Archives for the month of: June, 2016
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What’s the Matter with Kansas? Parents Fight Back Against Massive Budget Cuts to Their Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2016 //
12

Parents in Kansas are disgusted with Governor Sam Brownback’s massive budget cuts. The cuts were inevitable after Brownback and the legislature enacted the biggest tax cuts in the state’s history in 2012 and 2013. They must have been following the Reagan playbook of trickle-down economics, but it didn’t work. The State Supreme Court ordered the legislature to enact an equitable and adequate plan to finance the public schools.

And now parents are gearing up to fight for their public schools.

The struggle over school funding in Kansas reached a new crisis point when the State Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the Republican-dominated Legislature had not abided by its constitutional mandate to finance public schools equitably, especially poorer districts with less property wealth. The court, in an effort to force legislative action, reiterated a deadline that gave the state until June 30 to fix the problem or face a school shutdown.

The ruling exacerbated tensions over budgets enacted by Mr. Brownback and the Legislature that education officials say have led school districts to eliminate programs, lay off staff members or even shorten the school week….

Of even greater concern to many parents is a sense, they say, that the state leadership does not support the very concept of public education.

“People are saying, ‘This is not the Kansas I know,’ and ‘This is not the Republican Party I know,’” said Judith Deedy, who helped start the group Game On for Kansas Schools.

As in other states, the effect of reduced funding varies from one district to another. In poorer districts like Kansas City and Wichita, students are crammed into deteriorating buildings with bloated class sizes. One district in southeast Kansas, facing a budget shortfall, recently pared its school week to four days.

Parents who are Republicans feel betrayed by Governor Brownback and some plan to run against their incumbent representatives.

Educators are struggling to meet the needs of their students:


In Kansas City, school officials say they have been shortchanged by tens of millions of dollars over the past five years because the Legislature has not taken into account their needs when financing poorer districts like theirs. Ninety percent of the students in the Kansas City school district qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and 40 percent are nonnative English speakers.

Cynthia Lane, the superintendent of schools in the Kansas City district, said preparations were underway in case schools are shut down, as the Supreme Court has threatened. Schools are usually busy during the summer months, with administrators and members of staff preparing for the upcoming academic year, she said. The first day of school is scheduled for Aug. 15.

“If we can’t pay bills, how do we keep our utilities on, how do we keep our security system on?” she said. “Folks are really frustrated and embarrassed that Kansas is the butt of jokes across the nation. He continues to say things are fine, when they are not fine.”

The Wichita School Board voted on May 18 to eliminate more than 100 jobs and to close an alternative high school, as part of efforts to trim about $18 million from the district’s budget.

At that meeting, Mike Rodee, the vice president of the board, blamed state officials for forcing budget cuts. “We need to look at all the people that are doing it to us,” he said at the school board meeting. “Our legislators, our government, our governor — we are the ones who are fighting to keep the schools alive, and they are fighting to close them.”

Some school principals say they are resigned to making do with what money they have. At Welborn Elementary School in Kansas City, classes are held in two aging buildings and students dash back and forth during the day. Teachers keep a watchful eye on them as they cross an active parking lot between the buildings.

“I don’t need much,” said Jennifer Malone, the principal, one recent afternoon. “I just want a building.”

Governor Brownback has called a special session of the legislature to enact a new funding formula. Just hope that he doesn’t fund the schools by cutting the universities or other public services.

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, Kansas, Parents, Resistance

California Legislator Files Bill to Ban For-Profit Operators of Virtual Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2016 //
12

Thank you, Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, for writing a bill to ban for-profit operators of virtual schools.

The bill, Assembly Bill 1084, “would prevent charter schools that do more than 80 percent of their teaching online from being operated by for-profit companies or hiring them to facilitate instruction. If passed and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, the legislation would effectively put companies like K12 out of business in the Golden State.

“Our taxpayer dollars should be spent in the classroom to help our students, not used to enrich a company’s shareholders or drive up its profits,” Bonilla said in an interview.

But K12 spokesman Mike Kraft railed against the proposal, calling it “another cynical effort to take away the rights of parents to choose the way their kids are educated.”

How cynical are those “special interests” who want to take away K12 Inc.’s ability to profit while providing inferior education!?

That company is K12 Inc., a publicly traded Virginia firm that allows students who spend as little as one minute during a school day logged onto its software to be counted as “present,” as it reaps tens of millions of dollars annually in state funding while graduating fewer than half of its high school students. Students who live almost anywhere south of Humboldt County may sign up for one of the company’s schools.

Assemblywoman Bonilla was acting in response to a brilliant series of articles by Jessica Calefati in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing the profitable but educationally bankrupt K12 Inc., the corporation founded by the Milken brothers and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

I hope Assemblywoman Bonilla and the media will review the abundant research on K12 Inc, such as the Credo study or the NEPC study. What she will learn is that students in online charter schools lose ground and fall behind their peers in real schools.

If California chooses to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on bad schools to enrich the stockholders and the Milken family, shame on the legislators and the governor.

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Virtual Charter Schools

Harold Meyerson: The Challenge for Progressives in California to Clean Up Our Politics

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2016 //
11

Harold Meyerson, editor of The American Prospect, writes in the Los Angeles Times that progressives in California should stay involved in state politics and join to defeat the power of big money.

As he shows, the big money interests have combined to elect conservative Democrats and defeat progressive Democrats. Because of the state’s “top-two” primaries, regardless of party, the big-money guys are picking malleable conservative Democrats and pouring millions into their campaigns to pick off progressive campaigns.

Bernie Sanders’ keystone issue was to limit the role of money in politics. In California, the moneyed interests are saturating legislative races with donations that their opponents can’t match.

Over the past two years, oil companies and “education reform” billionaires have been funding campaigns for obliging Democratic candidates running against their more progressive co-partisans under the state’s “top-two” election process. In this week’s primary, independent committees spent at least $24 million, with most of that money flowing to Democrats who opposed Gov. Jerry Brown’s effort to halve motorists’ use of fossil fuels by 2030, and a substantial sum going to Democrats who support expanding charter schools.

Six years ago, according to the Associated Press, just one legislative primary race had more than $1 million in outside spending, and four had more than $500,000. This year, eight races saw more than $1 million in such spending, and 15 more than $500,000.

In a heavily Democratic district outside Sacramento, a November state Senate runoff will pit Democratic Assemblyman Bill Dodd, who opposed Brown’s legislation, against former Democratic Assemblywoman Mariko Yamada. Dodd has already benefited from one independent campaign funded by Chevron and other energy companies to the tune of more than $270,000, and from an education reform campaign funded by charter school proponents such as billionaire Eli Broad in the amount of $1.68 million.

Since progressives can’t match their millions, they should do their best to expose them and their surrogates as the puppets they are.

Public education in California is a plum for the billionaires. They want to privatize it. Who are the biggest spenders in the self-named “education reform movement”? Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, and Alice Walton. None is a parent in public schools. None has children in public schools. Two do not even live in California.

This is NOT what democracy looks like.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times: Trump Vows to Reopen Fraud-Ridden Trump University

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2016 //
17

David Lazarus, a business writer for the Los Angeles Times, writes here about Trump University and shows how it employed the hard sell to lure customers into thinking that they could become rich quick.

He says that Trump defiantly pledged to reopen Trump University, despite its legal troubles.

Now, if Trump expects to be elected President, he will use the bully pulpit to sell enrollments in Trump University.

Think of it, a snake-oil salesman for president. That’s a new one.

David Lazarus actually attended a seminar at Trump University.

He writes:

Donald Trump, who has a track record of vowing he’ll do things and then not doing them, vowed Thursday to reopen his controversial Trump University, which is at the center of multiple lawsuits.

“After the litigation is disposed of and the case won, I have instructed my execs to open Trump U,” he tweeted. “So much interest in it!”

Much of that interest is the result of a federal judge in San Diego this week releasing nearly 400 pages of documents related to two of the lawsuits — filed by former students who allege that Trump University duped people with bogus, get-rich-quick promises of making a killing in the real estate market.

Trump says he did nothing wrong and that the majority of people who signed up for his training were pleased with the results. His campaign issued a statement this week saying that “the court’s order unsealing documents has no bearing on the merits of Trump University’s case.”

Did he commit fraud? Take a look at the text of a newspaper ad that ran in these pages in 2007. It quoted a tough-looking Trump as saying that “investors nationwide are making millions in foreclosures … and so can you! I’m going to give you two hours of access to one of my amazing instructors AND priceless information … all for FREE.”

What’s clear from the newly released documents in the federal cases is that even if Trump University students weren’t deliberately fleeced, one of Trump’s top priorities was to separate them from as much cash as possible – regardless of the amount they might actually have available.

“If they really believe in you and your product, they will find the money,” the school’s salespeople were told.

Many of the unsealed documents were instructional “playbooks” intended to guide Trump University employees in closing a sale with prospective students. Trump’s lawyers had tried to keep the materials under wraps.

“When you introduce the price, don’t make it sound like you think it’s a lot of money,” one playbook advised. “If you don’t make a big deal out of it, they won’t.”

It emphasized that salespeople need to size up prospective students for how big a payout they’d be good for – “Are they a single parent of three children that may need money for food?” – and identify those “most likely to buy.”

New York Atty. Gen. Eric Schneiderman, who has brought a separate civil action against Trump, said in a statement Wednesday that the playbooks show “Trump University was a fraud that harmed thousands of individuals.”

The California lawsuits allege that Trump’s “hand-picked” instructors failed to impart any true secrets to real estate success and that the school misled people about the ease with which money could be made off foreclosed properties.

And here’s a fun fact: My name appears in both of the California actions.

That’s because I was one of the few reporters who actually attended a Trump University seminar and wrote about the experience. I’d seen the ad described above and decided, what the heck, I might as well spend a couple of hours at the Pasadena Hilton seeing what Trump (or his minions) had to say about scoring big bucks off foreclosures.

By the way,Texas considered suing Trump University, but the State’s Attorney General Greg Abbott met with Trump, and Abbott dropped the suit. A year later, Abbott ran for governor and the generous Donald Trump sent a $35,000 donation to his campaign.

Categories Trump

Arthur Camins: How to Go Beyond This Manufactured Crisis

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2016 //
8

Arthur Camins, Director, Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, recognizes that the nation’s public schools and their educators have been targets of a false narrative of failure. He argues that it is necessary not only to refute the propaganda campaign but to propose better ideas to strengthen public schools and our democracy.

 

He writes:

 

“There are real persistent problems in education. Today, failure narratives are the strategy-of-choice for groups who want to privatize education, undermine unions, disempower workers, and open profitable markets for educational technology, testing materials and publically funded, but privately managed charter schools that are unencumbered by government regulation. However, what is said is a smoke screen for what it intended.

 

“Let’s open up schools as profit centers,” “We don’t trust communities to make democratic decisions about their schools,” and “Let’s get taxpayers to fund some charter schools for a few poor kids to get ahead,” would have garnered little public support. Instead, the preferred narrative is that American public schools are failing (especially for the poor and students of color), as have past improvement efforts, so we must do something before it is too late. With the release of every new national and international assessment results, statistics are marshaled to support that argument. The unstated assumption is that our society has abandoned serious efforts to end poverty or segregation. Instead, the US has accepted the audacity of small hopes.

 

In response, critics of the privatization agenda have been justifiably quick to point out flaws, biases, and limitations in how data is often presented. That is a necessary lie-exposing response, but only one of the steps needed to promote equitable democratically-governed education.

 

As with the hyped Soviet and Iraqi threats, critics of the phony education crisis have also countered, with, “It’s not as bad as they say.” That line of argument always comes up short for two reasons. First, it permits those in power to frame the debate and put critics on defense. Second, there is a believable element in the narrative. Education in the US has, in fact persistently failed poor students.

 

Exposing lies provides the clarity and information that lay the foundation for action. The next step is resistance. Resistance is a strategy for protection, survival and to engage people in a unifying common struggle. Opting out of high-stakes over-testing, critiquing flawed standardized tests, fighting school closings and budget cuts, opposing pay for performance for teachers, opposing the disproportionate influence of wealthy donors on education policy, opposing charter school expansion, and resisting attacks on unions are all essential.

 

However, a win for equity and democracy also requires a third step: Promote a new and different proactive agenda for education that resonates with the public more effectively than the current, “We are losing” narrative. (Donald Trump is only the extreme version of that continuum.)

 

There is no denying that education falls short. However, supporters of equity and democracy need to reframe what ails American education and offer unifying solutions that give people something new to fight for together.”

 

Arthur proceeds to offer a clear, coherent and positive agenda for real education reform.

 

“Free, high-quality, universal Pre-K through post-secondary education should be the new norm. That is what the country now needs for all citizens to be successful in life, work, and citizenship. Fairness dictates equitable funding by progressive income, capital gains, and corporate taxes, rather than inequitable local property taxes….

 

Learning in diverse, well-integrated schools and classrooms is vital for personal, social and workplace success. Government policies must promote neighborhood, school, and workplace integration…..

 

Every child should be valued, known, and respected in a school where they learn not just a broad range of academic skills for college, career, and personal fulfillment, but also the empathy and social skills to be a responsible member of their community.

 

Funding programs that have the potential to mediate poverty and historic racial inequity are essential, as is promoting integrated schools. However, for too long both of those goals have been framed narrowly as helping “them.” Since the larger inequities in the US have never been fully addressed, too many people have heard “helping them” and thought, “Not at my expense.”

 

Exposing the lies and organized resistance are the essential steps to stop destructive policies. Winning policies that promote equity and democracy requires a next step: Frame new needs and new solutions that are explicitly multi-racial and unifying.

The crisis we face is in education is not about test scores. Rather, it is that we cannot achieve satisfactory results amidst the far broader crisis of growing inequality, eroding democracy, and escalating divisiveness.”

 

Categories Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity

New York Times: How Donald Trump’s Casinos Went Bankrupt, But He Didn’t

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2016 //
43

It is always informative to learn how the super-rich get their money.

Categories Billionaires, Trump

Julie Vassilatos: Who Owns the Chicago Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2016 //
13

This is one of the best posts ever, written by a Chicago public school parent and blogger.

Julie Vassilatos asks the question: whose schools? Who do they belong to? In Chicago, they are currently “owned” by the mayor and his hand-picked board. In other major cities, they are being given away to boards controlled by hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs, and corporate chains.

In Chicago, the mayor wants to cut the schools’ budget by 39%. Unimaginable!

Julie has a different understanding: These schools belong to US. They are OURS.

She writes:

The public schools belong to us. They are ours. In a very personal way, in a theoretical way, and in an actual, absolute financial way. Chicago Public Schools belong to us, the families who pay taxes to sustain them.

They do not belong to a handful of small-minded men who want to break them down, write them out of their budgets, and sever our communities from each other. They do not.

They. Are. Ours.

Our buildings, some of them historic, we have upheld and gardened and and repainted with our own volunteer efforts. We have papered their walls with our children’s art. We have forged relationships with our teachers, we have worked at this and so have they. We have struggled to get educational access for our special needs kids–struggled to create conditions in which our kid can learn despite draconian state-imposed limits, struggled together with our counselors and caseworkers and teachers and paraprofessionals.

We have chaperoned field trips and ridden on noisy bouncing buses, we have invented, organized, and staffed creative fundraisers, we have helped out in the classroom from stapling papers to reading to kids to finding and putting tennis balls on chair feet.

We have served on PTAs and LSCs, anxious and striving, weeping and sweating, laughing over shared meals and cheering over bake sale profits, working out and forging action on critical things like who our principal is and how we can best allocate our few paltry dollars.

In many cases our kids go to the same schools we went to, and our hearts can be filled with pride over this or with shame that they may be using the same textbooks we used. These schools are ours over generations.

These schools are ours. We pay for them. They are for our children and our society. They are not for the profit and manipulations of a ruler class, some of whom we elected in foolishness, and many of whom are appointed and about whom we have no say whatsoever. These educational overlords have shown that they do not care about our children’s educations. They care about their own children’s educations, as indeed so do we for our own children. It’s comfortable and easy for them, but the costs for this are high–a shrinking Chicago tax base, an exodus out of the city that will soon become a torrent, a generation of kids’ educations in jeopardy, and the moral cost of all the effort to maintain a lower class whose educational opportunities are denied.

Friends, readers, CPS parents, public school parents of the nation, hear this. Your school is yours. Our schools belong to us. Do not forget it. We have some power we need to retake here. We have a district to reclaim.

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Parents, Supporting public schools

Tom Scarice: Time for an Education Revolution in Connecticut

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2016 //
7

Tom Scarice is superintendent of schools in Madison, Connecticut, and a well-informed critic of what is deceptively called “education reform” in that state. He also happens to be a member of the honor roll of this blog because of his thoughtful commentaries about what needs to be done to fix education in Connecticut.

In this post, he says that it is time for an education revolution in Connecticut.

He begins his post with a metaphor about music that long ago brought everyone to the dance floor, swinging and swaying, but that is now tired and irrelevant.

We are the state left on the dance floor with tired policies, while other states are running away. We are overdue for a bold statewide vision that matches the uncertain and ever-changing world our students will enter when they graduate. But who will lead?

Codified by state law, and enforced by a bureaucracy utterly consumed by compliance, tens of thousands of educators across the state are suffocating, desperate to be exhumed. Consequently, this suffocation is stifling the young, inquisitive minds of children from all backgrounds and colors.

Have we seen the types of educational changes we want for our kids in the past 10-15 years, particularly as the world endures revolutionary changes? If not, why continue the same ineffectual practices? Can Connecticut jump to the forefront and lead in innovation, or do we stand on the dance floor with the two embarrassing guys clapping and swaying?

As we careen through rapid global changes that have profound implications for the worlds of work, citizenship, and lifelong learning, it is safe to assume that the traditional promise of “go to school, get good grades, go to a good college, get a good job” no longer applies. If you are clinging to that promise, you are probably still searching for your music at Tower Records.

The world continues to decentralize its economy, and the flow of information, at an unprecedented rate. The “sharing economy” rewards innovators and diversity of thought. Yet, Connecticut clings to a command-and-control educational approach destined to homogenize children.

Either directly through prescriptive laws, such as ones that mandate precisely how local boards of education must evaluate their employees, or indirectly through schemes and mechanisms that place high stakes on invalid and unreliable tests such as the SBAC, we rank and sort kids, schools, and teachers based on test scores. Our 8-year-old students take more state tests than what is required to pass the bar exam to become a lawyer. All the while we are missing the point.

We are educating our children for the wrong era.

What changes are needed?

Read on. Tom explains.

Categories Connecticut, Education Reform

Christine Langhoff: Report from Boston on Our Broad Superintendent’s Trail of Destruction

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2016 //
28

Christine Langhoff is a teacher in Massachusetts, a regular commenter on the blog, and a loyal member of the Network for Oublic Education. She describes what is happening in Boston, which recently hired Tommy Chang as its superintendent. Chang, a graduate of the unaccredited Broad superintendents academy, was a deputy for John Deasy in Los Angeles, who left his post under a cloud and now works for the Broad Foundation, which hopes to put half the students in Los Angeles in privately managed charter schools.

Here is Langhoff’s report:

I. Here in Boston, where the Third Way confab was held, parents FOIA’ed emails between the mayor’s hit man on education and various entities hell bent on following CRPE’s playbook to close 30-50 Boston schools, while moving towards universal enrollment.

II. This afternoon, there was a meeting held for students to participate in the on-going budget discussions. It didn’t go quite as planned:

“ ‘I think the atmosphere is kind of tense in here so we should do an ice-breaker,’ she [a student] said. ‘I have one in mind. It’s a stand-up, sit-down game.’
‘Stand up if you felt patronized by this activity,’ Joseph said.

Every student stood up. Multiple students expressed how they didn’t come to play games. They came to talk about the budget.”

Boston public school students overtook the district’s budget forum Tuesday with tough questions for the superintendent

III. And here are some proposals from the Broad superintendent’s negotiating team to the members of the Boston Teachers Union, currently bargaining a new agreement. Even allowing for the usual give and take inherent in the process, this is a pretty extreme starting point. Anyone see anything of benefit to kids in a single one of these proposals?

“Here is a small sampling of where some School Department proposals remain after more than 4 months of bargaining:

Teachers may be excessed from a school without regard to their seniority, but based on their ‘performance.’ Performance will be defined by performance evaluation ratings, which can include Student Impact Ratings as determined by District Determined Measures (DDMs).

Excessed teachers who are proficient or better and who don’t earn a position by the first day of school will be placed in a positon of Suitable Professional Capacity (SPC). Those placed in SPC will retain salary and benefits for a finite length of time. If unsuccessful in finding a position, the person serving in an SPC position will be fired.

The length of time in an SPC position will depend on one’s service years, and whether or not the teacher is from a school that has been closed. (As most know, the city last year commissioned the McKinsey Report, which claims there are 39,000 surplus seats in the BPS and calls for the potential closing of 30 to 50 schools.)

Teachers with a less-than-proficient rating on their last evaluation who are not hired by August 31 will be fired immediately.

Teachers fired, regardless of rating, shall not have a right of recall to any teaching position.

On teacher staffing: Those who take approved leaves, including maternity leaves, for a duration of 6 months or longer will not have an attachment right to their old building & assignment. Any such person without a position on the first day of school shall become an SPC.

Within a school, administrators ‘can reassign teachers to any teaching position … for which they are qualified.’

On length of teacher work day: Teachers will be expected to work a ‘professional day required to perform their required duties.’ Translated, that means that the length of the school day will be solely at the call of your administrator — as will any additional compensation.

The class size maxima in Grades 6 and 9 in Level 3 and Level 4 (Turnaround Schools) shall be increased by one.

On enforcing class size: Instead of ‘an appropriate number of regular teachers shall be hired’ to enforce class size maxima, the obligation now will be that the ‘district (shall) endeavor to hire a sufficient number of teachers.’

Caseload maxima, both individual and system-wide average, for SLPs, OTs, PTs, Nurses, and Guidance Counselors – all limits will be eliminated.

The eight Social Workers hired for the duration of the 2010 to 2016 will be fired.

The SEIMS Agreement will be eliminated. Secondary SPED teachers will lose the benefit of having two administrative periods set aside to do SEIMS paperwork.

Paraprofessionals will be excessed from a school by performance, not by seniority. Excessed paraprofessionals may be eligible for – but are not guaranteed– a positon.

Excessed paraprofessionals who have not secured a position for the following school year by June 15 will be fired.

Fired paraprofessionals with satisfactory performance ratings will be eligible for an interview for one year, however they will not be able to claim a position.

Paraprofessional training: The current $25,000 that funds the Paraprofessional training program will be eliminated.

Paraprofessionals will be able to be placed in any classroom for substitute coverage purposes.

The 20 ‘Coverage’ Paraprofessionals hired to service those students with the most severe Special Needs when their regularly-assigned paraprofessional is absent will be fired.

Substitute teachers who are both certified and recommended for hire will no longer be guaranteed up to four interviews.

Per diem substitute teachers who work more than 120 or 150 days will no longer receive a $1000 or a $1500 bonus, respectively.

And finally — On the school calendar: The superintendent shall determine when the school year begins, in mid-August or September, and whether there is a February break.”

http://btu.org/e-bulletin/btu-ebulletin-44/

Categories Education Reform

Yes, Bill Gates Wants to Help the Poor by Advising Them to Raise Chickens

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2016 //
57

Yesterday our friendly reader Raj reacted with outrage to the post about Bill Gates telling poor people around the world to improve their lot in life by raising chickens. Raj said the source was a disreputable British rag, and I should be ashamed for referring to such “sensational” claims.

 

To satisfy Raj’s curiosity (and my own), I did a wee bit of Internet research, and in four seconds, I found the original source of the story: it was an article written by Bill Gates.

 

The guy with $70 billion says if he were poor, he would raise chickens.

 

Now don’t get get me wrong. Raising chickens is a swell thing to do, and I donate to the Heifer Fund to help buy animals for people in poverty. Of course, I can’t raise chickens myself because I live in an apartment building, and it is probably against the house rules to raise chickens in an apartment. Also, I am not poor, so he wasn’t talking to me.

 

Bill Gates is different from me. He has about $70 billion. World leaders listen to him. I would expect him to have more fully developed ideas about how to reduce poverty. There is a big difference between abject poverty and subsistence. Maybe raising chickens would help large numbers of people live at a subsistence level.

 

But with Gates’ billions and his huge staff, I expected deep thinking about the structural nature of poverty. Not chickens.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, International, Poverty
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