Archives for category: Gates Foundation, Bill Gates
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Mercedes Schneider: Bill Gates Gives Another $4 Million to Educators4Excellence

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2018 //
10

Bill Gates loves Educators4Excellence. They claim to speak for teachers, but they are a TFA-founded group that can be counted on to spout the Gates party line. I once was on a panel with Evan Stone, where he sang the praises of the Common Core. That’s to be expected from someone who is dependent on Gates funding.

Mercedes Schneider documents the close financial ties between Gates and E4E.

He just gave them another $4 million. Gates gave them $12 million between 2011 and 2018. The co-founders pay themselves $216,000 each. They would never collect that much if they were in the classroom.

Question: Whom do they advocate for? Teachers or Bill Gates?

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teach for America

SAT Adopts Khan Academy as Provider of SAT Test Prep

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2018 //
58

For years, I have read SAT reports about test results. What you always see is that student scores are correlated with family income. See here for some good graphs.

What I noticed this year for the first time was that the College Board (which administers the SAT) is promoting Khan Academy, a private venture funded by the Gates Foundation. The release says that students who got their SAT prep from Khan Academy got higher test scores. The partnership was revealed earlier this year. The courses are free.

In the past, SAT prep has been characterized by paid courses and the ordering of thick books to help students master word-comparison exercises and memorize the so-called “SAT words.” Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy provides online resources that are tailored to each student to help them pinpoint which skills they need to improve. As they practice over time, their study plan will evolve with them and help them level up to more challenging skills.

When I was in high school, we were told explicitly that coaching did not affect SAT scores. That has since been disproved and the College Board now encourages coaching and tells you where to get it.

Never forget that the College Board is a business, always looking for market share.

Categories Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Testing

This Article about the Ford Foundation and Ocean Hill-Brownsville Brought Back Memories

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2018 //
4

A reader, Joel Schwartz, sent this article as a comment.

It is based on Karen Ferguson’s book Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism.

Ferguson tells the remarkable story of the Ford Foundation’s decision to become a funder of the community control movement in the battle over the future of the New York City public schools in 1967-1969. As she explains, Ford was The Establishment; it was the Gates Foundation of its time. Yet it decided to align with the Black Power movement and to cast itself as anti-establishment and anti-professional.

The events she describes were the start of my professional life.

I was an unofficial advisor to Preston Wilcox, a black social worker who was one of the leaders of the community control movement in Harlem (his organization was called Afram). Tagging along with him, I attended many of the meetings with community activists concerned about the new I.S. 201 in Harlem. I later worked for the Carnegie Corporation as an hourly employee, writing about the three demonstration districts at the heart of the teachers’ strike, which lasted for two full months in 1968.

It was during these tumultuous events that I began to write about the New York City schools. One of my first articles was about the role of the elitist Ford Foundation; the article was titled “Playing God in the Ghetto.”

I won’t go into all the details here, but the teachers’ strikes of 1967-68 inspired me to write my first book, which was published in 1974, called The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973. Many others have been written since then about those crisis-ridden years. They left a deep imprint on me.

Those events continue to resonate today for many people, for different reasons.

Ferguson’s focus on the Ford Foundation’s role is refreshing. I haven’t read the book yet, but intend to do so.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, New York City, Philanthropy, Race

Mercedes Schneider: Conflicts of Interest, Common Core, Gates Foundation, and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2018 //
37

Mercedes Schneider reviews an exhaustive report by Richard Phelps about the origins, policies, and practices of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

I approach this topic with caution because I was a founding board member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Institute. I was a close friend of Checker Finn, until I broke ranks and turned against the conservative activism in which TBF is a prominent actor. I don’t say bad things about Checker or Mike Petrilli. But I don’t agree with them, I think they are doing immeasurable damage to public education, and I regret that they lack the ability to be self-critical or reflective. When I was on the board, I strongly opposed the decision to accept funding from the Gates Foundation. I said it would compromise TBF’s independence. I was right. I opposed the board’s decision to become a charter authorizer in Ohio, where TBF is technically located. I thought that a think tank should not be a charter authorizer. That was well before I took issue with the whole conservative package of standards, testing, accountability, and choice.

Read the entire Phelps’ report.

Phelps raises a serious issue of “donor intent” and whether it was honored. The TBF Funds were intended by their owner to be used strictly for charitable purposes, Phelps writes, never to benefit any individual nor to influence legislation. When I was a member of the board, I was unaware of these restrictions. Mrs. Thelma Fordham Pruett’s lawyer was Checker Finn’s father. He was chairman of the board of the TBF foundation. He decided that the funds—about $35 Million—were not restricted, and he turned them over to his son, who became CEO of the new foundation and used the funds to promote a highly political agenda of education reform. The Fordham Institute has led the way in advancing privatization by charters and vouchers in Ohio. Nationally, it was and is a leading voice in promoting the Common Core standards. Gates paid millions of dollars to TBF both to evaluate the Common Core and to advocate for it.

This is a very troubling report.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Ohio, Philanthropy

Peter Greene: None Dare Call It “Philanthropy”

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2018 //
26

In this post, Peter Greene spells out the difference between philanthropy and the desire to control the lives of others.

One is generous, the other is a blunt use of power to gratify one’s own ego.

One helps people achieve the goals they have set for themselves, the other imposes the donor’s will on unwilling and resistant recipients, whose voice is silenced.

“Modern fauxlanthropy is not about helping people; it’s about buying control, about hiring people to promote your own program and ideas. It’s about doing an end run around the entire democratic process, even creating positions that never existed, like Curriculum Director of the United States, and then using sheer force of money to appoint yourself to that position. It’s about buying compliance.

“It is privatization. It is about taking a section of the public sector and buying control of it so that you can run it as if it was your own personal possession.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Injustice, Koch Brothers, Philanthropy, Shame, Walton Foundation

Laura Chapman Explains the Gates Foundation’s Latest Gambit

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2018 //
33

As you read recently, the Gates Foundation is investing $92 Million into the creation of “networks.” For the Gates Foundation, this is chump change. After all, it spent as much as $2 Billion on the Common Core, and $575 Million on trials of teacher evaluation by test scores (both failed to make any difference). So what is this tiny series of grants for? The education director of Gates is Robert Hughes, a lawyer who previously led New Visions for Public Schools in New York City. New Visions received the second largest grant.

Laura Chapman explains these grants, which promise remarkable results, results that have eluded Gates again and again.

She writes:


” It is still not clear what the $92 Million will do, although it’s likely to add a new layer of administrators.” Most of the Gates grants for “Networks for School Improvement” go to nongovernmental “intermediaries” and a theory of action (sort of) intended to induce targeted schools into some version of continuous improvement sharply focussed on improved test scores in math, plus college/career readiness.

I looked at the Gates Foundation press release and fact sheet about their current “portfolio of investments” in nineteen Networks for School Improvement. Almost all focus on improving test scores in math, middle school and 9th grade. Why? These test scores are viewed as “on-track indicators” for postsecondary enrollment.

Most of these grants require participating schools to adopt a continual improvement process (or continuous improvement process) determined by outside groups and “change experts.” The “science of school improvement” is a new slogan from reformers who wish to conduct experiments on students, teachers, and schools, while masking the corporate and science lab contexts from which the processes have been adapted. The Gates grants offer incentives for different versions of improvement science, some of these seeking incremental improvements, others seeking breakthrough improvements from “rapid” experimental cycles. All of these grants assume major deficiencies in the staff working in schools that that serve low income and mostly Black and Latino students, especially teachers of math.

In the following, I have edited the press release leaving in place only some of the jargon attached to justifications for each grant. Only one grant sends money to a public school district. Allmost all grants go to an intermediary organization structured to prevent direct oversight from elected school boards and supported by private dollars from foundations and corporations.

ACHIEVE ATLANTA: $532,000, 24 Months. Achieve Atlanta will help to develop a tool to support the successful matching of high school students to good-fit colleges and support students in selecting, applying to, and enrolling in good-fit postsecondary institutions. Aims: Create a matchmaking “tool” to aid students in selecting a postsecondary institution. Develop the “match and fit tool” as a predictive indicator for student success.

BALTIMORE CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS: $11,160,000, 48 Months. BCPS will hire onsite literacy coaches trained to use “high quality, standards-aligned materials and continuous improvement strategies” to support teachers and accelerate literacy in 12-15 middle schools selected as Literacy Intensive Sites. Aim: Improve “8th and 9th Grade On-Track outcomes.”

BANK STREET COLLEGE: $700,000, 16 Months (Yonkers, NY) Bank Street will organize, train, and support school-based math teams and team leaders in 10 Yonkers Public Schools. Teams will analyze data to track student improvement. Aims: Increase the number of Black, Latino, and low-income students who successfully complete 8th grade math. Support Bank Street’s own data collection and analysis capacity in addition to the skills of teams and team leaders.

ED PARTNERS: $12,000,000, 61 Months (CA). California Education Partners (Ed Partners) will launch a network that will manage up to 50 secondary schools across 18 small and middle-size districts. Aims: Improve outcomes for Black, Latino and low-income students. Build the capacity of Ed Partners and these schools to improve outcomes (design, deliver, measure, learn from, and evaluate interventions).

CENTER FOR LEADERSHIP AND EDUCATIONAL EQUITY (CLEE): $560,000, 20 Months (RI) The Center will create a network that serves ten high schools in Rhode Island. CLEE will train teams of school and district leaders to be receptive to “a culture of change, identify equity gaps in 9th grade course completion, study root causes, and test interventions.” Aims: Increase the number of Black, Latino, and low-income students who complete a 9th grade college-prep math course. Induce school and district leaders to accept prescriptions and methods for change from CLEE.

CITY YEAR: $520,000, 18 Months (MILWAUKEE, WI). City Year and the “Everyone Graduates Center” at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education will organize and train teams from 10 middle schools serving predominantly Black, Latino, and low-income students to embrace “continuous improvement by utilizing Early Warning Indicators” and leveraging “innovative human capital, including AmeriCorps members.” Aims: Enable all students to complete 8th grade “on-track to high school graduation.” Induce teams to accept and practice the “continuous improvement” methods from City Year and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education.

COMMUNITIES FOUNDATION OF TEXAS: $503,000, 15 Months (NORTH TX ) EducateTexas will lead the regional Texas Network for School Improvement (TXNSI) Collaborative. The Collaborative will also be supported by Learning Forward (expertise in continuous improvement) and The Charles A. Dana Center (subject matter expertise in math education). Aims: Increase the math proficiency of Black, Latino and low- income students 8th grade students in 10 North Texas schools. Train leaders in those schools to ”adopt continuous improvement processes,” accelerate change, and increase outcomes.

COMMUNITY CENTER FOR EDUCATION RESULTS (CCER): $515,000, 24 Months (South King County, WA). CCER and the Puget Sound College & Career Network, will expand the College & Career Leadership Institute’s work on “systems improvements” congruent with the Gates funded “Road Map Project for South Seattle and South King County high schools. Aims: Provide support for more low-income students to have a meaningful, high-quality plan for college and career. Long term, “Eliminate opportunity gaps by race and income, and for 70 percent of the region’s students to earn a college degree or career credential by 2030.”

CORE: $16,000,000, 61 Months (CA) CORE stands for the non-governmental California Office to Reform Education, since 2013 active in steering accountability measures for large, urban districts in Fresno, Garden Grove, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Ana. CORE Districts participate in a system of “data-driven continuous improvement.” Aims: Sustain the CORE-PACE (Policy Analysis for California Education) research partnership and publicize findings. Enhance the use of CORE’s data and improvement management systems to improve “9th grade on-track rates.”

HIGH TECH HIGH: $10,300,000, 60 Months (Southern California). The High Tech High Graduate School of Education will lead a College Access and Enrollment Network of 30 (high) schools. Focus is on financial access, college application process, bonding and belonging, reducing failure to enroll after admission. Aims: Increase the number of Black, Latino, and low-income students who apply, enroll, and ultimately go to a four-year college. (The High Tech High Graduate School of Education offers teacher certification and a master’s program. https://hthgse.edu/programs/teacher-residency-program/).

INSTITUTE FOR LEARNING: $7,400,000, 60 Months (Dallas, TX). Leaders from two University of Pittsburg programs will train participants from 12 secondary schools in the Dallas Independent School District in continuous improvement efforts. Aims: Increase the number of Black, Latino, English learners, and low-income students who are proficient in English Language Arts and on track at the end of 9th grade for high school graduation. Induce teams of school and district leaders to lead continuous improvement efforts. (The University of Pittsburg programs are: The Institute for Learning an outreach program of the Learning Research and Development Center and Center for Urban Education).

KIPP FOUNDATION: $499,000, 23 Months, (Multiple states). Convene and support KIPP’s college counselors in 31 charter high schools in 16 states, improving and refining how they help young people matriculate to and graduate from college. Aims: Accelerate the development of practices, tools, and approaches that predict and increase college success for their students. Keep high-achieving students from “under-matching” to colleges that are less rigorous than they are qualified to attend.

NETWORK FOR COLLEGE SUCCESS (NCS): $11,700,000, 60 Months, (Chicago, IL) NCS will train participants in 15-20 Chicago high schools to “engage in cycles of continuous improvement—testing which student, teacher, and school interventions create the school conditions that build upon the abilities, intelligence, and creativity of Chicago’s youth.” Aims: Increase the number of Black, Latino, and low-income students who are on-track to high school graduation and earning a 3.0 GPA or better at the end of 9th grade. Induce participating high schools to seek “continuous improvement” by using NCS methods.

NEW VISIONS FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS (NVPS): $13,900,000, 60 Months (New York, NY. NVPS will work train teams in up to 67 New York City high schools (over five years) to “use data and continuous improvement strategies (design, implement, test) to help more students maintain competitive GPAs, succeed in advanced coursework, and achieve college-ready scores on state Regents exams.” Aims: Increase the number of Black, Latino, and/or low-income students who graduate from high school prepared to succeed in college. Induce participating high schools to seek “continuous improvement” by using NVPS methods.

NORTHWEST REGIONAL EDUCATIONAL SERVICE DISTRICT: $586,000, 24 Months (OR) This Service District (NWRESD) is the largest of in Oregon, serving 20 school districts. NWRESD’s Deeper Learning and Equity Network will train participants in 32 regional high schools a use a continuous improvement process focused on “deeper learning and culturally sustaining pedagogies.” Aims: Increase the number of students who are on track by the end of 9th grade to graduate. Induce participants to use the network’s method of continuous improvement.

PARTNERS IN SCHOOL INNOVATION: $499,000, 15 Months (Philadelphia, PA). Partners will convene and help middle school math teachers, instructional coaches, and principals in 10 schools to improve math performance for selected students. Aims: Help students who begin the year below grade level in math to rapidly catch up to their high-performing peers. Increase the capacity of Partners to connect schools in virtual communities and to use classroom-level data in the continuous improvement process.

SEEDING SUCCESS: $560,000, 24 Months (Memphis, TN). Seeding Success (part of the StriveTogether national network of cradle-to-career collective impact organizations) will enlist 15 Shelby County Schools (middle school feeders into high schools) for a 24-month “rapid improvement cycle process” of identifying “8th grade and 9th grade on-track outcomes, root causes of students who fall off track, and testing aligned interventions. Aims: Help more students stay on track toward college and career readiness. Induce the participating schools to engage in “rapid improvement cycles” based on Seeding Success methods.

SOUTHERN REGIONAL EDUCATION BOARD (SREB): $3,300,000, 36 Months. SREB will enlist 10 secondary schools in Birmingham, AL (Jefferson County) to increasing the proficiency rates of Black, Latino, and low-income students on 8th grade math and 9th grade Algebra 1. Aims: Improve scores indicating “math proficiency” in grade 8 and in Algebra I. Promote “improvement science and cycles” in two national networks: High Schools That Work and Making Middle Grades Work.

TEACH PLUS: $619,000, 23 Months (Chicago, IL & Los Angeles, CA). Teach Plus will use an “evidence-based Change Management Framework” from the Boston-based Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy (has deep connections to Teach Plus) to develop continuous improvement skills among the teacher leaders and principals in ten middle schools located in two cities. Aims: Increase the number of African American, Latino, and low-income students achieving proficiency in 8th grade math. Promote use of the Change Management Framework from the Rennie Center https://www.renniecenter.org/change-management

I hope this post is of use in understanding how the $92 dollars will be used to extract compliance with the Gates-favored methods of intervening in schools. It is not obvious how much of the money will actually reach schools, teachers and students. It is not yet obvious how much collatoral damage will be done by these ventures. Gates is a sucker for anything that looks like a short-term fix or formula for public schools.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Andrea Gabor: School Reformers are Going Local, But….

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2018 //
30

Andrea Gabor, author of Education After the Culture Wars, believes that the latest Gates grant for “networks” is evidence that corporate reformers have decided to “go local” instead of funding big national plans like the Common Core.

“For two decades, the prevailing wisdom among education philanthropists and policymakers has been that the U.S. school system needs the guiding hand of centralized standard-setting to discipline ineffective teachers and bureaucrats. Much of that direction was guided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has spent billions since 2000 to influence both schools and education policy.

“But as schools open this year, top-down national initiatives based on standardized testing and curricular uniformity are in retreat.

“Last fall, the Gates Foundation ended its support for a $575 million, six-year teacher-effectiveness project; the initiative had failed to meet the foundation’s goals to “dramatically improve student outcomes,” according to a recent study commissioned by the foundation.

“Two dozen states started backing away from the Gates-backed Common Core State Standards not long after they were first embraced in 2010 (though many of these states retained “key elements” of the standards, according to a 2017 report by an education organization the foundation helps fund.) Earlier, the foundation acknowledged that “many of the small schools” that it invested in — the foundation’s first major education initiative — “did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way.”

“Now, the foundation seems to be stepping back from sweeping national initiatives in its bid to remake education. In the coming years, its K-12 philanthropy will concentrate on supporting what it calls “locally driven solutions” that originate among networks of 20 to 40 schools, according to Allan Golston, who leads the foundation’s U.S. operations, because they have “the power to improve outcomes for black, Latino, and low-income students and drive social and economic mobility.”

She believes this represents a significant shift from the top down mandates of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and similar efforts cheered on by Gates and other titans.

I am not so sure.

The Gates grant of $92 Million for “networks” is chump change. It’s amorphous.

Besides, Gates is still funding Common Core, despite its failure to fulfill any of the bold promises made on its behalf eight years ago.

Worse, as Gabor notes, Gates and Arnold and other malefactors of great wealth are funding another “go local” project called City Fund, which draws together the leaders of privatization to plant charter schools in many cities. “Going local” in this case means trying to fly below the radar to push privatization in many places, whether the local people want it or not. Eli Broad has “gone local” by buying control of the Los Angeles school board (that is, until the swing vote was convicted and removed from the board. But he won’t give up.) Betsy DeVos went local by buying the state of Michigan. Jeb Bush engineered the hostile takeover of education policy in Florida. DFER long ago went local by bundling campaign contributions for state and local candidates who support charter schools and high-stakes testing.

Going local may be more insidious than pushing a noxious national agenda, which, in the Trump era, brings resistance to a boil.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization

Leonie Haimson on Gates’ Latest Folly

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2018 //
29

The Gates Foundation has a new idea: it is putting $92 Million into “networks.” For the Gates Foundation, this small amount is more like a tip than an investment. The writer for “Inside Philanthropy” interviewed me, and I said that the Gates Foundation has a consistent record of failure in education policy, and it should consider investing in children’s health, an area that it actually knows something about. As you can see in this article, the writer was straining to find the good in this latest foray into education. It is still not clear what the $92 Million will do, although it’s likely to add a new layer of administrators.

Leonie Haimson, the leading education activist in New York State, is no fan of Gates’ latest foray into education.

She writes here about the latest Gates’ plan to remake public education. To read her post with all her links, go to Leonie’s Blog, https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com.


This week, Bob Hughes, appointed director of the Gates Foundation K12 division in 2016, made his first big move. He announced $92 million in grants for his new Networks of School Improvement initiative to be given to 19 organizations, collaboratives and districts. New Visions, the NYC-based organization that Hughes ran before coming to the Foundation, received the second largest grant at $14 million – to work with 75 NYC schools, as yet unidentified.

This grant was more than the amount given to the entire Baltimore system of public schools – despite New Visions’ spotty record.

Though Hughes admitted that there’s not much evidence behind the theory of network improvement, he’s determined to push forward nonetheless:

“I don’t think the research base is fully developed, and that’s one reason we’re making these investments,” said Hughes.

I suppose a lack of evidence never stopped the Gates Foundation before.

Asked by EdWeek reporter Steven Sawchuk how the results of this new initiative would be evaluated,
Hughes replied that “the foundation is still formulating its research approach.” And:

“We don’t have details for you, but we remain deeply committed to a third party evaluation of all our work and transparency about the results of those evaluations so we can enable the field to understand what we do well and what we don’t do well,” he said.

Yet it appears that The Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia Law School has already been chosen by Hughes to evaluate the program.

As the CPRL website notes, “In January 2018, CPRL received a two and one-half year grant to report on the research underlying the NSI [Networks for School Improvement] initiative and to use the research to design and conduct a formative evaluation of the initiative’s initial implementation.”

Sure enough, the Gates Foundation lists a grant for $1.9 million over 31 months to be awarded “Columbia University” for “evaluation” purposes.

The first Gates-funded CPRL study was a literature review of network impacts. The findings were described by Sawchuk this way:

A Gates-commissioned review of the research on the topic from Columbia University’s Center for Public Research and Leadership noted that there are more studies on the norms and conditions needed to support healthy networks than on how they affect K-12 outcomes; most of the 34 studies were case studies or qualitative, rather than quasi-experimental designs that sought to answer cause-and-effect questions.

CPRL is headed by Columbia Law professor James Liebman, who was appointed head of the NYC Department of Education’s Accountability Office under Joel Klein, despite the fact that he had no K12 education experience either as a teacher, administrator or researcher.

Liebman made a mess of the School Progress Reports at DOE, instituting a volatile, unstable system in which school grades wildly veered from year to year. A blog post by Professor Aaron Pallas in Edweek was memorably entitled, “Could a Monkey Do a Better Job of Predicting Which Schools Show Student Progress in English Skills than the New York City Department of Education?” Under Liebman’s direction, DOE efforts were statistically inept and I would not trust his ability to undertake a credible evaluation.

Liebman also commissioned the expensive ARIS data system, which lived up to none of its promises. It was rarely used by parents or teachers and was finally ditched in 2015 after costing the city $95 million.

In any case, I hope the Gates Foundation has not decided against commissioning an evaluation from a more experienced, credible organization like RAND. RAND recently released a highly critical analysis of the results of the Gates-funded Teacher Evaluation Initiative and before that, a skeptical evaluation of the Gates-funded Next Generation Learning Challenge schools, those that feature “personalized [online] learning.”

John F. Pane, senior scientist at RAND and the chief author of the latter study frankly pointed out to Ed Week, the evidence base for personalized learning is still “very weak.”

Hughes himself doesn’t have the greatest reputation for transparency. In 2005, he tried to suppress a Gates-funded research study that contained negative findings about the New Visions Gates-funded small schools initiative in New York City, a study that was subsequently leaked to the NY Times .

In 2007, it was revealed that New Visions threatened these small schools that they would not receive their full Gates grants unless they chose New Visions as their DOE “partnership support network” and paid the organization a fee in return.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what a huge conflict of interest,'” a principal said. “We have to join their PSO and pay them for support in order to get this grant that we qualified for?”

Only time will tell, but the hints of insular cronyism in these decisions by Hughes to award grants to New Visions and to Jim Liebman’s outfit do not bode well for the future.

This is an informative overview. My question is: what’s the theory of action here? What is the strategy, what are the goals? “Networks” have a nice ring, but what is Gates trying to accomplish? How will it help students and teachers? It sounds very squishy.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Laura Chapman: In Search of the Tentacles of the Privatization Movement

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2018 //
64

Laura Chapman, retired arts educator and diligent researcher, has created a partial portrait of the privatization movement.

My guess is that the privatization movement consists of a small but significant number of billionaires and several hundred of their lackeys, shills, and front groups. As you will see, it is almost impossible to tell the Republicans from the Democrats.

Laura writes:

I have been building some spreadsheets on who is funding what. There are so many interconnected initiatives that Jeb Bush and friends are part of.

For example. Bush’s projects are connected with another big reform outfit: Partners for Innovation in Education (PIE) an outfit with at least 180 affiliates (in my spreadsheet) all connected to many others and all seeking national, state, and large metro area policies that favor charter school expansion (marketed as innovative), along with Teach for America (mostly on the job training), and active interference with teacher union contracts.

The PIE website still includes a guide for “Rabble Rousers” who were given quidance on how to work on legislated policy changes to favor charters, TFA and privatizers and how to enlist active support from civic and business organizations. It is a guide for lobbying and controlling narratives about education in the press.

The 47-page PIE Rabble Rousers handbook (2010 funded by the Joyce Foundation) includes this statement about the process of changing state policy:

“Most of the groups we spoke with (about shaping state polcies) declined to involve educators on their governing boards; if they did so, those groups do not make up a majority of the governing board. The rationale was clear enough: if the goal is to be a voice for the public’s interest, educator involvement confuses that message. As one group leader explained: “Educators already have the overwhelming voice in our state capital through their various associations. If we brought the interest lobby to our meetings, our discussion would get rutted in the same issues that already complicate the public debate. Our goal is to have a conversation that looks at the issues differently, considering only the students without the adult agendas.” An even blunter explanation was: “We tell our teacher associations that when they invite our leaders to vote on their boards, we will include union representation on ours (p. 32).” http://pie-network.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/rabble-rousers.pdf

Since that 2010 publication, PIE has shifted its strategy to include carefully selected educators. Most are working in charter schools or they have been willing to be indoctrinated into PIE’s agenda. Indocrination is the correct word.

In Oakland, CA, for example, the bait for PIE’s program has been a two-year “fellowship” with $1000 for the first year, and $2000 for the second year for attendance at two-hour meetings twice monthly plus readings and research. (I could not determine if the “year” was a calendar year nine month school year). In a series of tasks, the Oakland Fellows were given preferred data about their union to think about, along with model language for changes.

There are similar programs in multiple metro areas and states, with teachers working as if hired hands of PIE, token payments or emblems of prestige by virtue of becoming “fellows” or “ambassadors.”

Here is a list of organizations and financial supporters of “teacher voice” in the PIE Network–all recruiting teachers to advocate for policies favoring TFA, charters, and dismantlying unions and more under the banner of “innovation.”

Advance Illinois “Every Student World Ready”; Chalk Board Project; Ed Allies (Minnesota); Educators for High Standards; Go Public Schools (Oakland CA); Hope Street Group (multiple states); National Network of Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY, nominated by governors of states and celebrated by the Council of Chief State School Officers); Rodel Foundation of Delaware; State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE, Tennessee); Stand for Children Louisiana; Teach Strong (National, with one year “ambassadors” who lobby politicians), Educators for Excellence (in Boston, Chicago, Connecticut, Los Angeles , Minnesota, New York); Teach Plus (in California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts); and Texas Aspires.

PIE Board members are powerbrokers. Many are veterans of reformy projects to undermine public education through draconian standard-setting, exemptions for and expansions of charter schools, and killing collective bargaining by teachers.
1. Derrell Bradford, Executive VP of 50CAN, recruits state executive directors, fellows, and YouCAN advocates; known for leadership of legislated tenure reform in New Jersey.
2. Rachael Canter, Executive Dir. and co-founder of Mississippi First. Two years Teach for America; successfully lobbied for Mississippi Charter Schools Act of 2013.
3. Jonah Edelman, co-founder and CEO of Stand for Children Leadership Center and Stand For Children with affiliates in 11 states (Edelman is son of civil rights activist and lawyer Marian Wright Edelman). A political scholar (Ph.D Oxford, Yale) with deep family connections to the Democratic Party. SFC works for privatization with major funding from the Gates and Walton foundations among others. Major promoter of Read-by-Grade-Three policy.
4. Chris Korsmo, CEO of the League of Education Voters, backed by The Broad Foundation and supporters of projects to undermine teacher unions.
5. Scott Laband, President of Colorado Succeeds, coalition of business executives for corporate friendly education, including school policies that subsidize workforce preparation.
6. Patricia Levesque, CEO Foundation for Excellence. Was Jeb Bush’s Chief of Staff for education promoting corporate friendly education, six years as Staff Director for education policy in the Florida.
7. Lillian M. Lowery, Ed.D. V.P. of Ed Trust’s PreK-12 Policy, Research, and Practice, former state superintendent of schools in Maryland and state secretary of education in Delaware.
8. Nina Rees, President and CEO of National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, first Deputy Under Secretary for Innovation and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education.
9. Aimee Rogstad Guidera, former president and CEO of the Gates-funded Data Quality Campaign for enganced surveillance of K-12 school and “teacher of record” performance, with a variant tracking workforce outcomes of pre-K to post-seconfary workforce outcomes.
10. Evan Stone, Co-CEO and Co-Founder in 2010 of Educators for Excellence. Yale University thesis on No Child Left Behind in urban school systems, Master degree in teaching, Pace University.
11. Suzanne Kubach, Executive Dir. PIE Network. Appointed to California State Board of Education, former Chair of Los Angeles Charter School Board. Ph.D. in Education Policy, University of Southern California.
12. Tim Taylor, co-founder and Executive Dir. America Succeeds, founder of Colorado Succeeds, seeking corporate friendly policies.
13. Jamie Woodson, Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE), Former legislative leader for expansion of Tennessee’s public charter schools. J.D., the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

And that is just for starters. What “innovative policies” are being marketed in your state, by whom, and why?

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Koch Brothers, Privatization, Republicans

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
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