Peter Greene taught high school students in Pennsylvania for 39 years. Now he blogs and writes about education for Forbes, where people in the business world get schooled about education realities.
In this article, he makes clear that a Bill Gates has a horrible record in education policy and should butt out of New York.
Greene points out:
Nobody has expended more money and influence on US education, and yet even by his own standards for success—raising reading and math test scores—Gates has no clear successes. Nor are there signs that he is learning anything from his failures. Reading through years of the annual Bill and Melinda letter, and you find acknowledgement that their latest idea didn’t quite pan out, but the problems are never located within the programs themselves. Teachers didn’t have the right resources or training. The Foundation’s PR work didn’t properly anticipate resistance. After years of failed initiatives, the latest Gates newsletter concludes not that they should examine some of their own assumptions, change their approach, or invite a different set of eyeballs to look over their programs—instead, they should just do what they’re doing, but do it harder. “Swing for the fences.”
Currently the Foundation is focused on factors like curriculum and in particular computer-delivered education. This may seem like just the ticket for a governor who also questioned why his state is still bothering with brick-and-mortar school buildings. But regardless of what you think of the policies and programs that Gates is pushing, it’s important to remember that while he may be great at disruption, he has yet to build anything in the education world that is either lasting or which works the way it was meant to. And he can always walk away, having barely dented his fortune.
It is perfectly obvious that Cuomo’s invited Gates to “reimagine” education in New York because Cuomo’s wants to make distance learning permanent. Parents hate the idea. Students long to be back in school with their friends and teachers. Teachers want to see their students really, not virtually.
Cuomo should back off. He hasn’t talked to parents, students, or teachers, only to Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt of Google.
It’s also important to remember that the Constitution of the State of New York gives the governor zero authority over education. That power belongs to the Board of Regents.
Cuomo should take care of reimagining the economy, getting people back to work, and leave education to the appropriate state and local officials.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Very interesting. I said many of the same things in a Guest Viewpoint that I sent to our local paper, in which I reference Diane. The Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin published my letter Saturday, May 9: Guest Viewpoint by Janice Strauss
May 6, 2020
Gov. Cuomo’s Tuesday announcement pairing NYS with Bill Gates to “reimagine” education sent chills up the spines of teachers throughout both our state and the nation. Bill Gates is as toxic to public education as COVID19 is to the lungs of an 85 year old with diabetes and heart disease.
Why do teachers fear Gates? Gates created Student Achievement Partners to write standards, then paid the National Governors’ Association money to adopt Common Core standards. No surprise, Gates had SAP write the standards. Many of the writers were representatives of the testing industry. So it is no wonder the standards were largely developmentally inappropriate. With students and teachers forced to work with non-fiction readings and equally bizarre math computing, testing began. Small wonder so many parents opted out of testing here in New York!
Next, teacher evaluations were linked to the test scores, and privacy-invading data collection began. This same movement pushed hard for the creation of charter schools, with legislation exempting these new schools from much of the regulation governing current public schools. Charters got themselves labeled “public”, despite their getting rid of students who might bring scores down. Remember Success Academy and its infamous “got to go” list for expelling unwanted students.
Gates has relentlessly pursued evidence-free solutions to his perceived problems with public education. Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education and research professor at NYU, tells us, “Think anything Gates has funded in education and you will discover a lot of publicity, loud claims of success, but ultimate failure.” Indeed Ravitch is correct; test scores in the US have remained stagnant for the last 10 years.
And yet, testing companies still seem to be in charge. While there was much hoopla given to NYS disassociating itself from Pearson’s creating the grade 3-8 tests, they continue to hold numerous contracts here. Just this week, the State Education Department announced that despite schools still being closed, Pearson Centers have reopened for testing our current college student teachers.
Beware when SED announces there will be “teacher input” and/or experts consulted. I’ve been to those gatherings. We are given a magic marker and get to write on a couple pieces of chart paper and are then sent home!
Those who are seriously concerned about our public schools would do well to find ways to allow our fully trained, currently practicing, certified public school teachers to have the greatest voice in how our children are educated. There was a time in NYS when teachers were called to Albany, worked together to create their own standards, syllabi, and tests based on the latest educational research. We even looked at successes in other countries and applied those practices to our work.
Beware Bill Gates and his checkbook. They move in when states and schools are most in need of money. I hope the Board of Regents members are listening because Section 207 of NY’s Education Law gives them the power to govern education in New York State. That may be our only salvation!
Thank you, Janice.
“We are given a magic marker and get to write on a couple pieces of chart paper and are then sent home!”
We get computer questionaires that are designed to make it look like we are supporting what ever viewpoint the administrations want.
an important point: so many surveys and statistical data gathering vehicles these days already pre-set to prove public support
“Threw Grid”
Gates infested lost up dawdlers
Jest fur nutting, butt sum “scowlers”
Gates well nabber gibbet hup
Grid ass watt ease god an gut
“Conman corps”
Coleman met eh conman corps
Redding clothes, an mulch mulch moor
Coleman’s ding worse jest infest
Inner “vixen” up detest
“Gates infested lost up doll hairs” also works
What we have learned”
We’ve learned a lot of stuff
And really quite enough
To say ‘it hasn’t worked’
We really have been jerked
Cuomo is so wrong. Gates is no educator.
Cuomo needs to know what he does NOT know and so does Gates.
Socratic Paradox
Knowing one does not
Impossible to spot
If self-indulgent thought
Is all that you have got
“Socrates Speaks”
I know that I know nothing
And that’s what nonsense is
So nonsense is the one thing
That I can surely dis
Read p. 280 of Slaying Goliath
and my thoughts –
I have friends who still talk about their teacher in the 1950s – one teacher up to 8th grade in their one-room school house…. In St. Louis, black children were taught to read on a riverboat in the 1840s because state law prohibited them from being taught to read. …..My 1963 sixth grade teacher was one of the most remarkable ever (dozens of field trips, writing across content, projects) and that’s looking through my lens as a lifetime educator observing thousands of teachers to this day…….. Al Shanker’s charter school concept was brilliant.
What are the common factors for success from the one-room school house to the riverboats to outstanding teachers to teachers’ innovative schools to the expected suburban successful schools and outliers in areas one would not expect? Parents valuing learning, the talented teacher, and the classroom / school as the unit of change.
What are some common factors of failure? Those who have no authority imposing their way who ignore teachers, experts, expertise, research, and authentic measures (sound familiar?). They do it their way and it fails.
My question to Bill Gates and governors is: What are you doing to perpetuate what we know works? Developing and supporting remarkable teachers with a skilled principal teacher in a school organized for success.
You have no authority but you do have billions of dollars, technology experts, a bully pulpit, and a budget. Here’s a start
Use your tech, $, and policy to:
Support parents for children birth to five. Access to literacy, funding for community agencies, pediatricians, social services, access to parenting support (research is compelling for these programs)
Universal access to technology. Access – not (just) devices but universal wifi and uncapped data limits on phones. The latter is as much a problem now as the tech.
Stop the digital worksheets and profits as all that matters. Use technology and yes, television to inspire creativity and bring the world to kids. They will get there “live” someday.
Location support for classroom and learning satellites – with real teachers. Yes, schools are petri dishes. Small elementary schools can pull this off but not the 1,000 student school? Use your technology and policy to legitimatize decentralized classrooms (storefronts, churches and temples, community centers) still coordinated and supervised by school leaders and district coordination. (Split shifts, A/B days, A/B weeks will not work and 100% learning at home will not work).
Virtual super small teacher/student/family learning communities in every school – good old fashioned advisories, homerooms, and small home-teacher ratios for routine communications and support.
Develop authentic measures. Benchmark – not high stakes- assessments. Revive learning as the goal, not scores and rankings and labels.
I wish Bill would first re-imagine my damn MS-Windows operating system before he screws up another system.
You, too, can sign up at the Gates website and become a “Gates Insider,” Bill’s ads promise. You and I have friends. Gates takes out ads to promote himself.
Now, for normal people, being an insider means that you are a confidant–someone with whom the person converses. It means that what you have to say means something to that person. But it Gatesworld, being an insider means that you get to listen to him any time you want. There is no such thing as having a conversation with Bill Gates. There is listening to him tell you how it is and how it is going to be.
And somehow, in education, this always involves computers and “data.” Why? Because Gates, as he and the sycophants around him, never tire of telling us, is an extraordinary person (as in “not normal”). Normal human interaction with other people simply doesn’t matter to him, and jhe can’t imagine why it would to any schoolchild. Gates is fine being in front of a screen. To him, others are objects in a virtual world where he is game playing, and he is at the top level, moving all the pieces around. He’s a 64-year-old teenager, and like many teenagers, he is self-obsessed and knows everything.
Gates paid for the development of the Common Core so that he could have a single national bullet list to key depersonalized education software to. It was part of a business plan. Then he created InBloom, which was to be a national database of people’s scores, first in school, on tests and other work in K12 and in college, then of evaluations and microcredentials earned in the workplace–a total surveillance system. Why these initiatives? Well, Gates has explained this himself. The former was so that educational products (courseware and so-called learning management systems could be sold “at scale,” you know, like Microsoft Windows. And the latter would serve as the nation’s gradebook, and no producer of educational materials would be able to sell a product without hooking up to it. In other words, InBloom would have functioned, like interoperability with Windows, as a gatekeeper, and others would have to pay to play.
Gates is sometimes described as strangely lacking normal human affect, but there is one thing Gates cares very, very deeply about–his own ideas. He long ago said in a speech that the major costs in education were facilities (buildings) and salaries, and both could be done away with by switching to distance learning via computers.
And, incidentally, he and his other nerdy computer pals would make a lot of money. Such synchronicity?
So, create a systemic monopoly and cash in on it.
Same old game play, different gaming arena.
Icy Hot. Jumbo Shrimp. Dodge Ram. Microsoft Works.
LOL. Exactly.
At least “Bill Gates” was aptly named.
“Fences and Gates”
Fences and Gates
Are all they need
To seal our fates
And feed their greed
“The Gritted Age”
The “Gritted Age”
Was full of grit
And “Gated Age”
Is full of it
Age of the Great Gritsby and
Age of the Great GatesB
“Hell’s Bells”
The Gates of Hell
Are leaved with gold
And Billy’s bell
Is loudly tolled
But bell is cracked
As we can see
Cuz Bill hijacked
Our Liberty
“The House that Gates Built”
Billyan errs and Common Cores
Rickety stairs and creaky floors
Leaky roofs and shaky stoops
That’s the house that Gates built
Flooded basements, cracked
foundations
Broken casements, termite nations
Rotten states and sagging gates
That’s the house that Gates built
Failing kids and firing teachers
Software bids and testing leechers
Standardizing and capitalizing
That’s the house that Gates built
“Bill and the Beanstalk”
Deep within the garden Gates
He planted seeds, for common fates
Beanstalks that would reach the
cloud
A Common Core for teaching crowd
Beanstalks grew with public money
Grew in the Land of Milken honey
Put down roots in public schools
Teaching standards, teaching rules
Beanstalks to which teachers bowed
Channels to the data cloud
Techies harvest student fruit
The more they eat, the more we toot
“Gated Fates”
If Tudors are our tutors
And Gates’ are our front-gates
Unsuited are our suitors
And gated are our fates
COVID-19 Is Creating a School Personnel Crisis
There are wide-ranging implications for our edu- cation system, given that it may not be safe for many teachers to return to a classroom until a vaccine is developed. With fewer than five months until the start of the 2020–21 academic year, leaders need to assess these risks now to make necessary preparations. The health and safety of their personnel must take paramount concern, requiring creative solutions that still leverage these teachers’ expertise and experience while addressing the pipeline challenges….
At least 18 percent, or nearly 646,000, of all public and private school teachers are older than age 55. The percentage of teachers in this category is rela- tively consistent across all school levels: 15 percent of primary school teachers, 17 percent of middle school teachers, and 18 percent of high school teachers. There is more variation relative to school enrollment, with smaller schools having a higher percentage of teachers older than age 55…
Click to access COVID-19-Is-Creating-a-School-Personnel-Crisis.pdf
Don’t worry, Carol. New teachers can be created with only 30 minutes of online TFA “training.” All they will need to be able to do is to explain to kids how to log onto Google Classroom and to their online depersonalized education software. Remember those people called “Technical Support Staff” in schools who would come around to make sure your white board or projector was working? Well, in the brave new world of Good Enough Education for Prole Children envisioned by Gates and Schmidt, all teachers will be those folks. They won’t have to know stuff, anymore, about kids or subjects because that’s for the software to do.
None of us will have to think ever again. Gates and Cuomo will do that for us.
Hope this eases your mind.
Bob Shepherd: “Hope this eases your mind.”
Dear Bob, I know that us teachers are ALL KNOWING and that we should be able to teach everyone, especially those of us with a few hours of direct educational training. I am sure that everyone is fully skilled in online work and that there are never and glitches that can’t be fixed by TFA associates, [known commonly as teachers].
It is true that none of us will ever have to think again because Gates and Cuomo will do ALL of our thinking for us.
I am ever so humble. Thank you for your ever knowing tremendous amount of knowledge.
Opps. My computer just went dark. Now ONLY I can fix it.
I remember them as “AV staff”
“Teachers cum AV Staff”
They keep computers going
The Audio Visual folk
When internet is slowing
They troubleshoot the poke
When software causes crashes
As Windows often does
They access data caches
Computer scrub a dubb
The AV staff are needed
To help the teaching bots
The cost of schools defeated
You needn’t pay them lots
Fauci and Birx’s public withdrawal worries health experts
As Trump clamps down on coronavirus communications, voices of experts give way to those of politicians.
5/10/2020
President Donald Trump’s oscillations over the fate of his coronavirus task force have tapped into a growing fear within the nation’s public health community: That at a critical juncture in the pandemic fight, the government’s top health experts might still be seen, but increasingly not heard.
The Trump administration in recent weeks has clamped down on messaging, largely shifting its focus to cheerleading a restart of the nation’s economy even as states and businesses clamor for guidance on how to do so safely.
Key health agencies remain relegated to the background. Some congressional requests for health officials’ testimony are being rejected. And though the task force is still intact, it has not held a press briefing for 13 days — the longest the public has gone without having Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx at the White House podium since the briefings began in late February.
“It’s a blind spot that the federal government doesn’t see this first and foremost as a public health crisis,” said Joshua Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University. “This is the public health crisis of the century, and we’re sometimes treating it as anything but.”
The broader turn away from the health issues at the core of such an all-encompassing national emergency is just the latest chapter in a communications strategy that’s long confounded and frustrated public health experts…
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/10/anthony-fauci-deborah-birx-withdrawal-246165