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Laura Chapman: Gates Still Pouring Millions into Common Core

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2017 //
11

Many people wrongly assume that the Common Core is dead, since Trump said he would kill it and Dezvos claimed she never supported it.

But Bill Gates launched and financed Common Core, and he is still funding it.

Laura Chapman writes:

“Anyone who thinks that Gates has given up on the Common Core is wrong.

“He is still pouring money into districts that will push it. His idea of “collaboration and listening” is pay others to come into a district and offer trainings to teachers and principals whom he regards as hapless, or lazy, or incompetent, or insufficiently dedicated to the Gates agenda, including Gates-Funded the Common Core.

“I just checked the database for the Gates foundation. In just 2016 and 2017 he has poured $32,175, 526 million into pushing the Common Core.

“Grants for this purpose were sent to the twelve groups who are willing to do for-hire work defined by the Gates Foundation.

“The following received grants the largest of these grants:

Center for American Progress, $1,000,000;
EdSource Inc., $1,362,606;
New Teacher Center $2,000,000;
Loyola Marymount University, $2,000,000;
CSU Fullerton Auxiliary Services Corporation, $2,000,000;
WestEd, $4,350,875;
University of Kentucky Research Foundation, $5,000,000;
CORE Districts $6,350,000;
New Venture Fund, $7,900,010.

“Gates has sent another $7,614,758 to those CORE Districts in California in the last three years, in addition to the grant for $6,350,000 ear-marked to push the Common Core (above).

“CORE stands for the California Office to Reform Education. CORE has no formal connection to the California State Board of Education, CORE and the districts it has signed up is called a “collaborative.” I think not.

“CORE is a privately funded organization that engineered a contractual takeover of some of the largest districts in California. The contract takes the form of a Memorandum of Understanding between the superintendent of each district and CORE. That MOU allows CORE to determine almost everything that happens in some of California’s largest districts: Garden Grove, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Ana.

“CORE is funded by the Stuart Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. The student, teachers, school, and parent data from the CORE “School Quality Improvement Index” flows directly to GreatSchools.org where school “quality” ratings are used to help market products and services to parents and other users. Zillow and Scholastic are among the companies that pay fees in order to market products and services.

“Don’t believe what Gates says. Follow the money.”

Categories Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Hillsborough County, Florida, Dealing with “Failing” Schools, Despite Gates’ Investment of $80 Million

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2017 //
9

The Gates Foundation agreed to pay Hillsborough County, Florida, $100 million to pilot its teacher evaluation program. However, the program cost $271 million, and the district exhausted its reserves. It ended its relationship with Gates in 2015, Gates stopped paying after investing $80 million, the Hillsborough superintendent MaryEllen Elia was fired by the board, and was soon hired by Commissioner of Education for the state of New York. The Gates program was not working, and the district pulled out. The state legislature adopted features of the failed Gates approach in its revision of state laws.

Elia, who was fired in 2015 as the district had a financial meltdown, discussed the “success” of the soon-to-collapse teacher evaluation program with Vicky Phillips, then the president of the Gates Foundation for education, in 2014.

This week, the Hillsborough superintendent is wrestling with the problem of seven D and F-rated schools and has promised not to close them.

Districts have four options for such schools, assuming they do not improve to a C.

The first, shutting them down, is not on the table. “We’re not closing any schools, so you can put that in bright lights,” superintendent Jeff Eakins said Wednesday.

Nor is the second option, turning the schools over to private charter operators.

That leaves two more — entering a partnership with an outside consultant who would help run the school, or creating a district-run charter school.

Under that fourth scenario, the school would have a governing board, as privately run charter schools do. The district would manage the school. But union contracts would not apply, giving the district greater latitude in deciding who would work there.

Eakins and his chief of schools, Harrison Peters, said they are optimistic that all seven schools will earn at least a C. Four of the D schools were within two points of a C when the last year’s grades came out.

“Nothing has changed about our expectations, but there has to be a back-up plan,” Peters said.

School leaders, so far, seem to understand, he said. “They’re not interested in being a charter school and they’re not interested in being closed, but they get it.”

School grades, invented during Jeb Bush’s tenure, are completely bogus, but Florida and many other states continue to use them. They are a tool in the privatization toolkit.

Categories Education Reform, Florida, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

John Thompson: Spinning “Success” at Gates-Funded Projects

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2017 //
30

John Thompson is a teacher and historian in Oklahoma who writes frequently here, at Huffington Post, and on other blogs.

Ironically, the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) revisionist studies, “Evaluating Newark’s Education Reforms” by Tom Kane et. al, were released as Bill Gates announced his latest, new approach to school reform. This is important because think tank papers consistently perform two basic functions. They first provide pro-reform spin for the mainstream media. Secondly, they reassure the “Billionaires Boys Club” by presenting the case that their critics are wrong. These studies typically imply that if educators and journalists had bought into the Gates’, Mark Zuckerberg’s, and other venture philanthropists’ theories, their policies (such as closing schools and expanding charters) would have worked.

Zuckerberg and the CEPR weren’t likely to be happy with the first headlines prompted by their new research on test score gains produced by the infamous $200 million Newark experiment. USA Today announced that the research found “a bit of progress.” Veteran journalist Greg Toppo also noted:

The study was funded by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and conducted by a number of Harvard researchers, including Tom Kane, who said that the study’s results were independent of its funding source.

Toppo reported that the Zuckerberg-led grant “made a difference — in a limited way.” He summarized CEPR’s claims, “Newark students improved sharply in English. In math? Not so much.”

https://cepr.harvard.edu/evaluating-newark-school-reform

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/10/19/bill-gates-has-another-plan-for-k-12-public-education-the-others-didnt-go-so-well/?utm_term=.25af39b803d2

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/16/what-did-zuckerbergs-100-million-buy-newark-bit-progress/769536001/

Toppo recalled Dale Russakoff’s “widely admired book” which found that “the effort produced ‘at least as much rancor as reform.’” He also cited Kane on the disappointing math results which the corporate-funded researcher said may look different when data from the spring 2017 tests become available,” and scores “could” rise in the future.

I stress Kane’s use of the word “could” because he has a long history of using that sort of word when spinning the modest results he documents in research studies that put Gates Foundation experiments in the best light. For instance, Kane’s study of the Gates’ value-added teacher evaluations concluded that teachers’ effectiveness “can” be estimated, although he reported little or no evidence that they would be estimated accurately enough to make those evaluations valid and reliable. After driving for the change in the laws of more that forty states, the Gates Foundation merely concluded, “It is possible to develop reliable measures” such as those that the law required, while not offering a plausible scenario for doing so.

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/media-center/press-releases/2013/01/measures-of-effective-teaching-project-releases-final-research-report

And that leads to the one quarrel I have with Toppo’s wording. What does he mean when he says that test score growth in English improved “sharply?” And what do Kane et. al mean when reporting that those test scores improved “significantly?”

English growth scores only improved “sharply” in one year, 2015. After five years, the $200 million investment’s one success resulted in less than .08 standard deviation Newark’s test score growth in English relative to similar NJ students.

It’s beyond my expertise to explain how such a meager gain, measured by comparing such small numbers of test results from Newark on a new test, could be seen as significant according to the dictionary definition of the term, as opposed to just being statistically significant. But reading the CEPR evidence, it seems that asking questions that are relevant for real world policy decisions is beyond Kane et. al. They acknowledge one major problem with the new scores; schools that began early in teaching to the new PARCC tests would be more likely to have higher scores. On the other hand, their discussion of an even more important point, missing student scores, completely misses the point.

Kane et. al present two charts that reveal patterns that are virtually identical. As with ELA results, before 2014 the Newark math value-added scores dropped in comparison to that of similar New Jersey students. In 2015, math scores soared by nearly .1 std. But during that year, the percentage of students with missing scores increased dramatically, by almost .2 std! The next year, as the percentage of students missing scores dropped just as dramatically, math scores declined so much that all of the five year gains were wiped out.

Rather than print a similar for graph ELA, the authors merely said, “The plot for ELA was similar.”

Why didn’t Kane et. al see the need to address the most logical correlation? When the percentage of missing scores goes up, Newark test score growth goes up. When the percentage of students with missing test scores goes down, test score growth goes down.

And this leads to the implicit recommendations by Kane et. al, as well as the questions they should have asked before making them. They attribute the gains to closing schools and expanding charters. They indicate that such an approach (which, of course, is dear to the hearts of “the Billionaires Boys Club”) could institutionalize better results for students who attend high-poverty neighborhood schools. The few relevant numbers they reported argue against such a theory.

In the first place, Newark charters had previously served higher-performing students, with the non-representative KIPP and North Star Academy being the charters that expanded the most. So the first question is whether those charters could change their model so that the higher-challenge students in neighborhood schools could be retained. Newark’s free and reduced lunch student population averaged 88% over the five-year study; charters were six points lower. However, KIPP and North Star tend to serve a relatively larger percentage of low income and a smaller percentage of poor students than traditional public schools in the inner city. For instance, Newark’s North Star has served far fewer poor children (14.6% fewer free lunch) while serving relatively more students whose higher family incomes qualify for reduced lunch.

Similarly, Newark’s charters served about 60% fewer students with disabilities, but that is just part of the story. For example, North Star has a record of “serving hardly any children with disabilities and few or none with more severe disabilities.”

http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/04/uncommon-comes-to-camden-let.html

These charters also have a long record of benefitting from greater rates of attrition when raising test scores. North Star has a history of suspending students “at an alarming rate,” and that is a reason why “only about half (of 5th graders) ever made it to senior year.” Similarly, as Richard Kahlenberg shows:

The big difference between KIPP and regular public schools…is that whereas struggling students come and go at regular schools, at KIPP, students leave but very few new students enter. Having few new entering students is an enormous advantage not only because low-scoring transfer students are kept out but also because in later grades, KIPP students are surrounded only by successful peers….

Click to access kippstudy.pdf

http://educationnext.org/student-attrition-explain-kipps-success/

In other words, Kane et. al should have asked questions relevant to policy-making. For instance, how different were the tested charter students’ poverty and disability rates in comparison to their classmates who were enrolled in the first quarter? Why was it that the missing test score patterns seemed to have a far bigger effect on “within-school” outcomes? Why did they assume that Newark’s charters can be scaled up?

Did Gates-affiliated researchers overlook these obvious questions because they still are oblivious to realities within school systems? Or did they only ask the questions that they knew would produce answers that would please their bosses?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization

Martin Levine in NonProfit Quarterly: Did the Gates Foundation Learn Any Lessons from Its Serial Failures?

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2017 //
36

Martin Levine keeps an eye on education philanthropy on behalf of the online journal Nonprofit Quarterly.

In this post, he recapitulates the speculation about the latest Gates’ initiative.

At least one observer thinks that Gates has learned his lesson and is now avoiding a “top down” approach.

Megan Tompkins-Stange, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, told Education Week “she was somewhat surprised that Gates said the foundation should serve more as a “catalyst of good ideas than an inventor of ideas.”

This would be a remarkable change for the man with $80 billion.

Is he capable of listening?

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Laura Chapman on Bill Gates’ Hubris, Ignorance, and Folly

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2017 //
54

A couple of days ago, Bill Gates said he has a new plan to reform education. As I pointed out in a post, Bill Gates is batting 0 for 3. He dropped $2 Billion into breaking up large high schools and turning them into small schools. He started in 2000, didn’t see a big jump in test scores, and backed out in 2008. Then, having decided that the answer to high test scores was to punish teachers whose student scores didn’t go up, he pushed value-added Assessment, partnering with Arne Duncan and Race to the Top. Thousands of educators were fired and many schools were closed based on Gates’s fancy. That lasted from 2008 until now, and it has been written into state law in many states, although it has distorted the purpose of education and created massive demoralization among teachers and a national teacher shortage. Then he funded the Common Core, in its entirety. It is his pedagogical Frankenstein, his personal belief that education should be completely standardized, from standards to curriculum to teacher education to teacher evaluation. Speaking to the National Board for Certified Teachers a few years ago, he praised standardization and talked about the beauty of standard electrical plugs. No matter where you live, you can plug in an appliance and it works! Clearly, that was his metaphor for education. What did he spend on the creation and promotion of the Common Core? No one knows for sure, but estimates range from $200 Million to $2 Billion.

There is one other massive Gates failure that I forgot to mention: inBloom. This was a $100million investment in data mining of students’ personally identifiable data. Several states and districts agreed to turn their data over to inBloom, which wipould use the data as its owners chose. Parents got wind of this and launched a campaign to stop in loom. Led by Leonie Haimson of New York and Rachel Stickland of Colorado, parents besieged their legislators, and one by one, the state’s and districts pulled out. InBloom collapsed.

We don’t know how much money Gates has poured into charter schools, but we imagine he must be disappointed that on average they don’t produce higher scores than the public schools he disdains. He bundled millions for a referendum in Washington State to allow charter schools, the fourth such referendum. Despite Gates’ swamping the election with money, the motion barely passed. Then the State’s highest court denied public funding to charter schools, declaring that they are not public schools because they are not governed by elected school boards. Gates and his friends tried to oust the Chief Judge when she ran for re-election, but she coasted to victory.

As you see, he is actually 0 for 5 in his determination to “reform” the nation’s public schools.

But he is not deterred by failure!

So what is the latest Gates’ idea?

Laura Chapman explains here:

“At the Meeting of the Council for Great City Schools October 19, 2017, Gates said:

“Today, I’d like to share what we have learned over the last 17 years and how those insights will change what we focus on over the next five years.”

“I think that Gates has learned very little about education in the last 17 years. He is still fixated on “the lagging performance” of our students on what he regards as “the key metrics of a quality education – math scores, English scores, international comparisons, and college completion.

“Gates wants his narrow definition of “quality education” to be accepted as if the proper doctrine for improving schools and also ensuring the “economic future and competitiveness of the United States.”

“Gates wants faster progress in raising test scores, and high school graduation rates. He seems to think that “constraints and other demands on state and local budget” actually justify his plans to “ increase high school graduation and college-readiness rates.”

“Gates takes credit for funding for the deeply flawed + Measures of Effective Teaching project (MET), claiming that it showed educators ”how to gather feedback from students on their engagement and classroom learning experiences . . . and about observing teachers at their craft, assessing their performance fairly, and providing actionable feedback.” The $64 million project in 2007 tried to make it legitimate for teachers to be judged by “multiple measures” including the discredited VAM, and dubious Danielson teacher observation protocol http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/01/review-MET-final-2013 Gates learned nothing from that micromanaging effort.

“Gates funded and promoted the Common Core. He says: “Teachers need better curricula and professional development aligned with the Common Core.”He remains committed to the ideas that “teacher evaluations and ratings” are useful ways “to improve instruction,” He thinks “data-driven continuous learning and evidence-based interventions,” will improve student achievement. This jargon is meaningless.

“Gates said: Overall, we expect to invest close to $1.7 billion in US public education over the next five years.“…“We anticipate that about 60 percent of this will eventually support the development of new curricula and networks of schools that work together to identify local problems and solutions . . . and use data to drive continuous improvement.

“Don’t be deceived by the “public education” comment. Gates wants to control public schools by dismantling their governance by and for the public. By “networks of schools” Gates means “innovation districts” where persons employed by private interests can control educational policy under the banner of “collaboration” or “partnership.”

“Gates offers several examples of networks. One is CORE, a so-called “partnership” of eight large urban school districts in California: Fresno, Garden Grove, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Ana,

“CORE stands for “California Office for Reform in Education CORE a non-governmental organization, based in San Francisco, funded by the Stuart Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation (Stephen Bechtel Fund); and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Here are some other things you should know about CORE.

“CORE was created in order to bypass the California State Board of Education and Race to the Top accountability, by marketing its new “School Quality Improvement Index.” This index includes social-emotional learning and school climate indicators in addition to California requirements—test scores, graduation rates, and the like.
Participating CORE Districts are bound to the terms of a memorandum of understanding, signed only by each district superintendent. This MOU specifies that the district will use: CORE-approved school improvement ratings based on existing and new indicators, a CORE-approved teacher and principal evaluation process with professional development plans, CORE-specific teacher and principal hiring and retention policies with cross-district sharing data—including results from teacher/student/parent surveys of school climate and student self-assessments of their social-emotional skills.

“The final rating for each school in a CORE district is a complex web of weightings and transformations of scores into performance and growth measures: 40% of the overall rating for school climate/social emotional indicators and 60% for academics.

“An autonomous “School Quality Oversight Panel” nullifies oversight of these districts by the State Board of Education. This “oversight” panel has CORE supporters recruited from The Association of California School Administrators, and California School Boards Association, California State PTA. The main monitors/promoters of this scheme are actually two panel members: Ed Trust West and the Policy Analysis for California Education. Bot of these organizations are sustained in large measure by private funding.

“Ed Trust West is funded by the Bloomberg Philanthropies, State Farm Companies, and these foundations: Bill & Melinda Gates, Joyce, Kresge, Lumina, Wallace Foundation, and the Walton Family. The Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) is based at Stanford University, with participation by the University of California – Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. PACE is a conduit for grants from USDE and from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation; Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund; S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation; Walter and Elise Haas Fund; and The Walter S. Johnson Foundation.

“School ratings developed by the CORE Districts flow directly to GreatSchools.org —a marketing site for schools and education products. GreatSchools.org is funded by the Gates, Walton, Robertson, and Arnold Foundations. Add the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the Bradley Foundation, Goldman Sachs Gives, New Schools Venture Fund. and 15 other foundations.“GreatSchools.org in a non-profit in name only. GreatSchools.org sells data from all states and districts. For a fee, it will push users of the website to particular schools. Buyers of the data include Zillow and Scholastic.

“I think that the CORE District model illustrates how the private takeover of education is happening. Policy formation and favored school practices are being determined by the wealth and the peculiar visions non governmental groups with deep pockets. In the CORE Districts, this work is aided and abetted by superintendents who are eager for the money and the illusion of prestige that comes from permitting private funders to determine educational policies and practices.

“Gates’ speech to members of the Council of the Great City Schools also includes the example of Tennessee’s LIFT Education as a “network” that is worth replicating.

“LIFT Education enlists educators from 12 rural and urban districts across the state to promote the Common Core agenda and Teach for America practices. Participants in LIFT Education are convened by the State Collaborative on Reforming Education —SCORE. The SCORE website says participants in LIFT have spent the last year and a half collaborating on high-quality early literacy instruction, focusing on building knowledge and vocabulary by piloting knowledge-rich read-alouds in early grades.

“The LIFT/SCORE alliance provides a governance structure for insisting that teachers follow the Gates-funded Common Core. Teachers are given an instructional practice guide that is also a teacher evaluation rubric from Student Achievement Partner, authors of the Common Core. https://lifteducationtn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/LIFT-Instructional-Practice-Guide-K-5-Literacy.pdf

“This LIFT/SCORE non-governmental network is the result of private wealth channeled to superintendents who have outsourced the “coaching” and compliance monitoring for the Common Core literacy project to the Brooklyn-based The New Teachers Project (TNTP). In effect, TFA coaching and systems of data-gathering are present in all of the LIFT/SCORE districts.

“SCORE, the State Collaborative on Reforming Education has been funded since 2010 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, so far $10,623,497 including multiple years for operating support. Add a 2012 grant to SCORE as sponsor of a Chiefs for Change Policy Forum for district leaders so they would be “ambassadors for education reform.” The bait for the LIFT/SCORE network thus came from Chiefs for Change–Jeb Bush’s baby, unfriendly to public education.

“Gates says: “Over the next several years, we will support about 30 of these networks (e.g.., CORE, LIFT) and will start initially with high needs schools and districts in 6 to 8 states. Each network will be backed by a team of education experts skilled in continuous improvement, coaching, and data collection and analysis.””

“Our goal is to work with the field to ensure that five years from now, teachers at every grade level in secondary schools have access to high-quality, aligned curriculum choices in English and math, as well as science curricula based on the Next Generation Science Standards.”

“What else is in the works from the many who would be king of American education?

“We expect that about 25 percent of our funding in the next five years will focus on big bets – innovations with the potential to change the trajectory of public education over the next 10 to 15 years.” What does Gates means by “big bets?” He expects to command the expertise and R&D to change the “trajectory” of education. He will fund translations of “developments in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics” in addition to “technology-enabled” approaches in education.

“There is money left for more.

“We anticipate that the final 15 percent of our funding in the next five years will go to the charter sector. We will continue to help high-performing charters expand to serve more students. But our emphasis will be on efforts that improve outcomes for special needs students — especially kids with mild-to-moderate learning and behavioral disabilities.”

“This proposal sounds like Gates wants to cherry pick the students with “mild to moderate learning and behavioral disabilities,” send them to Gates-funded charter schools to bring their scores up, then claim success where everyone else has failed. This same strategy is being used in “pay-for performance” preschools. Gates sounds like he expects to have a free-hand in ignoring the Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Evidently he wants the “flexibility” to ignore IDEA that he believes to be present in charter schools.

“Bill Gates is still fixated on the idea that his money and clout can and will attract other foundations and private investors. He still holds on to the mistaken idea that “what works” in one community or state can be “scaled up,” and REPLICATED, elsewhere. He is ignorant of the history of education and efforts to replicate programs. He is trapped in an industrial one-size-fits-all model of education.

“Gates ends with this: “Our role is to serve as a catalyst of good ideas, driven by the same guiding principle we started with: all students – but especially low-income students and students of color – must have equal access to a great public education that prepares them for adulthood. We will not stop until this has been achieved, and we look forward to continued partnership with you in this work in the years to come.”

“Beware of billionaires who want to partner with you.

“Gates still seems to think that students, especially low income students, can and will be successful if they have “ equal access to a great public education.” He remains ignorant of the abundant research that shows schools alone are not responsible for, or solutions to, institutionalized segregation and poverty–the main causes of serious disadvantage among low-income students and students of color.

“Gates has grandiose plans. All are focused on privatizing education and selling that snake oil as if it is authentic support for public education.“

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Data and Data Mining, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, John King, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

Lordy, Lordy! Bill Gates Has a New Idea. Run. Hide. Protect the Children and the Teachers

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2017 //
49

After two high-profile failures that he acknowledges, and one high-profile failure that he does not acknowledge, Bill Gates is ready to start reforming the schools of America again.

Valerie Strauss reports on his announcement here.

He jumped into school reform in 2000 with his plan to break up the nation’s high schools into small schools. He promised dramatic test score gains. It wasn’t a terrible idea, but it did not get the score gains he wanted, and he gathered the creme de la creme to his digs in Seattle in 2008 to announce that he was abandoning small schools. Valerie says he dumped $650 Million into that, but my own Research says it was $2 Billion.

His next obsession was evaluating teachers by the test scores of their teachers. He partnered with Arne Duncan on that; Arne made it a condition of Race to the Top funding. The ratings were criticized by the American Statistical Association, the National Academy of Education, AERA, and many individual scholars. But Duncan and Gates plowed ahead. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Post published the ratings of individual teachers. Duncan congratulated them for doing so. A teacher in Los Angeles committed suicide after his ratings were published. Gates gave out hundreds of millions to districts that adopted his evaluations. Hillsborough County, Florida, won $100 Million to apply Gates’ ideas about teaching, and the district exhausted its reserves and abandoned the plan. Gates paid up only $80 Million, and the district was left holding the bag.

Now Gates has given up on that idea, although many states are still sticking with it. Thousands of teachers and principals have been fired based on the ideas sold by Gates and Duncan, but that’s not of any interest to him.

The failure that Gates does not yet admit is the Common Core. He paid hundreds of millions for its development and promotion, and he still loves the idea of standardizing education. He refuses to accept that it’s dead man walking.

So what’s his new idea? I’m not really sure, so I will quote Valerie. My hunch is that he is still pushing Common Core, but it is not clear.

He said 85% of the money will go to public schools and the rest to charter schools. Knowing that Gates is a charter zealot, one must wonder what medicine (or poison) he is offering.

“He said most of the new money — about 60 percent — will be used to develop new curriculums and “networks of schools” that work together to identify local problems and solutions, using data to drive “continuous improvement.” He said that over the next several years, about 30 such networks would be supported, though he didn’t describe exactly what they are. The first grants will go to high-needs schools and districts in six to eight states, which went unnamed.

“Though there wasn’t a lot of detail on exactly how the money would be spent, Gates, a believer in using big data to solve problems, repeatedly said foundation grants given to schools as part of this new effort would be driven by data. “Each [school] network will be backed by a team of education experts skilled in continuous improvement, coaching and data collection and analysis,” he said, an emphasis that is bound to worry critics already concerned about the amount of student data already collected and the way it is used for high-stakes decisions.”

What is he up to? Big data? Common Core? Data mining?

I have often said and written that if he really wanted to help children, he would open health clinics in their schools. He would provide doctors to supply good maternal care to pregnant women. He would not tell teachers how to teach or get involved in evaluating teachers or writing curriculum. He would stop pretending he knows how to reform education and do something that is actually needed.

After 17 years of failure, has he learned nothing?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Data and Data Mining, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Testing Expert: The Common Core Would Be Dead Without Continued Gates Funding

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2017 //
32

I have written several books about the rise and fall of fads in education. One that has risen and should have fallen by now is the Common Core. Why does it persist? Trump promised to kill it, but Betsy DeVos has done nothing to discourage states that use it. Many states have rebranded the CC and call it something else like “Florida Standards” or “New Generation Standards.” But it is the same old Common Core.

Richard Phelps, testing expert, explains why the Common Core persists. As long as Bill Gates keeps funding it, it survives. He points out that the Gates Foundation has been the source of funding and advocacy for the Common Core standards. If CC were a normal educational fad, it would have died by now due to overwhelming opposition from parents and its demonstrated ineffectiveness.

But Bill Gates not only funded the creation of the Common Core, he has funded advocacy groups to support it and funded news media to write favorable articles, even if they have to beat the bushes to find a supportive voice.

Gates is not ready to write off his investment yet, as he did with his failed effort to impose cookie-cutter small schools ($2 billion) and his failed effort to evaluate teachers by test scores of students (full cost unknown, but surely hundreds of millions, mostly passed on to taxpayers by embedding the Gates quixotic idea into the Race to the Top).

Yet Common Core lives on, even if on life support. The life support is dollars.

“The amounts are huge. A search in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website for grant awards with the keyword “Common Core” returns 257 results accumulating more than $300 million.
Substituting the Common Core euphemism “college and career readiness” uncovers another $130 million for another 52 grantees.

Even more Common Core money has been sent under vague explanations such as “for general operating support” to organizations whose only relationship with the Gates Foundation is to promote Common Core…”
“Journalism in general may be suffering, but coverage of education issues has grown, in part thanks to you know who.

Gates generously funds all of the mainstream education press: Education Week, the Hechinger Report, the Education Writers Association, Chalkbeat, and EdSurge, as well as National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System…”

“(Common Core) is so unpopular and unwieldy it would probably have expired a few years ago if not for Gates Foundation support.”

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Testing

Bruce Baker on the Hoax of Tech-Based Solutions to the Cost of Education

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2017 //
15

Bruce Baker of Rutgers University shows in this post that the dream of cutting costs by replacing teachers with computers has been oversold and is a fantasy. It lures entrepreneurs and snake-oil salesmen into education but there is no evidence to support the claims.

Baker traces the latest iteration of the myth of cutting costs and achieving efficiency. Open the link to see the graph that promised huge savings:

“Modern edupreneurs and disrupters seem to have taken a narrow view of technological substitution and innovation, equating technology almost exclusively with laptop and tablet computers – screen time – as potential replacements for teachers – whether in the form of online schooling in its entirety, or on a course by course basis (unbundled schooling).[ii] For example, the often touted Rocketship model (a chain of charter schools), makes extensive use of learning lab time in which groups of 50 to 70 (or more) students work on laptops while supervised by uncertified “instructional lab specialists.”[iii] Fully online charter schools have expanded in many states often operated as for-profit entities.[iv] The overarching theme is that there must be some way to reduce the dependence on human resources to provide equal or better schooling, because human resources are an ongoing, inefficient expense.

“In 2011, on the invitation of New York State Commissioner of Education John King (later, replacement of Arne Duncan as U.S. Secretary of Education), Marguerite Roza, at the time a Senior Economic and Data Advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,[v] presented the Productivity Curve illustration (Figure 11) at a research symposium of the New York State Board of Regents.[vi] Roza used her graph to assert that, for example, for $20,000 per pupil, tech-based learning systems could provide nearly 4x the bang for the buck as the status quo, and double the bang for the buck as merely investing in improved teacher effectiveness.

“The most significant shortcoming of this graph, however, was that it was entirely speculative[vii] (actually, totally made up! Fictional!) – a) not based on any actual empirical evidence that such affects could be or have anywhere been achieved, b) lacking any definition whatsoever as to what was meant by “tech-based learning systems” or “improve teacher effectiveness”, and c) lacking any information on the expenditures or costs which might be associated with either the status quo or the proposed innovations. That is, without any attention to the cost effectiveness frameworks I laid out in the previous chapter. The graph itself was then taken on the road by Commissioner King and used in his presentations to district superintendents throughout the state![viii]”

We now know from experience and evidence that fully online schools produce worse results with no savings in cost or efficiency (the cost savings are turned into profits for inferior education).

A very important post.

Categories Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, John King, Technology

Laura Chapman : The Gates Foundation’s Newest Reformy Organization

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2017 //
11

Laura Chapman explains the nature of “Education Cities,” the latest plaything of the Billionaire Boys Club!

Here is the latest reformy initiative: Education Cities!

Our dear friend Laura Chapman has deciphered what this latest disruptive program is.

She writes:

“Here is some information about Education Cities.

http://www.educationcities.org/

“It is connected to the Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust) launched by The Mind Trust in Indianapolis.

“Both ventures have received Gates Foundation money to push “personalized learning.”

“About Education Cities:

“FUNDERS Laura and John Arnold foundation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Walton Family Foundation.

“PARTNERS

“Education Cities works with leading organizations to help our members achieve their missions.”

1. “Bellwether Education Partners works with Education Cities on research and capacity building projects. Bellwether is a nonprofit dedicated to helping education organizations—in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors—become more effective in their work and achieve dramatic results, especially for high-need students.”

“In Cincinnati, Bellwether was the recruiter for the “Accelerate Great Schools,” initiative that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, pushed by high profile local foundations and the business community—all intent on marketing the need for “high quality seats” meaning you close and open schools based on the state’s weapon-ized system of rating schools, increase charter schools, and hire TFA. (We have a TFA alum on the school board). The CEO of Accelerate Great Schools recruited by Bellwether was a TFA manager from MindTrust in Indianapolis. He lasted about 18 months and accelerated himself to a new job.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2017/01/24/ceo-quietly-quits-school-accelerator/96997612/

2. “Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington partners with Education Cities to analyze and identify policies that create the conditions that allow great schools to thrive. Through research and policy analysis, CRPE seeks ways to make public education more effective, especially for America’s disadvantaged students.”

“CRPE should be regarded as an operational arm of the Gates Foundation. It marketed the Gates “Compacts,” a make-nice-with-your-charters MOU giving district resources to charters with charters promising to share their “best practices” and other nonsense. The bait included $100,000 up front with the promise of more money to the district if they met x, y, z, terms of the memorandum of understanding. Only few districts got extra money. Many reasons, some obvious like the departure of the people who signed the MOUs.

3. “Public Impact” partners with Education Cities (and Bellwether Education Partners) on research and capacity building projects. With a mission to dramatically improve learning outcomes for all children in the United States, Public Impact concentrates its work on creating the conditions in which great schools can thrive. The Opportunity Culture initiative aims to extend the reach of excellent teaches and their teams to more students, for more pay, within recurring budgets. Public Impact, a national research and consulting firm, launched the Opportunity Culture initiative’s implementation phase in 2011, with funding from The Joyce Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” Current work is funded by the Overdeck Family Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.”

“Public Impact is marketing 13 school turnaround models, almost all of these with reassignments of teachers and students to accommodate “personalized” something. One arm of the “opportunity culture” website is a job placement service for teachers. In prior administrations Public Impact and Bellwether worked together to get USDE support for charter schools.

4. “Thomas B. Fordham Institute partners with Education Cities to analyze and identify policies and practices that create the conditions that allow great schools to thrive. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute works to advance educational excellence for every child through research, analysis, and commentary, as well as on-the-ground action and advocacy in Ohio.”

“Well, we have a pretty good idea in Ohio of how all of that pontification worked out.

“Here are the cities in the foundation-led move to eliminate democratically elected school boards and substitute public schools with contract schools that receive public funds but usually privately operated. At one time the number of Education Cities was 30, then 28, now 25.

1. Albuquerque, NM, Excellent Schools New Mexico

2. Baton Rouge, LA New Schools for Baton Rouge

3. Boise, ID Bluum

4. Boston, MA Boston Schools Fund, Empower Schools

5. Chicago, IL, New Schools for Chicago

6. Cincinnati, OH, Accelerate Great Schools

7. Denver, CO, Gates Family Foundation, Donnell-Kay Foundation

8. Detroit, MI, The Skillman Foundation

9. Indianapolis, IN, The Mind Trust

10. Kansas City, MO, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

11. Las Vegas, NV, Opportunity 180

12. Los Angeles, CA, Great Public Schools Now

15. Memphis, TN, Memphis Education Fund

16. Minneapolis, MN, Minnesota Comeback

17. Nashville, TN, Project Renaissance

18. New Orleans, LA, New Schools for New Orleans

19. Oakland, CA, Educate78, Great Oakland Public Schools Leadership Center, Rogers Family Foundation

20. Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia School Partnership

21. Phoenix, AZ, New Schools for Phoenix

22. Richmond, CA, Chamberlin Family Foundation

23. Rochester, NY, E3 Rochester

24. San Jose, CA, Innovate Public Schools

25. Washington, DC, Education Forward DC, CityBridge Education

“These cities have been targeted for capture by promoters of choice, charters, tech, poaching talent and resources from public schools, and pushing the idea that established public schools are failures.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Nancy Bailey: Bill Gates Wonders What the Purpose of Life Might Be

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2017 //
27

Nancy Bailey read a post written by Bill Gates (or his writer). It seems he read a book that led him to write a post called “The Purpose Problem: What If People Run Out of Things to Do?”

Nancy responded here.

I can say that the purpose problem could be very troubling for a billionaire. Most people find their purpose is to survive, or to make enough money to have a comfortable life and to send their children to college. Others find a purpose in their religious activities, helping others.

For a man worth north of $50 billion, the purpose problem must loom large.

He doesn’t need to work, but most people find their life enriched by work.

He doesn’t need to make money, but most people find that making money is necessary for the essentials of life.

He has spent billions trying to solve global problems, and he very likely has helped untold numbers of people by investing in medicine and science.

His educational investments have not panned out very well, but he can’t seem to give up trying to fix the schools and ending up by demoralizing teachers and driving them out of their profession.

Bailey hopes that Gates will give some thought to how his activities have a negative effect on other people’s careers, lives, and purpose:

Gates ironically reflects on what it means to have purpose in one’s life.

I say ironically, because many blame Bill Gates for the current push to replace teachers in our public schools with technology—calling it personalized or competency-based learning.

Not only will teachers lose their profession and their purpose, a whole segment of society will be displaced—careers shattered.

This will drastically affect how and what students learn. Even our youngest children will obtain their knowledge on machines.

Brick and mortar schools will be a thing of the past. Children will learn on devices anyplace and anytime. Or they will attend online charter schools with baby-sitter-like facilitators instead of teachers. Connections to humans for learning will be distant…

He doesn’t ponder what troubling results can occur when “disruption” through technology happens in our public schools, or what it will mean when there is no more public school system in America.

Can you help Bill Gates as he tries to find his purpose in life?

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates
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