A couple of days ago, Bill Gates said he has a new plan to reform education. As I pointed out in a post, Bill Gates is batting 0 for 3. He dropped $2 Billion into breaking up large high schools and turning them into small schools. He started in 2000, didn’t see a big jump in test scores, and backed out in 2008. Then, having decided that the answer to high test scores was to punish teachers whose student scores didn’t go up, he pushed value-added Assessment, partnering with Arne Duncan and Race to the Top. Thousands of educators were fired and many schools were closed based on Gates’s fancy. That lasted from 2008 until now, and it has been written into state law in many states, although it has distorted the purpose of education and created massive demoralization among teachers and a national teacher shortage. Then he funded the Common Core, in its entirety. It is his pedagogical Frankenstein, his personal belief that education should be completely standardized, from standards to curriculum to teacher education to teacher evaluation. Speaking to the National Board for Certified Teachers a few years ago, he praised standardization and talked about the beauty of standard electrical plugs. No matter where you live, you can plug in an appliance and it works! Clearly, that was his metaphor for education. What did he spend on the creation and promotion of the Common Core? No one knows for sure, but estimates range from $200 Million to $2 Billion.
There is one other massive Gates failure that I forgot to mention: inBloom. This was a $100million investment in data mining of students’ personally identifiable data. Several states and districts agreed to turn their data over to inBloom, which wipould use the data as its owners chose. Parents got wind of this and launched a campaign to stop in loom. Led by Leonie Haimson of New York and Rachel Stickland of Colorado, parents besieged their legislators, and one by one, the state’s and districts pulled out. InBloom collapsed.
We don’t know how much money Gates has poured into charter schools, but we imagine he must be disappointed that on average they don’t produce higher scores than the public schools he disdains. He bundled millions for a referendum in Washington State to allow charter schools, the fourth such referendum. Despite Gates’ swamping the election with money, the motion barely passed. Then the State’s highest court denied public funding to charter schools, declaring that they are not public schools because they are not governed by elected school boards. Gates and his friends tried to oust the Chief Judge when she ran for re-election, but she coasted to victory.
As you see, he is actually 0 for 5 in his determination to “reform” the nation’s public schools.
But he is not deterred by failure!
So what is the latest Gates’ idea?
Laura Chapman explains here:
“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 http://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 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.“
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sorry I did not catch a bunch of typos (e.g., The man who woulfd be king, not the many who would be king).
Thought you were using Old English.
I loved that movie.
I do not like Gates starring in a remake, though.
I don’t understand why journalists with access to Bill Gates don’t ask him this question over and over again:
If you care about at-risk students why aren’t you establishing schools that look exactly like the one to which you sent your own children — which have small class sizes and spend between $30,000 and $40,000/year for the students with absolutely no special needs and would have to spend even more per pupil if they also taught student with learning issues?
How would he answer? “I want to help those kids, but only in a way that doesn’t involve spending the same money for their education as my own children got. I want to find a cheap way to teach them.”
And then every single article would start with “Bill Gates is looking for a cheap way to give kids an education but not one that is anything like what his kids got because it’s too expensive.”
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Bill Gates is a hantavirus and terminal cancer cloaked in the misleading robes of a saint, thanks to his vast fictional PR image machine.
BG = DKB
He’s a Dunning–Kruger Bullionnaire, someone too rich for anyone he knows to tell him what an ignoranus (sic) he is about all the things he knows not of …
School districts have been far too willing to accept Gates’ money and give very little thought about what he was promoting.
Gates will shift ed reform just with the SIZE of the thing, though. RttT was about 4 billion dollars and that was (supposedly) all 50 states, although states that didn’t comply with the Duncan view of education didn’t get any.
Gates can dump one billion all by himself.
He can shift “ed reform” with just this effort- not necessarily “education”, but “ed reform”- that collection of people and programs aligned with certain views 🙂
It’s crazy really- he’s as big as a government – he’ll have that much impact.
The move towards public schools is interesting to me, because he’s really the only big actor in ed reform who goes in that direction. In that sense he’s singular- the rest of the big orgs focus almost exclusively on charters and vouchers although they all (mostly falsely) claim to be “agnostics”.
Gates’ move towards public schools interests me, too. However, his now talking about “continuous improvement” concerns me more. “Continuous improvement” implies never failing to improve, yet, as Diane points out, Gates’ record is “0 for 5.” How strange the guy does not make the connection. How can he in good conscious promote “continuous improvement” when he, at each turn, has failed to achieve it? Maybe that’s because “continuous improvement” is business-world’s egotistical, arrogant, fear-driven simplification hence corruption of “continual improvement” that operates much like the scientific method that discourages playing suck-up to authority.
Too, contradictorily, Gates talks a lot about achievement (suffix “-ment” = results) and not near as much about learning (suffix “-ing” = process). Thus Gates shows more concern with improving results than concern with improving processes that produce the results. Yet continuous improvement implies, again, never failing to improve processes that produce the results. So given Gates’ “0 for 5” record of continuous failure means probability of achievement does not favor him that much. Gates’ 0 for 5 record means he has continuously failed to learn he should leave learning to continually improve the process that is public education to those whose business it is to do so.
Those who achieve continuous improvement do so in either one of two ways: by extreme luck that defies the odds or by faking and cheating.
Mr. Gates followed a particular path, and this path made him the wealthiest man in the world. He thinks in terms of how he achieved his success and assumes that that method will work for schools. But what standardized testing, the Common Core, and school ratings have actually meant, on the ground, in classrooms all across America, is a narrow focus on exercises for practicing the childish list of Common Core skills using exercises closely modeled on the exam questions. This unintended consequence has been dramatic, and it’s destroyed my own field of English language arts education.
One of the huge problems with what the Gates Foundation does is that it doesn’t pay any attention to these unintended consequences. Walk into almost any English classroom in the U.S. today, and the curriculum and pedagogy have become extraordinarily narrowed because everything depends upon success on the test. But these problems are much deeper and more difficult to appreciate:
The vagueness and confusion and in the ELA “standards” are a terrible mismatch with the objective-test formats of the exams, so the exams and practice questions tend to be tortured, confused and confusing–a real mess–terrible for the kids and the teachers.
The ELA “standards” are breathtakingly constricted and constricting. They leave out really, really important stuff, AND they stifle innovation because all focus is on the limits set by these “standards.” The rich, profound, deep topic of figurative language in all its breathtaking variety of forms and astonishing consequences for how people understand the world becomes “how, in this passage, does the use of metaphor influence the tone. That’s like turning a class on the Civil War into one on comparison of the sizes of Union and Rebel cannonballs AND passing a law that this, and only this, will be studied in history class going forward.
Though the CC$$ gives lip service to substantive content, what’s being measured on the tests is the skills list, and so that is what gets the focus. Rich, connected content is pretty much out the window, replaced by skills practice on random, disconnected snippets of text.
And all this English class as test prep is completely joyless. It undermines what should be the prime directive of the teacher–creating intrinsically motivated, life-long learners.
Gates, Duncan, and Coleman – the 3 Stooges of the education world.
Larry, Mo. and Curly had a better chance of fixing bathroom plumbing than these disruptors had at actually improving the educational opportunities and experiences for 50 million children..
They expanded the null curriculum, narrowed the math and ELA curricula, narrowed the meaning of student, teacher, and school “success” or “effectiveness” while forcing the public school system to neglect its fundamental obligations.
Since every Gates project entails copious amounts of data collection, parents should be wary about the data collection and how it will be used. The laws need to catch up with technology. Parents should have some rights to protect their child’s privacy.
Five years ago InBloom data collection, or data mining, was accompanied with prepared administrative responses which later turned-out to be false.
Diane Gates should read the BeThree5 comment today and apply it to himself: “. . . there are many more students who start from premises or conclusions that are so self-evident to them they haven’t questioned their thinking process, unaware others may start & end up elsewhere– & find they have nowhere to go, nothing more to write.” That’s Gates’ thinking–his own thinking is the end all to the whole thing.
Also, the OVER-standardization of everything (emphasize: OVER) is predictable from someone who famously dropped out of school. Guess what Gates missed: a deepening of mind and a breakthrough from the kind of thinking BeThree5 speaks about above–an ideological, non-reflective (and certainly not SELF-reflective) thought process that is (to put it nicely) abbreviated; and that, in philosophical terms, is positivism–on steroids because of his world-wide influence.
I’m convinced that Gates is not the devil personified; however, I cannot find any incisive distinctions between him and the evil that C. S. Lewis writes about in “The Screwtape Letters.”
Insightful and incisive analysis, Dr. Chapman. This post encapsulates all that is terrible and terrifying with my professional life. Teaching in one of the CORE districts, my ability to teach has been hamstrung by all the data collection. Including any creativity or thoughtfulness in my practice is an act of bravery. (Thank you all for the kind compliments yesterday on my bravery.) Gates has taken my planning time with a teacher evaluation website that demands following flawed teaching scripts. He has taken my students’ class time with deeply flawed tests. He has taken my students’ and their parents’ time with downright silly surveys. He has essentially violated the California State Constitution by thwarting the state’s attempts to protect instructional time and practice from all this high stakes, data-driven nonsense. Principals only care about the ratings on the Zillow funded website, so they have stopped focusing on education and focused instead on marketing. And then there are the charters causing segregation and funding disparities. What a mess! And it will only get worse because no matter how many times he strikes out, Bill Gates gets to bat as many times as he wants.
Bill four letter word Gates. Don’t take his bribes, public officials. I beg you.
I’m not even in a CORE district, but I often feel like we teachers have become the equivalent of Taco Bell cashiers in a vast corporation headed by the billionaires. Autonomy –at the classroom, school, district and even state level –is effectively almost dead.
Years ago, I was running an editorial department in a publishing house. I bought a copy of Microsoft Project, which promised to enable me to track everything down to the most minute detail. I found after using this for a time that I had become disconnected from my staff and that they were spending astonishing amounts of time and energy not doing their work but feeding me data in the formats in needed it in. I threw the thing in the trash and went back to “management by walking around.” Soundest work decision I ever made.
Exactly. But in this case, the data we’re providing are deleterious to making a good “product” because we’re forced to use harmful strategies like close reading of overly complex snippets of boring text in the creation of the data.
yes. exactly. exactly the opposite of the intended effect. what a tragic waste!!! I am so saddened by this. It’s just terrible. terrible.
My dad was a Vice President of his company in charge of litigation (Sorry for the capitalization. My iPhone won’t let me use lower case here unless I bother to change the settings.) He shared with me a brilliant management strategy that Gates will never understand. It’s called MBWA, management by walking around. The manager, in this case the school principal, would get off his/her duff and walk the classrooms asking questions and collecting qualitative information. Teachers and students know best what’s wrong and also how to fix it. MBWA is much better that the tech mogul’s push for forcing employees and customers, in this case students and parents, to devote time to creating quantitative data. My dad called himself a dinosaur and lamented that the 21st century seems to have no quality, MBWA managers left. His lamentation was spot on.
Exactly what I did. See my note, above. Your comparison to teaching, spot on. Anything really good is transactional.
Horrific. Yes. This is happening everywhere. The death of the teaching of English.
Thanks for weighing in with your first person understanding of the CORE districts. When I started the research I had no idea what a tangled web was being woven. I was astonished that the school ratings that I selected at random took me straight to the GreatSchools.org website for reuse in all manner of marketing schemes thinly justified as helping parents guide their children.
Bill Gates as a two bit baseball player who has bribed his way into the major leagues and to multiple times at bat is an excellent metaphor.
First, it describes how politicians and school administrators have been captured by his money.
Second, I think it describes his own need to be the center of attention and to be recognized — as something more than just a guy who made a lot of money off of buggy software.
Above all, Gates is looking for recognition. He could not get it legitimately from scientists or from colleagues in the tech world (Steve Jobs once famously called Gates a ‘basically unimaginative’ person who ‘ripped off’ other people’s ideas.”) so he now tries to do it with money.
It’s actually very sad.
For some who make a great deal of money on a single idea think they have all the answers to solve the problems of the world. Lack of achievement on some students part is not the result of bad teaching, this may be one of many factors, not necessarily a teacher problem. Gates thought that teachers were the problem. Not poverty. He is wrong
He was MUCH influenced by his wife on this one: teachers are the problem.
Melinda once told a PBS program, funded by Gates, that the foundation knows how to solve the teaching problems. She was a financier. What does she know? She is as clueless as Bill.
Gates IS HUBRIS, just like the REST of those who have gobs of $$$$$.
Bill Gates—
[start]
“It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.”
[end]
Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/09/27/bill-gates-it-would-be-great-if-our-education-stuff-worked-but/?utm_term=.0ea150eaba43#comments
That quote is from 2013! Already much water had flowed under the bridge…
🙄
Only problem is, like all the other heavyweights of corporate education reform, he not only ignores his own deadlines for determining effectiveness but keeps extending them long past their due dates.
Gosh, ignoring the numbers. Not what you would expect from Mr. 3DM [data-drivendecisionmaker] His Own Bad Self.
Or, maybe just maybe, exactly what should be expected from those that believe that rheeality trumps reality.
😎
“It would be great if our education stuff worked out”
What an eloquent fellow.
Then again, eloquence seems to be a requirement for joining the Reformer’s club:
“No one gives a shit what you think and feel”
“White suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
And these are the people who would teach us English.
Saying he won’t know if his “education stuff works” for “probably a decade” is like starting WWIII and saying, We won’t know if our nuclear annihilation stuff works for probably a few hundred years. He’s conducting destructive experiments on humanity that cannot be stopped until it’s too late. He’s Dr. Frankenstein. He’s Dr. Strangelove. He’s not really a Dr., but he surely is a mad scientist.
I would not call him a scientist by any reasonable definition of the term.
But I think we can all agree he is mad.
And he undoubtedly hates this blog.
Which would make him a “mad hater”
A mad hater?
SDP,
A few years ago, Bill Gates told Jonathan Alter in an interview in a national magazine that I was his greatest adversary. I was pleased to hear it. Subsequently I made several trips to Seattle and tried to meet him. He was in town but would never meet with me.
“The Mad Hater”
Bill Gates is mad
As mad as a hater
Temper is bad
As bad as a gator
After watching the Sixty Minutes where MS cofounder Paul Allen talks about how Gates screamed at his employees, i would not want to be in his house when he goes on a rant against his “greatest adversary”, who has clearly thrown a monkey wrench into many of of his well laid plans.
Gates should ask himself one simple question before imposing his ideas on others:
Would I recommend this for my own kids?
If he would not, he has no business subjecting other people’s kids to his experiments.
Of course, his kids attend one of the best private schools in the country, so they don’t get subjected to any of dad’s schemes. They are lucky.
Some day perhaps one or more of them will ask dad why he did the things he did.
When it comes to the heavyweights of corporate education reform, their mandates and gimmicks and panaceas are for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
As for THEIR OWN CHILDREN, just click on the link below for the school Bill Gates attended. Guess where his kids go?
Link: https://www.lakesideschool.org
For a very small sample of what Lakeside School makes their consumers—er, students—suffer through, click on ATHLETICS and then FACILITIES for the following:
[start]
Lakeside School is home to some of the finest high school athletics facilities in the Puget Sound region. Teams have access to two artificial turf fields lined for multi-sport use, a natural-grass soccer pitch, an all-weather track, a shellhouse for all crew teams, a Middle School multi-sport gymnasium, and The Paul G. Allen Athletics Center, headquarters for the Upper School athletics staff, coaches, and physical education department.
[end]
And while I’m at it, just look at what those poor students have to suffer through at the above mentioned athletics center:
[start]
The Lions’s newest facility features the arena-style Ackerley Gymnasium, a multipurpose fieldhouse, the full-service Harry Swetnam strength training and cardio spaces, the Ed Putnam Sports Medicine Facility, mat room, three classrooms with Smart Board technology, and administrative spaces for athletics staff and coaches.
The Paul G. Allen Athletics Center is ADA compliant, and is equipped with three accessible parking spots, wheelchair accessible curbing and ramps, three automated entries, and an elevator that provides access to both levels of the facility. Obstruction free, accessible seating is available on the north and south ends of the Ackerley Gymnasium.
[end]
Yes, you read that right. Not a mention, jot or tittle, of anything calculated to improve test prep!
Boy oh boy, how are those students going to meet the challenges of the 21st century?????
😎
Gates’ kids are probably just glad that dad leaves them alone and focuses instead on his hobby of whipping other people’s kids into shape.
“The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done.” Mark Twain’s quote somehow seems appropriate.
He will always be a dropout.
Greg,
When that self-taught man is a billionaire, he has way too much power, and too many people follow blindly because he is rich.
The problem is that we measure success publically by how much money a guy makes. Making money means only that a person knows how to make money. Would we ask the advice of a novelist if we were about to invest money?
“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’ Great New Ideas are not about changing the way things are, but about maintaining the status quo. Gates wants to make sure, education promotes and supports the current model of the economy in which people’s ultimate destiny is to “work hard” 10+ hours a day for a billionaire.
From this uncivilized economy, it’s time to transition to a civilized one where people work 6 hours a day, and the vast majority of their K12 education is to give them ideas about how to spend the remaining 18 hours in the day.
A reminder: Microsoft has over $113,000,000,000 in cash stashed in overseas accounts. The media should mention that overtime they cover Mr. Gates’ “generosity”… Paying out 1,700,000,000 over five years is chump change… That is 1.5% of the money Microsoft is protecting from taxes… And they are not alone in this practice… http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/19/investing/apple-google-microsoft-cash/index.html
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Another 15 years of Gates’ “philanthropy”?
A perpetually pounding, gold plated battering ram.
So far, every reform he has promoted has been an exploding cigar. It hurts children, teachers, principals, and communities, not him.
He doesn’t give a damn about collateral damage.
Interesting that you’d say that, Diane.
I was about to submit a post, asking whether he suffered any remorse for what I’m fairly certain he sees as, “collateral damage”. Both in terms of the careers that he’s stifled and/or ended and the children who have been negatively effected by this “stuff” that he’s hoping will work.
I ended up canceling the reply. The answer is self evident, considering his Duracell mentality and longevity.
gitapik I wonder if those fired teachers could muster a class action suit, in the light of his own comments about failure. Just thinking out loud. I guess, in his mind, teachers are also just guinea pigs–dispensable and replaceable.
gitapik Doesn’t matter—-if children are thought of as guinea pigs.
All areas of American life are suffering from the destructive effect of “The Billionaires’ Disease.” Too many billionaires are delusional: They have accumulated not only great wealth, but also sycophants who tell them they are geniuses. These sycophant-surrounded billionaires come to believe themselves not only to be geniuses, but that they alone are responsible for the wealth they have accumulated; they rationalize away the key and essential roles played by others in the success of their businesses. In their delusional minds they see their “genius” as being applicable to other areas, such as government and public education, notwithstanding the fact that they have no experience or expertise in these areas. So what we have today are billionaires with no governmental experience who think they know best who our elected officials should be, what government should and should not do, and billionaires who never taught a classroom full of children but who think they know exactly what “reforms” are needed in public education. And, of course, what’s needed in public schools is the charter school business model because the business model is the only thing the billionaires know even a bit about. And of course there are plenty of simpering sycophants to tell the billionaires how insightful they are about reforms and charter schools because these sycophants see an opportunity to cash in on unregulated charter schools to bleed tax money away from children and into their own pockets. If only there was a simple cure for The Billionaires’ Disease, then perhaps cured billionaires could turn their resources to combating the true root causes of problems not only in schools but throughout our nation: Poverty and racial discrimination.
Billionaires could do more to change the racial estrangement that is at the root of all of America’s inequality, by forming a REIT funded by at least $20 billion and which would buy homes for nonwhite families in racially monolithic white cities and suburbs across our nation. The United States Supreme Court recognized the inherent social cancer of our nation’s segregated communities when it ordered busing to integrate schools back in 1971. But segregated communities have persisted, causing racial estrangement and distrust to continue as our national scandal. America’s races need to actually live together as physical neighbors in order to learn to trust each other, to learn to truly become, as our national motto declares, “e pluribus unum”. So, which billionaires will take up this challenge?
“Billionaires could do more to change the racial estrangement that is at the root of all of America’s inequality, by forming a REIT funded by at least $20 billion and which would buy homes for nonwhite families in racially monolithic white cities and suburbs across our nation.”
Nah, billionaires should be allowed (and mandated) to do only one thing: start paying taxes.