Here we go again. Before either Secretary-designate Miguel Cardona or Deputy Secretary Cindy Marten have been confirmed by the Senate, key jobs in the Department of Education are being filled by staff from the Gates Foundation and DFER, both of which are champions of bad ideas and antagonists of public schools. From my experience in the U.S. Department of Education, it is customary to allow the Secretary and Deputy Secretary to choose their assistant secretaries, and the assistant secretaries choose their deputies. These appointments seem to have been made by the White House. Please note that the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development shapes policy for the Department. The administration previously announced a fervent supporter of high-stakes testing—Ian Rosenblum of Education Trust in New York—as the acting Assistant Secretary for that office.
Andrew Ujifusa reports in Education Week:
The latest round of political appointees to the U.S. Department of Education include a veteran of Capitol Hill and Beltway education groups, the former leader of Democrats for Education Reform’s District of Columbia affiliate, and two former Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation staffers.
The Biden administration appointments, announced Feb. 3, fill spots in key offices, although nominees forthe top jobs in the office for civil rights and office of planning, evaluation, and policy development. (We gave folks a heads up about two of the most recent appointments hereand here before they were officially announced.) However, a few such jobs are being filled on an acting basis.
It’s difficult to discern just one trend or policy direction based on Biden’s Education Department appointments so far; those who’ve worked for and supported teachers’ unions in the past, for example, will be working alongside union skeptics and those who’ve drawn labor’s ire in the past. The administration announced its first set of department appointees last month, and it included two former National Education Association staffers.…
Here are a few notable names from the latest round of appointments:
Jessica Cardichon, deputy assistant secretary, office of planning, evaluation, and policy development. Cardichon is an education policy veteran in Washington. She comes to the Education Department from the Learning Policy Institute, a K-12 policy and research group founded and led by Linda Darling-Hammond, who led Biden’s transition team for the department. Cardichon was the group’s federal policy director. While at LPI, Cardichon contributed to reports about COVID-19 relief, how to “reimagine schooling,” and student access to certified teachers. [I worked during the election on a committee on assessment chaired by Cardichon on behalf of Biden. I urged the committee to recommend a suspension of the federally mandated testing in spring 2021 and to propose the elimination of that part of the law. When my proposals were ignored, I resigned from the committee.]
She’s also worked as education counsel to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on the Senate education committee; the Alliance for Excellent Education, a research and advocacy group, and at Teachers College, Columbia University. A long-time ally of teachers’ unions and a critic of standardized testing, Sanders has taken on a big role in the Senate during the creation of a new COVID-19 relief package.
Ramin Taheri, chief of staff, office for civil rights. Taheri comes to the department after serving as the District of Columbia chapter director of Democrats for Education Reform, a group that promotes charter schools, K-12 education funding, test-based teacher and school accountability, and other policies. The group divides opinion in the left-leaning K-12 policy space. Some have championed the group for focusing on issues they say will better served students of color and disadvantaged learners, while other claim DFER undermines teachers’ unions and traditional public schools. News that DFER was backing certain big-city superintendents to be Biden’s education secretary provoked pushback from union supporters and others skeptical of DFER. (Cardona was not on DFER’s list of preferred choices.) Taheri has also worked at Chiefs for Change, a group of district superintendents that provokes similar, if not identical, political sentiments.
Last year, DFER’s D.C. chapter under Taheri provoked controversy by singling out a candidate for the District of Columbia Council for wanting to cut police funding. Asked about the negative advertising, Taheri told the Washington City paper that the group wanted to inform voters about issues beyond education, and that the candidate’s position on police budgets was “deeply unpopular” with voters. (The candidate, Janeese Lewis George, who accused DFER of fearmongering, ultimately won her election.) The question of whether police should be in schools, and educators’ attitudes toward school resource officers, gained prominence after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of police last year. The City Paper’s story about DFER’s mailers focused on George was published three days after Floyd’s death. Taheri later said that the group’s mailers were a mistake.
Nick Lee, deputy assistant secretary, office of planning, evaluation, and policy development; Sara Garcia, special assistant, office of planning, evaluation, and policy development. Both Lee and Garcia come to the department from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where Lee was a senior program officer and Garcia was a program officer.
Although Lee previously managed $10 million in annual education grants covering both K-12 and higher education, according to his LinkedIn profile, he’s now listed himself as an assistant secretary for higher education at the department as of this month. Garcia also has a background in higher education, and used to work on the Senate education committee for Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who is now chairwoman of the committee.
The Gates Foundation has had a long, complex, and controversial involvement in education policy. For many years, it focused its considerable grant-making power on teacher effectiveness, teacher-performance systems, and support for the Common Core State Standards; by 2015, the foundation estimated it had put $900 million in grants toward teacher policy and programs. Previously, it had focused on supporting small high schools. These efforts became more politically controversial over time.
Supporters have applauded its focus on educators and improving instruction, while critics say its outsized influence has had a detrimental effect on policymakers. A 2018 study of one of its biggest teacher-effectiveness efforts in three districts showed no gains for students.
In recent years, the foundation has shifted its focus to support higher education access for students of color and disadvantaged students. (Note: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides general operating support to Education Week, which retains sole editorial control over its content.)
The full list of appointments announced Feb. 3 is here.
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/department-education-announces-more-biden-harris-appointees
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The last link to a list of appointments is flawed. It takes you to a September 04, 2018 press account of the B&M Gates Foundation “investments.”
I believe this is the proper link
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/department-education-announces-more-biden-harris-appointees
fixed the link.
Jessica the Liar.
Jessica the Liar.
Not really surprising. Follow the money.
$ from Charter & Testing industries put max pressure on Biden administration. Only antidote is organized citizens. Tell Democrats to get a divorce from 40 yrs of bad education policy https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/22/2011121/-Democrats-Time-for-an-Education-Policy-Divorce
How can Democrats move education forward if they keep repeating the same bad policy mistakes? Biden needs to remember the promises he made, and none of them included appointing DFER and Gates retreads. https://www.facebook.com/networkforpubliced/photos/a.1024804970914614/4003778276350587
From my experience as a blog poet following education, it is customary in Democratic Administrations to allow Bill and Melinda Gates to choose the assistant secretaries and assistants to assistants in the Department of educationn.
In the Obama administration, Bill and Melinda and Eli chose the Secretary of Education too.
Maybe this is progress.
They are merely choosing all the staff except the Secretary.
SomeDam It sounds like Gates if following the Koch playbook.
They buy people for positions who either have or are willing to spout their file-box of impenetrable ideologies.
Un-Koch My Campus
Un-Gates and Un-Jobs our Educational System CBK
“They buy people for positions who either have or are willing to spout their file-box of impenetrable ideologies.”
I am so going to steal this!
What good is “one of our own in the White House,” if policy is still dictated by billionaires? What good is the notion of “working with progressives,” if they are not represented in appointments. Democrats keep putting lipstick in the same old corporate pig.
Its good to have a mole
In White House, yes indeed
And better than a troll
As blatant as a weed
A mole can tell you stuff
You never knew before
When things are very tuff
He’ll even out the score
I wonder if Bill and Malinda are looking for an experienced blog poet.
I’d do it for a couple mil.
Hell, I’d do it for a couple hundred thousand.
Of course, I would still fawn over them like I usually do.
They don’t call me the “fawn mower” for nothin’
Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.
There’s no real debate in ed reform. They all follow the Gates and Walton agenda. We need people from outside the ed reform echo chamber or we’re going to get the exact same policy we’ve gotten thru the three former Presidents- Bush, Obama, Trump.
It’s a shame public school students have no effective or committed advocates at the federal level. It’s not fair to them. Their schools became unfashionable and no one told them they were slated as collateral damage in the ed reform effort to “reinvent” (privatize).
“Ed reform” is a raw deal for public school students and families. It’s either irrelevant to them or actively harmful to their schools.
Could we get ONE person who supports traditional public schools?
The vast majority of students and families attend the public schools ed reformers disdain and demonize. How did our students end up with NO advocates at the US Department of Education?
It’s ludicrous. Complete and utter capture by the ed reform lobby.
I can’t wait to see the latest iteration of NCLB and RttT.
Let’s sink some more billions into the Gates/Walton plan for public education.
Twenty solid years of this garbage. It seems we can’t quit the ed reform echo chamber no matter who we vote for- we’re stuck with this agenda forever.
No matter who you vote for, you get Jeb Bush.
It is sad that Biden is another “bait and switch” Democrat. His appointments to the DOE should include balance, not only corporate reform cheerleaders.
Frankly, none of us should be surprised. Biden’s brother owns charter schools. We knew this from the beginning. Obviously, he is far and away better than Trump and DeVos, but no teacher should have expected Biden to be friendly to public ed. There was no bait and switch here. Just, sadly, more of the same.
I suppose we will learn whether Dr. Cardona is really “a public school guy” that will stand his ground or cave to the deformers that are serving in his administration.
So we got a figurehead public school supporter to “lead” the Department but it will be staffed by the exact same people who have been running the ed reform lobby for the last 20 years.
How sad for kids who attend public schools. No one works for them- their schools have been deemed unfashionable by the elite policy leaders.
What a rip off. Same old, same old.
Here’s the DFER Twitter:
https://twitter.com/ramintaheri?lang=en
It’s all promotion of DFER and the other ed reform lobbies and public school bashing.
So just like the Obama Administration. I could not be more disappointed in Joe Biden. He tricked his voters.
If I wanted Jeb Bush to continue running public education I would have voted for Trump.
Imagine, if only the US had 2 national teacher’s unions who could leverage their numbers to end harmful public education policies.
Hard to imagine.
I know I can’t.
The echo chamber has a kind of pipeline. They only hire Believers and the Believers all come out of the same foundations and university departments.
They’re all the same because they are literally THE SAME people, administration after administration.
The restriction of debate and new ideas happens at the hiring level. If you buck any part of the ed reform agenda you simply aren’t considered for employment. It’s why we see the lock step agreement on all issues and the lack of any questioning or debate. It’s a belief system and the core tenets are what matters- labor unions are bad, private is better than public, schools need to be punished and berated into compliance.
“The schools” don’t matter at all. The privatized system is what’s important.
Here’s the latest “work” by the ed reform echo chamber addressing the pandemic in public schools:
“If the pandemic vanished tomorrow and all U.S. schools instantly reopened in exactly the same fashion as they were operating last February, how many parents would be satisfied to return their daughters and sons to the same old familiar classrooms, teachers, schedules and curricula?
A lot fewer than the same old schools and those who run and teach in them are expecting back!”
They see it as an advantage for the schools they market and promote- private and charter schools.
This is the level of effort we get – they contribute nothing to 90% of the students in the country. 100% ideologically-driven lobbying.
It looked for a minute like we MIGHT veer slightly from this lobby, but I guess that’s impossible and we’re stuck with this for the next 20 years, like the last 20.
Spin Cycle
Round and round and round we go
Where we stop, we never know
‘cept we know it will be where
William Gates will own a share
Will have the Chair
Will do the same as the other billionaire, the one who wants guns in schools for grizzly bears.
20+ years of mandatory high-stakes standardized testing, the Common [sic] Core [sic], data walls and data chats, school grading, and other bs invalid accountability numerology, at a cost of many, many, many billions of taxpayers, has bought us what?
No increase in test scores.
No closing of achievement gaps.
A dramatic devolution of curricula and pedagogy, especially in ELA, to make it more test preppy.
A de-emphasis on every other subject area except those subject to federally mandated tests (tested: ELA and Math; not testing: science, civics, art).
and what do these geniuses decide to do as a result of these decades of waste?
Double down.
Clueless fools.
Bob It’s like Trump: The more reformers get away with, the more they get away with. CBK
It’s insane. These people who claim to be all about accountability are never held to account. Master of the Universe Bill Gates has done profound damage to U.S. K-12 education, and he is totally clueless about any of it.
Bob Whether Gates et al know it or not, they are not unlike those who surround Trump including his media . . . in the sense of having created their own echo chamber.
To be kind, I think the very size and numbers that national groups, institutions, and governments, have to deal with create problems of their own . . . even before we get to the problem of educating the super-rich and powerful about what they are doing to unhook democracy from its vibrant ground and source of creativity. . . that is, IF they don’t already know and embrace it. With Gates, however, I have always felt he was well-meaning, but NOT self-reflective; and so totally unaware of his own . . . ahem . . . educational absences? (Walton and Koch, I think are different stories altogether.)
Also, I remember that, way earlier in this blog, it was remarked that Diane was pretty-much dismissed as an anti-Gates radical of sorts. Our critique of Gates and the rest is of the relationship between public and private in a democracy. . . a political philosophy that underpins the whole kit-and-kabootle of what they are doing, and not merely topical aspects and pieces of it.
But if that general ‘take’ (and others like it) is still stuck in Gates’ head as its own little ideology of people who resist, nothing else will get in.
CLASS DISMISSED, in at least two sense of that phrase. CBK
I think that Gates truly did not give a microbe on a hair on a rat’s tushy whether the “standards” hacked together by Lord Coleman were any good. He just wanted a single set of national ones to key software and Orwellian databases to because he though that in-person schooling in brick-and-mortar buildings was wasted on Prole children and that he could make yet another fortune peddling an online alternative. I further think that he started inBloom with the express purpose of setting himself up as the nation’s gradebook–the one entity with which any developer of curricula would have to play ball. The horrific, disgusting behavior of the oligarchical monopolist.
Bob It’s amazing what the power of money can do. CBK
I think, CBK, that you give Gates too much credit. He has long been a completely cutthroat and ruthless monopolist. He instituted stack ranking as company policy at Microsoft. He is breathtakingly arrogant. Like Trump, he refuses to learn. He was lucky, and then he was ruthless, and he made a lot of money, and now, because he has a lot of money, he thinks he’s freaking the answer to everyone’s problems. But as often as not, he is the problem.
He’s not a slow study. He’s a no study. He has no idea, none whatsoever, what damage he has done and how profound it is.
The best that English teachers can do at present is to pretend to be “teaching the Common Core” and pretend to be doing test prep and actually teach English behind their administrators’ backs. Plan a coherent, engaging lesson;plan a coherent, engaging scope and sequence. Ignore the Common [sic] Core [sic]. Then, when done with your planning, go back and plug in items from the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list. Oh, here we are studying CC$$.ELA.L.666.FU.
Love this bob! Where I live they are closing a middle school without figuring out what’s wrong w curriculum!!
The admins won’t look at things carefully enough to know that the correlation of your lessons to the “standards” is total hocus pocus, like the “standards” themselves.
For many decades, every state had its separate set of standards, but Educational Publishers would put out one textbook and, miraculously, it PERFECTLY CORRELATED with every one of these fifty sets of standards. LMAO. That’s because the correlations were completely bogus. But that didn’t matter. They were long and detailed and official sounding.
Lauren Bob is telling us to AKA: fake the fake and be a real teacher. CBK
BOB I have always had the sense that Gates believes in himself and so tends to portray a genuineness that many others of his ilk do not. He’s way off course, but he believes he’s doing the right thing?
(Hit me with whatever you have on hand if you want for thinking that.) CBK
Yikes. Cx: at a cost of many, many billions of taxpayer dollars
so much for the idealists who thought Jill Biden would guide ed policy! this is crushing but activists have successfully mobilized to influence economic, labor, and foreign policy; i’m hoping this can happen in education as well.
lauren h coodley Well . . . Bill and Melinda are probably very nice people. CBK
Well, even Trump is prolly a very nice person — in a parallel universe where down is up, right is left and white is black.
But in that Universe, Diane Ravitch is prolly evil, so as they say, you can’t win and you can’t even break even. Only bad..
It’s time for the teachers’ unions to step up and say, “Enough.” Take it to the streets and demand an end to
the federal high-stakes testing mandate,
school grading, and
VAM
These are all scams, and they are abusive. Allowing them to continue is complicity in child abuse.
We now have an entire generation of teachers whose careers have played out under this Deformer Occupation of our K-12 public schools. Enough. Enough. Enough.
Unions: start representing the interests of kids and teachers in this regard. THIS IS YOUR DUTY. Shirking it is malfeasance of the highest order.
It the absence of sound public policy, it is time for parents to refuse to allow their children to be exploited by testing companies and clueless politicians. Opt out!