After two high-profile failures that he acknowledges, and one high-profile failure that he does not acknowledge, Bill Gates is ready to start reforming the schools of America again.
Valerie Strauss reports on his announcement here.
He jumped into school reform in 2000 with his plan to break up the nation’s high schools into small schools. He promised dramatic test score gains. It wasn’t a terrible idea, but it did not get the score gains he wanted, and he gathered the creme de la creme to his digs in Seattle in 2008 to announce that he was abandoning small schools. Valerie says he dumped $650 Million into that, but my own Research says it was $2 Billion.
His next obsession was evaluating teachers by the test scores of their teachers. He partnered with Arne Duncan on that; Arne made it a condition of Race to the Top funding. The ratings were criticized by the American Statistical Association, the National Academy of Education, AERA, and many individual scholars. But Duncan and Gates plowed ahead. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Post published the ratings of individual teachers. Duncan congratulated them for doing so. A teacher in Los Angeles committed suicide after his ratings were published. Gates gave out hundreds of millions to districts that adopted his evaluations. Hillsborough County, Florida, won $100 Million to apply Gates’ ideas about teaching, and the district exhausted its reserves and abandoned the plan. Gates paid up only $80 Million, and the district was left holding the bag.
Now Gates has given up on that idea, although many states are still sticking with it. Thousands of teachers and principals have been fired based on the ideas sold by Gates and Duncan, but that’s not of any interest to him.
The failure that Gates does not yet admit is the Common Core. He paid hundreds of millions for its development and promotion, and he still loves the idea of standardizing education. He refuses to accept that it’s dead man walking.
So what’s his new idea? I’m not really sure, so I will quote Valerie. My hunch is that he is still pushing Common Core, but it is not clear.
He said 85% of the money will go to public schools and the rest to charter schools. Knowing that Gates is a charter zealot, one must wonder what medicine (or poison) he is offering.
“He said most of the new money — about 60 percent — will be used to develop new curriculums and “networks of schools” that work together to identify local problems and solutions, using data to drive “continuous improvement.” He said that over the next several years, about 30 such networks would be supported, though he didn’t describe exactly what they are. The first grants will go to high-needs schools and districts in six to eight states, which went unnamed.
“Though there wasn’t a lot of detail on exactly how the money would be spent, Gates, a believer in using big data to solve problems, repeatedly said foundation grants given to schools as part of this new effort would be driven by data. “Each [school] network will be backed by a team of education experts skilled in continuous improvement, coaching and data collection and analysis,” he said, an emphasis that is bound to worry critics already concerned about the amount of student data already collected and the way it is used for high-stakes decisions.”
What is he up to? Big data? Common Core? Data mining?
I have often said and written that if he really wanted to help children, he would open health clinics in their schools. He would provide doctors to supply good maternal care to pregnant women. He would not tell teachers how to teach or get involved in evaluating teachers or writing curriculum. He would stop pretending he knows how to reform education and do something that is actually needed.
After 17 years of failure, has he learned nothing?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Aie yie yie. Again. The Common Core has been, of course, a great horror.
Here, a word about that:
Excellent!
Love it.
“After 17 years of failure, has he learned nothing?”
It IS different though and I’m wondering if ed reformers ARE aware (however slightly) that they’re perceived as not interested in improving existing schools but instead interested in replacing them all.
Because this is a different direction. He’s admitting that schools are SYSTEMS and one piece affects all the other pieces- in fact, he’s making a systemic approach a requirement. It’s much less narrow.
In my opinion he’s coming closer to the views on this site- he’s moving in your direction.
I think it aligns better with the basic idea of “public” than other ed reform efforts because it recognizes that public school systems have to be universal, free, and operate within a certain limited geographic area, unlike, say, food trucks or colleges.
I think you missed the point of Gates’ praise for the CORE and LIFT/SCORE “systems.” These are purchased systems, funded by private wealth and designed from the get-go to circumvent public comment and oversight, especially criticism. You also missed the point that Gates wants to REPLICATE these privately endowed systems that have only a token “partnership” with a school official, typically a superintendent. I think you missed the point that these two models to be replicated are not in anyway conventional districts, but networks of geographically distinct districts. Gates has always forwarded perfected alignments between standards, curricula, and testing. That is a closed system.
Gates is drunk with the power he can wield and exercise over us mere mortals. He has more power and clout than many elected officials and does not appear to have any price to pay for his abject failures. There are whole masses of people ready to bow down and kiss the feet of this modern day King Midas.
I would just hope public schools do much more due diligence before they accept grants.
“Plus/and” is nonsense. If they accept a Gates grant they are setting the direction of their district because the Gates grant will knock other priorities either down or off the list.
If they KNOW this- if they go in knowing that this money isn’t “free”- then that’s one thing but they shouldn’t pretend they can do everything Bill Gates wants them to do and still do other things. That isn’t how priorities work and it isn’t how budgets work.
Not free. Could be hugely expensive, in terms of time spent and other priorities shelved and continuing costs.
Of COURSE districts won’t do due diligence. Districts would take money from the devil himself if they could. PLUS, the money will undoubtedly go towards technology, which all superintendents and most other administrators seem to LOVE.
That is exactly the way states sold their soul to Gates with the RTTT money. So many states are now deliberately trying to cut funding by such a large amount in order to try to get the public schools to collapse. They will jump at the chance to let Gates collect data on children if it means additional funds. Parents should be able to opt students out of data collection with parent consent. I don’t know what the laws state, but I believe parents should have this right.
Gates is like a drug dealer.
He gives enough money to get schools addicted.
He knows that schools are in dire need of money and will give away their first born to get a fix.
Gates and Duncan also played drug dealers to get governors to adopt Common Core.
You simply can not trust these people.
The media identifies him as a philanthropist. Whatever he does comes from the goodness of his heart and thus will not be questioned–no matter how disastrous. There is no accountability for corporate disrupters or their minions. The Daily Show had Arne Duncan on last week as some kind of savior of inner-city youth.
“Data driven”
When data are driven
Along for the ride
They never are given
A chance to decide
Gates should start by instructing the CEO of his company to pony up the estimated $35 billion that Microsoft owes for income tax on $100 billion they are currently holding in offshore accounts to evade income tax.
If Gates really wanted to help schools, he could doubtlessly broker a deal whereby part or all of the owed taxes was given to need school districts across the country.
He could also try to convince CEO’s at Apple and other companies that are similarly evading income taxes to do the same.
All told, there is over half a trillion dollars in income tax owed by many of the biggest companies in America. Apple alone owes at least $70 billion. Some “American Company”, that one.
That could replace tens of thousands (25,000 at $20 million apiece) of dilapidated schools in needy districts with brand new ones and simultaneously create jobs for the local economies where the schools are built.
But Gates will never do this because he is interested far more in himself than in anyone else.
“the estimated $35 billion that Microsoft owes for income tax on $100 billion”
When you put it like that, it’s obvious that it’s far cheaper for Gates to do it this way. Classic case of “look over there!”
Because a huge grant is kind of an end run around democratic decision-making, right? It starts with “free money if you adopt my ideas” which is hugely tempting (but isn’t free) and then when the policy is adopted the funding becomes public.
Presto. He’s changed the policy without it ever coming to a vote, anywhere, and now YOU’RE paying for it.
They always brag about how they make huge changes faster than public systems and it’s like “well, no wonder- you didn’t have to deal with the public at all”
I guess if one considers “the public” as some kind of impediment to get around this makes sense but that will almost invariably lead to arrogance, I would think, and also goes against the whole idea of a public system.
As we know from experience, the carrot quickly turns into the stick when Gates is involved.
States must know this by now. A lot of the Race to the Top grants in Ohio didn’t come near covering what the “innovations” cost. They ended up paying for “innovations” that they didn’t develop and didn’t know had any value. That naturally and inevitably pushed their own local priorities down the list.
If they’d just get it through their heads that money comes with strings and stop thinking things are “free” maybe they’d think about it more before taking it.
He could insist on changes to the way we fund research and the duration of patents . Eliminating patents that have made him a fabulously wealthy man . Lowering the costs of not only his software , but drugs that all Americans use . Those patents on drugs cost the government and the American people over 400 billion a year on patent protected drugs alone, above the costs of generics in a FREE MARKET. (Stieglitz, Baker) . That’s a lot of resources that could be going to class size, state of the art buildings ……….
So do those resources go to Bill, to Merck and Pfizer with tax holidays on their PATENT PROTECTED PROFITS or America’s children. “Politics Who Gets What When and How.”
My students need eye glasses. My classroom is 90+ degrees until late October. I buy almost every pencil used in my class, which is 72+ a week, plus 500 pages of lined paper. My annual expenditure is 1500.00. I am glad to do it, but it would help if we had physical infrastructure, para-professionals, adequate SPED staff, and some school supplies. We also need more school counselors.
Secondary_Math_Teacher .. . . . And THAT’s the material point. If Gates made it possible for public schools to just have smaller teacher-student ratios, the educational experience would change for all children, and THAT would influence positively everything else. And THAT could be through (as pointed out above) paying his taxes or just supporting specific school districts in a way that doesn’t destroy their or the teachers’ autonomy.
Of course he should pay his taxes (and Microsoft’s). But I have to say that “going around the system” and directing his funding to schools DOES avoid the present tax and state and federal legislative architecture that ALREADY starves schools and where some are now (as never before) so involved with privatization and pushing charters and vouchers. The extra money would probably go to the Pentagon anyway, and then outsourced to all those HUGE war machine companies.
Gates and his company (and other companies like Apple) are already in a position to “go around the tax system” when it comes to the taxes owed on the money held in offshore accounts.
There has been talk about reducing the rate paid on such monies to 10% percent to bring them back, but this is a giveaway to companies like Microsoft because the normal corporate income tax rate is 35%.
Gates could undoubtedly broker a deal whereby all or part of the taxes would be directly donated to schools in return for a reduction in the rate.
Trump has suggested a repatriation tax rate of 10% (reduced from the normal rate of 35%) but in my opinion, that is way too low. Make it 25% , with 15% going directly to schools. That way, the federal government would still get 10% and the companies could actually get a further tax break on the money they donated to the schools. The 15% donated to schools would amount to over 200 billion dollars.
The amount of money involved is roughly 100 times as great as the “donations” that Bill Gates has made to date. Even the 2 billion that some have estimated Gates has spent on education is less than half of 1% of the 500 billion owed by companies in taxes. And even if just 200 billion of that was donated directly to schools as part of a deal brokered with Microsoft and other companies like Apple with the government to bring their money back, it would far outweigh anything Gates has personally contributed.
Even from billionaires, personal contributions are always going to pale in comparison to the amount that big corporations REGUlarly get in tax breaks.
SomeDAM Poet Definitely a go-round of power and money.
His plan is clearly online schoolishness. This was the plan all along. Was there a doubt that total CBE would be force fed to everyone? Beta tested Bridge International is coming to America. It’s the data-driven monstrosity of the near future, if Gates gets his way. In his twisted dystopian soon to be our dystopian reality, schools are not local community cornerstones. They are NETWORKS. Networks existing in cyberspace. Soon, scripted curriculums [sic] will be delivered [sic] via the interNetwork. No need for teachers. Or roofs over our heads. Or cafeterias with food. Or books. Just plug your kid’s head into the Network goggles and start providing the Company with personal data. Children will be provided with just enough neural stimuli to keep from going comatose.
…forgot to insert ‘fantasy’ in there after ‘dystopian’…
Bill GATES is ARROGANT and is simplistic stimulus-response person. He has not a clue about learning and making meaning.
Diane this is from an earlier post that others here might not have seen from EdWeek–the article below is about the Gates’ speech and new donation of $$1/7 billion.$$ (Can you imagine?)
The problem is, however, who knows what he means by “smartly leveraged change”? That could be oligarchic code for: “Go slower when slipping the camel’s privatization nose under the public education tent.”
For example, in the article below: Goals/changes in are these:
QUOTED
4. It will do more in support of high-quality charters—with an emphasis on efforts that improve outcomes for special needs students, especially those with mild-to-moderate learning and behavioral disabilities.
It will make more funding available for “innovative” research to accelerate progress for underserved students.
END QUOTE
BTW, THEY put “innovative” in quotations. But par usual, this sounds good if the reader doesn’t know about corporate double-speak. That is: they may mean “individualized/personalized learning.”
Many who don’t understand the privatization movement yet read 4 and 5 above through the interpretive lens of, say, Montessori or the “private schools” of yore where teacher-student ratio is low, all teachers and helpers are required at least to have had formal college classes in child development, and students are given constant and caring support and extra-attention where needed.
But now that same phrase easily means some digressing version of “Hay, we all know that students love computers. So just give students computers and let them self-educate,” using a class monitor, of course, so we don’t have to pay professional teachers. But if that doesn’t work, punish or expel.” The more public education suffers its death-throes, the more draconian the charters will become.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/10/19/gates-foundation-announces-new-17b-for-k-12.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2&M=58243024&U=1182129
ALL COPIED BELOW:
Gates Foundation Announces New $1.7B for K-12
By Francisco Vara-Orta
October 19, 2017
Back to Story
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a new investment of $1.7 billion for K-12 education over the next five years, with the bulk of the funding aimed at existing traditional public schools that show progress in improving educational outcomes, the development of new curricula, charter schools focused on students with special needs, and “research and development” for scalable models that could inform best practices.
Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of the foundation, delivered the news in a speech Thursday at the Council of Great City Schools’ annual conference in Cleveland, where he spoke about the foundation’s work in education over the past 17 years, which has drawn both praise and harsh criticism. The preview of the philanthropy’s new priorities in education ended months of speculation following the appointment of new leadership in late 2016 and continued scrutiny of its K-12 priorities.
“If there is one thing I have learned,” Gates said, “it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others in the field.”
(Education Week receives financial support from the Gates Foundation for coverage of continuous improvement strategies in education, and has received grant funding in the past for coverage of college- and career-ready standards implementation. Education Week retains sole editorial control.)
In outlining the foundation’s work to date, Gates singled out the creation of smaller, more personalized high schools, support for teacher-evaluation models, and funding for the development and implementation of the Common Core State Standards. He also noted academic improvements in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, among others, from the foundation’s programming. But Gates acknowledged the foundation chose to pivot to other initiatives once it became clearer there were limits to sustaining and scaling up those earlier reforms.
“Schools that track indicators of student progress—like test scores, attendance, suspensions, and grades and credit accumulation – improved high school graduation and college success rates,” Gates said.
Gates listed five key shifts for the foundation over the next few years:
The foundation will no longer directly invest in new initiatives based on teacher evaluations and ratings—something the foundation had spent more than $700 million on by late 2013—but will continue to gather data on the impact of the reforms.
It will focus on “locally-driven solutions” that networks of schools will identify as working well with more potential to improve, with a focus on those that use a “continuous improvement” methodology that relies on data and feedback to incrementally reach set outcomes.
It will help to develop curricula and professional development models aligned to state standards, despite the political fallout that accompanied the adoption of the common core in some states.
It will do more in support of high-quality charters—with an emphasis on efforts that improve outcomes for special needs students, especially those with mild-to-moderate learning and behavioral disabilities.
It will make more funding available for “innovative” research to accelerate progress for underserved students.
About 60 percent of the $1.7 billion will go toward the development of new curricula and networks of schools that work together and use data to identify local problems and solutions. About 25 percent will go toward what Gates termed “big bets” that could revolutionize education through research and development in the next 10-15 years, citing it as an area severely underfunded compared to other sectors in the U.S. economy. The remaining 15 percent will be for charter schools, Gates said.
Gates cited the CORE Districts in California–comprised of eight of the largest school districts in the state–and the LIFT Network in Tennessee, which includes educators from rural and urban districts across the state, as models ripe for funding. The foundation hopes to support about 30 of these networks, and will start initially with “high needs” schools and districts in six to eight states.
“In general, with philanthropic dollars, their percentage on charters is fairly high. We will be a bit different, because of our scale, we feel we need to put the vast majority of our money into these networks of public schools,” Gates said to the loudest applause during the speech.
In a brief question-and-answer session, Gates explained that those eligible could be a large singular district that serves the majority of a region, or a consortium of districts using an intermediary overseeing the funding.
Gates cautioned that people wanting to reform education shouldn’t “fool” themselves that every model is scalable, explaining at one point that, “solutions to these problems will only endure if they are aligned with the unique needs of each student and the district’s broader strategy for change.”
A Change in Approach?
Megan Tompkins-Stange, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan who has extensively researched education philanthropy and profiled the Gates Foundation in her book, Policy Patrons, said she was somewhat surprised that Gates said the foundation should serve more as a “catalyst of good ideas than an inventor of ideas.”
“To me, it says that he and the Gates Foundation leadership has perhaps listened to some of the criticism of their more top-down, outside expert-driven approach to philanthropy in education,” said Tompkins-Stange, who watched the speech online. “I could not have predicted the new approach they would take would heighten the focus on communities having more autonomy.”
Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research focuses on how schools are influenced by social and economic conditions, said that the focus on continuous improvement might be welcomed by educators. But like Tompkins-Stange, he echoed that the details of how the money is allocated will dictate if the foundation is pivoting strongly to a softer approach and if there’s simply a new flavor of the month in which to put their dollars.
“Especially in high-need communities, it takes a lot of money and people to sustain change. I continue to hope these are not investments in just one single strand, that if it doesn’t pan out, they move on,” Noguera said. “Hopefully they are learning from past efforts to more smartly leverage change.”
END QUOTED MATERIAL
His contribution has been worse than failure, right? He’s been destructive. He’s made things far worse than they ever were before (am I exaggerating?). Some time ago, he said we won’t know for 10 years or so whether this was the right thing to do. Have we reached that, yet?
Success with all of Gates education schemes is always ten years down the road — ie, the clock is constantly being reset.
Kinda like success in the Iraq war was always just six months away (year after year) for Thomas Friedman.
The primary difference is that Gates is smart enough to make the time long enough that most people will have forgotten by the time ten years has rolled around.
Friedman is just dumb.
When was the last time he said it would take ten years to see if “this stuff” that he was funding actually worked. We see he is resetting the clock. He has been doing “this stuff” since 2000.
Gates is actually the least ideological of the ed reform billionaires. Walton and Arnold and Facebook and Broad specifically promote charters and fund candidates who EXCLUSIVELY promote charters and vouchers.
Maybe it wasn’t always like that but it is now.
I don’t know if that’s a plus or a minus for public schools 🙂
I see he’s jumping on the Summit bandwagon, however. They’re all madly in love with Summit in ed reform, so in that sense he’s traveling with the herd.
Summit is the new Rocketship.
Chiara Call me naive, but I think there’s a glimmer of hope with Gates?
Also, there’s another hyper-rich and world-known person, George Lucas, who developed EDUTOPIA. In the introduction of his website, he writes a letter explicitly relating public schools to their democratic roots. We don’t hear much about him or that organization (?) (I subscribe online and it’s pretty good stuff–no charter cxxp that I’ve seen, and I’ve mentioned him on this site before.)
But there are albeit-fragmentary pieces of a coalition out there who just MAY “get it” at some point and be leaders who are powerful enough to dig a big pothole in the road that the present privatization bandwagon is on. WE should risk being called naive, and be like bears standing in a river watching for salmon–we don’t want to be so negative that we miss catching a good salmon when it swims by.
But otherwise, Gates is just another Putin-in-the-making, even if he doesn’t recognize it. CBK
He is basically a stupid individual that doesn’t learn from past experience. He actually did the same thing with Microsoft employees by using a comparative rating system that caused employees to stop working collaboratively. This program led to Microsoft’s “lost decade” and was finally dropped by Gates’ successor a few years ago leading to a resurgence of the company.
“He said most of the new money — about 60 percent — will be used to develop new curriculums and “networks of schools” that work together to identify local problems and solutions, using data to drive “continuous improvement.”
Go ask Beverly Hall how well pursuits of “continuous improvement” works for her.
Too, please let this not be indicative of Gates having bought his way into The Deming Institute.
Has he learned anything? Heck no. He still believes if you throw enough money at education, you can change it for the better. To heck with educators who know what they are doing or curriculum developed by knowledgeable educators or a belief that every child can learn in their own way.
Paula If I may also interject this: Gates (and other techno-crats/fascists) mirrors the much deeper problem we have in education AND in the humanities and social sciences.
The problem manifests as a HUGE oversight of the similarly HUGE differences between (a) natural/ physical data and their sciences and fields, and (b) human data and their fields and sciences. These differences require similarly huge and correlative differences in the “data to results” methodology and pedagogy–both of which are commonly ignored by these ignorant meddlers, even if they are well-meaning, and certainly are not given any systematic treatment.
But then, education and the humanities have been living in that active conflict since the scientific revolution did its thing. At the core of things, we really still don’t have our act together. But that’s another story altogether.
Sorry Diane, there’s no potential earnings in those endeavors. Data however, is a gold mine just waiting to be tapped.
I guess the more money you have the more arrogant you become. Too bad Gates isn’t as philothropic as he’d like us to believe. Just think of all the good he could have done for the world if his pocketbook wasn’t his number one priority.
Bill Gates, a big reformer of public education, never attended public schools and sent his own children to the same K-12 private schools his own father sent him to where what Gates wants to do with K-12 public schools never happens in the school he attended and his children attend.
In addition, BIll Gates is still paying the same people to repeat similar mistakes as they keep spreading the same old terminal cancer of public school reform under a new name.
To prove that Gates has learned from all of his expensive failures that have repeatedly damaged public education in the United States., he must fire everyone in his foundation that works on reforming public schools and replace that entire staff, every single one of them with not one exception, with real K-12, highly experienced professional educators and not one fake educator from TFA and all the other corporate reform fraud factories.
I wonder what he thinks of Salmon farming? He must think it is so great, all controlled and uniform. Monoculture Bill.
yup. this pretty much nails it
I wish we could convince Gates and his really well-meaning philanthropic friends to invest in decreasing class sizes and increasing even traditional resources including teacher time with students and each other. It would mean making more space which would probably create more jobs. Failed charters could be closed and their space given to public schools for smaller classes.
Take students from under-funded schools to see the riches in wealthy communities and well funded charters and let them pick what they think they should have – within reason (cutting out swimming pools, tennis courts, etc.). The impact of small class sizes with adequate supplies should be universally dramatic and fairly easy to measure on several different scales.
“He said most of the new money — about 60 percent — will be used to develop new curriculums and “networks of schools” that work together to identify local problems and solutions, using data to drive “continuous improvement.”
We already have “networks” of schools, they are called districts, and they have democratic leadership (unless they were put into receivership). But notice the logical paradox that comes next – they will work together to identify local problems and solutions. But what if one “local” school’s problem is different from another? Or what if the “solutions” vary for different areas?
This is another round of tinkering, trying to apply automation or verticalization to problems that should be dealt with on the ground level. Any “philanthropy” that has strings attached is BS social engineering or corporate manipulation disguised as charity.
Bill Gates is stuck in a “one size fits all” mentality, and he’s still looking for that elusive size that will fit what he thinks. What he doesn’t know is that he keeps trying to pound the same square peg into different round holes that are all smaller than the square peg.
Long post. At the Meeting of the Council for Great City Schools October 19, 2017, Gates said:
Today, I’d like to share what we have learned over the last 17 years and how those insights will change what we focus on over the next five years.”
I think that Gates has learned very little about education in the last 17 years. He is still fixated on “the lagging performance” of our students on what he regards as “the key metrics of a quality education – math scores, English scores, international comparisons, and college completion.
Gates wants his narrow definition of “quality education” to be accepted as if the proper doctrine for improving schools and also ensuring the “economic future and competitiveness of the United States.”
Gates wants faster progress in raising test scores, and high school graduation rates. He seems to think that “constraints and other demands on state and local budget” actually justify his plans to “ increase high school graduation and college-readiness rates.”
Gates takes credit for funding for the deeply flawed + Measures of Effective Teaching project (MET), claiming that it showed educators ”how to gather feedback from students on their engagement and classroom learning experiences . . . and about observing teachers at their craft, assessing their performance fairly, and providing actionable feedback.” The $64 million project in 2007 tried to make it legitimate for teachers to be judged by “multiple measures” including the discredited VAM, and dubious Danielson teacher observation protocol dhttp://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/01/review-MET-final-2013 Gates learned nothing from that micromanaging effort.
Gates funded and promoted the Common Core. He says: “Teachers need better curricula and professional development aligned with the Common Core.”He remains committed to the ideas that “teacher evaluations and ratings” are useful ways “to improve instruction,” He thinks “data-driven continuous learning and evidence-based interventions,” will improve student achievement. This jargon is meaningless.
Gates said: Overall, we expect to invest close to $1.7 billion in US public education over the next five years.“…“We anticipate that about 60 percent of this will eventually support the development of new curricula and networks of schools that work together to identify local problems and solutions . . . and use data to drive continuous improvement.
Don’t be deceived by the “public education” comment. Gates wants to control public schools by dismantling their governance by and for the public. By “networks of schools” Gates means “innovation districts” where persons employed by private interests can control educational policy under the banner of “collaboration” or “partnership.”
Gates offers several examples of networks. One is CORE a so-called “partnership” of eight large urban school districts in California: Fresno, Garden Grove, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Ana,
CORE stands for “California Office for Reform in Education CORE a non-governmental organization, based in San Francisco, funded by the Stuart Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation (Stephen Bechtel Fund); and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Here are some other things you should know about CORE.
CORE was created in order to bypass the California State Board of Education and Race to the Top accountability, by marketing its new “School Quality Improvement Index.” This index includes social-emotional learning and school climate indicators in addition to California requirements—test scores, graduation rates, and the like.
Participating CORE Districts are bound to the terms of a memorandum of understanding, signed only by each district superintendent. This MOU specifies that the district will use: CORE-approved school improvement ratings based on existing and new indicators, a CORE-approved teacher and principal evaluation process with professional development plans, CORE-specific teacher and principal hiring and retention policies with cross-district sharing data—including results from teacher/student/parent surveys of school climate and student self-assessments of their social-emotional skills.
The final rating for each school in a CORE district is a complex web of weightings and transformations of scores into performance and growth measures: 40% of the overall rating for school climate/social emotional indicators and 60% for academics.
An autonomous “School Quality Oversight Panel” nullifies oversight of these districts by the State Board of Education. This “oversight” panel has CORE supporters recruited from The Association of California School Administrators, and California School Boards Association, California State PTA. The main monitors/promoters of this scheme are actually two panel members: Ed Trust West and the Policy Analysis for California Education. Bot of these organizations are sustained in large measure by private funding.
Ed Trust West is funded by the Bloomberg Philanthropies, State Farm Companies, and these foundations: Bill & Melinda Gates, Joyce, Kresge, Lumina, Wallace Foundation, and the Walton Family. The Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) is based at Stanford University, with participation by the University of California – Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. PACE is a conduit for grants from USDE and from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation; Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund; S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation; Walter and Elise Haas Fund; and The Walter S. Johnson Foundation.
School ratings developed by the CORE Districts flow directly to GreatSchools.org —a marketing site for schools and education products. GreatSchools.org is funded by the Gates, Walton, Robertson, and Arnold Foundations. Add the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the Bradley Foundation, Goldman Sachs Gives, New Schools Venture Fund. and 15 other foundations.“GreatSchools.org in a non-profit in name only. GreatSchools.org sells data from all states and districts. For a fee, it will push users of the website to particular schools. Buyers of the data include Zillow and Scholastic.
I think that the CORE District model illustrates how the private takeover of education is happening. Policy formation and favored school practices are being determined by the wealth and the peculiar visions non governmental groups with deep pockets. In the CORE Districts, this work is aided and abetted by superintendents who are eager for the money and the illusion of prestige that comes from permitting private funders to determine educational policies and practices.
Gates speech to members of the Council of the Great City Schools also includes the example of Tennessee’s LIFT Education as a “network” that is worth replicating.
LIFT Education enlists educators from 12 rural and urban districts across the state to promote the Common Core agenda and Teach for America practices. Participants in LIFT Education are convened by the State Collaborative on Reforming Education —SCORE. The SCORE website says participants in LIFT have spent the last year and a half collaborating on high-quality early literacy instruction, focusing on building knowledge and vocabulary by piloting knowledge-rich read-alouds in early grades.
The LIFT/SCORE alliance provides a governance structure for insisting that teachers follow the Gates-funded Common Core. Teachers are given an instructional practice guide that is also a teacher evaluation rubric from Student Achievement Partner, authors of the Common Core. https://lifteducationtn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/LIFT-Instructional-Practice-Guide-K-5-Literacy.pdf
This LIFT/SCORE non-governmental network is the result of private wealth channeled to superintendents who have outsourced the “coaching” and compliance monitoring for the Common Core literacy project to the Brooklyn-based The New Teachers Project (TNTP). In effect, TFA coaching and systems of data-gathering are present in all of the LIFT/SCORE districts.
SCORE, the State Collaborative on Reforming Education has been funded since 2010 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, so far $10, 623,497 including multiple years for operating support. Add a 2012 grant to SCORE as sponsor of a Chiefs for Change Policy Forum for district leaders so they would be “ambassadors for education reform.” The bait for the LIFT/SCORE network thus came from Chiefs for Change–Jeb Bush’s baby, unfriendly to public education.
Gates says: “Over the next several years, we will support about 30 of these networks (e.g.., CORE, LIFT) and will start initially with high needs schools and districts in 6 to 8 states. Each network will be backed by a team of education experts skilled in continuous improvement, coaching, and data collection and analysis.””
“Our goal is to work with the field to ensure that five years from now, teachers at every grade level in secondary schools have access to high-quality, aligned curriculum choices in English and math, as well as science curricula based on the Next Generation Science Standards.”
What else is in the works from the many who would be king of American education?
“We expect that about 25 percent of our funding in the next five years will focus on big bets – innovations with the potential to change the trajectory of public education over the next 10 to 15 years.” What does Gates means by “big bets?” He expects to command the expertise and R&D to change the “trajectory” of education. He will fund translations of “developments in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics” in addition to “technology-enabled” approaches in education.
There is money left for more.
“We anticipate that the final 15 percent of our funding in the next five years will go to the charter sector. We will continue to help high-performing charters expand to serve more students. But our emphasis will be on efforts that improve outcomes for special needs students — especially kids with mild-to-moderate learning and behavioral disabilities.”
This proposal sounds like Gates wants to cherry pick the students with “mild to moderate learning and behavioral disabilities,” send them to Gates-funded charter schools to bring their scores up, then claim success where everyone else has failed. This same strategy is being used in “pay-for performance” preschools. Gates sounds like he expects to have a free-hand in ignoring the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Evidently he wants the “flexibility” to ignore IDEA that he believes to be present in charter schools.
Bill Gates is still fixated on the idea that his money and clout can and will attract other foundations and private investors. He still holds on to the mistaken idea that “what works” in one community or state can be “scaled up,” and REPLICATED, elsewhere. He is ignorant of the history of education and efforts to replicate programs. He is trapped in an industrial one-size-fits-all model of education.
Gates ends with this: “Our role is to serve as a catalyst of good ideas, driven by the same guiding principle we started with: all students – but especially low-income students and students of color – must have equal access to a great public education that prepares them for adulthood. We will not stop until this has been achieved, and we look forward to continued partnership with you in this work in the years to come.”
Beware of people billionaires who want to partner with you.
Gates still seems to think that students, especially low income students, can and will be successful if they have “ equal access to a great public education.” He remains ignorant of the abundant research that shows schools alone are not responsible for, or solutions to, institutionalized segregation and poverty–the main causes of serious disadvantage among low-income students and students of color.
Gates has grandiose plans. All are focused on privatizing education and selling that snake oil as if it is authentic support for public education.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/Council-of-Great-City-Schools
Isn’t the United States of America supposed to be a “meritocracy”? But if Bill is really so “smart,” howcome he never learns?
The problem is not Bill Gates. No citizen should have this power.
Billionaires should not be a thing.
Hope all my FB friends read this. I think the world of Bill and Melinda Gates; They are terrific people doing work that benefit millions of people all around the globe. But I, and many others, take issue with his data approach to education. It is contrary to everything I’ve learned about how children learn. His previous forays into education have been unsuccessful and have cost him a LOT of money, yet he persists.
Joe, if you credit Gates with doing some good, you should educate yourself with all the bad he is doing beyond his meddling in public education.
His tax shelter that is called a foundation only has to invests 5-percent annually in the kind of ventures we often hear about while the other 95 percent that is sheltered in this foundation is often invested in ventures that benefit no one but the growth of Gates fortune.
Dark side of Bill Gates’ philanthropy: 30,000 Indian girls were used as guinea pigs to test cervical cancer vaccine
http://thevoiceofnation.com/politics/dark-side-of-bill-gates-philanthropy-30000-indian-girls-were-used-as-guinea-pigs/
Gates Foundation Reveals its Dark Side After Ditching ALEC
“While funding $218 million polio and measles immunization research, the foundation also invested $400 million in 69 of North America’s worst polluting companies and $423 million in companies like Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp, and Chevron – oil firms responsible for pollution which has caused respiratory problems in local African populations. In 2005, the foundation held $1.5 billion worth of stocks in drug companies who price their products beyond the reach of AIDS patients in Africa and are widely criticized for creating barriers to the flow of medicines to Third World countries.
“Other companies the foundation supports have been accused of supporting child labor and neglecting patients: $8.7 billion (or 41%) of the foundation’s assets are invested in companies whose practices directly counter the foundation’s charitable goals and mission of “improving people’s health” and “giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and poverty.” Reporter Charles Piller suggested these contradicting investments make it difficult to assess how much good work the foundation actually did in Africa, as the foundation is “contributing to both ends of the problems.”
https://mic.com/articles/7522/gates-foundation-reveals-its-dark-side-after-ditching-alec#.jzb0p1G2t
Bill Gates DID learn one thing before he dropped out of college. He learned how to shield his profits from taxation. Mr. Gates invariably gets headlines for his generous donations… and 1.7 billion sounds like a lot of money. But according to CNN Microsoft put $113 billion of their profits in off shore accounts to avoid paying taxes… and they are not alone in this. The media could help wake up taxpayers to this scam by reporting this tidbit every time they report on Mr. Gates’ largesse or the largesse of other “generous” billionaires who get to decide how the money that SHOULD go toward the general well-being of our country is spent.
Apple is holding over 200 billion dollars offshore on which they owe about 70 billion in income tax.
Apple’s CEO, Tim Crook, insists that it is “unfair” to tax Apple on this money because it was made abroad. This from the CEO of the same company that evaded paying 14.5 billion in taxes in Ireland.
Clearly, Apple does not wish to pay taxes at home OR abroad and will go to great lengths to avoid it.
And of course, Apple has also made most of it’s profits off the backs of people in China (including children) working very long hours for very low wages .
That they call themselves an American Company is a disgrace to our country.
If Bill Gates understood more about education and schools, he would know that he could contribute far more to improved education by supporting stronger preservice and inservice teacher and administrator education.
During my 30 years in education (as a teacher, administrator, and professor of teacher and administrator education), I have watched universities diminish programs to increase efficiency and revenue. That means more students admitted with less stringent admission requirements, fewer course requirements, larger class sizes, fewer hours in field experiences, more online courses with little or no instructor-student interaction, and more assessment by means of standardized tests that reveal nothing about the students’ ability to teach or lead.
Faculty, who actually know something about instruction, assessment, human development, and adult learning, have only token opportunities to express their views about these changes and no longer have any meaningful role in reshaping the programs in which they teach.
Preservice teachers and administrators leave these program with thin, shallow knowledge bases (beyond what they possessed when admitted) and limited practical skills. They are acutely aware of this and justifiably feel cheated. They are terrified as they leave university for school jobs for which they feel ill-prepared, and where they will receive little formal mentoring, lots of professional development related to the Common Core, and performance evaluation tied tightly to their students’ scores on standardized tests.
Maybe Bill Gates could direct at least some of his billions toward (re)development of educator preparation programs, based on sound, research-based principles of teaching and learning, as opposed to the sorry array of untested and/or discredited theories in which he is so deeply invested.
Gates has created a vast web of control in Washington State. He has created changes education-related laws to ensure public organizations are public-private partnerships, with guess who is funding. He gets his people in there who then shape and control the framework, members and agenda.
He has a hand in all education leadership organizations so he can cultivate current and future leaders and indoctrinate them, then had them carry out his agenda in the schools.
He funds the Seattle Times Education section to control public information.
He funds the state university education programs so he can control who is in charge of these programs, then funds research grants for them with a very narrow agenda and expected narrative.
He has many quasi-sounding public education organizations—except they aren’t.
The BERC Group, touted as an independent research organization out to help school districts is actually a Gates funded enterprise—and connected to his state leadership organization for educators. BERC hires educators who often concurrently work in districts to further influence.