in 2008-09, Bill Gates agreed to finance the creation, development, and implementation of Common Core standards. Why? He loves standardization. Estimates for his spending on the Common Core range from $200 Million to $2 Billion.
Most states adopted it, lured by the chance to win funding from Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top (states had to adopt the Common Core to be eligible to compete for a slice of $5 Billion in federal awards). But the backlash from every direction was so intense that most of the adopters renamed it, revised it, distanced themselves.
Bill Gates has never given up on the Core. He recently plopped a wee bit of money into a new effort to revive Common Core Testing.
Under Duncan, the U.S. Department of Education spent $360 million to create two Testing consortia. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.
“Only five of the original 24 states involved in the PARCC consortium are still using members. They include Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico and the District of Columbia. Louisana uses a hybrid of PARCC and another test.
“The other testing group, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) has seen massive attrition as well. The SBAC used to have 30 members.” SBAC is down to 12 full members.
Mercedes Schneider digs deeper into Bill Gates and his failing obsession here.
Give it up, Bill. It’s over. It’s done. Stick a fork in it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What an evil, stupid fiasco the Common Core and the related testing has been. This junk has driven out important literature, reading, and writing curricula and replaced it with very narrowly focused test prep, and so it has robbed, now, almost an entire generation of K-12 students of anything like a traditional education in English language arts. Horrible. Stick a fork in it indeed!!!!
Bob, I wholeheartedly agree and just said as much in another post I made. Common Core standards are great to teach the processes but miss out on supporting the teaching of the content as the traditional state standards did. No longer do our ‘I Do’ statements or lesson objectives that are posted daily on our boards talk about students’ learning content but instead talk about being able to compare texts or analyze texts–while important skills they should be taught while reading the literature not outside of it.
Thanks for your comments, Yvonne. There are many schools in the US now where all the kids do in English class is Common Core test prep exercises. No writing of essays and research papers. No reading of novels and short stories. And certainly no learning about the history of literature. All test prep, all the time.
Los Angeles is a sprawling county. An upper level administrator came all the way to my school to visit just little old me and find out why I wasn’t using the online test prep materials or interim assessments to teach English. I explained what literature is for. We read because we learn from authors ways to better understand and navigate the complex web of human and natural interaction. We don’t read to learn how to read. That would be pointless. I explained that it does my students no good to give me reading materials that lack meaningfulness.
InService,
Did you get your letter of reprimand yet?
I should explain how I got away with it. Don’t try this at home, kids. I used all the test prep materials last year when they first came out and made myself an expert regarding them before anyone else, including the administrator who came to visit. I explained to others how to navigate the websites. Now I am an expert in her eyes, and able to offer a critique, escaping unscathed. Probably.
I should also warn fellow teachers that I know there are administrators patrolling the internet for dissent against accepting Gates money. I know the administrator of whom I speak isn’t one of them, otherwise I would not have written about it here. Be brave. Be right. But be aware.
Good for you, Inservice. Yes, one has to be careful, these days. There are many, many administrators who care only about the test scores and how those look on their evaluations, and those people have turned many school systems into something like East Germany under the Stasi. Most teachers I know are hip to how badly conceived the Common Core $tate $tandards are and how invalid and unreliable and misconceived the tests are, but they dare not have an administrator learn of their true feelings for fear of losing their jobs. They dutifully post their Data Walls while talking to the friends among their colleagues about what complete BS it is. Playing the game.
Unfortunately the daytime SAT replaced the SBAC in. many high schools. Just more testing that tests nothing except the skill of choosing multiple choice answers. So sad the carnage continues masked and renamed.
And under the new tax law, he’ll be getting much more money to spend, which will come from us, and he’ll use more of our money to undermine our collective interests.
the final description of the “new” view on taxes: Using Collective Citizen Money To Undermine Collective Citizen Interest
Diane,
Speaking of Common Core! Just read this article today, might make a good post to discuss:
“Historians Want to Put Events in Context. Common Core Doesn’t. That’s a Problem.”. historynewsnetwork.org Sandra Stotsky, 12/24/17
First, let me mention how aghast I am at the secretiveness of the New Meridian Corporation that Gates just funded. Foul! Second, I just took a look at the Bill Gates blog because I am a glutton for punishment. You know, he will never stop. He is blinded by misleading data. That guy really believes in data! A big reason he (falsely) claims success with his investment portfolio of school systems under manipulation is the data he gets from surveys. He purportedly believes teachers appreciate his heavy handed meddling because the surveys supposedly tell him so.
I was just forced by my principal to fill out one of those surveys (told I had to stay after work an extra hour unless I did). I should have asked for that in writing, come to think of it. Admin will waste any amount of instruction or meeting time to keep Gates CORE numbers up, not just test scores but the numbers of surveys filled out by parents, teachers, and students.
Since the survey was online and required me to enter my identification number, it was not anonymous. It asked me whether I liked the Gates funded professional development products the principal had used. That’s the same principal who forced me to take the survey. Bill, listen. Seriously, Bill. Bill, do you think I’m dumb enough to tell my supervisors I don’t like what they’re doing in such sloppy fashion as to do it with a rating scale on a website? Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer, so of course, I answered, “Everything is totally awesome!” Your data are wrong, Bill. Stick a fork in Big Data.
(By the way, there was another survey (of so many) recently that was anonymous. Which is fine, I suppose, except that if I had so desired, I could have filled it out pretending to be a parent, a student, or for that matter, from another school I never even visited.) Surveys are as harmful as Common Core.
Bethree5, thanks for the link to the article, ‘Historians want to put…’ Was a good read and made several valid points and arguments regarding the disconnect between CCSS and content areas outside of ELA (what they now call ‘literacy’). I particularly appreciated the statement, “…Aside from the fact that “close” reading was not developed or promoted by Yale English professors Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren as a reading technique for historical documents, no history or English teacher before the advent of Common Core would have approached the study of a seminal historical document by withholding initial information about its historical context and clear language archaisms…” Exactly! Students taught prior to the onset of Common Core were/are intelligent analytical/critical thinkers that were accepted to the best colleges and universities, many on scholarships and some on full scholarships. All of the people that have shaped our government and country were taught pre-Common Core. The ONLY reason that CCSS was adopted in my opinion is so that states/districts would have access to the millions of dollars that were awarded for its use and for complying with the standardized testing that ‘measures’ student learning from its use.
Take any test. Do nothing but prep for that test. And guess what? You will get improvement in scores on the test. Improvements in your “data”–BUT AT WHAT OPPORTUNITY COST? The devil, here, is in the details that the Ed Deformers never see or think about–in all that is not being done, not being learned, because people are concentrating on learning how to answer multiple-choice questions about vaguely articulated “skills.”
You nailed it here, InService. This happens ALL THE TIME.
Thank you.
MOST RELEVANT INSIGHT: “Seriously, Bill. Bill, do you think I’m dumb enough to tell my supervisors I don’t like what they’re doing…” Teachers who cannot fill in school climate surveys without total anonymity know exactly how punitive this game is.
The reason computer and software gurus love standardized testing and standardized instruction is because that’s what computer machines and the software that operates on them do best: Lock-step standardization, just like the schools on Camazotz.
Gates has spent $33,675,613 in the years 2016 and 2017 shoring up the Common Core and associated tests, with a lot of that money going to California where he is also funding the CORE districts and the CORE districts are big on surveys of students, teachers, parents, and staff.
I also looked at grants for closely related phrases: college-ready, career-ready, and college and career ready for the years 2016 and 2017. These grants add another $123,769, 545 devoted to shoring up his vision. It is worth noting that $ 30,000,000, one of the largest single grants, was for “highly motivated, low-income DREAMers to graduate with career ready degrees” (no mention of college).
I looked at “personalized learning” investments, online, because these programs offer continual assessments of competence. For 2016 and 2017, these grants totaled $36,796,574.
In other words, and nothing new, Gates has not given up on promoting standardized education and assessments tied to specific criteria. Nothing is worthy of his attention in education unless there is an “it “ that can be reduced to a data point, a measure, better yet placed into a rating system so we can judge who is a loser, who has achieved mediocracy, and who has exceeded expectations.
Gates and those he has recruited to help him spend money on education have had too much influence on education in this century. He still thinks that there should be a direct correlation between test scores and dollars invested in education. He is Trump-like in his inability to learn.
Irrefutable.
Reformers want you to know that their efforts have nothing to do with the agenda of millionaires and billionaires, or their desires to pirate the scraps left in the public commons for profit and control. The demands for grit, rigor, tests, data, “accountability”, firings, school closings…? These come from the poorest mom’s and dads, their children, even cuddly puppies with sad eyes. TheY really want the rich to test them.
Gates IS a HUGE PART of the problem. He thinks those beneath him need “gentrification” ala Gates dictums and products. Holy cow…this man thinks he is royalty because his father was rich.
Here’s the thing about the issues with the CC$$ and the state tests–they can’t be articulated in a sound bite. One actually has to know a lot about English language arts and about assessment and to follow fairly sophisticated arguments to grok what the problems are. Above the heads of Ed Deformers. I think of whether people support the Common Core as a kind of rough and ready, pretty accurate test of the level of intelligence and education in math and English of teachers and administrators. The dummies love this stuff. The politicians and bureaucrats who support it don’t know any better.
It’s a shocking indictment of our profession that Coleman and the Core were not laughed off the national stage on Day 1. In a better world, these would have been met with a near-universal chorus of derision.
I agree. “Events” conspired to launch the CCSS, not least the massive infusion of money from Gates and legal needles threaded to get these standards and tests launched as a condition for Race to the Top money. Add the economic bust and the potential for a chorus of derision from professional communities never took off. The early support from teacher unions and other groups did not help. Books have been written about this fiasco, but the commandeering of so many people and continuing flows of money have kept this monstrosity alive.
O yes!
A few pieces that address problems with the current testing regime and with the Common Core $tate $tandards and their variants around the country:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/ed-reform/
The 21st century, standards-based, threaten-test-and-punish, “money-ball”, data-driven reform movement has FAILED at every level. Forget the meaningless bumps in test scores, just ask any 8th, 9th, or 10th grade teacher about the real, human travesty of these misguided policies. Children transformed in hollow shells; few interests, near zero curiosity – The Stepford Students of the Common Core.
yes yes yes
Bill Gates thinks computers are the solution to most everything. He wants standardized tests on computer; on-line instruction for students and teachers; information shared back with the computer companies to market more computer based products to schools, students, and parents; and CONTROL of education’s future direction to keep the dollars flowing to Microsoft. He has convinced himself that all of this is futuristic and in everyone’s best interests. Unfortunately, computers do not make billionaires better listeners to students, parents, and educators on what they really need.
According to Dr. Duke Pesta in a, 2016, Youtube video, Common Core 6 years later, said that Bill Gates spent over $6 billion of his own money on CCSS. It is about 17 minutes into the presentation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyRr6nBEnz4
He had said in his first video that Bill Gates spent $2.5 billion of his own money. So, he has added another $4 billion in roughly 6 years. I wonder how much he spent last year, 2017.
CCSS is a bad joke. I am glad that Texas was one of the 4 states that did not take the bait. I think that the other 3 were Virginia, Nebraska, and Alaska.
Talk about “fake news”, I have not seen such an incorrect, out of context & unsubstantiated column – and comments – since last year’s election ended. (Come to think of it, that ignorance hasn’t subsided, either.) The CCSS are still the official standards in 46 states.
The CCSS are not curricula, they do not dictate how anything must be taught, just the minimum proficiency you would expect, for example, a 3rd grader to have achieved by the end of 3rd grade in reading, writing & math.
A Gates grant may have been awarded to Meridian, but Gates, or any surrogate, has no ownership interest, nor even a place on its board. It is not benefiting Microsoft or Gates (like he needs it!).
Just because so many states are embarrassed by the low scores they are achieving, you can’t shoot the messenger!
Mike,
Common Core was supposed to lead to better education and higher scores. It has failed on both counts. In addition, it is developmentally Inappropriate and wrong for students who gave disabilities and are ELL.
You are late to the party. We have discussed Common Core on this blog for five years and evuscerated it. The tests are set to a ridiculous standard—NAEP proficient—which has been met to only 50% of the kids in only one state. How about if I set a standard that all 50 year old males should run a mile in four minutes? Great standard. Could you meet it? Better yet, I’m willing to bet that not one member of Congress could meet the NAEP proficient standard on the 8th grade math test for Common Core.
Oh, come on, Diane. NCES and others all have noted that Common Core has shifted certain math topics from earlier to later grades, leading to misalignment with the National Assessment of Educational Progress. To leave space for deeper learning, the standards shifted some topics to later grades. Where Common Core and the national assessment do not neatly lineup, some students simply might not have seen some of the national assessment material before their tests.
Also, the CCSS & NAEP definitions of “proficient” are quite different. In fact, I do not think PARCC even uses the word “proficient”, it uses “Meets” & “Exceeds”. NCES & U.S. DOE have shown that most state standards – and 46 states still ascribe to CCSS – fall in the “Basic” range of NAEP. Further, you also know well that there are exceptions made for kids with IEPs and ELL students.
PS: Re: the 4-minute mile – A classic example of ad hominem fallacy.