Valerie Straus reports that Bill Gates continues to pour millions of dollars into organizations that might persuade people to like the Common Core. Usually when a product or service gets good word of mouth, it takes off. Unfortunately for Gates, who has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in establishing national standards, a national curriculum, and national testing, the public is not buying.
This past year, Gates expended another $42 million trying to buy friends for his standards. You might be surprised by some of the recipients.
Here are a few:
Editorial Projects in Education, which sponsors Education Week: $100,000
National Writing Project: $1.6 million
National Congress of Parents and Teachers: $1 million
The Boston Foundation: $150,000
There are many more. Someone should tell Bill, “Money can’t buy you love.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Buying the Message”
Gates may buy it
But we just don’t
He will try it
But we just won’t
“The Fog Lifter”
The billionaire was beaten
By lady with a blog
Who managed to defeat him
By dissipating fog
SomeDAM Poet: well done!
I lack your deft touch, but for some reason you put me in mind of that tv show of yesteryear, Mr. Ed (of “talking horse” fame) and I reworked—or, truth be told, mangled—the first verse—
No one should flog a horse, of course of course,
and it’s cruel to flog this particular dying horse, of course,
that is of course, unless the flogger of the horse,
is the billionaire Mr. Bill!
😎
P.S. For all you Common Core ‘closet’ readers of decontextualized informational texts, “horse” is a stand-in for “CCSS” and I am playing with the meaning of “flog.”
I’ll give you a literary allusion Krazy; He thinks it is the story Stone Fox, he should be able to just carry the dead carcass across the line and win, He just can’t hire enough people to do the actual carrying.
Old Teacher: you don’t give Mr. Gates enough credit for distancing himself from dealing with reality…
First he spends many many millions of dollars measuring [none of this and the following personally, of course—that’s what a foundation is for!] various distances to various finish lines on various spots on planet Earth at various times of the day and night, how that is affected by the weight of a dog carcass along with the numerically determined “grit” and “determination” of the carriers [different ages and backgrounds], related measures like temperature and humidity, and so on. Thousands of hours will be spent videotaping every step involved in “carrying” and “depositing” and “winning” and “losing” and so on. Then, once ten years have gone by, he will decide if he has enough information to actually have someone else pay to do the deed.
Sadly, he never finds out if his “stuff” (after those ten years) works, because the dog has died years ago, the race has been cancelled, grandpa is no longer with us, Stone Fox has retired, and the young boy he was thinking of helping is now an AK-47 wielding member of a heroic militia that is occupying a wild life preserve in some state that begins with the letter O…
Rheeally! And all this in the most Johnsonally sort of ways too…
I had better stop here before I completely trash Mr. Bill “I only treasure what I can pay you to measure” Gates.
He might ask Eli Broad to sic Peter Cunningham on me for not engaging in “civil conversation” and put me on the “to monitor” list along with the owner of this blog.
An apparatchik by any other name…
😎
I am not surprised. I participated in OWP in Ohio several years ago. Even then they were entrenched. We had to write a personal Credo. I remember some of mine. It was well-received except for this: I believe that all children can learn, but not necessatily the same things at the same pace.
I got shot down.
I still stand by my statement.
Deb, What is OWP?
TIA, Duan
Buckeye “Righten” Project…Duan Wan K’noby
I would love to see our talented billionaires of our country start a program in which our country will no longer have any kids who are hungry without any food. I saw an ad on television asking for donations for hungry children – in our country – asking the regular Joe’s of the world to donate money for food for these starving children. Well I thought, how about the Gates and the Bloombergs of the world, the Koch Bros??? Where are these freakish people?? These are the same billionaire people who are spending countless millions on all kinds of unnecessary bull crap like “education reform”. Or,for that matter spending countless millions of dollars are “super pac” elections, going after teacher and other unions filled with hard working regular people. The fact that these billionaires are spending their money are bull shit is proof that they are all full of crap. Why not say hey we are not going to have any hungry children in this country. But no for example idiot Mike Bloomberg stated he would spend a billion dollars for a presidential campaign run. Are you kidding me mikey bloomcraps?? A billion dollars on a campaign that is useless and 0 ZERO chance of winning any presidential election. Hey Mikey Bloomberg, how bout spending that billion on some starving children in this country who really need the food!!!!!! This is why this country is full of sh** especially people like Gates and Bloomberg who spend their money making others miserable for their own stupid gain while we have starving children in this country.
These billionaires won’t be doing anything selfless for the poor. Their “venture philanthropy” is really venture capitalism. The government is their partner in figuring out ways to help them launder some cash, garner some tax credits and make some ROI while they exploit the rest of us.
Those billionaires aren’t really all that “talented”. Just a combination of lucky and rapacious. And, no, the last thing we need them involved in is child hunger. These guys have reverse Midas touch – everything they touch turns to, well, something I won’t say in Diane’s living room. Just tax the hell out of their billions and let the public take care of itself.
Check out another billionaire David Welch of Students Matter and his crew…They won an Oscar for their work!!!
http://anthonymize.net/2016/01/25/and-the-oscar-goes-to-wait-oscar-is-not-here/
Dienne-I think we should lower corporate tax and raise personal tax on the wealthy. If we had the Eisenhower tax schedule, these rapacious billionaires would be taxed at 90%. Think of all the common good we could do with this money instead of allowing them to buy democracy on fake “good” pet projects that supplant the function of government, wreck the public service and make them more money.
Figure that he’s convinced money can buy anything and unfortunately, he may be right.
All part and parcel of the common core mantra, If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS.
There is something very wrong with a legal/economic system, attached to a PR machine, that enables this amount of money to be thrown around, by a tax-avoiding gifter. Gates remains at the top of richest men lists, while creating an image, opposite of reality. His stranglehold on OUR schools, which his organizations describe as human capital pipelines, is a yoke, on the middle class.
“Common core is just another way to access knowledge- we need a common cure…”
“The Cure for the Common Core”
The cure for Common Core
Is simply to expose
Oneself to Coleman lore
And read a little close
I still like CC math (it looks exactly like “Singapore math” which our kids were already doing) and I still don’t like CC English, because it’s dry as dust and weirdly legalistic and joyless.
They actually have what I consider interesting reading selections in (what I call) “the CC workbook” but they have to take…. it…. apart…. so completely they wring any pleasure or really context or coherence out of it 🙂
There is so much that could be done without the restrictive Common Core math. The standards are a curriculum and not a very good one. The problem is the CCSS are taken as absolutes and there is little flexibility nor room for innovation. Competing standards would serve students better and not with the rigid, single-mindedness of high stakes testing tied in. My concern is that, like lemmings over a cliff, the inadequate CCSS will set us back as one unified, but deficient, nation.
The Common Core’s legacy will be one of failure, disruption, waste, and damage.
Bill Gates had no chance of improving math and ELA instruction/learning through the use of “higher standards” and harder tests. There was zero evidence in the 70 year, post-war history of public education to make him think this was possible. A perfect storm of arrogance and ignorance was all it took to leave our nation’s school system in shambles. Gates can own anything money, prestige, and power can buy – including his unwanted and undue influence over 50 million children and their futures. Now he owns the wreckage too.
A standard that can’t be changed by anyone but the copyright holder (Common Core) is inferior to any standard that can be changed, no matter how poor the latter standard might be to begin with. If it can be changed, it can be continually improved.
It’s actually very stupid to design a standard “set in stone”
…unless your purpose is to make money off of it — not off the standard itself but off the stuff that “plugs” into it.
Common Core was copyrighted so that businesses wouldn’t have to develop their products for a moving target and so that they could take advantage of the economy of scale — eg, so companies like Pearson could develop just a few tests to be taken by millions of students.
That’s good for businesses but bad for kids.
.
I agree that the lack of an ongoing governance system for multi-state standards is a serious flaw. No standards are perfect, especially in their inception, and will always need continued review and development.
I have to say that I view all standards, including the Common Core, as guides not mandatory prescriptions so the idea that the CCSS are copyrighted (while not great) is not too much of an impediment as we teach from the standards not to the standards.
He left me off: Mark Collins. I’ll be happy to take his ca$h and do nothing. Apparently many organizations who took his money have achieved the same results!
SEATTLE (November 18, 2015) – The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced it will commit $34.7 million over three years to five newly-formed Teacher Preparation Transformation Centers that will bring together higher education institutions, teacher-preparation providers and K-12 school systems to share data, knowledge and best practices.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GF) has departed from its customary policy of simply funding programs and organizations without soliciting proposals, at least not in any public way.
In the case of this $34.7 million teacher education project, the GF initiated a multip-step process to drum up interest. The first step was a fairly detailed Request for Information (RFI) from prospects. The second was on Request for Proposals (RFP) from the candidates who passed muster in meeting criteria for the grants. The process seems to have been structured to favor applicants who were already participating in a related activity.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/…/A-TeacherPrep–RFIRFP–Overview.pdf?…
Now: Here is where the GF’s struggle to salvage the Common Core fits in.
Gates wants new teachers to prepared to deliver Common Core lessons, so the trick is to get them while they in training.
The Request for Proposals included criteria for receiving a GF grant to set up “A Teacher Transformation Center.” The criteria were organized around four “drivers” of teacher quality…according to Gates et al. The following is my paraphrased summary.
Driver 1. Teacher competency is achieved through practice. Teacher preparation providers should:
1. Explicitly prepare candidates to teach at the level required by the Common Core State Standards.
2. Implement quality control “gatekeeping” measures, assessing candidate performance before candidates can advance from one stage to another.
3. Clearly define what candidates should know and be able to do (a set of competencies, an instructional rubric)
4. Develop and deliver…sophisticated curricula (aligned to rigorous K-12 standards)
5. Implement rigorous performance assessments
6. Deliver competency-based programming
Source: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/…/A-TeacherPrep–RFIRFP–Overview.pdf?…
I think that the actual awards may not have emphasized the Common Core as much as the RFI.
For example, one of the four grants went to a transformation center housed at the Massachusetts Department of Education of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE) : Elevate Preparation: Impact Children (EPIC) center.
However, there is an active ballot measure in Massachusetts to kill the Common Core. http://newbostonpost.com/blogs/why-do-the-mbae-and-bill-gates-want-to-kill-a-massachusetts-education-ballot-initiative/
I think the Massachusetts grant will go forward even if the Common Core is tanked, because so many other parts of the Massachusetts project fit with the GF’s priorities.
For example, the Massachusetts grant will force 71 teacher prep programs in the state comply with even more industrial strength accountability measures than have been imposed in the last five years, with considerable loss of academic freedom for teacher education faculty, all supervisors of student teachers, and student teachers themselves.
The GF grant will allow is ESE to support “data-driven analysis and continuous improvement,” provide “robust and direct support for new Candidate Assessment of Performance (CAP) process with nine reporting forms,” build “additional Edwin Analytics Reports,” develop “regulations for the Pre-Practicum experience,” embed “mixed-reality simulations in coursework,” and coordinate “regional induction institutes.”
But here is the grandiose claim that may have landed the GF grant.
“The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE) believes that educator preparation can and should produce teachers who are ready to be effective on day one. We are working toward an ambitious goal that by 2022, candidates prepared in Massachusetts will enter classrooms and demonstrate results on par with peers in their third year of teaching.” http://www.doe.mass.edu/edprep/
I suppose that ESE intends to acquire accurate, comprehensive, and concurrent measures of the “performance” of third-year teachers–every grade level, every subject, every teacher preparation program, every cohort of “new” teachers, test scores produced by students of these new teachers, also employer and family surveys to feed data into those additional Edwin Analytics Reports. Who knows where all of this end? The officials at ESE seem to be more informed than anyone else.
I pity the poor neophyte teachers who have to pull off perfect Common Core-sy lessons in order to get certified! It’s like asking a neophyte chef to make a crowd-pleasing meal out of sludge.
I recently Googled ideas for teaching about Gothic cathedrals, something I teach about to my middle school students. There was a “Race to the Top” branded, Common-Core style lesson on David Macaulay’s wonderful book “Cathedral”, elements of which I use with my students. To my horror, the twelve-lesson unit turned “Cathedral” into sludge. Instead of using the book as a vehicle for teaching about one of humankind’s grandest achievements, Gothic cathedrals, it turned the book into a vehicle for teaching about “author’s style”. Huh? Macaulay is a renowned illustrator, not a renowned writer. The point of reading the book should not be to analyze his style, or even his wonderful illustrations; the point should be to learn about…Gothic cathedrals! This is a travesty of reading. A travesty of education. This illustrates the lunacy behind Common Core –it focuses the young human’s mind on a list of poorly-conceived standards rather than learning interesting and important things about the world we live in (which, ironically, does much more to increase literacy than the inane and tedious lessons the standards tend to inspire). Gates’ unfortunate young teachers are going to be learning to teach dreck.
Bill Gates memorized his employees’ number plates to monitor when they left the office
Some 30 years later the leopard (Gates) has not changed his spots. It is clear he thinks public school teachers are his employees.
Bill, you are not exactly young anymore. Stop trashing your own legacy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/12131694/Bill-Gates-memorised-his-employees-number-plates-to-monitor-when-they-left-the-office.html
Here’s yet another one:
“AASCU ANNOUNCES NEW PROJECT TO RE-DESIGN STUDENTS’ FIRST-YEAR COLLEGE EXPERIENCE
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) launched “Re-Imagining the First Year of College” (RFY), a new project aimed at ensuring success for all students, particularly those who have historically been underserved by higher education: low income, first generation, and students of color.
With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USA Funds, AASCU has created a coalition of 44 member institutions that will work together for three calendar years (2016-2018) to develop comprehensive, institutional transformation that redesigns the first year of college and creates sustainable change for student success.”
http://www.aascu.org/newsreleases/RFY/
I read today that Rafael Cruz, father of Ted, got the family together and prayed until God told them all that Ted should run for President. I guess the message Bill got was that he should run all of education.
Bill is getting messages from himself?
Gates is a wanna be.
Jan. 26, 2016 – The Ecologist (magazine), “Why is Cornell Hosting a GMO Propaganda campaign?…Millions from Gates Foundation being used to promote GMO’s and pesticides for the benefit of agri-chemical corporations.”
All of Gates’ billions to impose the Common Core will not allow him to circumvent the first rule of systems:
Garbage in -garbage out.
The CCCSS/PARCC/SBAC is about as faulty an input as he could have tried
NOT surprised to see The Boston Foundation here. In 2009, they convened the RTTT Coalition to further all things ed. reform.
According to today’s Inside Higher Ed, the Gates Foundation is also now dabbling in data that are supposed to be used to improve college graduation rates (https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/02/03/gates-foundation-sharpens-its-data-push?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=2a29ad0a73-DNU20160203&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-2a29ad0a73-197328917).
I’m beginning to think we just need to hope that when the Gates are through wrecking public education, the way they created havoc with medical research, they will move on to some other area.
Thanks for the post. I see Gates is still selling his plans as helping the disadvantaged. Nice twist, “colleges are mired in the legacy of serving the privileged, we’ve got to help them serve the poor.”
(With sarcasm) the tech industry could push along the process by employing minorities, rather than ignoring them.
The oligarchs either intuitively know warfare or they’ve read about it. (1) Attacks on two fronts, privatization and corporatization. (2) Employing a disguise, like a philanthropy. (3) Weakening the opposition, with propaganda narrating false failures e.g. schools are failing (4) Co-opting the opponent’s usual sources of support e.g. universities and federal departments. (5) Paying betrayers among the opposition, and giving them plausible cover, e.g. helping the poor…..
That $42 million could have done a lot of good elsewhere if it had been true philanthropy without ideology attached.
Per CPRE website- The Gates Foundation, Goldman Sachs, Pearson, and the Hewlett, Joyce, Pew and Rockefeller Foundations provided funding for CPRE, a consortium of colleges of education that produce policy research. CPRE was founded by the current President of Columbia Teachers College. A reporter at, In These Times, in 2013, provided a statement from Dr. Fuhrman in the context of her Pearson board membership and ownership of shares. (Teachers College Students Urge President to Cut Ties With Pearson) The accrediting board for Teachers College, MSCHE, plans a site visit at Teachers College on March 9-11. The College can be contacted for forms for submittal of 3rd party input.
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.