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Leonie Haimson: Why Brooklyn Students Protested Against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Platform

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2018 //
15

Leonie Haimson provides a comprehensive report on the context for the Brooklyn high school protest against the Chan-Zuckerberg tech program called Summit. As she says, this is a David-Goliath situation. The students are powerful!


Last week, on November 5, about 100 students at the Secondary School of Journalism in Brooklyn walked out of their schools to protest the Summit online program. This digital instruction program, funded by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Bill Gates, forces students to spend hours staring at computers, left at sea with little human interaction or help from their teachers, all in the name of “personalized learning.”

As one of the students, Mitchel Storman, said to Sue Edelman who reported on the protest in the NY Post, “I have seen lots of students playing games instead of working….Students can easily cheat on quizzes since they can just copy and paste the question into Google.”

Zenaiah Bonsu, Kelly Hernandez and Akila Robinson credit: Helayne Seidman
Senior Akila Robinson said she couldn’t even log onto Summit for nearly two months, while other classmates can’t or won’t use it. “The whole day, all we do is sit there.” A teacher said, “It’s a lot of reading on the computer, and that’s not good for the eyes. Kids complain. Some kids refuse to do it.”

Since Norm Scott wrote about the walkout on his blog, and Sue Edelman’s reporting in the NY Post, the story has been picked up elsewhere including Fast Company and Business Insider. The online program, which originated in the Summit chain of charter schools in California, and was further developed and expanded with millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, Facebook and nowthe Chan Zuckerberg LLC, has now invaded up to 300 or so public schools, and is collecting a huge amount of personal data from thousands of students without their knowledge or consent or that of their parents.

I have been writing and questioning Summit for the past two years, and last year, met with Diane Tavenner, asked her all sorts of questions she never responded to, and toured her flagship charter school in Redwood City. My description of this visit is here.

Since then, parents in 15 states have reached out to me in huge distress about the negative impact of this program on their children. Many report that their children, who had previously done well in school, now say that they aren’t learning, that they feel constantly stressed, are beginning to hate school and want to drop out. Some parents have told me that they are now homeschooling their kids or have decided to sell their homes and move out of the district

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, New York City, Privacy, Resistance, Students

New York City: High School Students Walkout to Protest Zuckerberg “Summit Learning” Program

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2018 //
42

The high-tech learning “platform” called Summit has been controversial, but nowhere more than in Brooklyn, where high school students walked out of school to protest the amount of time they spend online.

Susan Edelman writes in the New York Post:

Brooklyn teens are protesting their high school’s adoption of an online program spawned by Facebook, saying it forces them to stare at computers for hours and “teach ourselves.”

Nearly 100 students walked out of classes at the Secondary School for Journalism in Park Slope last week in revolt against “Summit Learning,” a web-based curriculum designed by Facebook engineers, and bankrolled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

It’s annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long,” said freshman Mitchel Storman, 14, who spends close to five hours a day on Summit classes in algebra, biology, English, world history, and physics. “You have to teach yourself.”

Listen to the students. They make more sense than the adults. Not always

Summit stresses “personalized learning” and “self-direction.” Students work at their own pace. Teachers “facilitate.” Each kid is supposed to get 10 to 15 minutes of one-on-one “mentoring” each week.

Mitchel said his teachers sometimes give brief lessons, but then students have to work on laptops connected to the Internet.

“The distractions are very tempting,” he said. “I have seen lots of students playing games instead of working.”

Kids can re-take tests until they pass — and look up the answers, he added: “Students can easily cheat on quizzes since they can just copy and paste the question into Google.”

Listen to the students.

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, New York City, Rhee, Michelle, Students, Technology

Cheshire, Connecticut: The Town That Beat Mark Zuckerberg

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2018 //
23

This is an amazing story of a town in Connecticut where parents looked at Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas about how to educate their children and said “Hell, no.”

We live in a strange era where a handful of billionaires have taken it upon themselves to transform education. Think Eli Broad, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. They decided, not based on their own experience but based on their inflated egos, that they alone know how to re-engineer the nation’s schools, the schools that enroll 50 million children.

The schools of Cheshire, Connecticut, are fine schools. The parents are happy with their public schools. But the schools’ administration decided to adopt the Summit Learning Program, putting students on Chromebooks for their lessons. Things went south, and eventually parents rebelled. At some point, they realized that “personalized learning” is actually “depersonalized learning.” Worse, they learned that their children’s personal data would no longer be private, and that the learning program was data mining their children.

And Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning Program was kicked out of the schools of Cheshire, Connecticut.

Read the article to learn how it happened.

Last year, several classes in Cheshire, Connecticut’s elementary and middle schools switched to a new classroom model, where lessons were supposed to be tailored to every student. The kids and their parents were caught off-guard that first week of school. “We walked into math class,” recalled Lauren Peronace, now an eighth-grader, “and my math teacher said, ‘Everyone open up your Chromebooks. We’re going to go on a website — Summit.’”

Reactions were mixed. Most everyone in Cheshire, which is between New Haven and Hartford, is there for the public schools, which are among the area’s best. Some parents were skittish about the creep of more technology into the classroom, especially when they found out Facebook engineers had helped build the software and Mark Zuckerberg was spending millions promoting it. Others were at least cautiously optimistic. “My son initially thought it sounded cool,” said one parent, Theresa, who asked to have her last name withheld because of all the drama that followed. “The teachers told him, ‘You’re going to be on your own; you’ll be independent; you’re going to move at your own pace.”

The program had come with money for 130 Chromebooks, so every student could have one — courtesy of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Zuckerberg’s philanthropic LLC, and Summit’s other wealthy backers. But to hear the administrators explain it, the technology would be only one piece. The Summit Learning Program, which originated at a series of West Coast charter schools between 2012 and 2013, is conceived as a comprehensive program of “personalized learning” that promises to put students in charge of their own education. It’s now being used in some 380 districts and charter schools nationwide. Rather than having a teacher stand at the front of the room and talk, it emphasizes group projects, dialogue between students, and one-on-one time with teachers, guaranteeing at least a ten-minute “mentoring” session for each student every week. It also makes use of specialized software for regular lessons and assessments. Cheshire’s teachers had gone to training that summer in Providence, Rhode Island, at an event also funded by Summit.

But the implementation over the next few months collapsed into a suburban disaster, playing out in school-board meetings and, of course, on Facebook. The kids who hated the new program hated it, to the point of having breakdowns, while their parents became convinced Silicon Valley was trying to take over their classrooms. They worried Summit was sharing their kids’ data (it is, with 19 companies at present, including Amazon and Microsoft, according to its website), or, worse, selling it. It isn’t, but given that the guy who’d helped buy them all laptops had created a $500 billion company out of vacuuming up data and creating economic value from it, it seemed reasonable to have suspicions that the learning platform backed by CZI might also be data-hungry. Concern turned into exasperation when bizarre and sometimes inappropriate images appeared on their kids’ screens on third-party websites used as reading assignments: a pot plant, a lubricant ad, and then the coup de grâce, an ancient Roman statue of a man having sex with a goose.

Ultimately the superintendent halted the program, making Cheshire the only one out of hundreds to do so. To the program’s supporters, this makes it a fluke, the only one that never got past the learning curve. To detractors, the Cheshire parents are among the most articulate voices on Summit’s perils, the model of successful resistance.

Categories Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Connecticut, Innovation, Resistance, Technology

Did Zuckerberg Just Take Control of Summit Learning?

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2018 //
13

One day, we might wake up and discover that half a dozen people own all of our schools. One of them, you can be sure, is Mark Zuckerberg, who owns the personal and sort-of and sometimes private data of about one billion people.

Peter Greene tells the story here of Summit Learning, which is controlled by Zuckerberg. It has infiltrated scores of public schools as a cheap way of delivering in-line instruction. Parents have fought back, apparently wanting teachers who are actual living human beings.

If you happen to have a child in a school that has joined up with Summit, you should make inquiries about your child’s personal data.

Facebook has recently informed tens of millions of its users that their personal data were compromised.

Depersonalized Instruction is stoppable if parents speak out.

Categories Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Education Industry, Technology

Chicago: Now That Rahm’s Leaving, What Should Happen Next?

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2018 //
9

Raise Your Hand for Public Education-Illinois has some excellent ideas about what should happen next in Chicago.

As you may know, we have been critical of many of the mayor’s education policies over the years, as they haven’t often aligned with our vision of an education system that is based on high-quality, researched-backed policies, centers on children’s curiosity and creativity, emphasizes collaborative learning environments instead of competition, and provides crucial social-emotional and health supports alongside academics.

We’ve also been critical of how those policies have been decided and rolled out; rather than encouraging debate, engaging families, students, teachers, and communities in a robust process to provide input, and seeking consensus beforehand, the mayor’s office has frequently sought only a post-hoc rubber stamp from the Board for decisions about CPS.

So these are some of the things we’ll be looking out for:

Funding: Budgets are a set of priorities. What are the essentials that have been cut over the years, or were never funded, and how will the next mayor fund these things? Will a candidate end the damaging student-based budgeting (SBB) system? SBB contributes to an accelerated death cycle for schools with decreasing enrollment, distorts hiring practices to favor the least-experienced teachers, and forces schools to eliminate librarians, art, and music to cut costs. And how will the next mayor work to get increased revenue to the schools?

School ratings: Test scores and attendance are the primary factors used to rate elementary schools. These ratings drive a lot of bad practice inside schools. How will the next mayor change this?

Overemphasis on test scores: Linked to above issue. Skill-drill test prep must be replaced with authentic learning environments. This requires time for serious professional development and planning! PD and planning time have been cut dramatically under this mayor to make room for the longer unfunded day. When teachers can’t collaborate, schools can’t improve. Test prep is not a good practice to improve learning.

Privatization: Charter schools have proliferated in areas of declining enrollment, and the mayor accelerated outsourcing of critical positions in the school building. CPS has also engaged in a new partnership with Mark Zuckerberg where private student data will likely be handed over to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative LLC. How will the negative impacts of this be addressed and outsourcing reversed? Is a candidate willing to fight the continuation of IL’s tax credit scholarship program when it is up for renewal in 5 years?

Community: Schools should be community anchors. A number of schools with lottery-based or test-score based admissions have been added to the CPS “portfolio” over the past eight years. How can schools function as community hubs when there are so many barriers to access? How will facilities decisions be made to decrease race and class segregation rather than further entrench it in our divided city?

Wrap-around supports: CPS ratio of clinicians to students is grossly inadequate. The recommended ratio for students to social workers is 1:250 in districts without high poverty. In CPS the ratio is 1:1250. Will increasing clinician positions be a priority for the next mayor?

Early childhood ed: Rahm announced a new plan recently, but we are hearing from parents that there is a lot of chaos in the current system. We plan to do some listening tours with parents this year to find out what’s going on. Candidates should explain how new preschool programs will be funded and whether expanding services for one age group will mean reduction in services for another.

Special ed: CPS’s deliberate diversion of resources away from special education resulted in the state taking over special ed. How will the next mayor instruct CPS to systemically correct this debacle and to work with the ISBE monitor?

Elected school board: We believe that checks and balances, transparency and accountability are crucial in moving the school system to a better place. We need a Board of Education that’s directly accountable to the public at the ballot box and one whose deliberation of issues doesn’t take place behind closed doors. Where do the candidates stand on a fully elected, representative school board for Chicago?

So there’s a lot of research for everyone to do, and obviously education is only one area to focus on when determining who to vote for. Stay informed, stay involved, go to candidate forums, do your homework!

And attend our annual fundraiser, Raise a Glass for RYH, on October 2 to talk with us about all the important education issues facing our schools!

Happy school year, all.

Categories Accountability, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Chicago, Early Childhood Education, Education Industry, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Funding, Privatization, Special Education, Supporting public schools, Testing

Why Philanthropy Is Bad for Democracy: An Interview with Anand Giridharadas

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2018 //
28

This article expresses our frustration with arrogant, clueless billionaires like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Betsy DeVos, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, the Waltons, the Koch brothers, and Mark Zuckerberg. We have long known that they don’t like democracy. It gets in the way of their grand plans to change the world. Why should we—the targets of their plans—have any say? Those of us who are not billionaires think that they should stop rearranging our lives. We don’t want them to disrupt our lives and our institutions. We believe in the idea of one person, one vote. We are losing faith in democracy because these plutocrats have more than one vote. They use their vast resources to buy elections and, what is even cheaper, to buy politicians.

Anand Giridharadas frequented their circles, mainly at the Aspen Institute, which made the mistake of inviting him to join them as a Fellow. He confirms what we suspected. These people are a threat to democracy. They think they are “doing good,” but they are destroying democracy.

It begins:

“In 2015, the journalist Anand Giridharadas was a fellow at the Aspen Institute, a confab of moneyed “thought leaders” where TED-style discourse dominates: ostensibly nonpolitical, often counterintuitive, but never too polemical. In his own speech that year, Giridharadas broke with protocol, accusing his audience of perpetuating the very social problems they thought they were solving through philanthropy. He described what he called the Aspen Consensus: “The winners of our age must be challenged to do more good, but never, ever tell them to do less harm.” The response, he said, was mixed. One private-equity figure called him an “asshole” that evening, but another investor said he’d voiced the struggle of her life. David Brooks, in a New York Times column, called the speech “courageous.” That lecture grew into Winners Take All, Giridharadas’s new jeremiad against philanthropy as we know it. He weaves together scenes at billionaires’ gatherings, profiles of insiders who struggle with ethical conflicts, and a broader history of how America’s wealth inequality and philanthropy grew in tandem.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Democracy, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Inequality, Koch Brothers, Philanthropy, Walton Foundation

Gerald Coles: Billionaires Want Poor Children’s Brains to Work Better

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2018 //
71

Education psychologist Gerald Coles reports that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg plan to fund neurological research to find out why poor children’s brains aren’t working well enough to produce higher test scores.

Coles writes:

“Why are many poor children not learning and succeeding in school? For billionaire Bill Gates, who funded the start-up of the failed Common Core Curriculum Standards, and has been bankrolling the failing charter schools movement, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, it’s time to look for another answer, this one at the neurological level. Poor children’s malfunctioning brains, particularly their brains’ “executive functioning”–that is, the brain’s working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control–must be the reason why their academic performance isn’t better.

“Proposing to fund research on the issue, the billionaires reason that not only can executive malfunctioning cause substantial classroom learning problems and school failure, it also can adversely affect socio-economic status, physical health, drug problems, and criminal convictions in adulthood. Consequently, if teachers of poor students know how to improve executive function, their students will do well academically and reap future “real-world benefits.” For Gates, who is always looking for “the next big thing,” this can be it in education.

“Most people looking at this reasoning would likely think, “If executive functioning is poorer in poor children, why not eliminate the apparent cause of the deficiency, i.e., poverty?” Not so for the billionaires. For them, the “adverse life situations” of poor students are the can’t-be-changed-givens. Neither can instructional conditions that cost more money provide an answer. For example, considerable research on small class size teaching has demonstrated its substantially positive academic benefits, especially for poor children, from grammar school through high school and college. Gates claims to know about this instructional reform, but money-minded as he is, he insists these findings amount to nothing more than a “belief” whose worst impact has been to drive “school budget increases for more than 50 years.”

“Cash–rather, the lack of it–that’s the issue: “You can’t fund reforms without money and there is no more money,” he insists. Of course, nowhere in Gates’ rebuke of excessive school spending does he mention corporate tax dodging of state income taxes, which robs schools of billions of dollars. Microsoft, for example, in which Gates continues to play a prominent role as “founder and technology advisor” on the company’s Board of Directors would provide almost $29.6 billion in taxes that could fund schools were its billions stashed offshore repatriated.

“In a detailed example of Microsoft’s calculated tax scheming and dodging that would provide material for a good classroom geography lesson, Seattle Times reporter, Matt Day, outlined one of the transcontinental routes taken by a dollar spent for a Microsoft product in Seattle. Immediately after the purchase, the dollar takes a short trip to Microsoft’s company headquarters in nearby Redmond, Washington, after which it moves to a Microsoft sales subsidiary in Nevada. Following a brief rest, the dollar breathlessly zigzags from one offshore tax haven to another, finally arriving in sunny Bermuda where it joins $108 billion of Microsoft’s other dollars. Zuckerberg’s Facebook has similarly kept its earnings away from U.S. school budgets.”

Categories Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Poverty

Uganda Cracks Down on For-Profit Private Schools Run by Westerners

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2018 //
22

 

In the past few years, a group of Western investors have introduced low-cost for-profit private schools into African nations. Their company is called Bridge International Academies. It is a “tech startup” developed by entrepreneurs who hoped to do well by doing good. Veteran journalist Peg Tyre wrote a balanced yet implicitly scathing article about BIA in the New York Times Magazine. Some of the investors are Mark Zuckerberg, Pearson, the World Bank, Bill Gates, and Pierre Omidyar. The schools seek to replace the public schools, which are free but usually underfunded and poorly equipped. Bridge teachers teach from tablets loaded with scripted curriculum (apparently written in Boston by charter school teachers who understand how to write scripted curricula). It claims to get better results than the public schools, but at a higher price. Even though these schools are “low cost,” most families in poor nations can not afford to pay. It is operating schools in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, and a few in India.

Are they philanthropic saviors of African children or neocolonialists?

The government of Uganda is aggressively pushing back against the Bridge schools. 

Janet K. Museveni is First Lady and Minister of Education and Sports. She explains in the linked article that the 63 Bridge schools operating in Uganda are unlicensed and do not meet the standards required to operate.

The Bridge tactic of organizing pupils to march on behalf of the school corporation will sound familiar to Americans.

She writes:

“The media has been awash with news about the intransigent manner in which Management of the Bridge International Academies (BIA) which were recently renamed Bridge Schools are acting when faced with closure by the Ministry of Education and Sports for lack of licenses to operate in Uganda.

“It must be puzzling to the public particularly when all they see, as a result of the aggressive media campaign by Bridge operators, are pictures of children that look fairly “organised” as they match on streets and demonstrate at Parliament to protect the interests of the proprietors – at the risk of simply being used as pawns in a game they hardly comprehend.”

She goes on to describe the requirements of the law and the power of the Ugandan government to set standards. She describes the efforts made by the Government to regulate and inspect Bridge schools. These were the findings of the investigation.

 

“Key findings of the multi-disciplinary team that were brought to the attention of the Bridge team during this meeting are summarised hereunder:

“Issue #1: – Curriculum

“Early childhood Development (ECD):

“Children are kept for long hours at school without any designated resting places; did not use the approved ECD Learning Framework and the Caregivers’ Guide; administered written examinations which are against Government Policy.

“Lower Primary:

“The preparation, language of instruction and pedagogy were not in line with the approved curriculum.

“Upper Primary

“Curriculum Content, Schemes of Work, Lesson Plans, Textbooks, Schools and Class timetables did not conform to the approved Ugandan curriculum which they purport to implement. Many teachers were not free to adjust what they received on the tablets to teach from a central source and appeared to live in fear; claiming to be underpaid and lacking a forum for airing their grievances. Most of the Head Teachers, referred to as “Academy Managers” were not professionally trained and could not provide instructional leadership.

“Issue #2: – Teacher Qualification/Competence

“There were no clear documents on teachers’ qualifications in the Managers’ (Head Teachers’) Office; most teachers had no contracts; and about a half had no authentic Teacher Registration numbers.

“Notwithstanding the well-known benefits of introducing technology into the delivery process, teachers should have the freedom to adapt their classroom schemes of work, lesson plans, assessment and remedial activities to the practicalities of the specific teaching-learning context rather than be enslaved to the restrictions of centrally prepared and delivered lessons.

“Issue #3: – Bridge Schools Infrastructure

“All the facilities were temporary with School structures made of roofing sheet material (both walls and roof) and wire mesh, which are unsuitable for students during very hot weather conditions. The structures have no windows and battened wooden doors were used without proper framing. Sound-proofing between Classrooms is inadequate. There is no protection against lightening on any of the structures. Sanitation facilities are shared amongst students (boys and girls) and teachers. The facilities were not fit to be a school.

“Based on the findings/observations outlined above, specific and general recommendations were made on curriculum, teachers and facilities to enable them meet the basic requirements and minimum standards.”

She and the Government of zuganda are serious about regulating Bridge schools.

“I should, however, add that the impunity being exhibited by Bridge Management, and its likes, will not be tolerated and that Government will spare no effort to use all legal means to enforce the requirements of the Law to protect our children and our future, as a country.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, International, Pearson

A Parent Writes an Open Letter to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2018 //
17

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg invited the public to offer their ideas, and Bertis Downs took them up on their offer. Bertis is a parent of students in the public schools of Athens, Georgia, where his daughters have thrived.

He starts his letter:

“I hear you guys are looking for feedback from people involved in public education — teachers, school board members, parents, and many others. I write to you as a public school parent.

“Since I spend time in my kids’ schools and other public schools, I talk to teachers, students, other parents, school board members and principals on a fairly regular basis. What I hear consistently is that the education policies of recent years, however good or bad the intentions, are disrupting public education — but not in a way that could be considered positive for anyone who truly wants to improve and transform our nation’s schools.

“Our teachers are at a breaking point. Mandated standardized testing remains out of control, with kids over-tested and teachers spending too much time on test prep. Many teachers are evaluated in a discredited method based on their students’ standardized test scores. Our teachers and schools have been beaten down through a narrative — that they don’t work at all — which you and other rich philanthropists have spent millions of dollars to perpetuate. These and other factors are contributing to a real crisis of morale among our educators…

“What we all need and want is pretty straightforward: schools that are the center of their community headed by strong leaders who foster and encourage a learning environment of mutual support and collaboration. That sounds a lot like the school your kids now attend, have attended, or you want them to attend, doesn’t it? (Yes, I know Mr. Zuckerberg has a very young daughter and two of the Gates children have already graduated from a private high school.)

“So why can’t the policies and politics you support mirror those priorities and practices for all our nation’s schoolchildren? Why have you funded efforts that have taken our schools in a different direction? You surely consider all of America’s kids just as worthy and deserving of good educations as your own kids.

“But what would you think if your kids’ schools pushed the mechanized, de-professionalized vision of “public education” that have come from school reforms and reformers whom you have supported? What if the private Lakeside Preps or Sidwell Friends had inexperienced teachers, large class sizes, excessive high-stakes testing, hiring and firing teachers based on test score results? How would you and other tuition-paying parents like that? Would you feel like you were getting your money’s worth?…

“If policies you have supported are such a good idea, why haven’t they been adopted in the schools either you or other reformers have supported? I think we can figure out the answer to that: those policies are not what will result in a stable, talented, dedicated teaching corps, the kind of teachers any great educational enterprise needs at its core.

“So since you are seeking honest feedback, here’s mine: Why not see now, or in the future, if your own kids want to try your local public schools? Then take the leap of faith so many of us do every morning when we send our children off for their school day at the neighborhood school. I happen to know Seattle and Silicon Valley schools have some great teachers and great schools. There are plenty, and not only the acclaimed teacher Jesse Hagopian at Garfield High School in Seattle. I bet your neighborhood public schools would be plenty good (although the teacher morale might be a bit on the low side these days).

“Your kids, and those of your reformer colleagues, would do just fine and the schools could certainly use the infusion of enthusiasm and social capital you would bring to PTA meetings and school council meetings. I think you would be amazed how much you’d learn and how much your kids would learn — in the classroom and beyond. A teacher I know in Raleigh, North Carolina, does a beautiful job of articulating some of the advantages of a public school experience especially for affluent kids: “Why Affluent Parents Should Demand Diverse Schools for their Children.” Read it if you will. My kids have benefited in some of these same ways as well.

“The really great thing about our public schools is that they are resilient. Despite the beatdown they have been subjected to over the years, despite the drubbing they take in the media and through federal and state policies, most of our public schools do a good job of educating our kids. And this is thanks to the committed and gifted teachers still teaching year after year.

“My own kids have had great teachers in Athens public schools, wonderful extracurricular opportunities, great friends, and bright futures as products of their dynamic and caring school communities. Your children would be okay in public schools too — in fact, I would contend most advantaged kids actually receive a better education as a result of the social fabric of a thriving public school. Cultural diversity is inherent in a typical, regular school setting like the ones my kids attend — and they are better off for that.”

There’s more. Open the link and read Bertis’s sound advice to Bill and Mark.

If they had sent their own children to public schools, they would have a greater appreciation for their strengths and needs. They wouldn’t suggest reinventing them every other day with their latest flash in the night.

Bottom line, Bill and Mark, join us in supporting our public schools. They are the future. Get on the right side of history.

Bertis Downs is a strong advocate for public schools because his children attended them. He is also a member of the board of the Network for Public Education, and I am proud to call him my friend.

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Supporting public schools

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg Want YOUR Ideas!

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2018 //
49

According to James Shelton and Bob Hughes, respectively of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiate and the Gates Foundation, they want to hear from you!

They don’t understand why there is such a big gap between research and practice. They don’t see why schools are improving so slowly despite their best efforts.

They write”:

Recent months have thrust some of the education sector’s resource strains into the national spotlight. Across the country, budget constraints in several states have highlighted the difficulty of educating today’s students in crumbling schools, and with decades-old instructional materials. Meanwhile, many educators are struggling to support students through the increasing pressures of poverty, a changing economy, and a demand for higher-level skills. Yet despite these challenges, the education sector spends less than a tenth of the average percentage on research and development across other U.S. industries.

So, get this, despite low teachers’ salaries, despite crumbling buildings, despite funding that has not reached 2008 levels, the real problem is that we are not spending enough on R&D.

Could you help them with some of your ideas?

Here is my idea: When you two multibillionaires come up with a plan to reinvent education, find a willing district to experiment on. Get the consent of the teachers. Listen to them before you start your Big Plan. Don’t impose it on the nation until you can demonstrate that you have tried your Big Plan in one place and worked out the bugs and determined that it helps kids and teachers. Until then, please don’t use the nation as your petri dish. Our children are not your guinea pigs.

Categories Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates
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