Kevin Ohlandt, a parent blogger in Delaware, says that Bill Gates no longer even pretends to hide his ultimate goal: to digitize education and put all children online.
He writes:
Bill Gates wants a Federal Student Data Tracking System. That’s right. He also wants competency-based education, more career pathways programs, and personalized learning to take over public education. This is the same guy who funded Common Core. Remember that when you read the document released by the Gates Foundation today. If I had to guess, now that many education bloggers have exposed all the agendas which will lead to the Bit-Coin inspired Blockchain Initiative, the corporate education reformers (clearly led by Bill Gates) have nothing to lose by getting it all out there now. Now I know why U.S. Senator Chris Coons (Delaware) is chomping at the bit for his post-secondary legislation to get passed by Congress.
Read this. Every single word. Read between the lines. This is the endgame they have been pushing for, the complete and utter destruction of public education in anticipation of online education for all. Where you will be tracked from cradle to grave, with data allowed to be looked at through a federal database, which will track everything about you. The sad part is they play to civil rights groups by assuring more success for minorities. They screw over students with disabilities every chance they get. But their manipulation of under-served communities is at an all-time high in this document. Words like “outcome-based funding” scare the crap out of me, and it should for every single American. Look at all the footnotes in the below document. Look at the companies and think-tanks that are reaping immense profits for every bogus report they come out with. Look how embedded this already is in every single state and our national government.
This is all about the workforce of tomorrow. It has nothing to do with education, or liberal education, or liberating education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
We must remove the Bill Gates cabal of billionaires from public education.
AGREE with you Lloyd: “We must remove the Bill Gates cabal of billionaires from public education.”
They don’t care about the students and teachers. The Oligarchy cares about them as $$$$$ for themselves and their weird notions about educating our young. It’s ONLY about taking $$$$$ from public schools and sending their kids to private preppy schools where connections are made while perks and $$$$$ flows to them and them only
“This is all about the workforce of tomorrow. It has nothing to do with education, or liberal education, or liberating education. ” And what will that workforce look like Diane
Very interesting of Mr Gates .
The Business news app on Windows 10 provided the following link
“25 Fastest growing jobs in America over the next decade.”
https://a.msn.com/r/2/AAimwW8?m=en-us
These 25 were fields expected to grow by 20% . That is 2% a year .
Now there were some fields that actually paid a decent salary. But none of those that did broke the 100,000 mark by 2024. That’s a whopping 10,000 job increase per year. What is the population growth projected in a decade through birth and or immigration.
But here are the few that broke that mark. None require much education.
12 Personal care aid
458,100 created, Median salary 20,980
#4 Home Health Aid
348,400 created Median salary 21,920
25 Medical Secretary
108,200 Median salary 33,040
The plutocracy does not want a liberating, liberal education. An educated citizenry would fry them in oil. Then we wonder why Trumpism is on the march.
“We must remove the Bill Gates cabal of billionaires from public education.”
Lloyd, your sentence contains unnecessary details and information. Here it is correctly:
We must remove the Bill Gates cabal of billionaires.
Let me simplify further, Mate.
We must remove the cabal of billionaires.
Indeed. 🙂 Actually, Trump yesterday inadvertently gave the idea how to do this peacefully: raise the income and capital gains tax to 90% for them, and they will leave and continue their selfless jobcreation process elsewhere.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
“This is all about the workforce of tomorrow. It has nothing to do with education, or liberal education, or liberating education. ” And what will that workforce look like Diane
Very interesting of Mr Gates .
The Business news app on Windows 10 provided the following link
“25 Fastest growing jobs in America over the next decade.”
https://a.msn.com/r/2/AAimwW8?m=en-us
These 25 were fields expected to grow by 20% . That is 2% a year .
Now there were some fields that actually paid a decent salary. But none of those that did broke the 100,000 mark by 2024. That’s a whopping 10,000 job increase per year. What is the population growth projected in a decade through birth and or immigration.
But here are the few that broke that mark. None require much education.
12 Personal care aid
458,100 created, Median salary 20,980
#4 Home Health Aid
348,400 created Median salary 21,920
25 Medical Secretary
108,200 Median salary 33,040
The plutocracy does not want a liberating, liberal education. An educated citizenry would fry them in oil. Then we wonder why Trumpism is on the march.
The more we let VIPs (Vastly Ignorant People) gain control of education in this country the dumber this nation becomes.
Bill Gates (not his foundation), is an investor in the largest retailer of schools-in-a-box. Microsoft has a deal with Pearson to create products for Common Core. That tells me what I need to know about his dominion over the US Dept. of Ed.
Follow the money. It will show that there is very little interest in actually solving educational problems; problems, in fact, allow an endless “innovative” and very lucrative “fixing.”
Gates’ “little interest” (or none) in the common good, is reflected in his home colony in northeast United Sates. The “state” of Washington is one of seven that has no income tax. Gates’ massive income is untaxed and the tax on his palace is capped at 1%. Meanwhile, the cost of the state’s infrastructure (e.g. education and transportation) is off-loaded to the poor and middle class, through consumption taxes
Correction- northwest US
Gates is like the “godfather” of the corporate Mafia, and our policymakers sit at the table laughing at his every joke on cue. That is why all the politicians are afraid to state any support for public education. They dare not step on Gates “business” plan. They don’t want to get on his wrong side and wind up buried in the Meadowlands.
Retired Teacher:”Gates is like the “godfather”
It really is time to interpret properly what Godfather Gates and his disciples have been doing: organized crime with 21st century methods.
Those people, who think without the Mafia our country is dull, are mistaken. They just don’t look at the right place. We have the largest, most powerful organized crime in history. They call themselves the Public School Reform movement, but I prefer the more expressive and less formal Charter Mafia name, and I affectionately refer to them simply as the CharMa.
CharMa sounds exotic and charming, doesn’t it?
CharMa is conducted from the highest possible level in politics, but, as always, the real instigators are the wealthiest, most popular businessmen such as Gates or the Waltons. Just the billions CharMa has invested in Common Core, the largest child-brain experiment in World history, has already far exceeded what the Mafia ever got out of their small time experiments with business protection services, gambling, smuggling and pimping.
Do we know why these most powerful CharMa members are willing to invest this much into child experiments? Yes, of course. The prize money for their (m)educational operations will be in the hundreds of billions each year, and they dream of reaching one trillion per year by 2020.
Do these billionaires have a chance to collect this much in the near future? After all, they are far from charismatic or macho, they are rather nerdy looking, hopelessly unfunny and dress without style or even good taste in necktie. They wouldn’t survive on the streets, not to mention a gun battle.
The answer to the question is undoubtedly yes, and you, dear reader, will agree once you understand the devilish idea behind the CharMa plan.
http://wd369.csi.hu/apu/charma1.html
Gates with Teach Plus is using funds as abuse of power. The young teacher on the ad for Question #2 in MA is a Teach Plus (they also did a survey showing Teach Plus all like the PARRC test). Today on the news they announce that 2 Boston schools have been lowered in level because not enough students took the test. They are punishing the schools ; this is abuse of power because the tests are not valid or reliable. The only thing you might read from the tests is a bullying statement of competition (and lies because they are not valid)… Example: “These tests make my kid look really good because your child has spinabifida or cerebral palsy or whatever). The tests are now being used , as with lowering a school a level,, to create more discord among and between parents (while they offer nothing in the way of curriculum or program or IEP development ). We have a case in MA where Annie in her testing lab created over 24,000 cases of fraud in testing in her science lab. The lawyers want all 24,000 cases thrown out because of the fraud (it would take decades to re-litigate all the cases). We are seeing fraud not only in the science lab testing for criminal behaviors but in the schools where we categorize people. It is also similar to what Big Pharma did by manipulating research that resulted in opioid epidemic. I see a similar pattern… it is as if you went to your doctor and he shoved the EKG in the drawer; and the EKG instruments were off in compiling the data anyway. For a doctor it would be malpractice. For these large firms (like Pearson) it is businesses as usual. I support Mayor of Boston because he said lowering the levels of two schools is unacceptable.
Now we understand why vouchers are here. No where to run kids, no where to run.
Long post.
This is an accurate and gutsy summary of the Gates agenda. The Gates agenda for data gathering about education, under the banner of transparency and accountability, shows not an ounce of concern about any view of the purposes or means for education other than his own. He enlists others to his ill-considered plans, usually groups who are quite willing to go along as payback for a Gates grant. I think it is not yet accurate to call the agenda a “federal” system, but there is no doubt that Gates wants a national system and with the prospect of international expansion.
In a new Postsecondary initiative, Gates is targeting Congress and the following states in this bid for control of education through data gathering, analysis, and product development: California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. He has already enlisted the University of Texas system where the administrators are convinced that the Gates plan for “Postsecondary Success” and data mongering will finally tell them what their degrees are truly “worth.” See Politico Politico. Michael Stratford | 09/22/2016 GATES FOUNDATION UPDATES HIGHER ED PRIORITIES
The megalomania tendencies at the Gates Foundations continue unabated. In this recent pursuit of a total information system for education Gates has joined with the Lumina and several others foundations. The Gates-led agenda is supported by eleven papers and a wish-list for 31 forms of data not yet of Gates-approved quality or availability from two federal sources. These databased are on postsecondary education (IPEDS) and student loans (NSLDS). http://www.ihep.org/postsecdata/mapping-data-landscape/national-postsecondary-data-infrastructure and for metrics see p iv. Table 1-2. http://www.ihep.org/sites/default/files/uploads/postsecdata/docs/resources/ihep_toward_convergence_low_2b.pdf
Gates carefully omits some facts about the databases that he wants to see recast into one national system. The facts are revealed in the tangled web of “strategic partnerships” that would play a role in data management, analysis, and exploitation of the nationalized system.
Consider Oracle, an American multinational computer technology corporation still recovering from the largest data breech yet on record (2014). Oracle’s reinvented self allows hardware and software to work together — in the cloud and in its data center. Oracle helps about 400,000 customers in more than 145 countries design and integrate databases. For a recently touted example, “Oracle Integration Cloud Service” offers more than fifty pre-built adapters for apps including Ariba, Concur, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Slack, Twilio, Twitter and more. https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/paas-cloud-momentum-091916.html
Oracle gets connected to the Gates initiative by way of a maze of strategic partnerships and alliances with the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC). The NSC is the only national database involved in sending and receiving information bearing on secondary and postsecondary transcripts, transfers and so on. Gates wants far more data tracking and analytics from the NSC and its partners.
For example, the NSC has a partnership with Hobsons, an online career planning and advisory service providing “matches” between students and postsecondary programs. Pull the strings (explore the website) and you see that Hobsons has strategic partnerships with a boatload of others besides the National Student Clearinghouse. Among these are BenchPrep for an Enhanced Personalized ACT Online Prep Program, Gallup, Human Esources, RoadTrip Nation.com.
Then there are Hobsons “Alliances.” Here are a few examples:
Blackboard; Career Key®; The Common Application; Dell Boomi; European Association for International Education; EdMin; Experian® Data Quality; Front Rush; GeoLabs (based in UK, a call and marketing service for 65 higher ed institutions, including some in USA); iData Management for Higher Education; International Education Association of Australia; IntelliResponse; Kira Talent (a video admissions platform); mongoose (responds to inquiries with personalized mass texts — from a phone, tablet or computer); parchment (career and college planning resources with 13 “partners” able to tap K-12 data); Pearson; and Sallie Mae® (publicly traded consumer bank with newly named loan management, servicing and asset recovery business, Navient Corporation).
Another “strategic partner” of the National Student Clearinghouse is Ellucian.com, serving 2,400 higher education institutions in 40 countries. Ellucian’s website invites “strategic partners.” These vendors (unnamed) are providers of software, service, and technology. Ellucian’s “alliance partners” are offered tiers of services and co-branding opportunities as outlined here http://www.ellucian.com/Collateral/Ellucian-Partner-Success-Program-Guide/
When you start pulling the threads that tie the networks of data that Gates wants to enlist for his agenda, you can see that there is no effective means for protecting privacy. You see that the national system is envisioned as pre-K to postsecondary and more-ten years beyond exit from postsecondary education with job and income tracking. You see that the demand for data completely overrides any remnant of academic freedom among faculty who teach including what programs and outcomes they value.
You also see that data breeches on a grand scale, including SS numbers, are probable–to say nothing of the commercial exploitation of the whole system. This is a prime example of philanthrocapitalism at work, and without the consent of those who will be under the system of surveillance.
No just philanthrocapitalism by the all-seeing surveillance state allied with philanthrocapitaism to promote a cradle to grave system of surveillance that will be very useful in snuffing out any dissent.
Yeah, this is a target rich environment for hackers of every description, especially foreign nations with malicious intent. Looking for a well positioned person with vulnerabilities that you can turn into a spy or saboteur? Check the cradle to grave database. Ordinary criminals looking for targets to blackmail? Insider information? Check the database. What a timesaver for them all.
“Empire abroad entails tyranny at home.” Hannah Arendt
Could it be that Gates’ meddling in public education is just another corporate maneuver to wring more money out of this country?
They have for years pushed openly to replace American workers with immigrant H1b visas, alleging not enough Americans have the skills – the invented skills gap. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2531389/it-management/microsoft-to-hire-h-1b-workers–even-as-it-lays-off-some-visa-holders.html
Then there’s this…
http://www.inquisitr.com/1363194/bill-gates-under-fire-for-immigration-stance-after-microsoft-layoffs/
“According to professors Daniel Kuehn, B. Lindsay Lowell, and Hal Salzman, American colleges turn out more engineers and scientists than the market can employ every year, about 200,000 more. At the same time, many companies in the IT industry fill their rosters with guest workers”.
In the World According to Gates, the” ideal workforce of tomorrow” will be guest workers, not a well-informed citizenry.
The lockstep selling of the “skills gap” among education reformers raises real questions about their credibility.
It’s particularly insane for the Obama Administration to be selling it, because THEIR OWN labor dept stats contradict it.
They don’t read their own data Instead, they parrot whatever CEO’s tell them.
So if only we could stop humans from being human…
Gates is a one-dimensional thinker. Every idea is based on the exact same things: metrics, data, measurement (because everything valued is measurable?), digital learning. He views every problem with the same solution. I wonder if Bill and Melinda quantify their affection for each other on a daily basis? (Honey, today I only love you 4 but the metric can improve if you choose the right research organization to highlight initiatives I like.)
Basically, this is a future without humanity and interaction. Every decision is determined by algorithms. How will one achieve competency in artistic expression, I wonder? It’s cold, heartless and obsessive.
And everything must be standardized. Because, you know, all competencies can be determined through the exact same methods of evaluation. There are reasons that I provide multiple types of assessments. Because everyone isn’t good at the same things.
By the way, a person like me would be awesome at competency-based education. It fits my strategic, gaming-the system personality. I would just figure out how to beat the tests while learning as little as possible. It’s just video game leveling up.
And the suggestion of, say, student collaboration through digital systems is horrifying. I’ve watched students collaborate in that way. Very impersonal and lacks any real investment or connection between people. As interpersonal technology increases, people are becoming increasingly isolated.
Therapists are going to make a lot of money. They just need to pass those computer-adaptive, algorithm-driven competency tests!
Beating the system is what my sons are already doing with all the multiple-choice standardized tests. Also, in online courses they skip all the non-graded stuff and just to straight to the assignments and quizzes. Students will do exactly what you say about completing the required tasks but learning the absolute minimum.
This is made-up nonsense yet ALL of ed reform promoted it:
“With more than 5 million jobs open today and a skills gap that continues to threaten the ability of companies to compete and grow in a global economy, aligning resources and training opportunities to in-demand sectors is an economic imperative. ”
please. This isn’t “science” and it isn’t “data-based”. It’s spin promoted by CEO’s and the think tanks they fund.
The information collected by the US Dept of Labor contradicts the marketing from the US Dept of Education.
What’s that all about?
I feel sorry for the kids of the future if “21st century learning” means constant, endless assessments and tracking.
I feel as if they have a human right to a thought or feeling that is THEIRS alone and is not documented and filed and used to poke, prod and rank them by these insane adults.
I don’t know but I think kids themselves will rebel if this keeps up. No one wants to be treated like a lab rat . I think kids will throw a wrench into these systems and defeat them.
I’ve already seen my son and his friends do this with online test prep. They treat it like an opponent and they are thrilled when they can show the machine and system is stupid.
Our school bought a test prep program for math homework. I noticed my son is using a paper and pencil in addition to the computer form for answers so I asked him.
His teacher wants to see the work in their hand so she knows they’re doing it. Smart teacher.
It’s redundant. A complete waste of money. This is why they should stop pushing this. People will regret these expenditures. Don’t be first. Be last. Let the companies pay to do their own research Don’t pay THEM to test these products for them.
Bright kids might try to do something, but it will not last. The best thing is to homeschool or microschool.
Really? Best just to surrender and allow the demolition and privatization of this public institution without a whimper of protest?
Putting aside the sociological toxicity of the Gates/CBE agenda, the ecological impact of the tech itself is massive, and this in a time where climate change has a high probability of accelerating as well as synergizing with other threats. Here is a short piece on the power consumption of server farms. One grim statistic is that over 10% of electricity use in the USA in 2010 was due to server and IT equipment use. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph240/lee1/ Then there’s the inescapable threat of various sources of hacking and the abject stupidity of placing what passes as the reservoir of education knowledge in servers after destroying it in the far more resilient and distributed reservoir of teachers, so you end up with a recipe for a complete disaster, the total loss of a foundational knowledge base that the humans of the planet depend on.
If all this nonsense were such a fantastic idea and truly the path to the future, then all of the elite private schools in the country, indeed in the world would have taken the lead on this and we’d all be copying them. This has not and will never occur.
“In 2013, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, equivalent to the annual output of 34 large (500-megawatt) coal-fired power plants. Data center electricity consumption is projected to increase to roughly 140 billion kilowatt-hours annually by 2020, the equivalent annual output of 50 power plants, costing American businesses $13 billion annually in electricity bills and emitting nearly 100 million metric tons of carbon pollution per year.” https://www.nrdc.org/resources/americas-data-centers-consuming-and-wasting-growing-amounts-energy
“To put the size of this consumption into even sharper relief – the 416.2 terawatt hours of electricity the world’s data centres used last year was significantly higher than the UK’s total consumption of about 300 terawatt hours.” http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/global-warming-data-centres-to-consume-three-times-as-much-energy-in-next-decade-experts-warn-a6830086.html
“Massive as data centre energy use may already be, this is nothing to what lies in store, analysts warn. Ian Bitterlin, Britain’s foremost data centre expert and a visiting professor at the University of Leeds, says the amount of energy used by data centres is doubling every four years – despite the innovations in hardware that massively increase their capacity to store data. As a result, analysts forecast that data centres will consume roughly treble the amount of electricity in the next decade.”
IT LOOKS LIKE THE REFORMERS ARE SOLIDLY IN THE CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER CAMP.
The cognitive dissonance of the reformers on this single point is EPIC and completely beyond rationality. Their model for “improvement” is making a major contribution to the destruction of the better future they allege to want to build.
If Bill gates cared about kids would reduce at least 7 million kids with hunger in a year and I’m talking by himself. What is bill gates going to do with that money when he dies? the problem is that people are greedy and their religion is money. According to the bible since he was born Catholic he should read that it’s more easy for a camel to walk through a hole of needle than Bill gates in the kingdom of God/. I
About 21,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every four seconds, as you can see on this display. Sadly, it is children who die most often. Yet there is plenty of food in the world for everyone.
Diane,
Are we still supposed to back Clinton after reading this? I see more of the same attack on public ed. What do you think of Jill Stein? Now I am so confused!
Risk nuclear war or punish Clinton for impure ed policy? Hmm. Tough choice.
That should read “Avoid”, not “Risk”.
A caveat re this posting: Bill Gates & Co. will still be sending THEIR OWN CHILDREN to schools like Lakeside even when the vast majority of students AKA OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN are being denied genuine learning/teaching environments and punished by high-stakes standardized testing and stack ranked to ensure massive failure.
The goal of corporate education reform is simple: comfort the comfortable, afflict the afflicted.
And rake in as much $tudent $ucce$$ as possible.
😒
Kids are data, and data is for sale.
We all are.
Isn’t Gates the same person who said lets create small schools within larger ones then a few years later Gates announced small schools do not work??? Oh, this nerd is using our kids as ginny pigs and what is more disturbing is that this guy is really nothing but a computer geek who became rich after stealing software ideas from Apple computer. However in the US if you are rich you must be a freken genius on everything just ask mikey bloomberg
The low-income kids in our reform-fanatic district have served as experimental guinea pigs for more than a decade; no one EVER steps up to apologize as innovation after innovation invades, falls apart, and ultimately fails. http://www.ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/guinea-pig-kids
Bill Gates’ “gifts” are neither free nor altruistic.
Good review; thanks, Ed.
This book is a potent critique of philanthropy, and though it doesn’t explicitly say at any point, it is a critique of capitalism itself. Which ultimately is a critique of mass power and control in the hands of a few.
Diane in respnse to ( Ed detective )
I want to let know is up to him ,but I’m no
Born here but with the true I have nothing to hide . I’m and nobody but the true fight for us and the true is not for everyone most can’t hadjdvit