Reader Laura Chapman, retired consultant in arts education, often writes powerful comments. Here is her description of the Gates Foundation’s plans for teacher education.
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 Lemov’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.
I just looked at teacher2 on Twitter. It looks like garbageinane and asinine, and sometimes vulgar comments.
yes, yes, yes
Sigh. We need certified teachers in the classroom no matter what the tech tools are being used. Did people forget about our respectufl, loving, interesting, exciting, thoughtful, intelligent, bright teachers? OY! And how about a school library to experince, where books are everywhere and one can “smel” and “touch” those books. There is something very sacred and special about libraries and our young need to experience the wonders in a library and libraries become part of their every days lives. Online instruction, while can be good for certain learning activities, is NOT appropriate all the time and in all way.
Fasten your seat belts; the Koch Brothers have just announced their new venture philanthropy plan called “Stand Together.” Their goal is to “revitalize society.” They will address poverty and ‘educational quality.’ Their actual goal is probably to gain tax credits and ROI, but these goals don’t look good in a press release.
You wonder when it stops bringing a return, campaign investment.
People are barraged with this stuff constantly. Voters have to reach a point where they tune all of it out. I used to look up the names of the various lobbying groups and try to figure out who was funding them and what they were after, but there are too many of them now.
It’s like playing “find the billionaire” and there’s always one back there somewhere.
Gates & the Kochs want to buy everything. They’ve bought POTUS, congress & Senate, the regulatory agencies, the state houses, & working on local governments.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Bill Gates has lots of money and a lot of really bad ideas about education—ideas he is forcing on the United States and then the world.
Why anyone who is not getting paid by Gates would take him– a fellow who dropped out of college — seriously on anything related to higher education (even graduate school!) is a complete mystery.
Gates approaches things like a low-level hacker.
So, I am supposing if we follow Bill Gates’ plan, we never read the masters like David Elkind, Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, etc. etc. Kids will become like little robots working individually at the computer.
What a shame!
And cue Brookings Institute:
” A less-noticed new provision in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) may be critical to unlocking business model innovation in teacher preparation…
Most states’ policies governing teacher preparation reinforce established business models and traditional practices. In order for schools of education to operate legally, issue teaching certificates, and offer their students financial aid, they must demonstrate that they meet the standards set by state departments of education and regional accreditation agencies…
An alternative way to improve teacher preparation is to build new institutions from the ground up with entirely different business models that are aligned with student outcomes. A few examples of new institutions that have done this include Match Teacher Residency, Urban Teachers, Aspire Teacher Residency, and Relay Graduate School of Education.”
So there we have it, folks. Schools of education just need to get with it and be more like business.
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts/2016/01/27-essa-teacher-prep-innovation-arnett
An example of how one person can cause enormous damage:David Coleman,
Gates, Koch bros and Trump are examples of idiocy linked with pretension.
Thankfully Diane and her blog has taken on these monsters.
Is the Gates Foundation actually funding Relay anymore though? I know they gave them a grant back in 2012, but I haven’t seen any relationship between them since then.
I have a lot of respect for a lot of the opinions on this blog, but not the ones bashing Gates. Both he and Melinda admit that they have not made much progress in education. I appreciate that they invest so much money though into it. It’s made with good intentions and they’re not jerks about it.
Gates just gave $3.9 million to Relay for a three year “transforming teacher preparation center. ‘ ( Press release, December 18, 2015). I have seen nothing positive from the Gates initiatives in education and I have been tracking those investments since 2004.
What woiuld you call it then? The road to hell, if memory serves me well, is
paved with good intentions.