Archives for category: Gates Foundation, Bill Gates
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Mercedes Schneider Studies Pearson’s Tax Returns

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2013 //
7

In addition to holding a Ph.D. in research methods and teaching high school English in Louisiana, Mercedes Schneider has become infatuated with tax returns.

She has discovered that corporate tax returns tell interesting and important tales.

When she learned that the Attorney General of New York had fined the Pearson Foundation $7.7 million for becoming involved in the activities of its for-profit parent, and that the for-profit parent was allied in a business venture with the Gates Foundation, she decided it was time to study the tax returns.

She unweaves a tangled web of relationships. 

Categories Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Pearson

USA Today: U.S. Has a Poverty Crisis, Not a Schools Crisis

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2013 //
62

Believe it or not, USA Today published a powerful article by Oliver Thomas, a member of its Board of Contributors, acknowledging that the latest PISA rankings reflect the crisis of poverty in the United States. Our Students in low-poverty schools are doing fine; some analyses place them at the very top. But the more poverty, the lower the test scores.

He writes:

“As researchers Michael Rebell and Jessica Wolff of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, have noted, there is no general education crisis in the United States. There is a child poverty crisis that is impacting education.

“Here’s one data point worth remembering. When you measure the test scores of American schools with a child poverty rate of less than 20%, our kids not only outperform the Finns, they outperform every nation in the world.

“But here’s the really bad news. Two new studies on education and poverty were reported in Education Week in October. The first from the Southern Education Foundation reveals that nearly half of all U.S. public school students live in poverty. Poverty has risen in every state since President Clinton left office.

“The second study, conducted by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, reveals that poverty — not race, ethnicity, national origin or where you attend school — is the best predictor of college attendance and completion.

“Chew on that. The causes of poverty are complex and varied: excessive immigration, tax policy, and the exportation and automation of manufacturing jobs. Yet the list of solutions is strikingly short. Other than picking a kid’s parents, it amounts to giving all children access to a high-quality education.

“Here’s the catch-22. While the only long-term solution to poverty might be a good education, a good education is seldom available to children living in poverty.

“One reason is that spending on education has not kept pace with the rise in child poverty. While poverty grew by 40% in the Midwest and 33% in the South from 2001 to 2011, educational spending per pupil grew by only 12% in these regions over the same 10-year period.”

Unfortunately, the article goes on to praise the Gates Foundation for providing college scholarships to low-income students but fails to recognize that Bill Gates has done more than any single individual (other than Arne Duncan) to promote the idea that we can’t “fix” poverty until we “fix” schools. He has promoted Teach for America, charter schools, and teacher evaluation as the way to “fix” schools. Better to do something about poverty. It is a scandal that the world’s richest nation has nearly one-quarter of its children living in poverty, and the best we can do is to privatize school management and test students with greater frequency.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, International, Poverty, US Education

Mother Jones: Where Does the Gates Foundation Invest Its Billions?

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2013 //
17

Alex Park and Jaeah Lee wrote an article in “Mother Jones” detailing what they call the Gates Foundation’s “hypocritical investments.”

While professing concern for children’s health, they are heavily invested in companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.

It also has a major investment in Walmart, as well as smaller sums in privately managed prisons.

While professing concern about climate change, Gates invests in many oil and gas companies, like Exxonmobil.

Do as I say, not as I do.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Breaking News: Pearson Foundation Fined Millions for Violating Laws

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
45

New York state’s attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman won an agreement from the Pearson Foundation to pay $7.7 million in fines for using its charitable activities to advance its corporation’s profit-making arm.

According to the story by Javier Hernandez in the New York Times,

“An inquiry by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, found that the foundation had helped develop products for its corporate parent, including course materials and software. The investigation also showed that the foundation had helped woo clients to Pearson’s business side by paying their way to education conferences that were attended by its employees.

“Under the terms of the agreement to be announced on Friday, the money, aside from $200,000 in legal expenses, will be directed to 100Kin10, a national effort led by a foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, to train more teachers in high-demand areas, including science, technology, engineering and math.

“The fact is that Pearson is a for-profit corporation, and they are prohibited by law from using charitable funds to promote and develop for-profit products,” Mr. Schneiderman said in a statement. “I’m pleased that this settlement will direct millions of dollars back to where they belong.”

“Officials at Pearson and the foundation defended their work.

“We have always acted with the best intentions and complied with the law,” they said, in a joint statement. “However, we recognize there were times when the governance of the foundation and its relationship with Pearson could have been clearer and more transparent.”

“The case shed a light on the competitive world of educational testing and technology, which Pearson has come to dominate. As federal and state leaders work to overhaul struggling schools by raising academic standards, educational companies are rushing to secure lucrative contracts in testing, textbooks and software.

“The inquiry by the attorney general focused on Pearson’s attempts to develop a suite of products around the Common Core, a new and more rigorous set of academic standards that has been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.

“Around 2010, Pearson began financing an effort through its foundation to develop courses based on the Common Core. The attorney general’s report said Pearson had hoped to use its charity to win endorsements and donations from a “prominent foundation.” That group appears to be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Pearson Inc. executives believed that branding their courses by association with the prominent foundation would enhance Pearson’s reputation with policy makers and the education community,” a release accompanying the attorney general’s report said.

“Indeed, in April 2011, the Pearson Foundation and the Gates Foundation announced they would work together to create 24 new online reading and math courses aligned with the Common Core.

“Pearson executives believed the courses could later be sold commercially, the report said, and predicted potential profits of tens of millions of dollars. After Mr. Schneiderman’s office began its investigation, the Pearson Foundation sold the courses to Pearson for $15.1 million.

“The attorney general’s office also examined a series of education conferences sponsored by the Pearson Foundation, which paid for school officials to meet their foreign counterparts in places like Helsinki and Singapore…..”

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Pearson

EduShyster: Who Are “Educators For Excellence”?

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2013 //
14

In recent years, the Gates Foundation has funded AstroTurf “teacher-led groups” to advocate for policies that most teachers reject. One of these groups is called Educators for Excellence.

In this post, a guest blogger for EduShyster explains why he refused to join E4E. Among other things, he could not bring himself to sign the pledge:

“which states that they “pledge to support using value-added test-score data in evaluations, higher hurdles to achieving tenure, the elimination of seniority-driven layoffs, school choice, and merit pay.”

The Gates Foundation has shelled out a lot of money to create teacher groups, led by young teachers with limited classroom experience, to push its anti-teacher agenda. A very clever strategy.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Merit pay, Teacher Tenure

EduShyster: Microsoft Drops Stack Ranking, Why Not Schools?

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2013 //
12

Sue Altman of the new and unaccredited EduShyster Academy notes the irony that Microsoft has finally abandoned its stack ranking system but the schools are stuck with it, thanks to the Gates Foundation and its best buddy Arne Duncan.

What is stack ranking?

“Now, after hiring a new HR person, Microsoft is getting rid of the stack rankings—and good riddance. But thanks in no small part to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, our schools are still ruled by an education reform-mindset that’s informed by the same wrong-headed ideas that Microsoft just rejected.

“The belief that punishment motivates people to work better

“The belief that competition is better than collaboration in an organization

“The idea that worth of employees can be measured by ranking them on narrow criteria and that teamwork, innovation, problem solving and communication don’t count towards that criteria”

Now that Microsoft has decided that its players should not compete with one another, can we boot those ideas out of the schools?

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

Bill Gates’ Utopian Vision for Your Child

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2013 //
115

Bill Gates has plans for your child. He wants to know everything he can about your child so he can customize and personalize the deliverables.

A teacher in California told me that his principal enthusiastically signed up for the Gates plan. Here is the survey that every teacher was asked to complete. Where do you think this is going? Is this utopia or dystopia?

**********************HERE IS THE CONTENTS WHEN CLICKING THE LINK:

ORIGINAL Survey Option E: Teacher Survey

We believe in the promise of personalization to dramatically improve student learning. In the future, each student’s learning experience – what she learns, and how, when, and where she learns it – will be tailored to her individual developmental needs, skills, and interests. This is a fundamental shift from the way that students learn today, and as such, we believe that for personalization to truly transform student learning, schools will likely look dramatically different than they do today. Our current efforts support districts and partner organizations in building system-level capacity to design, launch and scale school models that embrace this bold vision of personalized learning.

The purpose of this survey is to understand the teacher perspective on the personalized learning activities happening in schools, including current instructional practices, PD, supports, etc. Further, this survey aims to gauge the level of interest for teachers to implement personalized learning in their classrooms. For this survey, personalized learning is defined as follows: Learning experiences for all students are tailored to their individual developmental needs, skills and interest. Personalized learning can, and should, include the following supporting elements: learner profiles, personal learning paths, individual mastery, and flexible learning environment. These attributes can be further defined as follows:

• Learner profiles: Captures individual skills, gaps, strengths, weaknesses, interests & aspirations of each student

• Personal learning paths: Each student has learning goals & objectives. Learning experiences are diverse and matched to the individual needs of students

• Individual mastery: Continually assesses student progress against clearly defined standards & goals. Students advance based on demonstrated mastery

• Flexible learning environments: Multiple instructional delivery approaches that continuously optimize available resources in support of student learning

While we believe that true personalized learning requires much more than the mere adoption and use of new technologies, we are optimistic about blended instruction – instructional design and delivery that incorporates the use of new technologies alongside traditional instruction – as a means of personalizing learning. As such, we are interested in hearing about your use of technology as part of your personalized learning efforts and implementation.

***************HERE IS THE FIRST PART OF THE SURVEY************

1. What is the name of your school?

*

2. What level is your school? Elementary School

Middle School

Grades K-8

Grades 6-12

High School

Other (please specify)

*

3. What grade level(s) do you teach?
K

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Other (please specify)

Categories Common Core, Data and Data Mining, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Bill Gates Explains Why His High School Experience Was So Great

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2013 //
34

All students should have the high school experience that Bill Gates had.

A wonderful campus with a rich curriculum, experienced teachers (79% with advanced degrees), small classes, excellent arts programs, great sports activities, up-to-date science laboratories. Everything that makes for success.

So why does he say that, for other people’s children, class size doesn’t matter?

Why does he support TFA, which sends temps without advanced degrees to the schools of the neediest?

Why does he not fight for the right of every child to have the experience that he had, rather than the dime-store model?

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Robert D. Shepherd on inBloom

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2013 //
41

Robert D. Shepherd, curriculum writer and author, left the following comment following Andrea Gabor’s post about the data collecting and data mining business called inBloom.

He writes:

“There were 55,235,000 K-12 public school students in the US in 2010. At $5.00 apiece for inBloom, that would amount to $276,175,000 a year. And if inBloom had a large existing database, it would become a monopoly provider. Switching from it would be next to impossible.

But that’s just the beginning. The whole point of gathering this real-time data on student responses is to link it to online adaptive curricula, with inBloom 2.0 as the gateway, the portal, for delivery of that curricula–

serving up the mind-blowingly inane online worksheet on the schwa sound to little Yolanda and the Powerpoint-like online worksheet on the foil method for factoring to little Kwame. The fans of this online adaptive curricula are the sort of people who think that all learning can be reduced to bullet points on a screen.

At any rate, when the inBloom database becomes the portal for curricula, that’s when the big bucks start rolling in, from inBloom’s “partners,” like Murdoch’ and Klein’s Amplify, for example. And inBloom has made it VERY clear from the start that that’s their plan. That’s the “promise” of having such a database.

Quite a promise.

In short, inBloom is a strategic powerplay for the education market.

I dearly hope that people will have the sense to stop this Orwellian operation before it sinks its data-gathering tentacles into our nation’s children.

Think of it, a nationwide portal for delivery of curricula, a gateway with inBloom as toll-taker.

As Arne Duncan’s office put it, “The new standards are about creating a national market for products that can be brought to scale.”

Bill Gates earned his billions by selling a small amount of stuff to practically EVERYONE.

It appears that inBloom has a very similar long-term business model.

It gets even worse. Read the Department of Education’s Report on “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century.” This report envisions hooking kids up to real-time monitors of their affective states and feeding THOSE into the database as well so that grit, tenacity, and perseverance can be measured continually.

This kind of thing goes WAY BEYOND Orwell’s Telescreens in 1984. The whole concept is sickening.

And Arne Duncan’s Department of Education is serving as the facilitator for the creation of this Orwellian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (Minitrue).

You have to give it to these guys for cooking up such a diabolical strategic plan. And almost no one seems, yet, to be hip to what this national data-gathering is really about over the long term. Such plans could be carried out only if people weren’t really paying attention. So far, that’s worked well for the, ahem, “reformers.” We have new NATIONAL “standards” even though most U.S. citizens have never heard of them and haven’t a clue what they are, what’s in them, who paid for them, who created them, what consequences they will have for curricula and pedagogy, and so on. All that new standards and testing stuff was done with NO national debate and with no vetting.

I’m sure that the inBloom folks were hoping for the same here. And the truly frightening thing is that their hopes might well be fulfilled.

Totalitarianism can come about through violent revolution. It can also come about because no one is paying attention.”

Categories Data and Data Mining, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Technology, Computers

Joanne Barkan: How Big Philanthropy Undermines Democracy

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2013 //
13

Joanne Barkan has an excellent essay in Dissent magazine that explains how foundations founded by plutocrats use their wealth and political power to damage democracy.

She uses the example of public education to demonstrate how a small number of large foundations have captured control of public policy, taking it out of the hands of voters and parents to impose their will and get what they want.

She offers the examples of the AstroTurf groups created by the Gates Foundation; these are groups that pretend to represent local, grassroots groups but in fact carry out the wishes of the plutocrats.

Then there is the example of grants offered to districts that are contingent on certain officials remaining in office.

Then there is the example of the “parent trigger,” which manipulates parents to hand over their public school to a private corporation.

And another example is the practice of the Broad Foundation, which underwrites the salary of certain public officials to ensure that it gets its way.

She asks a good question: why are these plutocrats allowed to get tax breaks as they impose their control over and subvert a democratic institution?

This is a subject that deserves a book-length treatment. With her meticulous research skills and her understanding of the political dynamics involved, Joanne Barkan is just the one to do it.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Los Angeles, Parent trigger, Walton Foundation
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