Peter Greene read the annual report from the CEO of the Gates Foundation, Sue Desmond-Hellman, and asked himself what the foundation had learned from its multi-zillion dollar investment in changing the nation’s education system. Nothing. They learned nothing. They blame “the system” for the failure of their bad ideas. It never occurs to them to examine whether they were wrong.
Bill Gates is never wrong. Unless he says so. And he hasn’t said so, so he can’t be wrong.
Desmond-Hellman cites a fake statistic to alarm readers. “Only 40 percent of students met three of the four college-readiness standards across English, reading, math, and science.”
Greene writes:
“This is a problem both because the basis for saying that in the first place (a study by test manufacturer ACT– so it’s kind of like a study by Ford Motor Company on whether or not Americans have enough cars) and the implication that you’re not really ready for college unless you have the knowledge base of both a science major and an English major (“Sorry, Chris. We were going to give you a full music scholarship, but your biology scores were too low”).
She writes: “However, I’m optimistic that all students can thrive when they are held to high standards. And when educators have clear and consistent expectations of what students should be able to do at the end of each year, the bridge to opportunity opens. The Common Core State Standards help set those expectations.”
Greene responds:
“So, apparently, nobody ever held students to high standards before (and apparently few people even thought of it). But we’ve discussed the magical power of expectations, and my advice to folks in the private sector remains the same– if expectations of high standards are the key to making every student succeed, then I suggest Microsoft just start hiring people at random and then expecting them to meet high standards. What’s that you say? Only some people can meet those standards, and so “hold to high standards” in industry means “sorting the wheat from the chaff, and only employing the wheat”? If that’s so, then where do we send the students who are chaff in public education?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
Question: What did the Gates Foundation Learn?
Answer: Apparently not much because they keep pushing their failed agenda and trying to do it by buying people, the wrong people.
As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a billionaire to understand something, when the salary of all his advisers depends upon their not understanding it!”
How could Sue Desmond-Hellman look any parent in the eyes and tell them that they won’t know if Bill’s Common Core program will work as promised for a decade (“the long haul”)? What could she say to that parent if she were told that Common Core isn’t working and that their child will never get that 10 year trial period back?
Haven’t you heard?
In Reformspeak, “a decade” has recently been redefined to be synonymous with “a generation”.
And after a decade with no sign of “success” (except of the charter kind), it will be re-defined to be synonymous with “a half-century”.
Isn’t Reformspeak fun?
Can Reformspeak also change my $10 bill into a $100 bill using the same alchemy?
Sure, No problem.
Just start a charter and you can easily turn a $10 application fee into a million dollars in the bank (a Swiss one, naturally)
The bottom line: Gates does not understand children/people. He can raise the bar as high as he wants, but if there is no interest, he’s just not going to get the pie-in-the-sky results to which he alludes. It would be a sad, sad world if the standardized teaching he wants were to become reality. I don’t want carbon copy teachers turning out carbon copy citizens. Maybe he should read Lois Lowry’s “The Giver”.
Ah, but Gates does understand how to make money.
“The Giver?”
You mean, fiction and literature, where it’s possible to learn about things like character and motivation?
Sorry, kids, it’s just “informational text” for you!
If anyone can turn up any prominent ed reform politician criticizing or questioning Gates in any fashion I’d love to see it.
I haven’t been able to find a single example, which is extraordinary, considering how influential Bill Gates is.
I think they should have to prove their independence from this foundation. I can’t help but notice the Obama administration pushes exactly the same agenda. Where do they differ from Gates? There must be one area they aren’t lockstep.
Omertà is a code of honor that places importance on silence, non-cooperation with the media, and non-interference in the ethically and morally irresponsible actions of other reformers. It originated and remains common in Southern Italy, where banditry and the Mafia-type criminal organizations (like the Camorra, Cosa Nostra, ‘Ndrangheta and Sacra Corona Unita) are strong. It is also deeply rooted in rural Crete,Sardinia and Corsica, and the 21st century American education reform movement.
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I agree. There is insufficient shouting NO to Gates money in education. He has coopted too many people who should know better than to avance his failed policies and screwy idea that there is one best path to life after high school.
Peter Green is spot on with this (“Sorry, Chris. We were going to give you a full music scholarship, but your biology scores were too low”).
The mantra of “college and career” was embedded in the Common Core. Gates is still trying to shore up the Common Core, paying the National PTA, the Education Trust, and countless organizations to support that deeply flawed agenda.
Bill sits in the tower of his billionaire bubble and naively clings to his failed policies. The difference now is that people are catching on to his brand of villainthropy. Parents are starting to resent his meddlesome policies that have put a vice grip on public schools with his test and punish agenda. Money can only buy so much; it cannot change reality. Gates has held our students and teachers hostage for too long with lies, threats, rigged tests and VAM spam. It is all a distraction from the difficult challenges of educating our young people.
Now Bill is poised to once again inflict public schools with “personalized learning,”more opportunities to sell products to public schools! I hope whoever wins the White House has more sense than Obama. Not all technology represents “innovation.” Untried delivery of essential educational services should be limited to pilot programs only with parent permission. We cannot afford to waste our students’ time by allowing them to be guinea pigs for tech. companies.
Never forget Bill’s billions, plus all the hedge fund money in the world, cannot buy the truth. Nor can it change failed ideas into successful ones. Now its just a matter of how much really bad money we all want to throw after the bad money already wasted.
Someone should notify this woman that her “long haul” is going to be a lot shorter than she thinks.
Long haul?
More like a keel haul
How does anyone “teach” Gates anything he doesn’t want to “learn”? He is so convinced that he has the correct perspective because of his personal world view and experiences. I think he’s never had respect for any teachers because he thinks he “knows better”. And, for himself, he might be correct. He isn’t just like everyone else, thank God. And, his opinion isn’t more worthy. There are people whose minds are like his. They are self-assured, domineering, manipulative, paternalistic, and don’t accept criticism. It’s an awful way to be.
I couldn’t care less how awful those qualities might be for Bill and Melinda; in fact, as the good people of Appalachia might say, I wouldn’t piss on them if their hearts were on fire.
What’s truly awful is how many people, children and teachers, must suffer because of their greed, will to power, arrogance and ignorance.
“… where do we send the children who are chaff in public education?”
You might want to ask Eva Moskowtiz and Dave Levin of KIPP that question, since they seem to have discovered the secret sauce for that.
And if they won’t give you their trade secrets, even though we all know very well what they are, then there’s always the private, for-profit prison system.
“They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” [variously attributed, most famously to Talleyrand]
😏
KTA,
Speaking of Talleyrand, have you read “The Ruin of Kasch” by Roberto Calasso?
I wonder if Gates has ever heard of AP classes and challenging electives. The big difference between what Gates is pushing is that every child has to prove they are a college bound scholar. That means every student is forced to take a flawed high stakes test that ranks, rewards a few and punished many.
But students have a choice to sign up for AP classes or not.
What Gates and the other autocratic, for profit at any pride, corporate public education reformers want is for every student in the public schools to be #1 in everything, but they have also demonstrated they don’t care what happens to the kids that move into the for-profit corporate charters. If they really cared, then every school would be totally transparent.
When a traditional and transparent public school that answers to community based, elected school boards and parents doesn’t measure up to whatever Gates uses as a ruler, then teachers are punished and schools closed while whatever goes on in the corporate charters is hidden behind a great wall that the oligarchs pay lobbyists to make sure stays in place so the for profit corporate charters can be totally opaque and operate in secrecy.
Gates supports a double standard until there is no more traditional public school left to attack.
What we need to understand is that Gates has a rubric for success that is much different than one we might create. According to his actual goals (not propaganda for the public) he is succeeding beautifully:
1 Standardize education. check
2 Standardize and monopolize teacher preparation. check
3 Standardize and monopolize and increase testing. check
4 Standardize teacher evaluation still working on that one
5 Increase investments in charter schools check ( but not done yet)
6 Standardize teaching by putting it all online still working on that one
7 Gain access to and exert control over Department of Education check
8 Gain access to and exert control over congressional education laws check
9 Gain access to and exert control over UNESCO spreading CC worldwide check
and last but definitely not least…
10 Gain access to and exert control over data collection through the Implementation of standardized education through standardized testing – it’s all about the DATA – store it, use it, sell it
As far as separating the chaff from the wheat…. Gates and his UN buddies are raging eugenicists who have no problem disposing of “useless eaters”
Gates’ utopian dreams will end as dystopian nightmares if we allow him to continue
ANY utopian dream will end in dystopian nightmares. The usual public school mission in general is just as utopian as Gates’s, isn’t it?
No, most if not all the teachers in the the traditional public schools do not harbor utopian dreams. The main goal of real teachers is to help children be all they can be and that might mean being an auto mechanic, a plumber or even an astronaught. No utopian BS for real teachers who are struggling to teach real children.
BS allegations like that usually come from the autocratic, for profit, opaque billionaire oligarchs, like Bill Gates, and their minions, like Campbell Brown or Michelle Rhee. They cook up such tripe for people who are easy to fool and manipulate.
Try teaching in the schools where I taught for thirty years and you’d know that anyone that entered teaching with utopian dreams either quits during their first year in the classroom, or they learn the hard way that teaching is probably one of the hardest jobs there is and success is measured one child at a time.
The child poverty rate in the district where I taught ran between 70% to almost 100%, and the gang violence was bloody and real. How in the H could any teacher working in that environment survive if they harbored stupid utopian dreams?
You make sense, Lloyd. I guess it’s sometimes the rhetoric of Diane’s vision that misleads me, the rhetoric of equal opportunity. There’s never equal opportunity and there never will be. School smarts is what you are born with. You’re lucky if you’ve got parents who can develop it. Was education then in your school just a holding action? Or can you sift and save one or two here or there?
How SHOULD we phrase the mission of public education then?
I think you misinterpret what “equal opportunity” means. The public schools in the one California school district (There are more than 1,000 school districts in California) where I taught for thirty years offered every child/student that “equal opportunity,” but it is up to the child/student and his or her parents/guardians to take advantage of what’s offered.
Public school teachers can’t force children/students to take advantage of the equal opportunities available to them. It takes a village to educate a child. Teachers can’t do it by themselves.
For instance, I taught for thirty years and in every class I taught there were always students that took advantage of the opportunity to learn offered to them. But man students did not take advantage of that opportunity to improve their future possibles.
If students do not cooperate and learn what the teachers and schools offer them, they they are not taking advantage of what’s known as an “equal opportunity”.
There’s an old and wise saying that says it best: ” You can lead a horse to water but you can’t force it to drink.”
Eva Moskowitz and her Success Academy autocratic, gulag style, opaque and for profit at any price corporate charter schools are a perfect example. The children that won’t drink the bitter water offered to them are sent back to the public schools that have no choice in the children they teach.
In addition, the corporate charter school industry doesn’t offer as many choices to students as most well funded traditional public schools do.
In the traditional public schools those children/students have the choice to excel or fail at many options like sports, drama, chorus, AP classes, band, honors classes, journalism, academic competitions, etc. These for choice electives are optional but they are not valued by the Testocracy industry so they are slowly being eviscerated and becoming extinct. Because those rewarding electives that are not worth testing cut into profits.
Our daughter is one example. In the traditional public schools she attended, she thrived and took advantage of all those equal opportunity choices (the key word here is CHOICE). She took as many AP classes as possible, she went out for track and focused on pole vault, she volunteered to tutor other students in English grammar and math and stayed late every day, and she graduated from high school with honors as a scholar athlete with a 4.65 GPA. In June of 2014 she graduated from Stanford. Our daughter, who is getting married this Saturday, has always been a horrible test taker. Yet, the same equal opportunities were offered to all the other students that attended the same schools she did and many of them walked away from those equal opportunity choices. She was the only graduate from her high school class to get into Stanford because she did take advantage of those equal opportunity choices.
I told her when she was in third grade that learning was up to her. Her teachers could not learn for her, and if she didn’t learn it was her fault and not the teachers. I told her it didn’t matter of a teacher was incompetent because she wast the learner.
From third grade to high school graduation, she earned straights A’s in every class she took . Near the end of her second year at Stanford, I asked her how many of her K-12 teachers had been incompetent. She thought about that one for awhile and then said TWO. From K -12, moving four times, she attended schools in five traditional public school districts and had about 50 teachers. Those two incompetent teachers did not hold her back as alleged by the frauds pushing the autocratic, for-profit at any price, even at the cost of destroying OUR children’s futures and not theirs, corporate charter school industry. These frauds have made misleading claims that teachers are responsible for what children learn. That is wrong. Children are responsible for what they learn and if they do not make and effort to learn then it is their fault. And if the child’s parents and/or guardians are complicit in that lack of effort, they are gulity too.
The education equation is simple:
1. Teachers are responsible to teach
2. Children are responsible to learn
3. Parents/guardians are responsible to support teachers and children in the education process.
Teachers can NOT do it by themselves, and yet teachers are being blamed and punished when children and parents do not taking advantage of the equal education opportunities offered to them through the traditional public education system that is not a monopoly.
Standard Oil under Rockefeller was a perfect example of a monopoly, but more than 15,000 community based, democratic traditional public school districts in 50 states (each state has its own ed code) and territories can never be a monopoly like Standard Oil was under Rockefeller.
HU,
I am rereading a book “Ethics in Education” in which the author, Emile Boutroux discusses the purpose and function of the teacher in education. The introduction has quite a number of quotes that are eminently applicable today in the US of A.
Why might that be so unusual?
Well the book was written in 1913.
Another of those books that if I were designing a teacher education program would be part of Education Ethics 101. (and there would be Education ethics 201, 301, 401, at least one a year)
Actually it is titled “Education and Ethics” and the original was in French.
Sounds interesting. I’ll take a look.
“then I suggest Microsoft just start hiring people at random and then expecting them to meet high standards. ”
I think Peter has the right idea, except he doesn’t give enough guidance for practical implementation. But his agriculture-research based suggestion can be made into a serious and workable scheme that will finally turnaround Microsoft’s poor performance in urban areas where youngish people only want to use freely available software claiming that’s all they can afford from minimum wage and student loans.
What Microsoft needs is to have its employees take yearly standardized tests in math and English. It’s common-sense—but also evidence-based—that this will ensure proper progress in developing the employees’ Microsoftian skills to produce and sell bloated, unstable software and also see to it that their retirement-readiness is where it needs to be.