Mercedes Schneider reports that Bill Gates is throwing millions into Common Core, making up for the fact that the new federal law bans federal support for Common Core.
Gates recently awarded $18 million to support Common Core implementation. It’s his baby, and he is not letting go in the face of mass opposition.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Never ceases to amaze me how money blurs reality for some people.
I’ll make my obligatory objection to the idea that state lawmakers were “coerced” or “bribed” into Common Core.
Race to the Top wasn’t enough money to bribe anyone into anything spread over 50 states. A lot of Ohio public school districts actually LOST money on it- the mandates cost much more than the award.
If they were somehow suckered into it then we need better quality lawmakers and policy people. Why did they support it? Because it’s an echo chamber and they all back the same identical stuff in every state.
That’s different than “bribed” or “coerced”.
You can say “duped” if you want but not one of them was forced into anything. They’re all supposedly adults with agency. I don’t think they were duped. I think they back anything and everything that comes out of Bill Gates mouth.
I don’t know, Chiara. I watched this farce play out in Washington (which had great state learning standards, or goals, that real educators had spent years and millions thoughtfully developing) and the legislature just went all chicken – s%$^t and said “OMG — if we don’t adopt these, we won’t get any of the money!” I KNOW the intent of the offer by its true backers was venal and evil — and probably a few of the state legislators were in on the fix from day 1 — but the rest seemed to be genuinely influenced (i.e. — bribed) by the lure of federal money (none of which we ever “won,” of course).
Chiara,
I predicted early on that the idea behind a Common Core was to make public schools look bad so that parents would demand charters and vouchers. Both Jeb Bush and Joel Klein said so. CCSS was never about the kids. It was about advancing the privatization agenda.
Something like 95.5 % of Ohio public school students sat for the Common Core test last year, my son included.
They were rewarded for their compliance by blaring newspaper articles about how bad their scores sucked and we had every political hack and lobbyists who wants to privatize their schools appearing in media to bemoan their “failing” schools.
It’s a betrayal. Stop lying to them. If you want to use their test scores to promote your political agenda then stop telling them this is FOR THEM. It is not.
Once again ed reform reneged on a promise they made to public school kids. They’re using the scores to trash them. There’s no “nuance” or “analysis”. It’s ALL negative.
Students should stop being compliant pawns and opt-out. Ohio can’t bash scores they don’t collect. If enough students resist, it will be impossible to enact punitive measures.
You have hit the mark with the word nuance. The PARCC practice test we were giving in Algebra II was testing to see if kids were ready for Ivy League or not. Since most of us are not capable of learning at that rate as youngsters, it is a sure fire way to show public schools as failures, and thus justify private takeover and public defunding, leaving the money in the private sector and creating a money vacuum at the part of education that ministers to the needs of most of us.
I remember how Mr. Gates told us how super-important it was for transient students to move from one school to another with nary a hitch in their education in this not-a-curriculum curriculum.
You’re on the money, as usual, Chiara.
I am one of the few parents who like the common core. My daughter liked it. She felt she finally knew what was expected of her to learn. Before the common core everything was loosey goosey. School was boring. After the CC she loved the content she was expected to learn. She never complained about the content on the state test. She was happy and always performed in the 95th+ percentile. Last year she asked me to opt her out in math. Although she could do the questions from last year’s test I showed her, the material was not what was taught in class, and she did not want the stress of not knowing how to do some of the test questions through no fault of her own. It’s one thing to make a mistake, quite another when it wasn’t taught. At her school last year, only 3 students out of 100 got the highest level score with most scoring below level. We explored options and she received a nice private school financial aid package. She said the private school placement test was hard. She didn’t learn most of it. We would have liked to stay in public school, but when school districts choose not to follow the common core, public school students suffer. If it had followed the cc cirriculum or even Khan academy, she would have aced the private school placement test.
Mr. Gates understands this. Stop bashing him.
Trying to get you straight, monicafeffef. You like “the Common Core” (as taught in class) but don’t like the tests because they’re not what is taught in class? Makes me wonder if what is being taught is class is the same Common Core. Nonetheless, my “bashing” of Bill Gates has far more to do with the chaos he created in national education policy using tests and disingenuous talking points like the one I mentioned above than the Common Core in particular. I’d categorize you as an even rarer breed of someone who supports “the Common Core”…but wants to opt your child out of the test…and then wants to switch to private school because the public school won’t teach the Common Core (but the private school will?).
I will bash William Gates the Third, evil, destructive, technocratic, tyrannical oligarch, with my dying breath. Then, when I die, I will take regular field trips on Heaven’s School
Bus down to Hades so I can see William Gates the Third suffer for his violations of human rights, and add fuel to his personal fire.
It’s not the framework or curriculum guides that cause problems. I have worked on numerous state and local curriculum projects that have served as instructional guides. The problem occurs when we attach high stakes to the tests such as failing students, teachers or schools. When the consequences attached to the tests are so dire and distorted, it becomes an instrument of harm, and, in some cases, a tool of mass destruction.
Monica, what you wrote makes no sense. Neither does Bill Gates, whose kids go to a private school that does not use Common Core or its tests.
My daughter s been taught CC since she entered kindergarten. She is now in grade 5, and I could not be happier. Still, I am waiting for the other shoe to drop, because testing in any curriculum is specious if used to determine more than a snapshot.
The reason the test did not relate to what she learned in class was that Dianne is correct: the CC process and its tests are not meant to help, they are meant to hurt. The reason your daughter had a positive perception of the things she was learning is that she had great teachers. Good teachers are now used to looking at “standards” and using them to teach what the kids need to know. Discovering this, tests were devised that would surely show almost all students as failures.
Roy,
As I have written many times, the tests were designed to fail most kids by setting the passing mark beyond their grade level. The CCSS were pulled out of a hat. They were never treated and tried anywhere before states in deficit were required to adopt them in exchange gmfir big bucks.
Real top private schools wouldn’t require students to take that flawed Commonly Corrupted test.
Gates can bribe, but at least he can’t blackmail like John Arne Duncan-King.
Gates continued funding of the Common Core is not always transparent.
For example, Gates is among foundations that pay for EdReports, a rating scheme that is supposed to function like a Consumer Reports for educational materials. The rating scheme, at EdReports.org, is funded by Broadcom Corporation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Samueli Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, and the Stuart Foundation. The Gates support was channeled through Rockefeller Philanthopy Advisors: From the Gates database: Date: August 2015 Purpose: to provide operating support for EdReports to enable them to build their core priorities of publishing reviews of instructional materials, and to grow their operations and capacity to include teacher feedback of such materials
EdReports ratings are based on the extremely rigid use of so-called “gateway criteria” which, if not passed just kills the rest of the review. In fact, the criteria were originally called “Drop Dead Criteria.”
The Ed Report reviews closely follow the original stipulation that the CCSS be interpreted “verbatim,” meaning the reviewers look for words in the curriculum materials that correspond to the original CCSS. Here is an example: For Gateway I, Indicator 1f
“Materials foster coherence through connections at a single grade, where appropriate and required by the Standards
i. Materials include learning objectives that are visibly shaped by CCSS(Math) cluster headings.
ii. Materials include problems and activities that serve to connect two or more clusters in a domain, or two or more domains in a grade, in cases where these connections are natural and important.
The review says this: The instructional materials reviewed for Grade 1 foster coherence through grade-level connections.
Topic titles and lesson titles are informed by cluster headings.
Module 6 has a topic called “Addition to 100 Using Place Value Understanding,” which is similar to the cluster heading “Understand Place Value.”
Module 2 is called “Addition and Subtraction within 20,” which is similar to the cluster heading “Add and Subtract within 20.”
Module 5 has a topic called “Attributes of Shapes.” The standards have a cluster heading “Reason with Shapes and their Attributes”.
Module 1 combines 1.MD.2 with 1.MD.4, using data to continue work on iterating length units.
And so on. Anyone who has been enlisted to rate instructional materials or prepare instructional materials for state or local committee reviews (I have done both) can appreciate that these criteria are intended to: (a) micro-manage the work of producers of these materials and (b) purge from the marketplace materials that are not compliant with the criteria and (c) keep the CCSS inviolable.
But, there is another Gated-funded rating system for instructional materials, from Open Educational Resources (OER). OER started as a collaborative of 13 states. Here is a recent Gates grant: Date: August 2016 Purpose: to support the K-12 Open Educational Resources (OER) Collaborative Amount: $2,500,000
A year earlier K-12 Open Educational Resources (OER) Collaborative received Gates money that was laundered through the Learning Accelerator (November 2015). Purpose: to support the K-12 Open Educational Resources (OER) Collaborative Amount: $2,750,000
The Learning Accelerator’s connection with the Common Core is explicit, from the website: “OER capitalize on new improvements in technology and online educational content to offer students dynamic digital content that is openly licensed, organized, searchable, tagged, aligned with Common Core State Standards, and engaging for students.” http://learningaccelerator.org/our-work/cultivating-solutions/open-education-resources
How are EdReports and OER ratings related? It turns out that both rating schemes have about the same purpose, but unlike the EdReports, the ratings at OpenUpResources are explicitly linked back to the instigators of the Common Core State Standards—Achieve and Student Achievement Partners. This is from the OpenUPResources Website: http://openupresources.org/approach-to-quality/
“Our quality assurance partners, Achieve, Student Achievement Partners (SAP), and work with a team of reviewers to further develop their level of expertise using the EQuIP rubric (Educators Evaluating the Quality of Instructional Products). Each reviewer conducts an individual review of the material and then participates in the calibration process with the larger team. In addition to the EQuIP reviews, full courses will be evaluated using the IMET rubric, the Instructional Materials Evaluation Tool created by lead writers of the Common Core State standards. Individual reviews are consolidated into a resulting consensus report. The resident Quality Assurance Directors, with input from Achieve, SAP, and UnboundEd, examine the educator reviews and consensus report for quality, and a materials feedback report is generated for each unit.”
A little more than “input” is provided by the EQuIP reviews. EQuIP review criteria are based on rubrics first developed as the “Tri-State Rubric” for rating CCSS materials “facilitated” by Achieve, Inc. with participation by Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island. http://www.achieve.org/EQuIP
All of these less than transparent connections (and there are more) show how sustained and multifaceted the effort is to keep on marketing the Common Core as if the standards and the many, many tethers to them on “proper” implementation” are intended to stay around forever, and ever…if enough money can be thrown around for that purpose, and if enough reviewers, and rubric producers, and calibrators can be rounded up for this work.
So, UnboundEd, has become a marketer of digital CCSS-aligned digital materials in ELA and math, with these supposedly passing muster by reviewers who use the EQuIP review criteria for CCSS compliance.
These UnboundEd units and lessons (over 3000, PreK-12) have two whisper credits; One is: “From EngageNY.org of the New York State Education Department.” The other is” “This work is based on an original work of the Core Knowledge® Foundation made available through licensing under a Creative Commons. AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This does not in any way imply that the Core Knowledge® Foundation endorses this work.”
In other words, UnBound is marketing digital units and lessons that others have played a major role in developing and these instructional materials are retroactively being scooped up and marketed as CCSS compliant, with huge investments from Gates and continuing support from the first pushers of the CCSS–Achieve,Inc, Student Achievement Partners. As for E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s Core Knowledge® Foundation and its curriculum, we can say this: Hirsch,was an early supporter of the CCSS. http://www.coreknowledge.org/ccss
“The EQuIP rubric is derived from the Tri-State Rubric and the collaborative development process led by Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island and facilitated by Achieve. This version of the EQuIP Rubric is current as of 06-20-13. View Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. Educators may use or adapt. If modified, please attribute EQuIP and re-title.
If you are lost, that is because these networks and links and tons of money invested in the Common Core go well beyond the standards themselves. Gates 2015 grants in December for five initiatives in teacher education stipulated that each recipient should include the CCSS in their proposals for “transformation” centers. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/…/A-TeacherPrep–RFIRFP–Overview.pdf
ESSA should prohibit private individuals from having disproportionate amounts of financial and political influence on CCSS.
Problem solved.