit for 4 hours to take a CC test on a Saturday. If that were the case, more power to him.
Well, billionaires like Gates and Waltons certainly get what theypay for — many many times over.
What Gates has spent to develop and sell Common Core to date is a drop in the bucket compared to the total amount that will be spent implementing it (curriculum, tests, etc)
The vast majority of what will be spent will come from public coffers.
So Gates’ education experiments on American children are basically being paid for by all of us.
If that were not bad enough, Gates is “setting up” American schools (through standardization of curriculum and tests) so that companies like his can benefit commercially.
Gates “donates” money to his own Foundation, takes a tax break (now and on estate taxes later on) and then uses that money as a “seed” which is “grown” into a giant beanstalk (standardized national curriculum and tests) at huge public expense, thereby creating the conditions in the schools which he (the Jolly Green Giant) can then exploit commercially.
The only hope at this point is that Jack (American parents) will cut down his beanstalk by opting out from the tests.
Spot on! Gates s a joke. He can’t even build a toilet.
“Bill and the Beanstalk”
Deep within the garden Gates
He planted seeds, for common fates
For beanstalks that would reach the cloud
A Common Core for teaching crowd
The beanstalks grew with public money
Grew in the Land of Milken honey
Put down roots in public schools
Teaching standards, teaching rules
Beanstalks huge and beanstalks proud
Channels to the data cloud
Where techies harvest beanstalk fruit
The more they eat, the more they toot
Bill isn’t paying for it…WE ARE…charters and public schools, alike, live off of our tax dollars. I don’t know where you live but we pass referendums all the time here in Illinois and the money is now going to Chicago charters, CCSS, PARCC testing and Charlotte Danielson professional development days (which cost a small fortune). I’d rather see all that money actually to towards educating the children to the standards our state and school board set…that is what I’m paying for, not Bill Gates.
Bill Gates has been allowed to have so much influence partly because so many Americans buy into the idea that if a person is rich that he/she inherently knows more than people with less money.
“When you’re rich, they think you really know.” Tevye
Microsoft terminated ~18,000 jobs in 2014, many former Nokia positions. Sure they were “career ready.” Hope Melinda Gates is sending empathy their way. Could Bill Gates think about how to deploy their talents rather than trying to direct education in counterproductive approach that doesn’t reflect the best of his personal past or his children’s future?
This is not new. Carnegie and Rockefeller spent more on public education than the federal government between 1900 and 1920. They funded the beginnings of teacher’s colleges. They supported the people who had been trained by Wilhelm Wundt in Lepzig, Germany in their efforts to bring his philosophy to the U.S. They funded the behaviorist view of education that reduces humans to nothing more than lab rats to be trained. John Dewey was a rat–not a wonderful educator as some purport.
It continued on with the change agents of the 70’s:
A SHORT ANGRY HISTORY OF
AMERICAN FORCED SCHOOLING – John Taylor Gatto
Between 1967 and 1974 teacher training in the US was covertly revamped through the coordinated efforts of a small number of private foundations, certain universities, global corporations and several other interests working through the U.S. Department of Education and through key state education departments, one of which is the state of Vermont.
Three critical documents in this transformation are Benjamin Bloom’s multi-volume TAXONOMY OF EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES. That was the first. The second was a many-state project begun in 1967 called DESIGNING EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE, and it was set forth in an enormous manual of nearly 1000 pages and finally the BEHAVIORAL TEACHER EDUCATIONAL PROJECT which came in a manual of over 1000 pages. These were inserted into every state education department in the country and moneys were inserted there to pay faculty salaries a certain range of bribes for the school districts that would pioneer the use of these things. http://4brevard.com/choice/Public_Education.htm
It continues on with Bill Gates, Waltons and Kochs.
When do we admit the elite have performed a bloodless coup?
Education in the U.S. is 500 billion a year, Gates has 80 billion or so. A week of cc testing might run the U.S. 20 billion a year. How much can Gates afford? Do the math.
TC,
Gates won’t pay for CC Testing. Taxpayers will. Since all CC tests must be delivered online, tech companies will reap profits
Gates is a marketer who came from $$$$$. He buys everything, and wants you to serve him…pure and simple.
Agreed.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
Just throwing this out off the top of my head now: What if Bill Gates was JUST the money? We all know that there are a merry-go-round of the same players with the same end goal – ROI…return on investment. I don’t know if all of the players are the smartest people in the world (because George W wasn’t the brightest bulb…but he was wealthy and had opportunities that the average bear did not) but…they have money to spend, er, invest, and when the planets aligned, and they could see themselves as rulers of man, their wallets and their egos allowed for the perfect storm.
Is Gates a scapegoat? Is Gates running all the shots? The Broads, Kochs and Waltons are huge players in this, right? TFA, TNTP….Rhee, Klein, Kopp…… I don’t think Duncan has a brain in his head–he is just a paid puppet. None of them, when confronted with a QUESTION, can give an answer – they just revert to their talking points, and their rhetoric is masterful. They can make you think you’re a dolphin swimming in a refrigerator if you listen long enough.
Anyhow, I’m not sure Gates is the ONE behind it all….while he could be, he may just be the mega money behind it all. I do know that his philanthropy comes with strings, and he is always looking for that ROI as all of them are.
The Kochs have consistently OPPOSED the Common Core as an unwarranted federal intrusion on what they believe to be states’ rights. They have at least been consistent with their own principles in this regard.
Bob, I think you are one of the most knowledgeable here – I wouldn’t disagree with you. The Kochs are, tho, for killing unions, dismantling public ed and replacing it with charters, and getting rid of the teaching profession, as are the Waltons and the Broads…or am I misinformed?
I have stated many times, if it were not for the fact that my daughter is a teacher (and her 3 year search for a teaching job–close but no cigar until she “got lucky”) I would be completely ignorant about “reform” and TFA, Rhee and charters.
I think we can all agree that the future will be a very unequal world with most people being poor and uneducated. A small, technological elite similar to “Hunger Games” or “Blade Runner” will lord over a large sea of an ever more diverse humanity. There will be more than enough slaves in the future. Everything in American society is pointing to a Blade Runner type of world. Eventually the very nice, small, rich enclaves we all know will be walled off and guarded. The borders will be made rigid. The era of a large, educated middle class is just coming to an end. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. Societies with a rigid hereditary aristocracy are actually quite stable. Everyone knows their place in society. The wealthy already send their kids to elite private schools. It is interesting to watch the future unfold. The top 10% will have lunch, and the bottom 90% will be lunch, be educated by computers in large warehouses, etc. This is the flow. Everything in society points to this future. You better be rich and end up in the green zone.
Mike… Your view of the world is most certainly shared by those who would, without much thought, destroy others in order to save themselves and their progeny from such a bleak sounding future. Isn’t it interesting how many of them believe themselves to be good christians, muslims, jews, evangelicals, mormons….etc
I believe that a few good people who are willing to take a stand against your vision of the future can in fact prove your vision wrong.
Bill Gates (The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) financed NEA to provide input to the Common Core effort sponsored by Secretary of Education (US) and many Governors of states. The teachers did provide input to the creation of the Common Core Curricula through the Union (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grants to NEA). Now that funding has stopped because the curricula work is completed, NEA is no longer being funded by the Foundation and now they (NEA and teachers) are fighting the baby they helped create opposing any implementation efforts. Remember to look at the work of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they provide grants to all comers. Also one may read the opposition by AFT another teacher’s Union. There is no money in it anymore and therefore the unions are against it.
I believe that teachers had significant input to the creation of Common Core, but they claim that they had nothing to do with it. They got millions of dollars from the foundation. They are against it since it may be used to evaluate their class room performance as per Race to The Top program of President Obama. No body shall ever judge the teachers if they have anything to say about it.
This blog site will never post the real truth, only half truths that support it’s viewpoints. This is sad commentary on the American media manipulated by people who should know better.
Raj, teachers were invited to review the CCSS after it was finished. It was left to the original drafting committee, which contained very few (if any) classroom teachers, to decide whether to accept any changes.
Isn’t it the ULTIMATE irony that classroom teachers (well various other ed specialists too) are required to have bachelors and masters ed degrees and all kinds of certification and current education professional development training (unless of course you are TFA)… and yet the common core “drafting committee” responsible for such an OVERARCHING education policy was not required to have spent one day as an educator nor to have fulfilled the same teacher requirements! If this is not telling of the problem with “ed reform”!!
THIS is a sad commentary of the American media? None of the major medial outlets, owned by the oligarchs, will tell the truth about the corporate takeover of public education, and the ROI of charterizing/privatizing, or the attack on teachers and their unions. Unions generally vote democratic, and the repubs can’t stand that; however, the repubs have infiltrated the democrats, so now its hard to know who stands where, but when they move their lips, you know they are lying. Do you believe that TEACHERS (?!?) got millions from the (Gates) foundation? The only people getting rich off the corporate takeover are the fake non-profits, hedge funders, the fake philanthropists, technology/testing/textbook companies, and the people like Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, and the like who are handsomely paid to spout their rhetoric/lies and the bought politicians.
Here? There are no untruths here. There is no manipulating going on here. Maybe in your post, there was.
If teachers “had significant input to the creation of Common Core” then it ought to be easy to name them.
Each and every one. Explain what kind of input they had, including whether it was merely “input” or they had decisive say over such matters as developmentally appropriate “standards.” Should be easy to do.
Plus name the international benchmarks. Specifically. And how they relate to the CCSS.
And what teacher decided that CCSS has a copyright owned by—fill in the rest.
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You seem to be totally uninformed about the origin of the Common Core State Standards and who funded them and who actually wrote the standards. You write about what you believe. What you believe will probably remain in place even if you are presented with facts. The CCSS were being marketed before they were written. Why? Do know who marketed the concept, who paid for the writing? Do you know that the National Council of Teachers of English was not consulted until after the ELA standards were written? Do you know that teachers have been evaluated by the test scores of their students long before the CCSS were published?
You are participating in a blog where many of the contributers are far more infomed than you are. USDE did not sponsor the CCSS. It is prohibited by law from doing so. Do your homework.
exactly
Unfortunately, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did pay the teacher’s unions to become propaganda ministries for the CCSS. Sickening.
And, you are no exception to those who are buying into the myth of privatization deform manufactured by the American media.Pity.
Myra,
Yes they are: even if you OPT OUT.
At this point, I can’t tell if the war on public education is ideological, monetary, or both. It’s obvious some people are getting rich off of it. Bill Gates doesn’t really need the money seeing as he is the richest in the US so I believe it must be ideological with him and probably with many of the other mega billionaires involved except those who really do seem to want/need the money for some pathological reason and just want a reason to dig a grave for unions.
The man has so much money he’ll never spend it all if he tries and he has pledged to give his riches away after he passes rather than building a dynasty.
Meanwhile, how can anyone delude themselves that charters on their own are somehow solving the problem of public education and doing it cheaper as though teachers have somehow been holding back or slacking off all these years when it’s becoming apparent the charter model is just as expensive or moreso (demanding the same funding?).
The only thing I can see, is that charters have established demand not because of some superior model of education, but just because parents have seen the “good” kids be sucked into them, and they don’t want to have their kids left behind with the poor/bad children that might impede their child’s education. This is how charter’s deliver better results via creaming – they make it so the public school can’t function without a mixture of strong/weak performers and drive demand from involved parents that perceive that there are worse kids in the public schools – not that public schools are worse – this is borne out in NYC by the Annenberg Study.
When all is said and done, and the privatizers and charterizers have their empires staked out, and we see more economic/racial segregation than ever before, and the public school system is in tatters both structurally (physical facilities) and in talent (driven away experienced educators/people who might have been good teacher who never become one), where will our country be in providing a free and equitable education to every student, and having an equal and democratic society?
When we realize what we need are strong communities that support their weakest members (mainly those in financial hardship though also weakened family units), and that, that costs money that can’t just be “given” year to year based on someone’s whims, how do we back the truck up to start building the schools that will meet needs rather than abandoning all schools and hoping cheap ones survive that do?
Isn’t this the next hedge fund financial bubble? There is money to be made. Big money. Whether the charters are good, bad or ugly…the for profits skim off the top. The charter chains don’t care about the kids; they care about more, more, more. I’m sure someone here can explain it better than I how there is money to be made. The testing companies’ stocks. The text books. The technology. The Real Estate; the rentals. Its all a money grab…funded by the endless flow of taxpayer dollars, into private pockets.
Some states are doing BETTER at removing some of the over the top moves – like a business renting its own location to itself at monstrous rates, buying administrative oversight from its own company at greater than generous rates (as in if they bid it out, they’d have saved a ton…), boards that are in bed with themselves, no transparency in accounting, renting computer equipment and classroom equipment to the schools, buying massive upgrades to property using public money/bonds and still retaining ownership. And that doesn’t count the massive tax breaks for new constructions/donations to charters that you don’t get for public schools.
Still, it’s a forced buy every single year from the tax payers controlled by very few people including the unelected authorizers who approve the unelected boards and force them on their communities that then pay them for their services no matter how degrading it is to the tax base or the public school they are now competing with.
When you force schools to compete, there are going to be schools that lose. How on earth can schools losing be good for kids or even for a local area’s property values? It also seems silly when you look at the above list of money making schemes and who controls them, WHY would you choose to have a charter school that would abuse taxpayers like this? Solely because they can choose to exclude the “losers” the public school can’t turn away so if you get in – your kid wins….sucks if you’re a tax payer though and your child can’t compete….
It is curious that:
“Gates also espouses “data-driven” education, in which numbers and data analysis take precedence over what teachers and parents believe is best for individual children.”
And yet, when the data does not support the current reform efforts, it is conveniently (intentionally?) ignored. This suggests that profit rather than improvement is doing the “driving” by unqualified “drivers” and in a worrisome direction.
And as for Bob Shepherd’s observation that kids are not widgets, while we as educators know that at a fundamental level, I suspect that is exactly what the corporate reformers consider them to be: kids AS widgets – “Kidgets”.
I didn’t read the original source. Did she talk about him wanting to make money with software sales? Did she talk about how Microsoft squashed competition? Did she talk about people who cannot seem to get enough?
Study on whether the tests used to slot people into remedial courses in college are valid:
http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=17757
Wouldn’t that be a hoot? If they were relying on bad data to send students to remedial courses in college and then using the number of students who take remedial courses to justify privatizing public schools?
Does anyone check these numbers they throw around?
Great article Myra. Bill Gates may be brilliant but the arrogance of the Gates Foundation is stunning. It would be just too time consuming to bring “the little people” into the planning process. Oh – and the lack of evidence confirming that “personalized learning” – which is their end goal – actually improves education, which can only be defined by test scores in their digital universe, doesn’t exist. He’s like the Wizard of Oz. Thanks for pulling back the curtain.
“Bill Gates’ Decadent Experiment”
A decade before we’ll know it works
A decade before you’ll know we’re jerks
A decade before your child is failed
A decade before your child is jailed
“It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.” — Bill Gates
I feel moral outrage by Bill Gates’ largely uninformed interventions. But, I don’t equate Bill Gates with high-stakes testing or the alleged “worship of measurement”. Indeed, Bill Gates is the primary funder of the Common Core Standards initiative — an effort to institutionalize fuzzy measurement and no-stakes testing for students into the foreseeable future.