There are many fine journalists at Education Week. I count on EdWeek to be the K-12 paper of record.
That is why it is distressing to learn that the Gates Foundation gave Edweek nearly $2 million to cover technology. Gates has supported EdWeek for years.
“Date: October 2015
Purpose: to broaden education digital media capacity in the U.S. to share analysis, best practice, and current innovation in public education
Amount: $1,998,240
Term: 36
Topic: College-Ready, Strategic Partnerships
Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Bethesda, Maryland
Grantee Website: http://www.edweek.org”
I wish the billionaires would keep hands off the independent media. Can EdWeek be independent of the man and the industry that underwrites their coverage?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No of course they can’t.
No, Edweek is not the K-12 paper of record.
Diane, this is very disingenuous, coming from an education historian. You know that the Gates Foundation has ALWAYS been a primary funder of Edweek’s parent company, Editorial Projects in Education..
“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports coverage of the education industry and K-12 innovation in Education Week and on edweek.org, and provides capacity-building support for Editorial Projects in Education, Education Week’s nonprofit parent company. The Gates Foundation is dedicated to the principle that every human life is equally valuable. Its commitment to education centers on ensuring greater opportunity for all Americans through the attainment of secondary and post-secondary education with genuine economic value.”
http://www.edweek.org/info/about/philanthropy.html?intc=main-footer
To answer your question Diane, NO!
It’s the ol nose of the camel in the tent process.
This is a repeat reply to an earlier comment by you, but I really like the camel image
“ NCLB (No Camel Left Behind)”
The Bushy camel head
Was poking in the tent
And look at where that led
To Oligovernment
And now we have the butt
Of camel in the tent
We’re really in a rut
With stinky camel scent
I just resent the manipulation. I feel like the ed tech sales job was carefully rolled out the moment they finished promoting the Common Core tests.
I’m sure the individual journalists are good and ethical people but I don’t think that’s the right question.
The right question to me is simple: “should Bill Gates have this much influence on tens of millions of public school children?”
These are HUGE purchases by public schools, and while government and the private sector are promoting these ed tech purchases we’re all seeing pictures of crumbling buildings and boilers that don’t work and cuts in the programs in schools that children enjoy.
The truth is budgets set priorities. The President is wrong. It isn’t “plus/and” for public schools. It’s often either/or. In my experience it’s almost always “either/or”. They all need to go to a school board meeting. “Plus/and” is a slogan. It isn’t how this works.
EdWeek can present all the “practice” the tech moguls are eager to sell us. Gates uses his deep pockets gain a platform and sway opinion in his direction. He uses cash to infiltrate groups that may present a dissenting view.
What about when the “best practice” is to not use technology? How much reporting will go into that?
Amen!
That’s a well kept secret!
Don’t go through the looking glass.
Gates is not the only funder of specific content in EdWeek. Gates is also. the major funder of the annual Quality Counts report in EdWeek, a report card.
Even more interesting is that Gates Foundation has recruited Lynn Olsen, a top EdWeek journalist, to replace Vicki Phillips whose farewell note included some self congratulations about getting the Common Core in place and so forth.
New initiatives for the Gates Foundation focus on getting rid of teacher education in higher education except as an authorizer of credentials, including a masters degree in “effective” teaching. More charter colleges of education are the next step. Relay is one model.
The aim is to dump scholarship in and about education within teacher preparation in favor of a bundle of “high leverage” tricks of the trade for raising test scores, with repeated practice In using these until they become automatic.
Practice could begin with teaching avatars followed by doing an on-the-job residency program, with lots of tests, online tutoring and such. Think Relay Graduate School of Education, with Doug Lemon’s bag of tricks, highly prescriptive teaching with no critical thinking allowed, 3.5 GPA for admission, content mastery tests, and so on.
Gates wants to control who gets to teach, where, and all of the criteria for credentialing teachers. He is certain that critical thinking and almost all scholarship bearing on education is an unnecessary distraction from raising test scores and getting kids launched into college and/or career. He has funded an “inspectorate” system for rating teacher preparation programs aimed at replacing existing state and national accreditations.
Look for lots of marketing of those ” high leverage” tricks of the trade via social media, especially the Twitter platform called “teacher2” or TeacherSquared. Gates is paying Relay Graduate a school of Education to exploit social media for recruiting and data gathering. Concurrently, the Foundation is also hiring a new manager to help exploit the Twitter teacher2 platform and others. The manager will be assembling a “portfolio” of social media sites united by some connection to education and, of course, the prospect of mining all of them for data.
The new slogan for the foundation’s work is the fuzzy and warm phrase “teachers know best”…(if they are not critical of the work of the Foundation).
Meanwhile the Foundation is still pushing charters and technology and teacher evaluations with VAM, observations, and student surveys, the latter from his $64 million investment in the deeply flawed Measures of Effective Teaching project.
Like many others, I refer to Bill Gates when the proper phrase should be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That is because Bill, far more than Melinda, is vocal about education and speaks as if had earned expertise sufficient to shape policy and practice on a national scale. He has lots of money and a lot of really bad ideas about education.
“Doug Lemon”
Great Freudian typo!
I like to say “Less Lemov, more Maslow.”
It is disturbing that someone with no training or experience in education should have so much influence over a public institution. Our skewed tax system helped to create these arrogant billionaires that use their power to try to dictate policy. We have to deal with people like the Koch brothers, Eli Broad, and Bill Gates and the foundations they fund. Their main goal is to remake our democratic system so that it is a whole lot less democratic. They are guided by the notion that their “natural superiority” gives them the right to do so.
As I wrote in reply earlier – beware of EdWeek
The people who produce processed food are “good people”, I guess. They would all say they are, certainly. But their business is selling processed food to families and children and often that food is not good for children.
No one would ever say they should be running public nutrition programs, because, after all, they’re good people! That would be a bad idea. It’s true to a certain extent that they ARE running public nutrition programs- they lobby DC heavily and they opposed Michelle Obama’s push to make school lunches healthier. However. No politician ran around saying “the best thing to do would be to put General Mills in charge of school lunch programs” because that’s laughable and also politically untenable.
So why is the ed tech sector different? There’s something magical about this industry and products that makes them pure and unsullied by vulgar and self-interested profit motives? That would be a first.
This is nonsense. Ed Week has never been “independent,” as any close analysis of their articles on, say, Chicago, shows. From its inception, Ed Week has been the “news” voice of corporate “school reform.” It was as true when I first subscribed more than a quarter century ago, and it’s true today. Any journalistic analysis of Ed Week’s “news” reports shows that the quotes in Ed Week are first and foremost from “experts” who are vetted for their support of corporate “reform.”
Where in the world did Diane Ravitch get the idea that Ed Week was practicing “independent” reporting. It’s been pushing propaganda from beginning to now.
NPR also?
Sharon,
I think you are correct in that EdWeek has depended on advertising and that usually means tip-toeing around direct criticism of corporations. That is not unique to EdWeek.
If EdWeek was only a rag promoting corporate reform, this week’s first page would not be featuring an article about the issues facing TFA, the new landscape for the Opt Out movement, the disaster in Flint Michigan.
Inside, I find brief reports on the state-of-the-state addresses given by founteen Governors, not easy to find anywhere else, and with links available to the full text of each speech. The summaries focus on budgets, charters, laws and so on. There I learn that Governor Cuomo said that charter schools cost half as much as public schools (as if to rationalize continued investments).
I learn of the total mess the testing companies have made of the college admissions process, glitches, errors, non-responsive customer services, patched together “resources” that are making a lot of people really angry–
I am not ready to give up my EdWeek subscription, but I have learned to be a skeptic of many reports, including the massive Quality Counts report card. I know that this year, specific topics are covered by grants from nine foundations. I know their preferences. Most of are notorious for their support of charters, pay for performance, so-called personalized learning and other ideas. I am also aware of what is NOT covered and found elsewhere or not at all until content surfaces on truly independent blogs like this one, no ads, staff, just one-person operations that manage, against the odds, to have millions of people engaged with important ideas.
Needless to say, I disagree about EdWeek being “the K-12 paper of record.” For the same reason, I do not consider the Wall Street Journal the paper of record for insights into finance.
I would gently disagree with the idea that EdWeek has never been independent, and suggest there is reason to believe, as Diane Ravitch says, that Education Week is still the K-12 journalistic outlet of record, simply because there is no other comprehensive national coverage of K-12 policy, administration, publishing and practice, in one source.
When Ron Wolk founded Education Week, it was to fill a need–a place to gather reporting on ed policy, across the nation. It didn’t have a particular axe to grind, beyond sharing news–and opinion–that was otherwise buried in state and local reporting. EW has gone through several editorial and funding shifts since then–as have virtually all news media outlets–largely thanks to the way news is reported, using instant, 21st century technology and an audience that now gets to talk back. When you stop funding via print subscription, you either fold, accept a greatly reduced audience and limited scope of reporting–or take grant funding.
Grant funding has indeed impacted editorial viewpoints, in news media across the country–it’s not just EdWeek. But, please–if you know of a completely “independent” outlet reporting ed policy news, pros and cons from both sides of policy issues, one that’s genuinely fair and balanced, please post it here. Because I don’t believe that outlet exists.
Like most of Ravitch’s faithful readers, I am angry and suspicious and cynical about what goes under the label of “education reform.” EdWeek still lets me–one of their Teacher division bloggers–post stories like these, that helped break the story of DPS teachers:
I have never been censored or asked to change anything that I wrote, including regular jabs at the Gates Foundation.
I’m not defending Education Week–only pointing out that all major journalism outlets “of record” are struggling with trying to stay alive and keep their independent voice, such as it is, in the era of Citizens United, when money is indeed, speech.
Edweek ceased to be independent many years ago.
This is from the former Obama Administration official who runs the Gates-funded site that promotes charters and, now, ed tech:
“We as educators need to release our fear of technology in the classroom and the fear of change. We are failing our students and losing them in the process to boredom.”
A consultant wrote it. As you can see it’s very nuanced and scientific- buy ed tech immediately or you’re “failing our students”. That is a sales pitch. Outside education no one would even question that it’s a sales pitch. Let’s not kid ourselves.
http://educationpost.org/take-it-from-a-teacher-this-will-get-your-students-off-the-phone-and-engaged-in-the-classroom/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Betcon&utm_content=TwAcctTimWiseCg3
Chiara,
Do you think he wrote that with the inspirational Billy Joel song, “Only the Good Die Young” feeding his dreams?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhjNm20XbXw
They need to face facts. When kids are forced into more screen time they will rebel. They are always seeking reasons to rebel and Gates is delivering right on schedule.
Smashing Pumpkins is evolving – kids dropping computers out of windows.
I have stopped subscribing to and reading Ed Week. In fact, if I see an article from there I deliberately pass it up. Their writing and the issues they cover have become biased and there is already a noticeable slant away from representing issues from teachers’ or other educational professionals’ perspectives. It does not surprise me at all that they accepted this money, you can tell that they are adapting their reporting accordingly. Nancy Neill
This isn’t really new. Gates has funded EdWeek since 2007 that I know of, as he did back when you and Deb were writing Bridging Differences for it. My link to their disclosure page is dead, unfortunately.
They did publish some rousing guest posts, for which I give them credit. In 2012, they asked to see this one in advance, to check for potential liability, they said. They argued weakly for a different slant here and there, but finally published it unedited. I think it is a mistake to overestimate their status as a source of actual information, nonetheless, as they certainly would have edited it if they thought they could.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/07/the_gates_foundations_educatio.html
This just makes official what has been apparent for years. It always seemed to me that Edweek includes just enough critical coverage of so-called education reform to inoculate themselves against charges that they are there to engineer consent, rather than inform.
Common prostitutes are pillars of virtue, when contrasted with ed. reformers and their tarts.
The rich sugar daddies of ed. reform, dangle money in front of highly educated sell-outs, who are eager to put children in harm’s way, for their own enrichment. They’re complicit with the johns, in obtaining stolen taxes to degrade a third party…public schools. And, while the sugar daddies’ kids are cloistered in wealthy enclaves, the middle class kids take the full brunt of the oligarch-created “human capital pipeline”. There may be worse forms of human trafficking in the U.S., but none, more widespread, in impact.
yep
Christine Langhoff, you said
“Doug Lemon”
Great Freudian typo!
I like to say “Less Lemov, more Maslow.”
Not a Freudian slip, just a fight with my ipad that insisted that Lemov should be Lemon.
I though I had won the battle but did not. Thanks for paying attention.
The iPad is right!