According to James Shelton and Bob Hughes, respectively of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiate and the Gates Foundation, they want to hear from you!
They don’t understand why there is such a big gap between research and practice. They don’t see why schools are improving so slowly despite their best efforts.
They write”:
Recent months have thrust some of the education sector’s resource strains into the national spotlight. Across the country, budget constraints in several states have highlighted the difficulty of educating today’s students in crumbling schools, and with decades-old instructional materials. Meanwhile, many educators are struggling to support students through the increasing pressures of poverty, a changing economy, and a demand for higher-level skills. Yet despite these challenges, the education sector spends less than a tenth of the average percentage on research and development across other U.S. industries.
So, get this, despite low teachers’ salaries, despite crumbling buildings, despite funding that has not reached 2008 levels, the real problem is that we are not spending enough on R&D.
Could you help them with some of your ideas?
Here is my idea: When you two multibillionaires come up with a plan to reinvent education, find a willing district to experiment on. Get the consent of the teachers. Listen to them before you start your Big Plan. Don’t impose it on the nation until you can demonstrate that you have tried your Big Plan in one place and worked out the bugs and determined that it helps kids and teachers. Until then, please don’t use the nation as your petri dish. Our children are not your guinea pigs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Exactly. Would love to see these guys take a 5-year moratorium from their intrusions.
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Did you say a 5-century moratorium?
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I think 5 decades would probably be sufficient.
By then Gates will certainly be gone (assuming his sons and of daughters do not take up the family business of interfering in the lives of millions of people) and Zuckerberg will be in his eighties.
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Not long enough. Maybe 5 generations.
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Maybe we should just say “,until the sun burns out”.
I think that would be a safe bet.
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That works for me.
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Maybe longer.
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And then re-create the experiment in another willing place to confirm the results. Then maybe you can find an entire district willing to participate to see if your ideas transfer to a larger population.
It would be best if you started in a high poverty area.
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How about the Los Angles Public School? They like Billionaires.
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Apparently, Gates and Zucks do not understand what writing is. They cannot grasp the simple fact that people write to express ideas to people. Writing to express ideas to a computer program is an exercise in futility. No one gives a confounded cat hair what Siri thinks of their writing. Gates and Zucks will never understand that an artificial intelligence tutor can never come close to matching a human teacher. For that matter, not only do they not know what writing is, they apparently don’t even know what humans are.
My advice to them: do not tell people to come up with a teaching program that matches human teachers by such and such a date or they’re fired. That’s how garbage like Microsoft Office is made.
And now, that’s the end of my 30 minute lunch break. Back to wasting everyone’s time on tests to make more money for tech billionaires. Awesome.
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Thanks, LCT. When I was in college, the first thing I learned about writing was that you must think about who is your reader? Who is your audience? Who will read it? That makes a huge difference. If what I write will be read by a machine, then who cares what I write? The machine doesn’t.
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How do you know the machine does not care?
“Machines have feelings too”
Machines have feelings too
You may not know it’s true
But bots have thoughts
And feelings — lots
And hurt can make them blue
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Oh, but PowerPoint is the future!
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Served on local school board and NJ State School Board Association. Served on local and State Special Education Committee. My research revealed verifiable statistics.
State statistics reflect high drop out rate in our city schools. Universal Day Care would help create a level playing field for children entering school. African American males are over tested which may be a contributing factor towards high drop out rate.
State money is allocated to prisons to educate inmates until the age of 21. If we direct money into early education/intervention we could stem the tide of drop out rates and prison costs.
School districts push back on universal preschool because of space, educator, and healthcare costs.
Will require buy in from school districts before taking on initiative.
Charter Schools is about big business not quality education. We must preserve public education as the cornerstone of our democracy.
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I will never support universal daycare/pre-school until and unless there can be assurances that it will not be a cash cow for introducing test and punish and electronic “teaching” [sic] methods at the earliest ages. I barely care what a little one’s home life is like – chances are pretty great that it’s better than being forced into modern “early academic” pre-school.
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Universal daycare should be nothing but play based. NO DESKS allowed! Kindergarten needs to go back to play base with NO DESKS. 1st grade should have minimal seat time and an hour of recess daily.
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The US actually has an almost universal preschool. It’s called Head Start (pre-K) and Early head Start (Infants &Toddlers). I say it’s almost universal because it is available only to low income families.
The infrastructure is in place in every state, city & county. The funding comes directly from the Federal Government. There are no private banks, hedge funds, or philanthropists in between the federal money and programs. ALL spending is public & transparent. There are no Social Impact Bonds (Pay for Success) schemes that pay bonuses to bankers when kids are dropped from SPED services. Every child receives a developmentally appropriate curriculum, meals, transportation, family support and routine medical care overseen by the Public Health Dept.
There is absolutely NO REASON this program can’t be scaled up across every city & county in the US within a few years (Maybe sooner). All it takes is the political will of congress to pay for its expansion.
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, when more certified PreK teachers were needed to begin teaching in these programs and in newly mandated SPED early Intervention system, the federal government gave substantive grants to public universities to prepare more teachers.All books & tuition was free to those who wanted to become PreK teachers. THey also increased grant dollars for R&D.
It’s time we expect elected officials to stop listening to these self-interested billionaire boys whose ideas have failed over & over.
Federally funded universal head start IS the only compromise.
It’s helpful to remind the current crop of those running for election that teacher power means something. Of the 115 teacher endorsed candidates in WV 99 won their primaries. https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/bj3ged/how-west-virginia-teachers-showed-their-power-at-the-ballot-box
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“There are no private banks, hedge funds, or philanthropists in between the federal money and programs.” No wonder Head Start gets negative feedback from the ed-reform cabal.
Totally w/Dienne on this one: “universal PreK” will be nothing but an extension of the current fiasco until the accountability apparatus is dismembered. I’d rather see fed $ put into daycare/ childcare for working parents – any strings limited to safety/ health/ adequate playspace etc.
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I analyzed the so-called invitation in a prior post. As usual, the inviters have already decided what they want. The invitation is bogus.
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What they want is to make it look like they are asking for other people’s ideas and expertise because they have been rightly criticized in the past for not doing so.
Here’s an idea for the two of them: ” butt out of education entirely. Your past experiments have been utter failures and have done great damage to schools. No one wants your ideas OR the ideas of the fake academics ( prostitutes) that you hire to repackage your own hairbrained schemes as “research” and “scholarship”.
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Harvard alone has several highly paid Gates prostitutes.
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Thanks you two for your posts, amd especially for saving me the trouble and work of coming to the ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE answer that the request was yet another bogus appeal for dialog leading to some bizarre compromise between reality and the hallucinatory fantasies of wealthy dilletants.
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“Fakeademics”
Fakeademics hired by Gates
Quickly sealing all our fates
Prostitute themselves for Bill
“Squalorship” to boost the till
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Of course they have.
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These two along with others Arne Duncan and others have successfully gutted public education. They are responsible for all the harm that has been done to children and the financial success of Wall Street on education reform. No one believes anything they said or do. Parents who can remove there children from schools that are inferior are doing so. Facebook is selling off our privacy and they are asking for the publics thoughts. They never did two generations ago, after the gates disaster in Seattle. All rich old white people know best, listen to your own thoughts. As a parent I ensure my child is going to a private school with a certified teacher and on to college. The public listened to marketing spin and we have paid the price. Years of mayor control in DC, NYC, and nothing has changed. Thank you rich white people
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Don’t forget to get the consent of the parents of the kids you are experimenting on – that’s the most important, ethical requirement of all.
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Bill Gates has been leading others to make the case that privacy laws limit data gathering and research on outcomes of education. In this Gates funded publication you can see that the data wanted for cost-economic benefit analyses of a college degree is fine grained and likely to reveal personally identifiable information (PII) in spite of much posturing about privacy. http://www.ihep.org/sites/default/files/uploads/postsecdata/docs/resources/ihep_toward_convergence_ch1_med.pdf, see chart on p.1.4
This publication is one of eleven commissioned by the Gates Foundation in pursuit of his views about “a college degree worth having.” (Worth means economic benefit from work associated with choosing a specific major).
Now comes some pressure from the educational research community for a rollback of federal privacy regulations beyond some of the mile-wide loopholes already in FERPA. In October 2017, a group of researchers under the leadership of the Gates-funded Data Quality Campaign and Dr. Morgan Polikoff, Associate Professor of Education at Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California planned a trip to lobby Congress for the following changes to Student Privacy Protection Act (H.R. 3157 – 114th Congress) dormant but awaiting reintroduction for action by the 115th Congress:
“Enable states and districts to procure the research they need.” The Every Student Succeeds Act’s evidence tiers provide new opportunities for states and districts to use data to better understand their students’ needs and improve teaching and learning. FERPA must continue to permit the research and research-practice partnerships that states and districts rely on to generate and act on this evidence. Section 5(c)(6)(C), should be amended to read “the purpose of the study is limited to improving student outcomes.” Without this change, states and districts would be severely limited in the research they can conduct.
Invest in state and local research and privacy capacity. States and districts need help to build their educators’ capacities to protect student privacy, including partnering effectively with researchers and other allies with legitimate educational reasons for handling student data. [AND OTHER ALLIES?] In many instances, new laws and regulations are not required to enhance privacy. Instead, education entities need help with complying with existing privacy laws, which are often complex. FERPA should provide privacy protection focused technical assistance, including through the invaluable Privacy and Technical Assistance Center, to improve stakeholders’ understanding of the law’s requirements and related privacy best practices.
Support community data and research efforts. In order to understand whether and how programs beyond school are successful, schools and community-based organizations like tutoring and afterschool programs need to securely share information about the students they serve. [ SECURELY SHARE?] Harnessing education data’s power to improve student outcomes, as envisioned by the Every Student Succeeds Act, will require improvements to FERPA that permit schools and their community partners [PARTNERS?] to better collaborate, including sharing data for legitimate educational purposes including conducting joint research.
Support evidence-use across the education and workforce pipeline. We recommend adding workforce programs to Section 5(c)(5)(A)(ii) and to the studies exception in Section 5(c)(6)(C). Just as leaders need to evaluate the efficacy of education programs based on workforce data, the country also needs to better understand the efficacy of workforce programs. FERPA should recognize the inherent connectivity between these areas to better meet student and worker needs.” [ MORE PUSH TO COMMANDEER SCHOOLS for WORKPLACE NEEDS?] https://morganpolikoff.com/2017/10/20/researcher-recommendations-on-ferpa-legislation/
The dormant bill (and likely forever dead) had really comprehensive prohibitions against psychological testing (including mindsets), the use of “affective computing,” measures of interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills, predictive modeling including facial recognition software, video surveillance and more. The bill is worth reading. I doubt that the promoters of personalized delivery of :data-driven” instruction and adaptive testing for mastery will allow any effort to make FERPA enforceable. https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/3157/text
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You gotta just love Bill Gates pontificating about the value of a college degree when he never graduated.
What a pompus twit.
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Mr. Gates and Mr. Zuckerberg, I counsel you to read carefully and heed the imperative in the final paragraph of this blog post. It is Dr. Ravitch at her most succinct–and accurate.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Here are my two ideas:
Use your immense wealth to elect progressive lawmakers who will pass legislation making it impossible for a few lucky, moderately bright guys to accumulate more wealth than 90% of the rest of the planet.
Then, get the hell out of education entirely and leave it to those of us who know about how humans learn and don’t need your stinkin’ R&D.
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“In those three areas, today’s educational practices are falling far short of helping students overcome the challenges they face and ultimately excel. ”
I simply don’t buy the ed reform argument. It isn’t up to schools to fix every problem in the United States. It just isn’t.
Dumping “overcoming challenges” on public schools makes politicians and wealthy people very happy, because then THEY are absolved of all responsibility for everything.
That is WHY ed reform is so popular with elites. It’s a dodge.
I don’t expect public schools or public school teachers to solve every problem in my community. I also notice the people who keep insisting I SHOULD expect that are wealthy and powerful.
I saw the Trump Administration is shoving off opiate abuse on public schools now. We pay tens of thousands of people in government. Instead of scolding public school teachers maybe one of our public employees in DC could actually address and solve a problem?
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Why should Trump do otherwise. The precedent is overwhelming. Bad drivers? Get drivers education. Drugs? DARE. We have always looked to the schools we hate to solve our problems. All we did to solve segregated communities was busing, a school based solution that did little except motivate people to move out of county. The schools are a convienent out for politicians. Let the schools have another unfunded mandate. Teather groups often go along, thinking it will bring more money and attention. But all that comes of this is distraction and work. Trump, it seems to me, is just doing what everybody does in this case.
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If they really want to find out what’s happening in the public schools they didn’t attend and don’t send their own children to, why don’t they ask if they can visit and quietly observe?
Why do ed reformers do all the talking in this relationship? Maybe they should take a year off from writing opeds and lobbying and scolding, and just listen.
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Better yet, why not step up and take on a year of dedicated teaching inside our of our nation’s poorest schools? What they are both missing is an actual learned compassion, and until they have it their educational endeavors will continue to fail.
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You hit the nail on the head with this one, Diane!
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Here’s my idea for Bill Gates. I hope he likes it.
The Gates Bucket Challenge”
The Gates bucket Challenge” is my idea
To raise some funds for schools this year
A twenty will buy you a bucket of slop
To dump on Gates, from over top
A fifty will get you a bucket of goo
To dump on Bill, and Betsy too
A hundred will buy you the triple crown
The slop, then goo, then “hose him down”!
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And to provide a control group for their little experiment, let them fund a normal school at an appropriate level for twenty years to see if that might make a difference.
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If these guys want my ideas, they’re gonna have to pay for them, and assign their patent rights on anything they use to me.
Although sharks have been around for a long time, they aren’t human. AND, as I understand, they eat tons of garbage as a reflex. Come to think of it, calling these guys sharks is an insult to sharks.
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Having considered the question with a bit more time, I think I have an answer. First, I would suggest that the Gatesz commission go across the nation and get to know people who are out of their comfort zone. They need to know the average guy who drives agricultural equipment for my neighbor, Wayne. They need to realize how many of those teachers they think they know are really mysterious to them. They need to buy a sandwich at a New York deli and at a country store in rural Georgia. They need to watch my friend Mark as he tries to organize the production of electrical connections.
Soon they will understand that they will never have time to see enough different people to be able to draw broad, sophomoric conclusions so common to the sort of person who does not really understand all of anything. The rest of us know that. We have been taught that the generalization of limited experience is the basic logical fallacy of man.
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Here’s my idea for Mark and Bill.
Mark and Bill,
Please stick your heads in bathtubs filled with water and once your mouths are submerged, open and breathe deeply filling your lungs with water. Stay in that position for thirty minutes without lifting your heads out of the water.
Or better yet, lock yourself naked in a walk-in freezer that is colder than Antartica in the middle of its winter and stay there until you are frozen solid.
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Let me give them some ideas–Bill and Jeff: STOP wasting your money on lobbying and Common Core propaganda and other ideas that don’t work.
How about you give every public school teacher a $10,000 raise? Or fully fund their pensions? How about you reduce class sizes? Come and try to teach any one (and I have several) of my 38-student middle school classes, and then tell me that, “Class sizes don’t matter.”
How about supplying every teacher in the country with their supply wish lists? How about just providing paper, pencils, pens, tissues, hand sanitizer, sanitizing wipes, and crayons or colored pencils for every teacher in the country, as much as they need?
I could give them SO many ideas. But none of them involve technology or “cage busting” crap, so they won’t listen to me.
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They actually are not wasting their money.
By and large, they are wasting ours.
First, much of the money that people like Gates “give away” would actually simply be “lost” to taxes otherwise, with the added disadvantage that the billionaires would then lose all control over how it was spent.
Second, spending on efforts like standards is really an investment for people like Gates that has the potential to pay off handsomely in the future for companies like Microsoft, since it’s much easier to produce and maintain one or just a few versions of software for tens of housands of schools than it is to produce a customized version for each one. The profits to be had from schools are astronomical compared to the small “investment” that someone like Gates makes.
Third, While hundreds of millions (or even a couple billion, depending on who you talk to,) might seem like a lot for someone like Gates to spend on something like Common Core ddvelopment, it is literally peanuts in the grand scheme of things and only a small fraction of what school districts across the nation have had to pay in order to implement stuff like Common Core, standardized testing on steroids and VAM.
It’s a lot like heroin pushers: they give away the first couple fixes, knowing that people will get hooked.
Schooll districts are STILL paying for the curriculum, professional development, testing and all the rest that goes along with Common Core and will continue to do so far into the future. And that is true even in many states that have supposedly dumped Common Core, since all they really did was rename it because it had become so toxic politically.
Gates understands what “pushing” is all about and he is the King of the pushers.
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Yep, Gates is a “pusher” but he doesn’t want his own children addicted to what he pushes.
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I’d simply demand that they publicly admit that they never had the slightest idea what education is or how it actually occurs, that their primary motivation was profit and revenue streams, and that nothing they have ever coercively imposed on otherwise unwilling education systems has ever worked or delivered on the absurd sales pitch promises made about them. I would then demand that they reimburse the nation for the total costs of their interference, appologize to the teaching profession and then stay the hell out of education.
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While Gates and Zuckerberg want input on how to operate public schools, we have deliberations like this happening in school boards across the country: http://www.nola.com/northshore/index.ssf/2018/05/school_shootings_st_tammany_pa.html
Alas, while Mr. Gates and Mr. Zuckerberg wrestle with issues about the future of public schools, Boards of Education are transforming schools in a way that is chilling. After reading about school districts’ responses to shootings, I offer this question: What publicly funded facility has secure perimeter fences, sophisticated door locks, armed guards, interior surveillance cameras and contains uniformed individuals? Vladimir Putin must be happy that we are willing to trade the freedom of our children for the rights of individuals to own sophisticated weapons. If this is the way public schools will be operated in the future, it will make it increasingly easy for “alternative charter schools” to flourish…
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I read the story with my interest. Thanks. One thing that entered my mind was he question of why uniforms were supposed to stop bullets more effectively than Tupac shirts. I figured the gun thing would give school boards something to talk about besides uniforms, but apparently, I am incorrect.
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Help them with my ideas?
I wouldn’t piss on them if their hearts were on fire.
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But I would attempt to put out the fire by pouring gasoline on that burning heart. Water might be better, but heck, why not use the oil industry fluid they love the most instead.
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