Let’s just say it upfront. If you wanted to know more about “The State of Education,” and how to “rebuild a more equitable system,” the last person you would ask is a billionaire. Right? Specifically Bill Gates, who has spent billions over the past 20 years promoting high-stakes testing, charter schools, merit pay, value-added measurement of teachers, the Common Core, test-based accountability, and every failed reform I can think of. The media think he is the world’s leading expert on everything, but we know from experience with his crackpot theories and ideas that none of them has made education better, and all of them have demoralized teachers and harmed students and public schools. What hubris to have foisted one failed idea after another and then to convene a summit on how to fix the mess you made, probably by doing the same failed things you already sponsored.
So how can we build a “more equitable system”? Well, one way would be to have higher taxes for people in Bill Gates’ economic bracket. He lives in a state with no income tax. That’s not fair. He should pay his fair share–to his local community, to the state, and to the federal government. So should every other billionaire. I don’t mean to pick on Bill Gates–well, actually I do–since he is the only billionaire who thinks he knows how to redesign education without either knowledge or experience. And he is only the third richest person in the world right now (sorry, Bill). But if he and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk paid more taxes, they wouldn’t be poor. They wouldn’t even be middle-class.
So here are some ideas for the conferees:
- Pay your taxes
- Demand an increase on taxes for people in your income bracket so that wealth is more equitably distributed
- Insist that class sizes be reduced, especially in schools that educate the neediest children
- Leave education to the educators.
Here is your invitation. Please, God, don’t tell me they want everyone to go virtual all the time.
| A reminder: Our live virtual event, The State of Education: Rebuilding a More Equitable System, is this Wednesday, March 3 at 1:00 p.m. E.T. / 11:00 a.m. P.T. While the pandemic has exacerbated existing disparities, it’s also presented a unique opportunity to dramatically overhaul the education system. We’re excited to share with you our full program agenda for this week’s virtual event, filled with voices who will outline the innovative solutions that should be implemented to create an equitable learning environment for all students. Visit our website to learn more and register today to reserve your spot. |
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
OMG, but not a surprise. I wouldn’t do what Bill Gates says if ya paid me.
Thanks for this information, Diane.
Good GAWD … is all I can say. Sure hope Biden doesn’t listen to that ‘wanna be educator’ Gates.
I suspect Bill Gates can pick up the phone and call or FaceTime Biden any time of day or night.
I think it’s the other way around: Biden will call him whenever he wants to do something in education, and asks Bill if it’s OK with him. No, I think he just texts Bill, since he doesn’t want to disturb the great man.
Some will remember The Batphone that the mayor of Gotham City had to call up Batman.
Well, I wrote this during a different error (and no, that’s not misspelled), but only the names have changed
The Gatesphone
The Whitehouse has a Gatesphone
That’s answered by Barack
When Billy Gates is home alone
And simply wants to talk
“And simply wants to bullock”
I know it’s UK English, but it fits and rhymes better, imo.
By the way, texting to and from Bill Gates is known as Gatesting (a double entendre: Gates sting)
The Gatesphone (2)
The Gatesphone is answered
By Joe and his gang
Who jump to the chance for
A Bill Gates harangue
We know from reporting by the NY Times that Bill Gates met with Jeffrey Epstein.
But did Gates ever gatest (one syllable) with Epstein?
Would that be Gatesteining?
Shoot, I think I have a prior engagement Wednesday.
I think we should see what he says. Unfortunately, I have to teach exactly during that time but I hope some of you will listen in.
Bill Gates is like a broken phonograph record.( Remember those? They are coming back in vogue)
He has been saying the same thing for over ten years.
You know, back before he said “we probably won’t know for ten years whether our education stuff has worked”
ROFLMSAO. Perfect!
Mr Texting Aficionado, what is ROFLMSAO?
The “S” stands for “sweet.”
The “S” is my innovation to reflect the reality, btw.
Máté Wierdl
Sorry to see that you too suffer from AIIDS* I have found it to be a lifelong affliction. The military wouldn’t take me because of it. And I only snuck by in education because the adminimals were easily deceived.
*AIIDS = Acronym Identification Impairment Disorder Syndrome. To be included in the DSM-X
EduPundits learned long ago that if they created an acronym for something, it sounded real and important to people with cognitive impairment.
“EduPundits AND THE MILITARY BRASS learned long ago that if they created an acronym for something, it sounded real and important to ALL POLITICIANS NOT JUST THOSE with cognitive impairment.
Example:
He is amazingly talented… just last week he solved climate change (he was on all the talk shows!). Prior to solving climate change, he solved several problems of the third world simultaneously (agriculture, innoculations, global health, and integrating women into labor markets, etc…). It is amazing how he and his wife know so much about everything! Jacks of all trades! He really should reflect on the ethics of money going to billionaires such as himself at the expense of living wages for the working poor.
He’s hoping the philanthropy keeps our attention away from his obscene accumulation of wealth.
He’s hoping we will continue to call it philanthropy. It’s not. It’s profiteering.
The State of Education
The State of Education
Is Washington, it’s true
Cuz Gates lives there
A Billyanaire
Who knows just what to do
He’ll give you test
And give you VAM
And give you Common Core
He’ll never rest
A driven man
Who’d like to give you more
Hey Poet, question: How many Bill Gates does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Answer: F__‰ Bill Gates.
I think I should have written ‘Screw’ instead of ‘F___’, actually, the screwing in of lightbulbs being the butt of the jo— F___ is better.
Exactly, LCT!
What is jo— F___ ? What is the jo— part?
…lightbulbs being the butt of the joke.
F___ is better.
Who’d like to take more
With Gates “give” actually means “take”.
Perhaps I should have written it “give”
This dual use and interpretation of give and take is true for all billionaires: “I’ll give a job so that I you can give me more of what you produce than what I give you as salary for it, and as a result, I can give away more jobs, which then enables me to give away even more jobs.”
Capitalism is about giving; in fact, it’s a pyramid scheme of giving. In math and computer science, we call this a tree not a pyramid.
1) I wonder if participants can interact with him during the conference? Or if there is a question and answer time.
2) I think I need to send a pallet of Diane Ravitch books to Bill Gates.
Gates is not big on interacting.
It’s “My way or the highway”
Just ask anyone who has ever worked with him, including his former business partner Paul Allen.
I guess you can’t ask Paul cuz he’s no longer with us, but he did a Sixty Minutes interview that basically answers the question.
Thank you – just watched it. (Taking a break from work I am doing)
“Allen was miserable and felt he was being marginalized”….. hmmmm sounds like the same effect Gates has on teachers.
Posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Bill-Gates-Invites-You-to-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Education-Costs_Education-Curriculum_Education-Language_Education-Testing-210301-741.html#comment786166
with this comment (which has embedded links which can be found if you read the comment at the above address, which I wish you would, so that the publisher sees that people read about education:
Remember–It is Shared knowledge that MAKES DEMOCRACY POSSIBLE. https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/hirsch.pdf
An ignorant citizenry is the goal, not just the profit made by the businesses that take over our schools. Iff you want to know the facts — the truth about what is necessary to educate and inform our people, who are our future, pay attention to DIANE RAVITCH WHO is the a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University. Listen to Diane not Gates speak about what is needed for our children to learn, and how the billionaires are prioritizing education.
My goodness, read Diane’s books ,https://dianeravitch.com/book-author/diane-ravitch/
like “Slaying Goliath,” where she explains about “the Disrupters–,who have privatized the schools, who believe America’s schools should be run like businesses, with teachers incentivized with threats and bonuses, and schools that need to enter into the age of the gig economy in which children are treated like customers or products. She writes of the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, the Waltons (Walmart), Eli Broad, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others, on the right and the left, as well as corporations, foundations, etc., intent on promoting the privatization of one of our most valued public institutions.
Instead of listening to the know-nothing Gates-rlisten to her speeches https://dianeravitch.com/speeches/
Her daily blog features every writer who offers the the TRUTH about LEARNING and genuine education, and what is happening in America.I read it daily and post many Quicklinks here at OEN, in my Series on Education https://www.opednews.com/Series/legislature-and-governorsL-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-150217-816.html
She created the nonprofit advocacy group Network for Public Education — the most reliable place for FACTS about the war on public schools, and the plot to end an educated citizenry. get the Newsletters – Network For Public Education
The NPE was very busy in 2020, when the NPE published Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures From 1999-2017. https://networkforpubliceducation.org/brokenpromises/
The report provides the first comprehensive examination of charter failure rates over time beginning in 1999 and ending in 2017. By following all charter schools from the year they opened, we were able to determine how long they lasted before closing down. We also determined how many students have been displaced by failing charter schools and where those closures are most likely to occur. In November 2020, NPE exposed that charter schools took between $1-2 Billion in PPP COVID funds meant for small business owners. To read that report, go here. Mark your calendar for the new date for the NPE/NPE Action National Conference. Due to the ongoing dangers posed by COVID-19, the National Conference has been rescheduled to October 23/24, 2021. The conference will still take place at the same location, the Doubletree Hotel in Philadelphia. NPE will be sending more information to registrants shortly. Know that your conference registration is secure, as is NPE’s commitment to speakers and panels”
TRUST ME! You will see the connection between this blog, and what Diane explains about the billionaires and how democracies become dictatorship. Even if you only listen to the first 5 minutes you will see how we are on the way to oligarchy, as the powerful monied elite leads us there.. so interesting…how the tsunami of cash allowed the voices to destroy the labor unions and silence the voice of the people
.Thom Hartmann: Oligarchy; The Hidden History – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3JhNMeWCbg
(BTW Rob Kall, the interviewer is the publisher of Oped News
Bill Gates is the darling of the media, they fall prostrate in his presence and go into a deep trance of adulation and idolatry. The mere mention of his name has reporters, news and culture shows go into a swoon and go dreamy-eyed. You would think he was the 2nd coming of Moses, a prophet to be heeded, his every syllable a gem of wisdom. Yuck! It’s really all those billions that give him a platform to endlessly pontificate on any given issue. He’s toxic to public education.
fatigable
Sorry, that was an error, a goof due to fatigue.
fatiguable is also acceptable
So when you are tired you resort to sensible English spelling which reflects pronunciation. I recommend “fateegabl”.
Yup. Want innovation? How about eliminating inequity in families’ live! How about ensuring healthcare, housing, food, clothing’s, and a well- paying job. How about ensuring union representation for workers. How about ensuring voting rights and equal justice.
Bill Gates total wealth was 100 billion dollars on January 3rd. Forbes is reporting (they do a daily thing about it) that today it is 124.6 billion. Not sure if any of it is taxable.
If he keeps up the pace, he’ll have half a trillion dollar by the end of the year. He could then buy all the education secretaries in the World.
Gates claims he is giving all his money away, but keeps getting richer by the day.
How does that work?
I think I need to try that.
He made The Giving Pledge so he won’t give away a big chunk of his billions until his death. There may be a few exceptions in that pledge. Somehow I believe he will try to control his assets beyond the grace.
So, are you saying if I sign the giving pledge, I will get richer by the day?
Where do I sign?
Obviously Gates doesn’t care if training and/or education of American labor leads to higher salaries or standards of living. CAP which he’s funded began its efforts for “progress” in 2003. CAP’s leader, Neera Tanden, talks a good game about raising minimum wage. The last time the minimum wage was raised was 2009.
I’m a bit torn about Tanden. In a sane world, she shouldn’t be anywhere near a position in public policy, much less OMB. On the other hand, the only reason she has opposition is because of her forebears’ ethnicity. And the outrage about her tweets, considering the crap we had to endure from the Idiot, is rich. It is a conundrum!
Somewhat along the same lines, I had great experiences decades ago learning about and advocating for disability rights, so I still keep up as much as I can. So it is oddly satisfying to see the real story about Madison Cawthorn coming out. A bit torn about this too, but if the stories are true, I hope the SOB goes down and has to beg for a job at a fast food joint soon.
He has a rich father. Won’t happen.
You’re correct- the reasoning for votes against her, serves to mitigate the wrongness of her nomination.
MLK said it was white moderates not Ku Klux Klanners who retard social progress. In an example that will be unwelcome at this blog,
one of the largest evangelical-run adoption and foster programs, the door has been opened to equality for gay people. The Fulton v. City of Philadelphia provides info. about the contrasting Catholic hierarchy’s position and that of Catholic conservative judges..
I think if you register they may send you a link to the recorded event—it’s worth a try.
Does anybody know what happened to the nomination of Cindy Marten to Education Dept? Did the ghouls thwart what looked to me like a very good nomination.
Bill Gates is just another Donald Trump but without molesting women and tweeting.
Nah, he gets his kick out of mass-torturing kids.
People like Gates keep reminding me of the Dilbert strip:
“You have a problem? Quick! Give me money!”
“Okay, but how will you solve our problem?”
“Oh, suddenly this is about you?”
LOL
Indeed. 🙂
Great quote as perfect description for neoliberals and conservatives.
and the people who endlessly give them money
By all the gods, no!!!!
Now it begins. Billy Boy is getting ready to roll out his latest Orwellian nightmare for US public education. The puppet master must know that he’s going to be calling the shots in the new administration.
And all his money will buy whatever disaster he has decided to foist upon the rest of us this time.
When Gates issues a “call for ideas,” you can bet the farm that it’s because HE has had the ideas, that he has hatched some new constrictive, clueless, demoralizing, top-down, authoritarian, inhuman and inhumane scheme, some new horror that we’ll all be living with for the next two or three decades. A “call for ideas” from Bill Gates is always a call for people to come together to learn whatever he has decided they have to do now.
This “education expert” is incapable of learning.
You know what, my feeling is that Joe won the dem primaries instead of Bernie because Joe made a deal with the devil, that is, with Billy: “You are in bad shape Joe, but I’ll help you win the primaries if you give me education. No need to name me the secretary of education, just let me pack the office with my people. ”
By the way, what is the role of Linda Darling-Hammond is selecting all these Gates-puppets to surround the education secretary? Did she approve these associate/assistant/deputy/whatever secretaries?
She always seems to have a hand in this stuff, doesn’t she?
In addition to heading Bidens education transition team, she did the same for Obama.
She us also behind the edTPA exam that is used in many states to decide who can become a teacher.
But Darling-Hammond seems to have escaped all accountability for her legacy and is still the “darling” of many, regularly touted as some sort of education progressive.
Linda Darling-Hammond
She really is the darling
Of ed deformer crowd
And really quite disarming
The critics can be cowed
In the beginning, she says good stuff against testing here, but then in the last part of the talk, she advocates training kids as if they were scientists.
I really would like to see a transcript of the committee meetings where they selected the members of Biden’s ed team.
Typical professorial viewpoint.
She expresses a philosophy which is identical to those of CC. So actually, I can now imagine, she and Bill texting to each other regularly.
You’d think at first she is against testing, but actually, she is just against testing content, and testing skills is fine with her. She thinks, Singapore is a great model for how to teach science. No, in K-12, we do not want to raise scientists, ma’m. We want kids who appreciate science, who are happy to learn some basic stuff, but pls forget about what you want from college students when you need to decide what and how all kids should learn in K-12.
Trying to “raise scientists” is the best way to kill off all interest in science.
And if edTPA is Darling -Hammonds idea of “science”, I’d have to say she knows nothing about it.
These people make me ill.
They parade around as pretend scientists but have no clue.
“In the beginning, she says good stuff against testing ..”
These are precisely the most dangerous types because they say some stuff that sounds reasonable as a lead in to their main theme which is inevitably bullshit.
Scientists are the very few who are left after the misguided efforts to raise scientists have killed off all the scientific curiosity in everyone else.
One problem with the argument that knowledge has increased so fast recently that no student can keep up is that it has been true for a very long time. In fact, knowledge increase is exponential, which means it started out relatively slow and increases at an ever faster pace.
But the main problem is the implication that because one can’t know everything, one should not bother trying to know anything.
Though the knowledge base has increased exponentially, the fundamentals are basically the same as they were a hundred years ago.
The basis of high school physics (Newton’s laws) and high school math (algebra and geometry and even calculus) have not changed in hundreds of years.
The same is true with high school English. And history. Are we supposed to believe that students can’t be expe Ted to learn basic history because the knowledge has increased exponentially recently?
The one area where the change is most pronounced is biology, with genetic engineering, for example. But even in that area, the basic knowledge (about cells, animals, plants, evolutikn and even genetics) have not changed in a long time.
While it is true that it is important to know how to find needed information , that is nothing new.
And the idea that the huge increase in the knowledge base in recent times has someone fundamentally changed the way people should learn — from focussing on knowledge to focussing on skills — is just not true. People can and should still learn the fundamentals in the various subjects because without doing so, skills are just useless.
What can I say? Calculus is 17th century material, and that’s all what most engineers use. I do not see anything in math which was discovered in the last 150-200 years kids in K-12 need to know about.
Now it’s a subject of discussion how much of the latest developments in science kids in K-12 should know about. In my opinion, not much. They could learn about Einstein’s or Crick-Watson’s discoveries on a fairy tale level, but certainly not enough to be graded on.
Euclid’s geometry is over 2000 years old!!!
Man, I can’t believe you still teach people that!
It is SO outdated.
You mathematicians are such old fogies.
Get with the program, will you?
Physicists are pretty bad, but at least their important stuff is less than 500 years old.
Mathematicians are still living in the stone age counting pebbles.
And obsessing over infinity.
No wonder it takes you so long to progress.
Yeah, I know. Compared to infinity, any finite progress is unnoticeable. Mathematicians have shorter lives than physicist; infinity is the reason. The spectre of infinity haunts us, like Gates haunts school kids.
And don’t even get me going on “imaginary ” numbers, which seem to have sent the physicists off on a wild snark hunt from which they may never return.
The man who knew infinity
The man who knew infinity
Knew nothing else, it’s true
Infinity, obscured, you see
The real world from his view
I totally agree with you guys. Watching her made me queasy.
Remember Bill’s last BIG IDEA for education?
InBloom
A single database of all scores and outcomes of all educational software and testing, privately owned by, you guessed it, Bill Gates. But it wasn’t going to stop there. It would be the national gradebook not only throughout K-12 and college but throughout people’s careers as well.
And if you wanted to play–to you the results from your software reported in the national gradebook that every district and state and employer was using, you would have to ask permission of Bill Gates.
As in, Mr. Gates, can I ship your operating system on our computers?
Orwellian. And a whole bunch of states gleefully jumped on, sight unseen, until they were forced to reconsider by a lot of bad press about student privacy rights. No one even talked about the monopolistic control of education and HR that this would have given Gates. People clearly weren’t thinking. If he had succeeded in this, he would have set himself up as THE NATIONAL GATEKEEPER of curricula and grades and evaluations, and his system would have determined the course of people’s lives.
Because Gates should be the decider for the rest of us. We should creep about under his colossal shadow, asking, “May I?” He should decide who gets to play and who doesn’t and what matters and is of value and what doesn’t or isn’t. And we should pay him for the privilege of this serfdom.
When you think about all the kids and teacher who are tortured by Gates, you’d call this martyrdom not serfdom.
cx: And if you wanted to play–if you wanted the results from your software reported in the national gradebook that every district and state and employer was to be using, you would have to ask permission of Bill Gates and pay him for this. Want to play? Pay the toll.
He Sees You When You’re Sleeping
The utter subjugation of the populace didn’t happen via secret police and mass executions as in Stalin’s Russia.
No, it was much more subtle, occurring bit by bit, drip by drip, a boiled frog phenomenon.
It all started, seemingly innocently, with Student Longitudinal Data Systems, or SLDSs. These were database systems into which were entered all of a student’s information–grades, disciplinary actions, attendance records, health records, demographic and economic information, standardized test scores, and so on.
The Department of Education, with a big grant from a billionaire donor, rolled out the national educational reporting system, run by a private corporation, Elenkos, in a “public/private partnership.” This, in effect, made that corporation the gatekeeper for all educational software in the country, for no one could sell a new online textbook product that didn’t interface with the reporting system, so Elenkos got to decide who could play and who couldn’t. This proved to be enormously lucrative and a semi-effective means for thought control. The National Educational Reporting Validation EcoSystem, or NERVES, was followed up by retinal scanners and galvanic skin response wristbands that students would wear. These fed data about student attention to task, or gritfulness, directly into NERVES and alerted teachers when that attention strayed. These were the forerunners of the “identification buttons,” popularly known as “ID Butts,” that employers started having their employees wear–the ones wirelessly readable by the ubiquitous workplace drones that swept the floors and washed the windows and emptied the trash and inventoried supplies and so much, much else.
Of course, the national security services had bankrolled, many years before, the creation of several social media platforms to which people would post EVERYTHING about themselves, and it was a simple matter to data mine these to create extraordinarily detailed profiles of every citizen.
And then it only made sense to extend NERVES from school to the workplace, making it easy to provide prospective employers with transcripts and test scores and other “Human Capital Management” data and to add to each citizen’s NERVES profile his or her digital badges, or microcredentials; work evaluations; and workplace time-on-task, location tracking, and other data.
And then the Social Responsibility Transparency Acts (TransActs), which followed the 2028 jobs riots caused by automation of just about everything, merged Human Capital Management data from NERVES with credit ratings and credit card records and banking records and intelligence agency social media data profiles and Armed Services records and police records and GPS location data from people’s cellphones to produce the Social Credit Index, or SCI, which had as it motto,
Scientia potentia est.
How difficult, in comparison, were the jobs of the Thought Police in Orwell’s 1984. All the Ministry of Love had were spy helicopters, collaborators with the Thought Police, and two-way telescreens that watched you as you watched them. Of course, many of the designers of this totalitarian nightmare never stopped to consider that they were violating Robert’s Rule: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/01/21/roberts-rule/
Copyright 2019. Robert D. Shepherd. All rights reserved.
These insider stories make me think, you, Bob, are a spy; a spy for us.
Imagine what would have happened if all states in the country had in fact adopted Bill Gates’s Orwellian database and reporting system. If you were a small publisher who wanted to sell, say, a new online civics program for use in K-12 schools, you would have to compete against companies whose software was plugged into that system. So, you would have to get plugged in, too, and that company would decide whether to let you play or not and charge you for the privilege. In other words, that company would be the tollgate, the gatekeeper, for all curricula, and guess who would get a piece of every transaction?
People attacked this based on the student data privacy issue, but this one, I think, was even more significant and more dangerous in the long run.
An Orwellian nightmare, and very, very lucrative and empowering for the guy at the top
“Orwellian Scheme” is a way too objective and philosophical term here; we need something that reflects our emotions better, so we feel some satisfaction when we say it or write it down.
Diane doesn’t allow such language on her blog,. LOL.
Billsmellian scheme?
Decentralize. Destandardize. Empower teachers and instructional departments in individual schools to make their own decisions and curricula and pedagogy and to do their own testing. This is how you get real innovation. Centralize the power, and you get corruption and stagnation.
Let me put it this way. Suppose that you have a great idea for a new educational product. Suppose, for example, that it’s a system for developing syntactic fluency because you’ve figured out that one of the barriers to fluent reading is inability to follow (to parse automatically and unconsciously) sentences with complicated structures. Now, suppose that you can send sales people to individual school buildings to talk to individual English department chair-people empowered to make textbook purchasing decisions for their departments. You can do this. You don’t have to have vast resources. You can start small and build, building by building. Your innovation can catch on.
Suppose, instead, that the decision to purchase is made by a school district or a county or a state. Now, you have to go up against the huge resources thrown at these fewer customers by the big players in the industry. Good luck. Or suppose that “building syntactic fluency” isn’t in the state “standards.” Forget it. You’re out.
Local decision making empowers innovation. Standardization and centralized control kills it.
cx: to make their own decisions about curricula and pedagogy and standards to design their own tests
if you want to rebuild education, I suspect few politicians have a clue what to do. What’s worse is they don’t know they are clueless.
Of course small class size and a lot of planning time are essential, but educators and politicians alike are in for a huge reality check. When students return to school, their scores will be all over the board.
First we must determine what levels they are on. This requires assessment. NO THE BIG TEST ISN’T IT. A test is only a snapshot in time so what is needed is a small pre test that goes immediately to the teachers. THE PURPOSE OF THE TEST IS ONLY INFORMATIONAL! That will give a “jumping off spot for each child.
And then we begin to break down and dispose off the current racist system. This time has come for a reality check. 1. Letter grades are a lie. They differ from state to state, city to city, school to school and, yes classroom to classroom.
Grade levels are moot. How many 7th graders are on the 7th grade level in everything?
The outrageous pass fail system that is designed to push kids out of school. When a child doesn’t “pass” a grade level, do we pass them without learning or retain them until they see themselves as too old to graduate.
We must realize that school may no longer be a game to see who is first and goes to college and who is last and is thrown into the streets like rubbish. It’s time to make school about learning.
When students come back to in person schooling, educators and politicians will get a huge slap in the face. Kids scores will be all over the board. Now what?
Trolling alert:
I’m sorry but for 50 years I have been trying to do a wake up call alerting all to a system of education that was never designed to serve all kids.
We must design a system that respects the intelligence and abilities of all children. The answer my friends is
(drum roll please. to indicate trolling ahead). “Stop Politically Driven Education”. Roman and Littlefield publisher. Finall a book full of actual answers
If tests were administered to you and you were found to perform less well than your average peer on that day possibly because of family and community turmoil and impoverishment, personal food and shelter insecurity, a language barrier, hopelessness etc. what is the mechanism by which you would improve as a result of more sophisticated tests?
Linda,
Thank you. That is a question that Adam Harris at The Atlantic should be asking of John King.
(I changed it a bit):
If tests were administered to a student and the student was found to perform less well than their average peer on that day possibly because of family and community turmoil and impoverishment, personal food and shelter insecurity, a language barrier, hopelessness etc. what is the mechanism by which you would address it?
The answer is simple: the kid needs to repeat the test when he had more to eat. Hence we are planning on so called summer standardized tests which will solve this problem. We have been developing, in collaboration with Microsoft, an experimental software which will train kids for these tests without the need of teachers.
Mate,
I’m sure that some of the terrible education journalists would accept the pablum you just wrote as an answer, but it’s nonsense. It’s as ridiculous as a scientist answering a question about a study promoting a new drug by saying “yes it works on everyone but some people wanted to die and they may not be included”. No doubt there are too many education reporters who would dutifully report on this new miracle drug as a miracle because they believe that nonsense was a good answer.
The correct follow up to that nonsense would be “you did not answer my question. Are you saying that ed reformers believe that if they keep giving the test over and over again, a child in poverty who doesn’t have enough to eat, medical care. private tutors, small class sizes and all the other things Bill Gates children have will get a higher score?”
If Adam Harris reported on what the ed reformers are really saying, he would have to write that their solution to kids performing poorly on state tests is to make them take more tests! And Adam Harris would notice that the ONLY money that these ed reformers want to spend on these most impoverished children is to spend more money testing them.
NYCPSP, I intended my answer to sound nonsensical, since that’s what we always get from these professional charlatans.
These people have absolutely problem with giving nonsensical answers or lie, since they really, truly don’t care one bit about education or kids.
Mate,
I knew you were intending to sound nonsensical! But what is depressing to me is that education journalists would have dutifully transcribed and reported that answer as a brilliant response that completely justifies why they report every education story as if these education reformers had the most amazing new ideas that will clearly solve all the problems in education!
You and I know it is nonsensical, but the typical education reporter would think it was intelligent and a sign that these ed reformers really care about kids — after all, they keep saying they care about kids and how much their ideas to keep testing them will help kids so it must be reported as true.
Basically, education reform is similar to “Make America Great Again”.
Education reporters embrace ed reformers’ claims that they just want to “Make Education Great Again” and those reporters are about as ignorant as most Trump supporters in that they simply worship at the feet of people offering nonsensical explanations about how to Make Education Great Again and just know they are right and they don’t need no stinking facts to prove it!
I am going to assume that Adam Harris is not a “Make Education Great Again” true believer, but that instead he is a real journalist who understands that just because a rich person offers pablum and people who want the rich person to like them offer pablum, it doesn’t make pablum true.
Ah, OK.
Gates, the least accountable man in the world.
I can think of a glutinous blob in Palm Beach who also fits the bill. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Trump is loathed by a vast swath of Americans. He lost the election.
Gates pays for good PR and he appointed himself for life.
He has pockets deep enough to warp the U.S. in perpetuity.
Does anyone know Adam Harris, the staff writer at the Atlantic, who is the one who will be asking questions of John King during the “Where Does Education Reform Go from Here?” keynote session?
He has a twitter feed. I hope he acts like a real journalist and does more than just let John King speak without challenging John King on what ed reform and testing of students is supposed to accomplish. I hope Adam Harris directly asks John King why Ed Reform has NEVER included the things that Bill Gates demanded for his own children — small class sizes, private tutors, good food, counseling, access to medical care. Why doesn’t John King think small class size is important when Bill Gates’ children got that?
I hope Adam Harris avoids being co-opted to push the ed reform agenda that if John King’s charter schools can teach kids in urban areas cheaply in large class sizes using “no excuses”, then that is all that any kid (except Bill Gates’ children) should get. I hope Adam Harris understands that these charter promoters are using the success of large class size/ no excuses charters to “prove” that kids who need a lot more don’t need anything but newly minted college grads who will treat urban children in the no excuses manner that Gates and King believe is all they need.
I hope Adam Harris acts like a real journalist and not an ed reform sycophant and asks why it doesn’t matter that the “successful” charters are the one where extraordinary numbers of students disappear — something that would be questioned if middle class white families were supposedly voluntarily pulling their children from top ranked schools but is not questioned when so many African American parents do. Does Adam Harris really believe the racist myth that all those African American parents who chose a charter because of its strong academics then turned around and “changed their mind” about wanting their kid to have a good education? I hope Adam Harris understands that lots of children are NOT welcome in the “high performing” charters that supposedly welcome all students and whose “success” is used to justify large class size/ no excuses/ low funding of public schools.
Why doesn’t the school that Bill Gates’ kids attended force their children into taking the state tests, which they can do? Did Bill Gates send his kids to a school that doesn’t care about their kids? How did Bill Gates know his kids were learning anything if his kids weren’t taking the very same state tests that he says it the only way to know what kids are learning?
I hope Adam Harris acts like a science journalist who doesn’t accept the hyping of drug companies and the scientists they fund who push false “miracle cures” that work only on selected patients. I hope he doesn’t act like the typical education journalist who would say “hey, this patient that the drug company presented to me was cured after taking that medicine and the patient says it’s all because of that medicine, so it doesn’t matter to me whether it works on 99% of patients or on 10% of patients because the drug company told me that the missing patients didn’t want to be cured!”
I hope Adam Harris does not act like the typical education reporter would if they were moderating this and decide “It doesn’t matter how many children go missing as long as some parents are happy and Bill Gates is happy. I will not ask any inconvenient questions that Bill Gates wouldn’t like because that might make people disbelieve that a large class size/ no excuses charter school where huge numbers of students disappear might not be the model for education that Bill Gates claims. I will not wonder why Bill Gates puts his own kids in a private school with small classes that doesn’t have “no excuses” discipline because I will just assume that his white children deserve that and the kids John King is talking about do not.”
Where is this “keynote session” you are talking about in teh beginning?
I just clicked on the “full program agenda” link Diane Ravitch posted above (on the invitation).
Calling it “keynote” was my own wording, but there are only two sessions and that’s the first session.
Scroll down and you’ll see the schedule
“Where Does Education Reform Go from Here?”
To Hell, if we’re lucky.
since one of the tech tyrant’s favorites has been withdrawn from contention for OMB, who will they choose next? Raimondo, Wall Street’s favorite, secured the job at Commerce- she’s the buddy of Cory Booker.
I get regular emails decrying Gina Raimondo’s “reform” policies in RI education.
Hopefully she will have nothing to do with education at the Commerce Department.
The liberal alternative to the Federalist Society is purportedly the American Constitution Society. University chapters of ACS presented a panel in Jan., “Corporate Influence in progressive legal spaces: Why is Amazon Lawyer on ACS’s Board of Directors?” (Intercept)
It’s VILLAINthropy, people. VILLAINthropy.
BTW, Gates’ book was #1 on the NYT Non-Fiction Bestseller List.
I think it should be on the Fiction list. & should NOT be a bestseller.
Reminds me of Arne Dumkin’s book, How Schools Work, which was basically empty pages bound together because, of course, he hasn’t a CLUE about “how schools work.”
Again, I say, WHY don’t these so-called people just LEAVE.US.ALONE.
Bill should have called his first book “The (Myway or) The Highway Ahead” because his basic belief is that he — and only he — has all the answers.
Still, I hope you guys listen in to what he says. I need to go teach…
If Arne had titled his book “How my mind works”, empty pages would have been even more apt
Arne Duncan’s Gates-inspired Race to the Top was a total flop and a waste of billions of dollars.
Oh–& I’d meant to add–here in these Untied States just WHERE is the “state” of Education?
No state I can identify. They ALL give “standardized” tests, precluding Education.
Prof. Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown Catholic University is worth noting. He is listed as a scholar associated with a companion initiative, 1776 Unites, to Trump’s 1776 Commission (Philanthropy Roundtable 10-7-2020). Not surprisingly, Mitchell’s cv lists a grant from the Koch-linked Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and he’s a visiting scholar at the Koch’s Heritage Foundation.
In the same Philanthropy Roundtable article, “The 1776 Commission: A brief guide for the perplexed”, Ian Rowe, a resident fellow at AEI is listed as a scholar associated with 1776 Unites. He was with TFA, the Bill Gates Foundation and he started a charter
school. He’s also listed on a page at the Fordham Institute.
Mitchelll and Rowe’s initiative, 1776 Unites, announced its own K-12 curriculum. Their study in broad terms appears to champion each person lifting himself up. And, I presume we can infer the rest of the libertarian follow-up, people left to die like feral dogs in the gutter.
I prefer Prof. Craig A. Ford’s review of the 1776 Commission report (NCR on-line). The report features a “racist, white God”.
I don’t like the Christian slant of the 1776 United crowd (all African Americans, by the way) but I do like their rejection of critical race theory and embrace of teaching a core of shared knowledge a la ED Hirsch. I heard Ian Rowe recently on a Commonwealth Club forum on history education, and I thought he was the most cogent of the crew, which included a Harvard professor and CA social studies guru Michelle Herzog.
From Rowe’s bio, posted at the pro-charter anti-public school Thomas Fordham Institute:
“Rowe is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at the Charter School Growth Fund, and is founding Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-based, International Baccalaureate public charter high schools to open in the Bronx in 2022. Rowe is also writing a forthcoming (2021) book, tentatively entitled Agency (Templeton Press), that seeks to inspire young people of all races to build strong families and become masters of their own destiny, despite life’s challenges.”
“Entrepreneur-in-Residence” pretty much describes everything that is wrong with those who believe you can privatize public goods like public education, Medicare and anything else where “entrepreneurs” see a way to profit handsomely by serving only the least expensive Americans while demanding disproportionately resources as a reward for profiting handsomely because they are doing such a good job at serving the people – often children – who don’t cut into their profits to serve.
Can I pick and choose what I like about Ian Rowe?
Pondi “Can I pick and choose what I like about Ian Rowe?”
No, you can’t. 🙂 If somebody shows any sign of fondness for charter schools, the infection will rapidly take over the whole body and mind, and it will always end up with incurable worshipping of choice for the few. Recovery from the disease has been reported only in rumors.
Ian Rowe gets to promote Thomas Sowell’s research on charters being far, far superior to public schools without being asked even one question that would actually challenge the nonsense he is saying:
Ian Rowe, in 2019, your Boys Prep Charter School in the Bronx had a Math proficiency rate of 66% and an even worse ELA proficiency rate of 49%. But in 2019 at the far superior Bronx charter school, Success Academy Bronx 1, the Math proficiency rate was 98% (not the embarrassing 66% that your mediocre charters are satisfied with) and the ELA proficiency rate was 90% (not the far inferior 49% that your mediocre charter managed).
So, please explain why anyone who supports charters would ever support your charter when they know that more than half the students in your charter failed the state ELA exam and the research you believe in proves that almost every single one of them would have been far better students if they had been lucky enough to have Eva Moskowitz overseeing their education instead of you?
Ian Rowe loves to compare apples to oranges to “prove” his charters are superior, but you won’t catch him comparing his charter directly to the supposedly far superior charters that prove that his own charter is vastly inferior to “good” charters and should be closed down so more far superior charters like Success Academy can take their place.
Ponderosa
Take a look at the photo of Mitchell and read his bio at the Georgetown site.
Clarification- 4th paragraph of Philanthropy Roundtable article,” The 1776 Commission: A Brief Guide for the Perplexed”, “In addition to the 1776 Commission, another initiative was launched this Feb. to promote America’s founding values. 1776 Unites is a project …announced its own K-12 curriculum intended to counter that of the 1619 Project by offering… (stories that show) what our freedom makes possible even in the most difficult circumstances…the curriculum …maintains a special focus on stories that celebrate black excellence, reject victimhood culture…”
The 5th paragraph states, “Despite their similar names and similar missions, the 1776 Commission and 1776 Unites are unrelated and Rowe says there is no coordination planned between them at this time”.
The article lists 1776 Unites members – reps from AEI and Hoover Institute, 3 from private universities and, Unite’s founder.