Discounting for the rhetoric and hyperbole, it is worth reading Bill and Melinda Gates’ letter about what they do and why they do it.
They claim that Deborah Meier was one of their primary inspirations for their work in education, but knowing Debby Meier, I doubt that they read her book The Power of Their Ideas or that they understood what she was saying.
Both of us had the chance to attend excellent schools, and we know how many doors that opened for us. We also know that millions of Americans, especially low-income students and students of color, don’t have that same opportunity.
Experts, of course, have a much more rigorous vocabulary to describe this situation. In 2001, I met an educator named Deborah Meier who had a big impact on me. Her book The Power of Their Ideas helped me understand why public schools are not only an important equalizer but the engine of a thriving democracy. A democracy requires equal participation from everyone, she writes. That means when our public schools fail to prepare students to fully participate in public life, they fail our country, too.
I think about that a lot. It really helps drive home the stakes of this work for me.
If you’d asked us 20 years ago, we would have guessed that global health would be our foundation’s riskiest work, and our U.S. education work would be our surest bet. In fact, it has turned out just the opposite.
Deborah Meier believes in democracy. She believes that democracy should be the norm inside schools and outside schools. She does not believe that billionaires should fund a national standardized curriculum and pay to impose it on everyone.
The Gates’ should invest more in global health, where help is desperately needed, and stop imposing standardized curriculum, standardized technology, and and standardized testing on everyone.
They truly don’t understand Deborah Meier.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Gates’ should stay out of global health, also. Their free market, competition model has disrupted efforts in Africa and other third world countries to combat disease. It used to be a collaborative effort between nations to battle disease, until Gates and his cronies came in and threw in $$$ for effort. When competition was created, health agencies closed their doors and kept their ideas to themselves instead of collaborating. Gates seems to think this is the best way to eradicate disease, when in reality, it takes many minds and many ideas and much persistence by the medical community to ensure the safety and health of the general public. Bill doesn’t want to hear this but “Competition is about ME but Democracy is about WE”. Bill doesn’t like Democracy and he doesn’t like to play by the rules…he is a horrible, deplorable human being.
Bill Gates gives lip service to democracy because he has no idea what it is.
His way is the only way. He just hasn’t figured out how to buy everyone’s consent.
And he’s not really a self-made man, anyway. The only reason he was able to create Microsoft in the first place was because he was able to come up with $50K in order to purchase an already existing operating system which he then licensed to IBM.
In other words, he’s the “Forrest Gump” of the world of computer software, basically (though he did have some significant programming abilities in the early years).
Amen, Bill & Melinda had “many doors opened” for them because they are both trust fund babies whose families were white millionaires who belonged to all the right country clubs, lived in the most exclusive neighborhoods, and worked & socialized with the powerhouses inside Seattle political circles. Gate’s father was a partner in the top law firm in Seattle at the time Bill started Microsoft . He used his dad’s $1million “loan” to start the business.
How many black & brown children have those kinds of connections?
Diane, you have a way with words that always hits the mark of a situation. I think you could say the same thing about Bloomberg, e.g., Mike Bloomberg “gives lip service to democracy because he has no idea what it is.
His way is the only way. He just hasn’t figured out how to buy everyone’s consent.”
Well said Diane.
If I had an icon of two thumbs up or a Heart to like your comment, I would give it. Thank you!
“Deborah Meier believes in democracy. She does not believe that billionaires should fund a national standardized curriculum and pay to impose it on everyone.” – if this country had national curricula, Bill Gates would not need to rig the system and force the states to jump on Common Core bandwagon. But this country does not have national curricula, instead it believes in entrepreneurship and public-private symbiosis. This belief is pushed by the billionaires, but it also is supported by those who say they would never vote for Bernie because he is a socialist. He is not, but they don’t dissect his program, they have been trained to jump marker words like service dogs, but they have not been trained to think. I suppose most of them went to public schools. Well, maybe some graduated religious schools. These people are the demos that elected Trump.
BA, the Common Core is the closest we will ever get to having a national curriculum, and it has been a massive flop. There has been zero improvement in the states that adopted it, and zero improvement on national and international tests since CCSS was foisted on the nation by Gates and Coleman.
This is too big and too diverse a country to have one set of standards for everyone.
By the way, Deborah Meier responded to my post with one word: “Amen.”
In ELA, unfortunately, the CC$$ has been treated as a de facto curriculum, which has led to devolved ELA courseware, print and online. However, I’m not sure that this is “the closest we will ever get to having a national curriculum,” for even now, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is calling for a national curriculum to complement the Core [sic] because it thinks we need a Curriculum Commissariat and Thought Police to be the deciders for the rest of us. This worries me, for these people are funded by the Waltons and Gates and usually take their marching order from them.
There’s probably a public health blog somewhere with a post urging Bill and Melinda to stop meddling in health research and stick to education.
I recall reading an article by an international researcher about 10 years ago (I quoted it in my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”), who complained that Gates had hired such a large proportion of the researchers in the field that it was almost impossible to create an independent peer review panel.
“Her book The Power of Their Ideas helped me understand why public schools are not only an important equalizer but the engine of a thriving democracy. A democracy requires equal participation from everyone, she writes”
Says the fellow who circumvents democracy at every opportunity to impose his ignorant ideas on schools.
“Rooting out Democracy”
Public education
Democracy in action
Demands eradication
By oligarchic faction
“Democratic Billionaires”
They don’t believe in democracy
In fact, they have contempt
For any vote by you and me
From which they act exempt
“Foilanthropy”
The billionaire’s foilanthropy
Subverts and foils democracy
It circumvents the people’s voice
Replacing it with wealthy choice
“Philanthropy”
They “Love the human kind” —
Of flesh, served on a dish.
The cannibals, you’ll find
Are real philanthropists
“The Mack Truck in the Mirror”
The objects in the mirror
Are closer than they appear
And oligarchic terror
Is something we should fear
Reflecting total capture
Of democratic state
The money-driven rapture
Is sealing certain fate
“The Billionaire’s Beef”
Democracy’s inefficient
It takes so very long
I really am impatient
To sing my favorite song
So buy me politicians
And buy me think-tank wanks
To ram through my positions
And gain me many thank$
“Monitoring Student Brainwaves”
The brainwaves are the key
To tell us what they’re thinking
We need to really see
The neurons that are blinking
To know if they are plotting
For democratic rule
And if their brain is rotting
On Founding Fathers’ fuel
“All lives have equal worth”
Every life has equal worth
To billionaires like me:
Consumers all, to death from birth
The way it ought to be
“Heads, they win”
The coin is double-headed
And flipping doesn’t matter
It’s oligarch-provided
Beholden to the latter
Great poem, SomeDam!
They claim that Deborah Meier was one of their primary inspirations for their work in education”
I think maybe they are confusing Michael Myers with Debbie Meier.
I cannot believe (head-smack, head-smack) that either Bill or Melinda actually wrote this:
Meier’s “book The Power of Their Ideas helped me understand why public schools are not only an important equalizer but the engine of a thriving democracy. A democracy requires equal participation from everyone, she writes. That means when our public schools fail to prepare students to fully participate in public life, they fail our country, too.”
So, they take from that: throw the baby out with the bathwater and billionaires can do it better? How twisted is THAT? Apparently, they are still purveying the self-serving propaganda that “schools are failing.” Did they actually buy it?–which would be easy for them considering the flood of interest in technology as the best “teacher” a child can have.
I put their ideas up there in fantasy-land with “Trump will learn his lesson;” and where WAY TOO MANY are testing positive for being infected with the Trump disease. Who’s next? CBK
CBK,
Like you, I feel certain that Bill & Melinda never read Deb Meier’s book. I doubt that they read the annual newsletter that they sent out. Why should they? They pay someone to do it.
Deb read my post, and sent a single word: “AMEN.”
Diane “Amen.” Why doesn’t that surprise me. CBK
This letter is wrritten in two voices.
Melinda Gates says she was “inspired” meeting Deborah Meier and reading her book.
Bill Gates speaks about education in a different voice. He still thinks the problem is one of scaling his ideas and getting them properly implemented.
There can be no doubt that Bill has shaped the foundation’s education policies and investment and sought in the limelight to promote them.
Written in two voices:
Stupid
And Stupider
Who is which will be left as an exercise for the reader.
The inequities found in public education are not the fault of the teachers or their bargaining groups. The inequities in schools are caused by the fact that we fund schools through property taxes. Schools in wealthy areas receive more funding than those in poor areas where the needs are greater. The funding scheme is the result of politics. If we want to blame anyone, blame politicians that have turned a blind eye to the needs of poor students. Teachers that have worked in urban schools dislike the inequity, but they did not cause it. These teachers also did not cause the poverty that the urban students suffer from daily. Blaming teachers for all the flaws in urban schools is misplaced blame that has resulted in thousands of teachers losing their careers or has caused them to needlessly suffer the shame of a “scarlet letter” due to “unacceptable test scores.” We can thank the Gates for many unsuccessful, punitive practices in public education. We can also thank the Gates for meddling in education where they have used schools, students and teachers like their own personal tinker toys. Our society has failed our poor students, not our teachers.
“The inequities in schools are caused by the fact that we fund schools through property taxes.” Hmmm . . . perhaps, rather, its about (1) the distinctions in the tax base (as you say: property); but also (2) how taxes are used according to the State drawing and funneling of funds?
State politicians, of all people, should know where funds are best allocated to derive equity where educating children are concerned. CBK
Don’t forget – politicians claim that “they’ve tried giving schools more money” and that was a failure. They insist that money isn’t the issue, it’s the curriculum and those awful teachers.
Of course, their children probably go to private schools They’ve never set foot in a public school, let alone one in the inner city.
Yet, they are the experts on this issue (not the teachers in the trenches).
flos56 “‘. . . they’ve tried giving schools more money’ and that was a failure.”
I’ve thought for a very long time that the “throwing money at the problem of education won’t fix it” is just more propaganda code for: “We don’t want to spend any money on education. ” CBK
Of course throwing money at schools won’t fix the underlying societal problems associated with poverty.
speduktr “Throwing money at schools”? How about providing them with adequate funding for, say, support services and smaller classes. CBK
Imagine actually providing the services needed! I was speaking more to the point that schools are being made the scapegoat for problems that need to be addressed in a wider arena than just the schools although community schools with wraparound services are a good way to reach marginalized people. But since they are providing services far beyond the delivery of education, their funding should come from more than the limited education dollars.
speduktr Both: tongue in cheek. CBK
I still think if the Gates want to spend their money on something that will really help children, they should put it in the present adult education programs, state by state. The general rule is that “Parents are the First Educators.” And the first few years of a child’s life, while not a locked-down affair, do set the stage for the rest of life. Note: I didn’t say: “take it over.” CBK
I don’t think B&M Gates write that stuff.
He made clear that he didn’t believe in democracy when he paid to defeat the re-election of judges who had rendered verdicts favorable to public schools.
His disdain for democracy was evident in his opposition to Bernie Sanders on the grounds that Gates himself wasn’t rich enough to both pay taxes and live on a measly billion dollars for the remaining twenty years of his life (assuming he’s lucky and the world is unlucky).
The Gates’ loathing for democracy was on display when a manager of one of his ed organizations co-wrote an article with Frederick Hess, “Don’t Surrender the Academy”, in which they advised an alternative method of control from that favored by ed disrupters who preferred “blowing up the ed schools” -cash to the schools.
I suspect that Bill and Melinda do put a lot of personal time and effort into the Gates Notes website. This is a really important public relations vehicle for them.
I suspect they pay someone to write the Notes for them.
“This is too big and too diverse a country to have one set of standards for everyone.” – diversity and size have nothing to do with a single set of standards. Do laws of math of physics change depending on location or language? Are you saying the U.S. have too many languages? AFAIK, India has 26 or so only officially recognized ones. But if you want to talk about size, Russia is obviously the largest country, with Canada and China being on par with the U.S.
“In Russia the state provides most education services, regulating education through the Ministry of Education and Science. A 2015 estimate by the United States Central Intelligence Agency puts the literacy rate in Russia at 99.7% (99.7% for men, 99.6% for women). According to a 2016 OECD estimate, 54% of Russia’s adults (25- to 64-year-olds) have attained a tertiary education, giving Russia the second-highest attainment of tertiary education among 35 OECD member-countries.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Russia
“Canada does not have a national curriculum; rather, the provincial governments are responsible for establishing the curriculum for their schools, and each province has its own, ministry-established common curriculum. However, the Ministers of Education from each province have joined together in the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), in order to establish best practices in a collaborative effort.” – http://ncee.org/what-we-do/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/canada-overview/canada-instructional-systems/
“China has a national curriculum. Until 1988, China also used standardized syllabi and centrally-issued textbooks. In that year, the Ministry of Education (MOE) began to approve the use of multiple texts and resources. Schools can now choose their materials from a ministry-approved list.” – http://ncee.org/what-we-do/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/shanghai-china/shanghai-china-instructional-systems/
You might reply with “we are not Putin’s Russia and neither we are Xi’s China”, but what this has to do with education, in particular with science? You may also reply with “if Russia has such a great education, why it has one of the lowest GDPs?” or “If Soviet education was so good, why the USSR broke up?” or “If American education is so bad, how come we have the strongest economy and military in the world?” – all this is unrelated to education per se, and if you care more about economy and military might, then why caring about education at all? After all, the U.S. DOES have the strongest military and probably still the strongest economy. So the nation has been doing just fine for the last one hundred years. And if we need more programmers, we can import them from India or Belarus.
BA,
I have written about national standards since 1995, when I published a book about the idea for the Brookings Institution on the subject. That’s 25 years of study and experience.
What do you bring to the subject? Just endorse the Common Core and recognize that’s the best you will get, and that it has had zero impact on anything other than to destroy the teaching of literature in the schools.
CC math standards are actually not half bad, at least for elementary and middle school. CC ELA are crappy, but this is not the reason to disregard the idea of national curricula. Gates does what he can within the constraints of the system. If this country had Ministry of Education, the curricula would be controlled by the fed, not by billionaires.
Schools in this country have been destroying the teaching of literature, reading and writing (not to mention math, history and science) for decades even before Bill Gates took interest in education. You wrote about it. I’ve read it in your books, among other ones. I witness it myself. I see no reason to believe that relieved from the Procrustes bed of CC, schools will suddenly flourish, turning to Singaporean or Finnish model.
Just 10 years ago you yourself advocated national curricula. Your about face seems more like acceptance of defeat, not as an actual change of opinion about the necessity and usefulness of national curricula in principle.
Over the past 25 years, I learned quite a lot about national standards, their strengths and their weaknesses. Yes, I advocated for them in the past. I got wiser. This was not a “defeat,” as you put it, but reason and intelligence at work.
We do not need national curricula.
Gates had no right to buy a national curriculum and use Arne Duncan to impose it on everyone else and fund every possible ed organization to advocate for it. He knows less about education than my beautiful pup Mitzi. At least she knows what she doesn’t know.
“If Russia has such a great education, why it has one of the lowest GDPs?” or “If Soviet education was so good, why the USSR broke up?”
If your education was so good, why you wrote like that?
Me likes the simpler form without an auxiliary verb. Similar to “Have you time?” instead of “Do you have time?” Bothers you much? Concentrate not on me, but on the topic of the discussion.
Did you learn grammar under the Common Core, by chance?
See my Notes on the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] below.
The last thing we need is some Curriculum Commissariat or Thought Police from some national Ministry of Truth doing the deciding for all of us. I will fight this with everything I have to my dying breath.
Dear Bill and Melinda: Want to make a HUGE difference in education in the United States. Then fund a program to send copies of the following to the family of every poor child in the country:
Daureles’ Book of Greek Myths
Blanche Fisher Wright’s The Real Mother Goose, illustrated
The Best-Loved Poems of the American People
The American Reader, ed. Diane Ravitch
The Classic Aesop’s Fables, illustrated by Arthur Rackham and Trans. by Vernon Jones
and
a selection of children’s classics (Corduroy, The Little Engine That Could, Madeleine, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Snowy Day, The Snow Goose, Make Way for Ducklings, Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Thomas the Tank Engine, Pat the Bunny, The Little Prince, Goodnight, Moon, etc.)
Poor families CAN’T AFFORD THESE, and it makes A HUGE DIFFERENCE if a child grows up with a little library.
If you did this, you would be remembered as Carnegie is for his libraries. What a gift this could be to the future!
Bob: They could also (again) support adult education programs all over the country where (still) some don’t know how to read. CBK
YES!
The Gates could also contribute to helping under served groups like the children of migrant workers that live on farms while their education suffers greatly. They could help fund schools on the reservations. These are both marginalized groups that would benefit greatly from having a wealthy benefactor.
If you got busy on this by summer, these could be arriving in the homes of poor children in time for Christmas. Now wouldn’t that be GRAND!
Books to EVERY poor kid, including migrant kids and Indian kids. It’s important not to underestimate how much difference having these as a day-in-day-out part of the home can be. The kid who is bored will always have these to turn to, and he or she will learn that reading is interesting, entertaining, fun. The value of that? Enormous. Inestimable. Priceless.
I always sent home books and audio-books. These confined poor students were bored out of their minds! The kids loved them, and sometimes the whole family benefited from the audio-books.
Certainly, of course, it would be of enormous value if some billionaire member of the U.S. oligarchy became a major benefactor of migrant and poor Indian children. The conditions in which these kids often live are shameful in a country this wealthy. Again, Carnegie did a lot of this kind of thing in his later life.
The Gates Gift of Reading
Send them “The Prince”
Diminutive not!
Children might wince
But kids must be taught!
They could just pay a fair share of taxes.
Agreed entirely, Christine!!!!!
Yes, and I figure their fair share is about $110 billion (,give or take a few billion, depending on the market)
We don’t want to be greedy.
If Gates were left a dollar
He’d buy a Common Core
And Gates would surely holler
I need a billion more!
What the poor kids, who weren’t taught how to read in their neighborhood school, would do with these books? Use them as door stops?
For thirty years Open Court books actually did teach reading to kids in one semester of the first grade, and they did contain lots of good literature you mention above. Open Court lost the battle to “deeply rooted spirit of anti-intellectualism” of public schools (not my words, but by Dr. Ravitch herself: https://www.educationnext.org/the-triumph-of-looksay/) This alone says enough about the idea of giving money to schools and teachers and then allowing them to do what they do best.
Stop twisting my words. You live in a time machine. I don’t.
I guess, I wanted to say *If Bill Gates had not usurped … *
“A pack of bull”
“Logic” is unpackable
Grammar is just laughable
Comments are a pack of bull
BA is intractable
You are right. As I learned more, as I listened more, I changed my views about testing, choice, standards and accountability. “Death and Life” is the only book I wrote where the publisher gave me carte Blanche to revise at will. And I did.
Have you read “The Revisionists Revised?” That was my second book. It vigorously defends common public schools. It was written in 1977.
“Have you read “The Revisionists Revised?” That was my second book. It vigorously defends common public schools. It was written in 1977.”
Careful, Dianne. BA seems to read your books like a conservative Christian might read the Bible, i.e. literally. If your thinking has changed in any way since then, he will point out your inconsistency.
He cited a review written in Amazon and it came out extremely hostile, and I deleted his comment. He twists everything I write to fit his purpose, which is to smear public schools and teachers.
cx: Diane. Sorry.
I’m not going to discuss this here. The topic requires more than a sound bite. An extended discussion of this AND OTHER necessary components of reading instruction: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/
If kids have books, the adults around them will read to them. They will spend time with those books. They will learn that books are sources of interest, and they will pick up skills that will enable them in school. This is what happens with kids in the middle class and above. Your notion of what reading entails, BA, is a bit simplistic. Read that essay of mine.
Does the baby know how to “read” Goodnight, Moon or Pat the Bunny? No, of course not. Does he or she learn from sitting with Mom or Dad and one of those books that books tell stories, that books are fun, that the words correspond to the pictures, that they are sequential? that this “reading time” is fun? Yes. Are those things extremely important? Yes. Do they also incidentally pick up some random words and learn the key fact about written language–that the written word is associated with a thing in the world, that it captures a meaning? Yes, they do. Is that valuable? Of course it is. But go ahead, BA, sneer at the idea of giving poor kids what every middle class kid has. Lord knows, that’s what all the Deformers/Disrupters do. Don’t worry about the inequities. Don’t worry that the poor kids don’t have the home libraries that well-to-do kids do. Use this magic reading and learning elixir instead.
Do you SERIOUSLY mean to suggest that there is no value to be had from poor families having children’s books in the house? SERIOUSLY?
SERIOUSLY?
What can I say? It’s as though you had suggested that there is no need for poor children to have access to food.
Poor kids need food?
Who knew?
Bob, as I said many times, reading is basically playing back a tape – the analogy shows my age, I hope it works for you. Books lying around is just useless pulp. Parents reading aloud is just an annoying radio station that cannot be turned off. My friends brought up their kid by reading great books to him every day, by going to theater plays, by participating in plays, they traveled. They did not teach him reading. He was taught at school. His reading sucks. My mother taught reading to me when I was four because she could not be bothered with reading aloud, she had other stuff to do. Yes, we had tons of great books at home, and she carefully selected the best ones to put on the shelves. They would be useless if she did not teach me reading. Yes, having a sandwich would be better than having great books around, one does not have to be taught how to eat.
Likewise, I taught my son reading when he was four. Unlike some teachers who spent twenty, twenty five, thirty years “teaching” reading to kids, wondering why they get no results, but doing nothing, expecting the school or the district to feed them the correct program, I researched the topic and found a solution. Needless to say, I used phonics. My current home has fewer paper books, but lots of great stuff is online or in ebook form. My son reads well enough for me not to worry about it. Proper instruction is everything, without it the best books will remain door stops.
I think he just told you what he thinks of your profession, Bob. Any schmo can teach any kid the mechanics of reading with your handy dandy phonics program (Open Court was it?) and the heck with of this engagement stuff. Who needs more? Who in their right minds wants to read to their children? Cats in their hats? Looking for wild things? A gingerbread man and a fox? Blah,…blah, blah,…blah, blah.
Cx; any of this engagemment stuff
Cx: engagement. Guess it’s easy to tell BA hit a nerve. I’m sure it pleases him no end.
Public school parents really need to start reading in the ed tech industry. It’s just dishonest to continue to say this industry is about “supporting teachers” – it is blatantly about replacing teachers:
“The two see summative testing as losing ground under pressure about its ultimate value in helping students.
“Testing will become continuous,” said Khan. Learners will experience “true progress monitoring,” as they interact with the platforms where they get their practice, take assessments and get feedback, he said.”
There is no teacher/student role in this at all. They envision students spending entire days interacting solely with a platform.
Back in the early days Jeb Bush and his professional lobbyists used to brag that this would save a bunch of money because obviously it’s cheaper than employing an actual live teacher. That was more honest than this endless nonsense that amounts to the same thing. Education on the cheap for low and middle income children. That’s what this is about.
https://marketbrief.edweek.org/marketplace-k-12/khan-academy-dreambox-learning-ceos-share-ed-tech-future-predictions/?cmp=soc-tw-shr-mktbf
Gates never mentions how much money he has poured into trying to force schools to buy more computer products with, of course, the intent of supplanting legitimate teachers with a machine and software that will further enrich him.
You got this right, retired teacher.
Gates sees schools and kids as an endless supply of $$$$$ for his warped notions about education and learning.
It’s interesting that despite his efforts to “give away” all his money before he dies, Bill Gates keeps getting richer year after year.
He’d better accelerate the pace of “giving$” by at least a couple orders of magnitude cuz by his appearance, he does not have many years left .
From what I have seen, SDP, Gates has done a lot more “buying” than “giving.”
Hi Diane,
I agree with you in that they should get the heck out of the education “business” but they should also stay out of the “health care” business as well. They are not doctors and they are teaming up with big pharmaceutical business to “force”their products on others including us citizens. It is fine to offer it to people but not force it on them.
Just because the have money does not mean they know best.
My body my choice – my kids body should be my choice until they are old enough to have it be their own!
They took away religious exception in NY and and next week they are trying to do it in CT.
>
On the Coring of ELA in the US
The following comments are about the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] (the CC$$) for the English Language Arts (ELA).
–The CC$$ are COMMON only in the sense of being mediocre, vulgar, base. They were cobbled together in haste based on a cursory review of the lowest common denominator groupthink of existing state standards. They don’t reflect any sort of common (consensus) thinking about what standards in ELA should look like. Gates paid a small group, headed by Coleman, to throw these together so he could have one national bullet list to key depersonalized educations software to. One would expect that someone attempting to put together a single set of national standards for the first time would consult the most knowledgeable researchers and scholars in the land on the topics of their expertise—literature, writing instruction, vocabulary acquisition, the acquisition of the grammar of a language, speaking and listening instruction, theatre, and so on. Well, that simply didn’t happen, and no provision was made in these “standards” for revising them based on future input from classroom practitioners, scholars, and researchers.
–The CC$$ don’t treat the CORE of the subject. Attainment in ELA consists of acquisition (via automatic processes operating below the level of conscious awareness) and learning (via conscious processes) of a great deal of descriptive knowledge (e.g., What a metaphor is and how it operates; who Mary Shelley was and what she wrote and what its characteristics were and how this changed literature in general; what couplets and quatrains are; what the pitch of a voice is; what the elements of a film script are and how it is organized) and a great deal of procedural knowledge (e.g., how to create a metaphor [by identifying a tenor with the appropriate characteristics and associations], ways to grab the reader’s attention at the beginning of an essay, how to use couplets and quatrains to organize ideas in a sonnet, how to create melody in your speaking voice [by varying your pitch]). The CC$$ treats almost none of either!!! It is almost completely CONTENT FREE. Instead, like the execrable state “standards” before it, it is a list of vague, abstract skills. So, wrong from the start.
–The CC$$ weren’t created by the states, and they so are not STATE standards. They are national ones forced on the states by blackmail by the feds via the Race to the Top program. Most states in the US today, btw, are using the CC$$ under state-specific names.
–The CC$$ are not STANDARDS. A standard is a specification of the minimum level of quality with regard to some characteristic that a product must have. So, there’s a standard for the percentage of insect parts allowed in peanut butter; there’s a standard for how much gold has to be in a product for it to be labeled “22 caret.” Because the CC$$ skills list is so vague and abstract, almost none of these “standards” can be made concrete enough—can be sufficiently rationally operationized—to make them VALIDLY testable, though they are, in fact, what is purportedly tested by high-stakes standardized exams on reading and writing. To give one example illustrating the point: one cannot devise a single multiple-choice question that will validly measure whether a child has reached proficiency at “making inferences from text.” Obviously. So, the CC$$ has created a whole industry, high-stakes testing of these putative “standards,” that is basically a multi-billion-dollar SCAM.
–The grammar and vocabulary “standards” in the CC$$ are based on prescientific, folk theories of the acquisition of grammar and vocabulary. They do not reflect current understanding by linguists of how either is acquired. This ought to be a national scandal. It’s as though we had new, national “standards” for the Navy that warned against sailing of the edge of the flat Earth.
–The writing “standards” are based on an inane and indefensible division of types of writing into distinct “modes” when, in fact, real writing in the real word combines these, typically. But that’s not the biggest issue with these “standards.” The biggest issues are that they are incredibly vague and don’t’ treat either the specific, concrete procedural knowledge that a student must gain in order to be able to write pieces of particular kinds; that they aren’t properly scaffolded and do not treat in a coherent, developmental manner, the acquisition of the building blocks of writing ability, such as varieties of sentence structures and ways of connecting ideas; and they don’t treat types of prewriting and the goals and methods of revision (good writing is typically rewriting).
–The literature “standards” have more lacunae than does Swiss cheese. Where is the systematic development of understanding of the types of world oratures or of literary genres, motifs, techniques, or archetypes? Where is the systematic exposure to literary periods and styles or to the canons of US, English, and world literatures? Where is the treatment of the interplay between literature and politics, social life, and ideas of specific milieus? Where is the systematic development of the ability to recognize and employ the techniques of prosody? Where is the development of understanding of the wide variety of critical approaches to literature? NOT THERE.
–Because of the high stakes put on the tests on these puerile, backward, pedestrian, uninformed “standards,” the CC$$ has become the de facto curriculum in the US. Courseware, print and online, no longer coherently and systematically teaches topics in ELA, but, rather, consists of random exercises in applying items from the CC$$ bullet list to random pieces of text. This has led to a great devolution and trivializing of ELA curricula and pedagogy.
–No mechanism was created for revising or adapting these execrable “standards” in light of classroom practice, the needs of particular groups of learners, input from and innovations by scholars and researchers with particular expertise, and so on. No, we are to wait, one supposes, until Gates and Achieve and the Chiefs for Ka-Ching convene their Politburo, once again, to do the deciding for the rest of us.
–You don’t get innovation via standardization. You get mediocrity, sameness. Obviously.
I have more to say about how awful these “standards” are, but that’s a book, not a blog post.
Here, a sample analysis of one of these “standards”: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
One could do the same for most of them.
cx: “tenor,” above, should be “vehicle,” ofc
cx: off the edge of the Earth
Off Edge of the Earth
It’s not of this world
“Off edge of the earth”
When sail is unfurled
The ship rounds the girth
I read a quote about people like Diane fighting against “winnwers take all”.
“You may fetter my leg, but not even Zeus himself can overpower my will.” -Epictetus
Yep. My leg is fettered but my will is not.
Gates’ empty ideas are sustained only by his pockets. Diane came, she saw and, she conquered.
She thought. She blogged. She prevailed.
She fought. Defogged. She unveiled
The Foglifter
The billionaire was beaten
By Lady with a blog
Who managed to defeat him
By dissipating fog
Poet- powerful first stanza!
What a great line, Diane!!!! xoxoxox!!!!
Too bad Will (iam Gates) is not fettered.
Slaying Goliath*
Leg is fettered
Will is not
Giant bettered
With a shot
*Alternate title: David Fetterman
Gates is still calling education a “driver of equality”. No, equality is a driver of education.
Gates used Warren Buffett’s baseball analogy to say he “swings for the fences”, in other words, tries to hit a home run every time he swings the bat. In baseball, always swinging for the fences is also called striking out a lot. Coaches teach batters not to swing for the fences all the time because you wind up stranding your teammates on base and losing games that could have been won with sacrifices and other kinds of team ball. But Gates doesn’t care about his team, does he.
Gates doesn’t get Deborah Meier. He doesn’t get education. He doesn’t get global health. He doesn’t get teamwork. He gets lots of money gathering poor people’s private, personal data. That’s what he gets. He gets richer.
He swings for the Gates’
“Fences and Gates”
Fences and Gates
Are all they need
To seal our fates
And feed their greed
That’s right, he plays for himself.
He plays with himself
He doesn’t “get” collaboration. I’m guessing he was never into team sports.
Judging by high school pictures ‘of Bill’s buff physique, I’m guessing that if he played any “sport” at all, it was prolly singles tiddlywinks
You gotta just love the fellow with the bowtie at the beginning.
And the guy at the end who just won the World Tiddlywinks Championship
“It’s great to be Winker of the World after seven years…and particularly nice because someone I work with collects sperm from chimpanzees..so it’s very nice to be a champ winker… and I’ll leave him to do the other half” (British humor)
How wonderful to live in a world in which there are people who devote themselves to becoming champion winkers! As Vonnegut put it, life is for farting around.
As the new world champ intimated: at the end : winkers and wankers.
“Driving Miss Crazy”
Standards drive the testing
And testing drives the teaching
And teaching drives divesting
From outcomes worth the reaching
Gates is still calling education a “driver of equality”. No, equality is a driver of education.
Beautifully said, LeftCoast!!! From a fellow inhabitant of the Left coast.
It’s time to revisit fawning interviews with the stupid, clueless, delusional Gates family.
Delusion-
Their flight from reality as “risk takers” when it is others to pay the cost for their failures.
Clueless-
M had to convince B that a society’s culture might require more than just the availability of condoms to achieve birth control. M practices the faith led by bishops who fund clinics that promote ovulation calendars as the exclusive bc method. The method fails 25% of the time.
Stupid-
They think people believe their crap about supporting democracy and “local ownership ” when we are aware they are the barbarians at the gate.
Billburyians at the Gates
Billburyians at the Gates
Determining our fates
By charging pricey rates
On software from their pates
Andy Stern and Keri Rodriguez (SEIU)… the Las Vegas Culinary Workers Union –
Reportedly there are union leaders swaying their members against Bernie.
I wrote to a group at online@culinaryunion226.org to point out the threat of canned instruction in front of screens for their kids’ schools- TFA scabs-and profit taking from children’s right to education.
Cutting off their noses to spite their faces- labor hierarchy’s opposition to Bernie’s democracy is single issue. The workers currently have good private health care insurance i.e. occupational and generational selfishness.
“The workers currently have good private health care insurance i.e. occupational and generational selfishness.”
They have reason to be suspicious of the unknown, and, frankly, I can’t blame them for wanting to protect themselves. I am more open to incremental change simply because more people will buy into it, and we are more likely to be able to implement it. Just look at the Affordable Care Act. People who were opposed to the idea who got healthcare for the first time were very shortly converts. It didn’t solve all our healthcare problems by a long shot, but it moved us forward. If we attack the problems incrementally, we are less likely to make big mistakes and we can work out kinks as we go along. I suspect more people will buy into such a plan. As they do, we might be able to accelerate the pace. Of course we will battle on how to do that and what to do first, but we will face those issues even if we try to move immediately to a single payer plan. I’m guessing that we will eventually end up with a hybrid system where there is still a role for private insurance at some level (at least for the foreseeable future).
Sped-
You and your like-thinking companions will get the insurance plan that the corporations profit the most from and, you will doom the rest of us to the same fate.
I hope I do get the plan I hope for. I hope to not need private insurance to cover what Medicare doesn’t. I hope the same for everyone else as well. I just don’t think it will happen in one fell swoop. I don’t disagree with the goal. Healthcare should be a right not a benefit for just those who happen to be employed in the right place (or employed at all). There were quite a few years where we rationed medical care because we could only afford catastrophic coverage but made too much for any assistance. I am very familiar with what preexisting conditions can do to the cost of insurance. I didn’t want anything more in our health records that could influence insurance rates. No one has yet outlined a plan of what will be covered, how it will be provided, or how it will be paid for. Bernie will not wave his magic wand and announce to the medical profession and institutions that tomorrow thou shalt provide medical care to all citizens with such and such conditions at such and such a cost, and, oh yes, by the way, ye pharmaceutical industry will do thus and so as well. It will take time! It will take time to formulate a plan to which there is adequate support and that will probably come through incremental change. Bernie probably knows better than anyone that his dreams will not be easy to turn into reality. Right now he has a goal and not much more.
Older people’s Medicare – is that a model? So, it’s really not creating the wheel from scratch. and, every other developed nation managed to accomplish it decades ago. Are you saying the U.S. is incapable of innovating when there are large, successful, well-established prototypes to imitate?
The incremental change of ACA- being clawed back by Republicans?
The second largest group of doctors reportedly supports Medicare for All.
Way to put words in my mouth, Linda. I never said we don’t have models on which we can draw. Nor, despite your attempts to paint me as opposed, did I discount the possibility of a Medicare type program. All I said is that there are a lot of questions to be answered. Bernie would probably have to work very hard to even get all the Democrats in Congress to support his plan, whatever that might be. I just think it would be more likely to pass in an incremental fashion. Bernie knows he can’t promise a comprehensive single payer system; it is his dream that he will work his tail off to achieve, but he is no fool. He will make compromises to get us closer to his goal. Will you call him a sellout when he does so?
When Axios feels uncomfortable writing “Bernie’s Pipe Dreams” because they acknowledge his ideas move the needle and progressive, establishment and neoliberal Dems back his agenda, the “selling out” vernacular will be antiquated. With luck, Manchin and Koch-financed Cueller will be replaced by politicians who serve the people, instead of corporations. And, Bloomberg will return to his cronies in the Republican Party.
How do Bill and Melinda Gates live with the rape, torture and death of a homeschooled student this week in Dayton, Ohio and, all of the other abused children who no longer have the protection of a school day away from abusive parents?
Reporters published the following related, research conclusion in explaining the child’s tragic situation, “Forty-seven percent of school age victims of abuse were removed from school to be home schooled.” “When the children were in school, parents knew there were certain lines that couldn’t be crossed.”
Taxpayers being fleeced out of billions by charters wasn’t diabolical enough for billionaires. We can speculate that kids are tortured for not measuring up to be “college ready”. And, we know that young children go hungry and have their lives cut short by abusive parents in homeschooling situations. And, it’s because billionaires in states where the poor pay a tax rate up to 7 times higher than the ugly rich, make it so.