The trouble with hailing a school as a model is that you can’t predict what might happen next year.
This has never stopped Bill Gates!
In 2012, he visited the Eagle Valley High School in Colorado. In 2013, he celebrated the school in his annual letter as one that was successfully adopting his ideas.
But…Gary Rubinstein reviewed Eagle Valley High School’s latest state report, and it is no longer a model school. Gary doesn’t know why. Maybe it is just a regular school. No miracles here. Or maybe it is the Kiss of Gates.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Give it ten more years”
“Give it ten more years
Before we know it worked
Meanwhile, have some beers”
He said, before he smirked
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Do the deformers, like Gates, really understand learning and that learning is NOT a smooth straight line on a graph? Schools cannot control for human variables. Schools have HUMANS, not machines. Even natural phonomena in science have “SINE” waves, depending on the conditions.
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“The Kiss of Gates”
The kiss of Gates
Will seal their fates
Like mo-tel dates
With Norman Bates
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that is just too much rhyming…
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Basing mandates upon scientific reality is far out of deformer range; money appears to be the only motivation required to call for the implementation of endless change. Temporary, carefully spotlighted “success” stories simply keep the public mesmerized.
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Murdoch identified the market’s worth- $1 trillion. Bill Gates, Mark Z-berg, Pearson,…, are investors in the largest seller of for-profit schools-in-a-box.
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Is the same thing said by both sides though? Serious question.
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Mark,
Please explain what you mean by “the same thing”.
TIA,
Duane
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I still feel pretty good about my Wednesday appearance…might be just as well that I did not get called back like he said….I had a few words to say about Bill Gates…
RUSH: Joe in Festus, Missouri, great to have you here. Glad you called. How you doing, sir?
CALLER: Liberal greetings from a graduate of Mark Scully University of Cape Girardeau, and I’m a Vietnam veteran. I wanted to weigh in on what happened with this so-called victory for the Democrats last night.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I’m not impressed by it at all. And the reason is I started checking where this money was coming from for him. First thing I noticed was the Caliber charter schools. The biggest mistake made by Democrats, specifically Obama, in the last eight years was when he brought in Bill Gates and Arne Duncan and trashed public education by starting this privatization. Now, DeVos is pretty much a mess, but at least people recognize that. They thought Bill Gates, well, he must know everything. And so that’s my viewpoint as a liberal from Missouri —
RUSH: I need to ask you to clarify something. You think that charter schools are bad and that Obama signing on to them with Bill Gates and Arne Duncan, it angered Democrats like a sellout of public education, the teachers unions? What was bad about it?
CALLER: The nasty secret to the billionaires is that our teachers in the classrooms are very good people that are doing a good job for the most part —
RUSH: In the public schools?
CALLER: — problems — (crosstalk)
RUSH: You mean in the public schools?
CALLER: — a source usually for Democrats, not completely of course, but usually for Democrats, teachers are a source of energy and organization and, you know, getting out the — raising the vote totals. Instead of 62% or 59% turnout, you get a larger turnout, and they stand for things that help families. And so I think that was the biggest mistake, bringing in Arne Duncan and Bill Gates. The charter schools are bad for two reasons. One, the good ones — and there are some good ones — do a lot of cherry-picking and don’t carry their fair share of the more difficult students. A lot of them are just —
RUSH: A-ha.
CALLER: — very bad schools that are dumping grounds that —
RUSH: A-ha.
CALLER: — you know, use Teach for America and very —
RUSH: I hear you.
CALLER: — not experienced teachers that are likely to not cost ’em much and be gone within two or three years —
RUSH: So when they invest in the charter schools, both financially and ideologically they’re selling out the public schools and all the get-out-the-vote efforts that teachers engage in, they’re underselling the teachers and this kind of thing. And you think that had a lasting effect in this election last night?
CALLER: Oh, I think it’s been the most dominant thing, mistake that the Democrats made in the last eight years —
RUSH: Are you a teacher?
CALLER: I thank you and you’re a guy that made the point about how much we’ve lost in legislatures. They don’t just affect national elections. You know, these charter schools are buying people every which way.
RUSH: Wow, that’s just a fascinating theory. I wish I’d a had a chance to get to your call sooner today. ‘Cause you’re the first guy I have ever heard say that the Democrats’ root problem here, or one of them, is the sellout of public education in favor of charter schools by bringing in Bill Gates, who I thought was into mosquito nets, and Arne Duncan. Well, look, I appreciate the call. Joe, think about giving Mr. Snerdley your number and maybe on an Open Line Friday I’ll call you back when I have more time. Because I’m really curious about it. You sound serious, and I’d like to drill down deeper and unpack this a little bit more with you, if you ever have the time and chance. Thanks for the call.
Read more: http://wlac.iheart.com/onair/rush-limbaugh-55812/liberal-caller-charter-schools-doomed-the-15756191/#ixzz4eukLbqxw
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Joe,
I have figured out your “problem” in getting folks to listen to you!
You’re from the wrong side of the tracks (Festus) in the Missouri “twin cities”-ha ha!!
(just funnin ya, as my mom grew up in the country between Desoto and Festus/Crystal City, so I’m fairly familiar with the area)
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we did what we could….offered Bill Bradley as President, (we educated him in Crystal City), instead of Clinton…..If you went to Athena….which is halfway between DeSoto and Festus….I might have been your 6th grade teacher. Or possibly your mom’s.
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Nah, I grew up in “white county”, oops I mean very south, South St. Louis County in the sixties and attended the K-12 Catholic system. Unless you’re Methuselah, you probably didn’t have my mother as she was born in 1919.
But I have many fond memories of “going to the country” to visit/stay with relatives, celebrate holidays and when needed funeral services. Some of the Armbruster, Decker and Probst families are my relatives. I’m almost certain some of them would have gone to Athena as that is right where they all live.
Keep commenting and I’ll keep reading. Take care Joe!!
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Congrats on getting in so much truth in in such a short time!
And on Rush’s show, no less. It could be a first.
He must have been gobsmacked that a self-described liberal would be criticizing Duncan and Obama.
And BTW, Bill Bradley would have made a great president.
Very smart man and, unlike Arne Duncan, he could actually play basketball.
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I made a mistake…Bradley ran against Gore, not Clinton….the nation, or at least the democrats…..also made a mistake. Bradley is too liberal. Gore is the one with sensible positions….well……Bradley campaigned as the liberal alternative to Gore, taking positions to the left of Gore on a number of issues, including universal health care, gun control, and campaign finance reform.
On the issue of taxes, Bradley trumpeted his sponsorship of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which had significantly cut tax rates while abolishing dozens of loopholes. He voiced his belief that the best possible tax code would be one with low rates and no loopholes, but he refused to rule out the idea of raising taxes to pay for his health care program.
On public education, Bradley reversed his previous support of school vouchers, declaring them a failure. He proposed to make over $2 billion in block grants available to each state every year for education. He further promised to bring 60,000 new teachers into the education system annually by offering college scholarships to anyone who agreed to become a teacher after graduating.
Bradley also made child poverty a significant issue in his campaign. Having voted against the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, better known as the “Welfare Reform Act,” which, he said, would result in even higher poverty levels, he promised to repeal it as president. He also promised to address the minimum wage, expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, allow single parents on welfare to keep their child support payments, make the Dependent Care Tax Credit refundable, build support homes for pregnant teenagers, enroll 400,000 more children in Head Start, and increase the availability of food stamps.
uhhh….On public education, Bradley reversed his previous support of school vouchers, declaring them a failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Bradley_presidential_campaign,_2000
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Thanks for the post. I hope Diane finds a place for the call’s transcript as a topic heading. Democratic politicians are running with their hands tied behind their backs as long as the Party is shackled to Gates, Walton heirs and the hedge funds of DFER. It continues to amaze me that so few people are aware of Gates’ education tyranny. The Democrats’ white wash of tech tyrants is as loathsome as it has been effective ( teacher unions aided and abetted).
The Center for American Progress ($2.2 mil. in Gates funding), proposed a democracy-attacking plan for higher ed., in Nov. Rubio introduced remarkably similar legislation in March.
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From the article:
“I don’t think that the measures right now, whether they are for teachers or for schools, are very accurate.”
Those “measures”by definition can never be accurate. Why? Because there is no “measurement” being done so that it is logically impossible to sort and separate accurately leaving any rankings completely invalid.
To measure something there has to be an agreed upon standard unit of measurement with precise definition such as may be found for measuring time (standard unit of time, i.e., second), weight (standard unit of weight, i.e., lbs or kilogram) etc. . . . Without the standard unit, without an exemplar of that unit against which one can devise and calibrate a device there can be no true “measuring”.
And there isn’t any agreed upon standard unit of measure in the teaching and learning process, never has been and never will be. This is why can’t we “measure student achievement” as is proposed by all the testing organizations and most educators. Another factor is the nature of what is supposedly being measured in the standardized testing process.
Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, i.e., latent non-observable mental traits, for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
Just like Gates “rank stacking”, student achievement and teacher rankings based on false metrics can only cause much harm and lessen the teaching and learning process.
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