As regular readers know, Mercedes Schneider is one of my favorite bloggers. I love her keen mind, her smart research, her deep experience as a teacher, and her ability to explain complicated issues. She also has a great heart. She is an original.
I think this was one of the first, maybe the very first post of hers, that I put on my blog. It is one of her best. It explains that one man bought and paid for The Common Core: Bill Gates. She wrote this in 2013, before that endeavor became radioactive. Why did Gates want the Common Core? He believes that everything should be standardized. That is the way computers work. That is the way markets work.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Too BAD Gates doesn’t just fund school libraries without any hitches. But alas, he’s stuck on himself and really wants an endless stream of $$$$$.
I suspect Gates thinks that because he has $$$$$, he knows everything. He doesn’t know squat about how kids learn, what teachers need, and how to build classroom communities, where teachers must orchestrate many variables in “REAL-TIME” and respond appropriately in “REAL-TIME” to students and the ever changing landscape in the classroom.
The reason why many charter schools have this NO-NONSENSE OBEY approach to learning/teaching is because they really don’t know how to teach and help students learn.
And I also suspect the Common Gore is just another way to keep the citizenry dumb, despite what is marketed about the Common Gore. All I have to do is look at the schools the RICH send their kids. The RICH kids do not have to put up with the Common Gore and repressive testing.
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Good thing Bill Gates doesn’t fund school libraries, cuz if he did, there would be no books. Only Microsoft software manuals.
I know you said without any hitches, but “Gates without hitches” is like, well, “gates without hitches”, forever blowing open no matter how many times you close them.
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YES! Too BAD Gates would NEVER fund libraries without hitches. I know I was dreaming. But had to put this out there anyway.
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You’ve caught the exact logic attached to a “punitive” test-based school reform: “The reason why many charter schools have this NO-NONSENSE OBEY approach to learning/teaching is because they really don’t know how to teach and help students learn.”
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To quote Mercedes from the original piece: “Bill Gates likes Common Core. So, he is purchasing it. In doing so, Gates demonstrates (sadly so) that when one has enough money, one can purchase fundamentally democratic institutions.
I do not have billions to counter Gates. What I do have is this blog and the ability to expose the purchase.
I might be without cash, but I am not without power.”
And, THAT, my friends, is a great summation of the power of Diane’s website. Thanks to all who have contributed.
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Also be aware of this: Since 2016 Gates has poured $57,142, 619 into sustaining the Common Core and $1,610,413 to prop up the Common Core Tests, PARCC and SMARTER.
Gates Money for the Common Core has gone to:
Riverside County Office of Education in California,
The University of Michigan,
Stand for Children Leadership Center Date (two grants) , West Ed,
The CORE Districts in California (Long Beach, Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Sanger, Oakland, Garden Grove, Clovis, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno).
EdSource Inc. (to link the Common Core to ESSA plans)
and
Southern Regional Education Board–the largest amount, $35,065,000 to support a college- and career-readiness strategy across its 16 southern states.
Readers should be aware that Gates, and many other fans of standards that serve as a tool for creating “data” are switching their vocabularies and their aims to support the USDE ” Common Education Data Standards coding scheme.
The US Department of Education is developing a system of coding data for education extending from early childhood through elementary and secondary school, post secondary education, and adult education and workforce performance.
This coding scheme is distinct from the National Center for Education Statistics and US Census information. Almost every aspect of education is being identified and assigned an alphanumeric code so the whole database for education in the United States (including unique identifiers for students, parents/caregivers/educators) can function much like the search engines Goggle or Bing, and interlocking networks of information such as those used for targeted ads on Amazon. What the CEDS “thesaurus” supports is data mining of the kind required for so-called personalized learning, including predictive analytics and “recommendation systems” for teachers. https://ceds.ed.gov/domainEntitySchema.aspx
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The great thing about Deform is it remains as fresh as the day it was dropped out of the hind end of the cow.
You can repost something you posted years ago with no fear that it will be outdated or inapt.
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And of course, my poems also remain as fresh as the day they were dropped.
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I love Mercedes too, but I read a lot of ed reformers and Bill Gates is now more pro-public school than most of them.
Bill Gates didn’t change. Ed reform lurched Right.
I think part of the reason Gates is now following a different path than The Movement is that he’s big enough and has enough money to go his own way.
Gates has a focus on PUBLIC schools that is simply absent in ed reform as a whole.
Now obviously that could be good or bad for families in public schools and the argument that this 900 pound gorilla shouldn’t be directing policy for 50 million families is still dead-on, but Gates is less of a PRIVATIZER than the mainstream ed reform movement.
It’s interesting to watch. At some point they all started following Walton more than Gates. Whatever internal argument there was between the various factions in ed reform privatizers won that, hand’s down. The idea that all districts should be all-charter is now mainstream in ed reform where as late as 2010 that was a fringe position. Gates doesn’t espouse that. He may secretly want that, but it isn’t what he says, and it IS what they say. Their newest hero is Osborne and Osborne thinks all schools should be privatized.
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Gates’ new found tolerance for public education does not stem from understanding its value. I fear it stems from understanding the opportunity he has to sell his depersonalized learning to them. Years of disinvestment in public education has left many schools struggling to keep the lights on. “Personalized learning” is a cheap, easy solution that requires no benefits or pension. Gates knows how to bribe states, cities, superintendents and school boards to get his way. His plan is: “In case you were wondering, one of the focus areas of Gates’ new-new plan is “…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” https://seattleducation.com/2017/10/22/is-summit-basecamp-bill-gates-latest-plan-for-public-education/
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I agree on the promotion of “personalized learning” – there’s isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between that and any other product promotion, but Gates has an understanding of public education as a SYSTEM that ed reformers just don’t have.
Betsy DeVos refuses to admit that a system is necessary or desirable. It’s nuts. She seems to GENUINELY believe that they could just hand out vouchers and all the messy details would be sorted out by “markets”. This is FAR to the Right of Barry Goldwater, let alone Bill Gates.
Gates approaches this in a fundamentally different way, which Mercedes knows but she focuses on the “standardization” he likes, but he’s more pro-public school than ed reform because at this point they no longer “believe” that public schools have to be a system, and he does.
I think it comes from his background, actually. “Systems thinking” is very much a part of his industry.
Ed reformers NEVER CONSIDERED the systemic effects of ECOT. They opened and promoted a HUGE school and never once thought about the system as a whole. That’s remarkably obtuse. It’s a kind of blindness.
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I have a son in a “personalized learning” science class and the AMOUNT of information they collect from him is amazing. They get it because they test him constantly.
It’s not a mystery why they have more granular data in personalized learning. Every bit of information they have on him comes from constant, endless testing.
On parent teacher night I went from his science class where I saw elaborate representations of data on his every move to his math class, where he has an older teacher who is highly regarded locally. You know what she told us about him? She told us about his friends and how much he loves playing the guitar. She thinks he’s in “good shape” because he adjusted to high school. She didn’t get that from testing. She got it because she has tons of experience and she observes them as PEOPLE. Much more valuable to me, as a parent. Nearly priceless, that insight. That’s what I need to know because I’m not there every day and I don’t have her depth of her experience across years and many, many students.
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Experience matters in education as does humanity. There is no need for the endless data mining that does not really benefit the student.
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Gates might understand software systems but school systems are not at all like software systems.
I know because I have worked in both areas.
Gates thinks he can standardize people the way one standardizes products. He also believes he can use crackpot “metrics” like VAM to identify “quality” or “value” in teachers and schools.
The irony is that he does not even know what quality is in his own industry. There is a very good reason why many good software engineers refer to his company and what they produce as Microslop — because so much of it is poorly designed, poorly tested (if at all), full of security holes ( that you could drive Mack trucks through) and VERY buggy ( did I say VERY? I meant VERY VERY VERY)
As a software engineer, I am intimately acquainted with Microslop applications, operating systems and software developer tools and let’s just say I am not at all impressed.
And there is no excuse because his company hired a lot of very capable people. I have to conclude that the software development PROCESS at Microslop is very very bad.
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Ed reformers are promoting Altschool in the same way they promote Summit Charters.
The Altschool site is amusing because it seems to be designed deliberately to imitate a nonprofit:
https://www.altschool.com/
No where will you find that they intend to SELL this platform to public schools. Instead you get this fuzzy (and deceptive) language about a “community of educators”
This is VERY sophisticated marketing. Deceptive as heck but clever.
Call me crazy but I preferred vendors who peddled products without the phony gloss of “mission”. Just make your pitch. We know you think your product is wonderful- if you didn’t you wouldn’t have been hired for the sales team. The superintendents who are going along with this nonsense should be fired by the public who pay them.
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Hope “alt right” tarnishes “Alt school”.
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