Governor Andrew Cuomo has asked billionaire Bill Gates to “reimagine” New York’s schools. We have had more than enough of Bill Gates’ ideas in New York. Remember the infamous inBloom, which was meant to collect personally identifiable student data and store it in a “cloud”? Thanks to parent protests, inBloom collapsed. Remember the rollout of the Common Core standards and testing, which launched the nation’s biggest parent-led opt out movement. Remember the failed idea of judging teachers by the test scores of their students? That failed too.
Invite parents, teachers, and students to reinvent education, it a man who has failed repeatedly.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Remote learning. Ger. phr. An purported educational system in which there is a remote chance that learning is taking place
Wow, did Cuomo kick a beehive!
Here’s a link an elementary teacher just posted taking the governor to task. https://www.kathrynrbiel.com/post/an-open-letter-to-the-governor-of-new-york-state?fbclid=IwAR2kwUDF-GvLhYyItbQdReAiyZcCgMf2D1FCJ_D5tljnaQZDIoHMjewnSnw
Is this 2016 all over again….?
Trump tries to fire up his base.
What if the Democrats just keep alienating theirs?
That’s a recipe for disaster in November.
Gov.Cuomo….do the right thing….talk to Diane Ravitch. Better yet, appoint her to one of your decision-making commissions. And, listen to us.
I agree.
This is an awfully stupid thing to do at this point in time — even for Cuomo, who ain’t the sharpest utensil in the spoon drawer.
Including a grotesque, narcissistic billionaire who takes advantage of the rigged system, guarantees Andrew campaign donations. He can be bought, as his record indicates. He would sell his mother if it raised another dollar for his campaign.
Our dignity and children’s education are NOT for sale!
and narcissistic is the increasing danger from Gates: the more he gets the “crisis” spotlight, the bigger will grow his need to intervene and control
In my district where all students have IPADS and free wifi access from multiple sites around town still has a 20% non compliance rate among the students. The teachers have been doing a great job. I understand that Idaho is wishes to dump Comon Core but no such luck in WA. One positve: parents are becoming more appreciative of the work teachers must do.
Cuomo should just ASK TEACHERS and certainly NOT that Gates. Gates doesn’t know.
🤮😱🤢
I think Gates does not have many great ideas on his own. He is likely to propose ideas that have been circulating for a while, including pay-for-success contracts to raise test scores, techie devices to address social-emotional problems and attention deficit disorders (e.g., headbands with brain-wave monitoring and “nudges” to get back on task), and so on.
Because state budgets will be thin, Gates is certain to encourage monetizing every aspect of education he can, perhaps enlisting help from the Robinhood Foundation for metrics and tips for cost cutting from the Edunomics Lab now monitoring compliance with the per-pupil cost accounting required by ESSA. https://robinhoodorg-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/04/Metrics-Equations-for-Website_Sept-2014.pdf
Recent initiatives from the Gates Foundation include “school improvement networks” that ignore district lines and teacher contracts but assume teachers are so dumb that they need some Gates-approved coaches and dog and pony shows. Gates also continues to think the Common Core is fine, just poorly implemented and in need of compliant curriculum materials. That is why he set up EdReports, a rating scheme to evaluate curriculum materials by “drop dead” criteria from the Common Core.
These “current interests” are slightly edited from the website
–Networks for School Improvement. Networks of schools and school support organizations use continuous learning approaches—where schools use data to identify a problem, select a strategy to address the problem, set a target for improvement, and iterate to make the approach more effective and improve student achievement.
–Educator Preparation. We support organizations and programs that prepare teachers and school leaders to better serve low-income students and students of color.
–High-Quality Charter Schools. We want to expand the number of high-quality public charter schools, with a specific focus on improving outcomes for students with disabilities, including special needs students.
–Aligned-Instructional Materials. Interests are in middle and high school English, math, and science aligned to the Common Core and Next Generation Science standards with curricula reviewed for standards compliance (through ratings in EdReports).
–Social Emotional Learning. Research and assorted tools and best practices especially for adolescents.
–Stronger Pathways. Expand the evidence base and validate exemplars of interventions that support students to access, enroll in, and transition to postsecondary programs.
–Big Bets in Innovation. Support R&D in education technology and learning science, especially to increase the number of black, Latino, and low-income high school students who have access to technology and engineering coursework, as well as credential-based pathways that give them access to good jobs. https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/US-Program/K-12-Education
Reimagining education could mean that the Gates will try to migrate some of its “Grand Challenge” formats and specific ideas the Foundation has funded. This is an example.
“We are looking for new innovative ideas that transform teaching or school leadership to better prepare children with the 21st century skills they need to succeed in the future. Modern 21st century skills, such as problem solving, leadership, creativity, and adaptability, require a new active, student-centered system for learning. We seek ideas that better prepare teachers and school leaders to drive this new active 21st century system for learning. This challenge was launched as a collaboration between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Misk Foundation; grants awarded under this challenge are funded and managed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. https://gcgh.grandchallenges.org/challenge/reinventing-teaching-and-school-leadership-preparing-youth-21st-century-skills-needed
There were only two U.S. winners of this 2018-19 international challenge. One was a tutor for each child, named Ali. Ali is an artificial intelligence system with natural sounding conversational language programed to ask use a version of the Socratic method offering open-ended questions and answers to stimulate critical thinking. See more at https://gritdaily.com/value-spring-technology/
The other grant, from Paragon Learning Research Group, proposed the use of a digital platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs) to be teach STEM and 21st century skills to K-6th grade teachers.
Gates has other projects in the works with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. One of these is focused on “the executive function” and math. See https://www.efmathprogram.org
I hope Gates is stopped from imposing his ideas in New York State. He will treat students and teachers as if they only exist to provide data for more of his many, many failed experiments in education.
Governor Cuomo. Talk. to. Diane. Ravitch.
Not likely.
Like Gates, Cuomo undoubtedly blames Diane for throwing a monkey wrench in his works.
In fact, I can imagine that they must have some things to say about that when they speak on the phone.
Spite is obviously the primary thing that motivates Cuomo on the education issue.
If I were in the military and a) had a question about the feasibility of a particular concept for a nuclear weapon and b) an open channel to speak to Ed Witten about this, I would talk to Witten even if I detested the guy personally. Why? Because he’s widely acknowledged to be one of the smartest and most knowledgeable physicists in the world today. There are few people on the planet who know as much about education as Diane Ravitch does. That he could sit down with her (virtually) but would choose not to do so would be just dumb. And given the fact that what he’s talking about is a major change in public policy with profound consequences for his state, not discussing this with her would be misfeasance. Trump is the sort of guy who won’t talk to those he disagrees with. Does Cuomo really want to be that guy?
Gates is much smarter than Cuomo ( Einstein vs a 🐒) but even he won’t meet with Diane.
A computer, in education, is a tool, as a pencil is a tool. Pencils are very useful tools, of course. But don’t try to do eye surgery with one. You will do enormous damage. Enormous, irreparable damage.
Use computers, in education, for what they are good at. A few examples:
Accessing texts that are difficult or expensive, otherwise, to get access to.
Doing complex computations.
Writing papers and creating bibliographies.
Scoring music.
Doing literature searches in scholarly databases.
Automatically grading objective-format assignments.
Presenting demonstrations that would otherwise be difficult or expensive (e.g., virtual dissection).
Using slideshows to do virtual tours and analysis.
Some examples of doing eye surgery with a pencil:
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that computers can grade essays. Don’t make the mistake of believing the bs. from courseware manufacturers about their purported “diagnostic tests”–that’s purest snake oil. Don’t buy into the “personalized learning” nonsense. The tests that place students are a sham, the stuff is mostly based on failed behaviorist models of learning, and almost all of the so-called personalized learning software has been shown, in practice, to fail (there’s a long list of reasons why; I’m not going to go into them all here).
And remember this: people just don’t like learning by computer. Online courses have enormous no-show, dropout/noncompletion, and failure rates. And after a couple weeks, students generally LOATHE any online courseware they are forced to use. This last fact should give pause to anyone considering going down this path. He or she should stop and ask why this is so. Why is this stuff HATED by students? Why is it so demotivating? Why would anyone think it a good idea to use stuff that is dramatically demotivating, that always begins in hype and quickly devolves into misery? And why would anyone go to the people who peddle this garbage to get accurate information about it? That’s like going to Trump to find out how successful Trump University was.
Here’s the record for online courseware: investors have lost BILLIONS on it. Why? Because it almost always fails. Company after company after company has introduced this stuff with a lot of hype and then bombed. Bombed. If you bought a bunch of some exotic fruit to introduce to the U.S. market and found that no one wanted to buy it because it tasted terrible and smelled bad, the solution to your problem would not be to buy a lot more fruit AND to do so from the same guy who sold the stuff to you before. Now that would be pretty stupid, wouldn’t it?
Thank you, Diane.
I believe they have just declared war on us.
I have me with the title if this article! Amen!
Cuomo is like Giuliani. Both were given fantastic opportunities to become heroes but both are ruining their own reputation by overplaying the game of politics. They are like true gamblers: they don’t know when to stop.
It helps to have a winning hand.
These guys have been bluffing all along.
Now that they are being called, they will have to show their pair of twos.
I think they are gambling for the gambling’s sake. Getting rich, getting powerful is secondary for them. They just need the excitement of betting on something that may result in a loss. A sure, completely lawful game is not what they want to play. In some jobs, this attitude actually may be beneficial, but gamblers need to get out of politics. Their bettings affect millions.
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