Laura Chapman, reired arts educator, writes here with extensive documentation, about the Gates Foundation’s audacious effort to control teacher education.
Beware, Massachusetts! Gates has already planted its flag on 71 providers of teacher education.
Laura writes:
“I have been looking at all five of the Gates “Teacher Transformation Grants,” each for 33 months and just shy of $4 million for each grantee. All of the press releases are filled with jargon about “elevating” the teaching profession. The interlocking networks and complementary funding by other foundations of these new Gates investments is amazing.
“In October 2015 the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education received a 33 month grant for $3,928,656 from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to support the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE) “teacher transformation” effort: The Elevate Preparation: Impact Children (EPIC) center. This is an addition to a separate Gates grant in October 2015, $ 300,000, “to launch, execute, and utilize implementation data collection at the state-level.”
“On other blogs, I have commented on this takeover of 71 “providers” of teacher education in Massachusetts, where a large administrative unit in the state department of education is functioning as one of Gates Foundation’s Teacher Preparation Transformation Centers.
“Why Massachusetts? Massachusetts has already imposed industrial strength surveillance systems on teacher prep programs. The Gates grant will complete the so-called “EPIC System” including tracking the “performance outcomes” of graduates of 71 teacher prep programs insofar as their graduates are employed by the state. Among the measures of performance (in addition to those already required in the state) are surveys of employers, parents, students, and all of the candidates who have become teachers—tracked for a minimum of three years.
“In addition, Massachusetts and six other states are part of the Network for Transforming Educator Preparation (NTEP), with a focus on teacher licensure, program approval, and data systems—an initiative of the Council of Chief State School Officers. The CCSSO is so dependent of the Gates Foundation for operating support is should be regarded as one of many subsidiary operations of the Foundation.”
Gates is relentless. He is like a madman with a laboratory who won’t give up on his project to control teachers. He has said repeatedly that “we” know how to create great teachers. He believes that if everyone did what he wants, every teacher would be in the top quartile.
VAM failed. But he is moving on now to teacher education.
He never learns. He ruins other people’s lives, tries to destroy an entire profession, and expects the world to thank him.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Gates is a huge backer of Eva Moskowitz’ SUCCESS ACADEMY charter school chain.
I wonder if Bill approves of Eva’s and her teachers’ unique strategy of direct instruction to kindergartners on ‘How to Count to Ten,’ or how he would feel if one of his kids in the Seattle private schools treated his kids like this. (SEE VIDEO BELOW)
Holy sh–! It’s only 1 minute long, but again … Holy sh– !
“Video: A Momentary Lapse or Abusive Teaching?”
“In 2014, an assistant teacher at Success Academy Cobble Hill secretly filmed her colleague, Charlotte Dial, scolding one of her students after the young girl failed…”
View on http://www.nytimes.com
The kids all look terrified, with the fingers interlaced
and dead quiet, while the teacher, who looks barely
out of high school, runs the show.
Then, when one of the little girls cannot count to
ten fast enough, the teacher tears her paper, then
applies her cutting edge Success Academy teaching
skills and explodes:
“GO TO ‘THE CALM DOWN CHAIR’ AND SIT!!!”
The only one here who needs to “calm down” is the teacher,
Ms. Charlotte Dial.
Also, this Success Academy is in the more upscale Cobble
Hill. I don’t think the parents in that neighborhood — oh
heck, in ANY neighborhood — are going to be happy about this.
Time for another tear-filled press conference about how
this was all “just an anomaly”… blah, blah, blah ..
Also, the administrators at that school know exactly who the teachers’ aide who filmed this is, and gave it to the New York Times. I don’t think she’s going to be holding her job much longer.
Perhaps this can be the beginning of a genre of sorts: secretly-filmed Success Academy videos show what’s REALLY going on behind Eva’s propaganda machine.
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Wow, that video is horrifying.
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The TA is incredibly brave. Ms. Charlotte Dial needs a new career. She probably owes apologies to most if not all of her students and their parents. I hope that after she is deprogrammed she is able to move on.
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A person who would do this to a child is teaching bullying, by example.
IMO, it reflects someone more concerned with the data analytics, reflecting his/her own performance, than the child’s improvement. The video puts on display, the culpability, of the reformers, driven by profits for Wall Street and Silicon Valley, enabled by the fleecing of taxpayers.
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Should teachers be taped? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmPL1K9ucgQ
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This is an interesting topic: I have to go from one extreme to the other with side one (1) being a liberally edited far-right-radio attack against what a non-far-right teacher had presented to her class , to side two (2) being so much recent cellphone video of school “security” personnel physically harassing students.
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I am encouraged by the idea of this type of exposure becoming “a genre of sorts.” I was terribly abused by my district’s greedy grasp after any and all reform funding, and when pushed out of teaching I worked very hard to write about what I’d been through in the hope of “exposing” it, and putting it up to the light. I encourage every educator, every administrator, every school employee, every parent, and ever public school advocate to find an outlet for their own anti-reform voice!
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I read it here many times “don’t take Gates’ money” and “he is powerful because he has so much money”.
Well, we won’t have to worry about the above if you stop giving Gates money. Stop it!
Stop buying Windows computers, stop writing your blog posts and comments using Internet Explorer and Word. Stop using Excel to make your calculations about charter schools, stop preparing your presentation about the sorry state of public education using Powerpoint. Just stop it!
Gates and friends have made you believe, there are no alternatives. There are. Just as there are free, high quality alternatives to charter schools, there are free and high(er) quality alternatives to every single software you are using—including the Windows (or Apple) operating system.
Remember, people in computing have been suffering as much from Gates as teachers have been. In some sense, they have it worse: they are creating the free alternatives without any compensation. They are doing it for the love of it during their free time.
If you starve Gates in computing, you starve his foundation, and hence you help teachers and your kids.
So it’s time to start the starvation.
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Do you suppose people pull their “forelock” when Gates walks by?
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Mercedes, thanks so much for featuring Laura’s work on your blog. More folks need to be familiar with her excellent research. I never fail to learn something from Laura, usually information that makes my hair stand on end!
“At present TeacherSquared is not much more than a social media space. But… I tripped on a job opening for the Gates foundation that suggests this “center” for teacher transformation is envisioned as one part of a surveillance and a data mining operation focussed on teacher practices, enthusiasms, sentiments, and so on.”
The Twitter version of TeacherSquared is likely Teacher2Teacher. It seems to be aimed precisely at surveilling and data hoovering just as Laura suggests. For sure, it’s not some grassroots organization of teachers:
https://twitter.com/teacher2teacher?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
And one of our favorite groups, the CCSSO, is promoting #LoveTeaching on social media:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14mUIZI6RxUjImZ7ySlYKuTWeYVJatbm7LIJWhZULR-4/pub
Can’t they just leave us alone?
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This one individual has way, way too much influence over the lives of tens of millions of public school children. It’s just a bad idea.
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“Gates is relentless. He is —- a madman with a laboratory who won’t give up on his project to control teachers. He has said repeatedly that “we” know how to create great teachers. He believes that if everyone did what he wants, every teacher would be in the top quartile.”
I have said before, and been warned not to say it in a public forum, that there is only one way this is going to end. I won’t say what it is, but consider that I’m a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam vet.
>Gates failed at his smaller high school project – didn’t he spend more than $250 million on that failed experiment or was it more?
>Gates failed at VAM (test and punish) through Duncan’s DOE controlled Common Care crap—we hope. Gates might not be done with that one yet. His next step might be to bribe all the states or as many as possible to keep using VAM with his test and punish agenda.
>Now we must defeat him in his latest endeavor to destroy community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, public education in the U.S. by taking over and scripting teacher training.
Gates is not the only billionaire oligarch who must be stopped. The real psychopaths in this bunch will not be stopped easily. I think as long as they are breathing and their foundations are in place, the war will wage on nonstop?
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Lloyd, I am with you, but: the bloodbath can be avoided. There are plenty of examples in Europe where the insanity of insanely rich people are well controlled by modern constitutions and laws.
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Let’s hope it can be avoided, but what’s happening in Europe isn’t happening here. I’ve read that many Europeans are watching the U.S. shaking their heads in shock as the country rolls backwards toward the 19th century.
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Speaking of bloodbath and past centuries: I got this in the mail today
“Legislation has been filed that would require state universities to allow permit-holding faculty and staff to bring their weapons on campus. HB1736/SB2376 “permits full-time employees of state public colleges or universities to carry a handgun while on property owned, operated, or used by the employing college or university if the employee has a valid Tennessee handgun carry permit.” HB2131/SB1991 “prohibits public postsecondary institutions from taking any adverse action against an employee or student as a result of such person’s lawful transportation and storage of a firearm or ammunition in the person’s parked motor vehicle.”
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I must admit that considering where I taught for thirty years—I witnessed one drive by shooting from my classroom doorway and heard of others from the staff—I often thought of carrying a Glock in an underarm shoulder holster. The local barrio was so dangerous, my first principal warned us to never leave the middle school campus on foot and walk into the community even in pairs. At night the local police would not patrol those streets.
It seemed like a week didn’t go by that we didn’t hear about gang killings taking place outside that fence. In fact, I have not forgetten the one girl who was forced to kneel and beg for forgiveness before a shot gun barrel was forced into her mouth and blew the back of her head off. Her crime in the eyes of the rival gang that executed her was being the girlfriend of a rival gang member who had gone into hiding. They were hunting for him and when they couldn’t find him, they made an example out of his fourteen year old girlfriend.
That shooting happened on a weekend on the corner of the high school where I taught my last 16 years in the classroom. She was a good student well liked by her teachers and peers and did not belong to the gang but she fell for the charismatic gang banger, another student at the same high school, that she was dating. She was a member of the high school chorus and planned to go to college.
Another regular weekend episode of gang valence happened in front of the high school when two cars driven by rival gang members came racing down a major four lane avenue shooting at each other. The shootout ended when one driver lost control and went up on the sidewalk in front of the HS football stadium and hit a telephone poll. The other car raced away.
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What you lived with as the daily normal would be enough to make anyone think it might be wise to be armed and at least “go down shooting.” Although gun violence was not unknown in the community where I taught, it was still viewed as an anomaly. We were on lockdown more than once, but I only remember being crouched in a corner with my students once. It turned out to be an armed robbery at a nearby store. I can’t remember whether they caught the guy, but they eventually decided we could safely resume instruction. After the school installed metal detectors, the atmosphere became calmer. Knowing that gangbangers would have to duke it out with their fists was a little less threatening. Gang paraphernalia was banned as were gang signs, and residency requirements were more closely followed. We tended to collect kids from the city who were living with relatives and brought with them a more aggressive response to authority. With the tighter restrictions, many of them disappeared. Even the local gang leaders who used to appear in school on an irregular basis to check up on their crew found they could no longer come and go as they pleased. It took me (naivete personified) awhile to realize that the pleasant, respectful young man who attended my class sporadically was just there to survey his crew and their drug dealing activities. I found it expedient to maintain the fiction that I was unaware of various students’ connections. I treated them all as I would any teenager, and they were either amused by my ignorance or happy to remain anonymous. A surprising number of them did not want their teachers to judge them by their gang affiliation. They would light up like any student who had earned approval from a favored teacher. I suppose in retrospect there were a few students that I should have been afraid of, but the teacher role protected me from my own ignorance.
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Not all teen gang members are hardcore. Most join to be left alone by the gang’s aggressive recruiters and also gain the protection the gang offers against bullies and rival gangs. The hard core members are the ones who do the recruiting and deal with drugs and in some areas even prostitution (often sex slavery), gambling, etc. Multi generational gangs are a tribal culture that grows in areas with high rates of poverty. And that environment of poverty is why the gangs have turned to crime to make money. That doesn’t make it right. All it does is help explain this violent and often dangerous subculture.
Attacking the roots of poverty with a high quality, community based, transparent, democratic, public sector, early childhood education system is the only way to reverse this growing trend. Common Core and high stakes tests are not going to scratch the surface. In fact, they will make it worse.
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I understand and can relate to this, Lloyd. Memphis is one of the most crime ridden places in the US.
The question is if allowing teachers carry guns in school would make things better? As it is, the bill would allow teachers have their guns in the classrooms with them. What if the teacher gets mad at a kid? What if two teachers get mad at each other? I can imagine many scenarios when teachers would start shooting and kids would run to their cars, get their guns, and join in the battle. Any of these scenarios are more likely than what the bill is trying to address: a shooter comes to the school with an automatic rifle. And even in this case, I think it’s likely that teachers, who are not trained professionals, would shoot innocent people accidentally.
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I don’t agree that teachers are going to wig out and start shooting—unless they work for Eva in her Success Academy chain gang corporate charter schools. A much larger danger is the risk that a dangerous and disturbed student takes the weapon away from the teacher and uses it against the teacher or other students. Imagine a student who weights twice a teacher who managed to overcome the teacher and take the weapon away.
If teachers were allowed to have firearms in the classroom, I think every classroom should have a fire proof weapon’s safe and the only time a teacher could legally access it is if the campus was invaded by a killer who was running around shooting other children. Maybe that safe’s locking mechanism would be controlled from the office and in an emergency there would be several administrators who had the ability to unlock the safes in those classrooms where teachers were willing to have one.
But even then, the teachers, who decided to buy a firearm and keep one in that safe for only emergency purposes, would have to go through training the same as a Marine or FBI agent does.
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Lloyd,
Gates spent $2 billion on his small schools program, which he abandoned in 2008
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He is so power hungry and will stop at nothing. Teachers, parents and students must get involved.
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The story of Windows and Microsoft underlies what you say: quality is not important for him, but control, and as much of that as possible.
Vonnegut’s poem is fitting:
“True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
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