The Associated Press reviewed the Gates Foundation’s education spending and found that Bill Gates is now engaged in “helping” shape the ESSA plans of the states. He just can’t stop telling everyone how to run their public schools even though everything he has tried until now has been a failure.
Does he care that teachers in several states have walked out due to underfunding? Is he trying to persuade governors and legislators to tax billionaires to raise school funding? Don’t hold your breath.
Presumably he wants to make sure they are sticking with high-stakes testing, Common Core, and charters, his three favorite reforms to which he never subjected his own children or their school. If it is not good enough for Lakeside Academy in Seattle, why must it be mandatory for the rest of the nation?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
He wants his kids to be the best of the best.
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If I may correct your thought, Mary:
“He wants his kids to be the bestest of the bestest.
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The best of the best of the best, Sir!
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He has to be totally ignored if that is possible. He has such a limited understanding of learning and so much money it’s frightening!!
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If he doesn’t understand learning, why does he send his own kids to expensive private progressive schools?
We really, really, have to stop assuming that these billionaires and politicians don’t understand. They do understand. They just don’t care as long as it’s not their children.
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And what this particular multi-billionaire understands is protecting his investments. Ed accountability via standards measured by aligned assessments means laptops and software for tens of millions of students, w/tax-backed payment guarantee.
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To answer your question Dienne: Because that is what the upper crust of society does. He’s a lemming in that regard.
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“New Gates Strategy”
With puppet gone
From DOE
The Gates’ moved on
To ESSA, see?
The Common Core
And test and VAM
Are simply more
Than Gates’ will can
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My turn, Poet. Here’s a sonnet by Bill Shakespeare cut up to cut up Bill Gates:
Sonnet CXLIV the Teachers Version
Two sides I have of teaching and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is instruction fair,
The worser spirit a Common Core wrought ill.
To win me soon to hell, my test prep evil,
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing my purity with my foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turned fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
One being bought by Gates, that one machined,
I test true angels in Bill Gates’es hell:
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till Bill’s bad angel fire my good one out.
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Excellent!
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“Gates was influential in supporting the Common Core academic standards, and now is doing the same as states sort out the best ways to implement their education policies under the 2015 law.” — from the AP article
That’s quite the understatement, given Gates’ singular role in the development of Common Core and the plan to get CC adopted quickly by states with virtually no discussion by state legislatures.
It’s no exaggeration to say that without Gates, there would have been no Common Core.
He owns it and is now trying desperately to salvage the wreckage.
Its actually rather pathetic.
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Quote from Denis Ian in his article Is Common Core Racist. ” The ugly beauty of common core is that it screwed everyone. With ugly equality.” I thought that was pretty fitting thought.
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Gates. Paid for every part of Common Core.
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I worked in education for decades, and I neither heard nor saw anything from billionaires or other wealthy types. Educators worked with state education departments and sometimes institutions of higher education to address issues. Since NCLB and GERM, the billionaires, business types have appointed themselves education “experts.” They have marginalized the input of legitimate educators that stand between them and a mountain of public money. “Reform” is a top down, fake movement designed to move the public asset of public education into private hands by suppressing democratic input. Bill Gates’ “activism or philanthropy” is “pay to play” seed money to dominate the “education market” as he peddles his depersonalized learning to states and school districts. Since Gates has the most money, he has been allowed to insert himself into education policy. ESSA equals an opportunity for Gates to make lots more money. The recently released NEPC reports shows that various virtual platforms do not work as well as traditional brick-and-mortar schools. This will not deter Gates. He is too arrogant to notice or care.
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Plus Gates’ push for “small schools” that saw big urban high schools broken up into clusters of small co-located schools for not good reason, and no good results. I think Gates eventually admitted that experiment failed, after 10 years of busting up schools.
Funny how he never broke Lakeside into smaller schools.
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oh, that the many, many people, kids, teachers, parents, school personnel, so devastatingly and irrevocably affected by his push to “experimentally” break up schools could SUE THE MAN.
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Here are some numbers not in the article. The Gates Database shows the following funds distributed to influence ESSA plans, but this is only a starter list because the Gates Foundation sends money to many other groups as well.
These are the “ESSA” grant amounts.
New Venture Fund 2016–$7,900,010
New Venture Fund 2017–$7,900,000
National Newspaper Publishers Association, Inc. 2016–$1,699,176
Results in Education Foundation 2016–$1,500,000
Urban One, Inc. 2016–$1,499,998
The 74 Media, Inc. 2016– $1,499,349
National Urban League Inc 2016v$1,199,994
Georgetown University 2017–$949,810
Education Commission of the States–$750,000
Opportunity Institute 2017–$500,000
National Center for Learning Disabilities 2016–$300,000
Phi Delta Kappa International, Inc. 2016–$200,000
Education Reform Now, Inc. 2017–$150,000
Rodel Charitable Foundation DE 2016–$75,000
Florida Coalition on Black Civic Participation Inc 2017–$30,000
Total in Gates Database with “ESSA” identifications = $26,153,337
This is only a fraction of the influence peddling from the Gates foundation. You can see the influence of Gates money sent to the Rodel Foundation in Delaware at the Rodel website (with ESSA as the keyword). Rodel helped to organize TFA and charter operators with minority groups and the others, including the ACLU, to shape ESSA plans.
Gates sent money to the New Venture Fund for two years, and some of that was passed along to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute where Gates-preferred ESSA policies are marketed with help from https://edexcellence.net/policy-priorities/essa
Apart from these easy-to-track investments, Bellwether Education Partners partnered with the Collaborative for Student Success to select a team of “independent reviewers of ESSA plans. This was an effort to shape how states and USDE would evaluate the state plans. The initiative began early in the tenure of Secretary DeVos who appeared to be clueless about how to organize a peer review process for plans, or what criteria should be applied them. The USDE criteria have shifted several times. The Bellwether/Collaborative for Student Success “solution” claimed their reviewers were bi-partisan and the criteria were objective—a real stretch.
You can see the criteria for these reviews at https://bellwethereducation.org/sites/default/files/Bellwether_PeerRubric_Final.pdf The long list of reviewers and review methodology is also at the website.
In any case, Gates money flowed into the Bellwether ESSA review process because Bellwether’s partner, The Collaborative for Student Success, is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the Bloomberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, ExxonMobil, Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.
Elsewhere I have documented how Gates money in Ohio warped the process of “stakeholder engagement” required for ESSA plans so that discussion of topics could not include the charter school and online corruption and plans to remedy it. The Ohio reviews were set up by a person who identified herself as the representative of the Gates Foundation in Ohio. I wonder how much she is paid. She has an independent consultancy.
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Once again, great job, Laura. Thanks for the work you do in exposing all the aspects of edudeform that you do!
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Gates makes life miserable for people, especially children the world over with his dark money. His secretive investments in swaying public policy are tantamount to bribery of public officials, and therefore criminal subversion of democracy. He calls himself a technocrat, but he is a kleptocrat, king of monopoly. He is an architect of the data driven surveillance state. Imagine what would be happening right now if the company inBloom were buying and selling testing data, and remember that just because that publicized effort was undone by caring parents it does not mean a secret effort isn’t underway. Gates is picking apart the threads that weave together civilized, free society. He is Gates the Destroyer, Destroyer of Public Education and much more.
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Agree, LeftCoastTeacher. Gates lives inside his own fantasy world where he is the pretend engineer, the “knight.”
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Education Deform is a religion. Ironically, no amount of evidence will convince these people who tout a “data driven” approach to education. These people are ideologues, and their ideology blinds them. As Wallace Stevens put it, “Theology before breakfast sticks to the eye.”
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You’ve probably seen this before, but I think it captures the sentiment
“The Reformation”
Reform is a religion
With Friedman as it’s god
And Billy Gates as Profit
To worship and to laud
With charter as the chapel
Where people kneel and prey
With hymnal books from Apple
To rapture them away
The fundamental tenet
The key to Heavenly Gates
Is righteousness of market
That’s sealing all our fates
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Excellent back at you!
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OMG. SomeDAM, I do hope that these all become a book. Awesome. And thank you, so much, for the delight you’ve brought to so many readers of this blog. Our Poet Laureate.
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Thank you both.
As I have said before. I like to think of myself as a channeler of all the excellent contributions that others bring to this blog.
Sort of the Shirley McClaine of the blog.
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Absolutely agree! So many more people should be reading these poems!
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Do players like Gates really worship on the altar of free markets? Or are they just making that a part of an extensive falsehood that accompanies all their other power grabbing behavior?
I have always believed that companies grow into governmental entities. On some scale, certain large companies become government not just for the people who work there, whose wants and needs are organized for the good of the company, but for all the attached community as well. Once a company has become large and powerful, it becomes a parallel government to the real organization that people live under. While I assume everyone else knows and understands this, I often get push back on this idea.
Gates and others that have all the money a person could ever use are actually wealthy enough to become an organic form of government residing within a body politic. When Bear-Stearns failed a few years ago, the negotiations with the U.S. Government over their death or bailout set off a string of such negotiations which ultimately led to the bailout of GM and other large, government sized companies.
Real capitalism works because there is competition in a real marketplace. When a company gets big enough so that government that is elected by the people are required to deal with it in negotiation, it has become a government. Real capitalism looks like my nephew trying to build a better classical guitar so people will buy his. He does not spend time in lobbying. He spends time making and selling an item (for the record his are the best. I would not be biased), not making laws to quash competition. When we were dairy farmers, we sold our milk to a cooperative organization that had been formed because the farmers knew they had to band together to gain access to governmental negotiations. When the farm bills in the 1990s quit supporting milk prices, another government took over, and milk prices plummeted. Today, large farms with thousands of cows produce the milk. A different government is in power.
Gates does not believe in capitalism and free markets (I still like your poem). He believes, rather, in power. Government through the back door.
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Roy,
No, yes! Good questions and commentary!
Although I may quibble a bit with “Real capitalism works because there is competition in a real marketplace.”
Thing is that there never has been “real capitalism”, at least in modern times, since governments make the laws that regulate financial/exchange transactions. And those laws serve to then “distort” that “real marketplace”. I can’t believe that an unfettered capitalism would be anything other than a true dog eat dog, I got mine screw you any way possible, world-it most certainly would be brutish and deadly for many.
“Gates does not believe in capitalism and free markets (I still like your poem). He believes, rather, in power. Government through the back door.”
You are correct to surmise that he doesn’t believe those things. Hell, he’s a monopolist extraordinaire. But he doesn’t even need the back door as he comes bulldozing through the front wall to take what he wants, when he wants it and then walks out leaving the destruction behind for others to clean up-see his pushing (yes, in a drug sense) of CCSS, VAM style teacher ratings, small schools failures, etc. . . .
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Roy, i agree with your assessment and would only add that not all of those who claim to follow religion actually believe what they say.
This is too often true of those in the upper echelons, who simply use their faux piousness as a means to get others to give them what they want. Lots of “ordinary” Americans believe in the miraculous powers of the free market, so repeating the myth is a way to get them to buy something they would not otherwise buy.
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Duane: what I meant by the phrase “real capitalism” was the economic interaction that takes place in the absence of power brokers. Sometimes, usually in the absence of great demand that creates the potential for high income, a subset of economic activity occurs wherein there is no one powerful to tilt the table toward their hole. In these instances, competitions pits people against each other in a race to produce the best product.
My perception is that this rarely occurs for very long if demand exceeds a noticeable level, for corporations which are large enough to exert political control on wages or markets enter the arena and there is no free market. I do not believe a truly free market exists now or has ever existed on a massive level. Rather, markets seem to inhabit a subculture that thrives when demand is low and potential for amassing large fortunes is absent from circumstance.
SDP: you are undoubtedly correct when you suggest that free market religion is a point of belief among many people. This faith, like all idolatry, may be sincerely held, or cynically held. Often, it seems people do not know which they are.
And I, like most of the other readers of this blog, am willing to grant you enough poetic liscence to give you plenty of room to introduce wisdom and humor to these pages. Thanks for your views.
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Bill Gates knows the difference between HIV and HPV. That’s what Bill Gates knows. He is very proud of himself.
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Ask instead of telling. Ask students parents & teachers what they need!
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Indeed.
Gates should take JFK’s advice:
Ask not what your schools can do for you*. Ask, what you can do for your schools.
*Implementing Common Core, standardized testing and VAM
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He was presented as the object of ridicule on either Seth Meyers’ Late, Late Show the other night or on Stephen Colbert (I watch the monologues/openings of both those shows, because their political views/jokes are brilliant (& I really love Amber Ruffins on L.L.S.). There were clips of him making a speech that was nothing but mindless babble (much like some of Trump’s; the epitome of cofefe).
He cannot be ignored; he should be laughed at nightly & we should continue to fight him & his brethren (Waltons, Broads,Pear$on) fiercely.
It ain’t over, Gates, till the fat lady sings, & I have I terrible voice!
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The good news is that the reform fraud is nearly dead. It is still destructive, it still has the ability to destroy schools and ruin education, but it is a pathetic dying fraud.
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Here’s the way I see the shift in policy-making: The influence of billionaires is linked to the decimation of State Departments of Education. While many in public school employees bemoaned the regulations that emanated from the “bureaucrats” at the state capitals, there was a time when State legislators deferred to their expertise and allowed them to develop the policies and regulations that dictated what transpired in classrooms. As state $$$ became scarce, the “bureaucrats” were the first to go and when they were gone there was a void in “expert” policy making… a void filled by Blue Ribbon panels of businessmen who complained that the workforce was untrained and unprepared (at the same time as THEY cut back on in house training that formerly trained entry level employees). Eventually the tech moguls and Friedman-ites who saw an opportunity to make $$$ in the “education marketplace” got a foothold and… behold… we now have Bill Gates setting policy and Betsy DeVos promoting vouchers.
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“The Gates Foundation says it’s simply helping states navigate a “tectonic” shift in responsibility for education — from the federal government to more local control.”
That statement there shows that the Gates Foundation has no clue as to who has and still does have the responsibility for public education. The federal government has never had any real “control” over what happens in a local community public school. It has always been the local school board.
But hey, it sure fits in that meme of “big gubmint bad”. I guess whatever it takes to sell Gates’ failed education malpractices (see CCSS, small schools, etc. . . ) is fine with Bill and Melinda, eh!
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“We hit the trifecta (unfortunately)”
The two things that exceed
The ignorance of Bill
Are arrogance and greed
Enough to make us ill
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Short, sweet, to the point & oh so true! Love it!
Another winner, SDP!
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Thanks
I guess I really should have titled it “We hit the Cryfecta”
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This man is a crook, he is an anti destroyer of anything that talks about education. He is an entitled white man who has effectively destroyed public education. Is he going to take care of three generations of kids who have been subjected to his stupidity. I get sick every time I see his name with the rest of the white people destroying public education. Leave minorities alone and use your great educational skills on your own race.
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