Archives for category: Gates Foundation, Bill Gates
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Reader Asks: Is This the True Goal of “Reform”?

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2013 //
46

A reader posts the following comment.

Thought you might be interested in Gates latest “Request for Proposal: Literacy Courseware Challenge.” More teacher-less, computerized learning to support his Common Core [National] Standards. “Adaptive digital learning tools” are his robo-teachers, because apparently the standards [read: curriculum, no matter how many people say that the CC are not a curriculum] are teacher-proof. Just create a huge quonset hut, or even better, a stadium, full of computer cubicles, sit the kids down, and, voila! A perfect Gates-ian school. Disgusting.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Pages/rfp-literacy-courseware-challenge.aspx

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, On-Line Education, Privatization

Is There a Method Behind the Madness of “Calibrating” Principals?

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2013 //
16

Jersey Jazzman read Carol Burris’s account of her “training” sessions where she was being “calibrated” by people who know how to calibrate principals.

He saw behind the smokescreen.

The goal is to create a system so “objective” that principals have no room for judgment and teachers may be fired by those allegedly objective criteria.

We must have standards! We must stack and rank our employees! Where have we heard that before?

The answer is in the link.

Categories Accountability, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

Vote for This Man for School Board!

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2013 //
29

I don’t know Michael Weston, but I love his comment below.

He is a teacher in Hillsborough County, Florida, which received many millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to pilot a new teacher evaluation program.

Bill and Melinda visited the district and expressed great pleasure at the compliments directed their way. They don’t seem to realize that 1) educators are very polite (as a rule), and 2) people are starstruck in the presence of billionaires.

But Michael Weston knows the score.

He decided enough is enough, and look what he is doing:

 

I am the Union Rep at my high school (in Hillsborough County). Just two hours ago I was explaining to some members that there was absolutely nothing (except running for School Board) I could do about:
1. High school science teachers being evaluated by a former sixth grade teacher.
2. That no consideration is given to how long you have been teaching a particular class, nor how many different class preps you have.
3. That a sleeping child will count against you, but God forbid you touch the child’s desk or anything else that may call attention to a particular kid.
4. All of the teachers being fired this year for poor evaluations are over 40.
5. Since it is a totally subjective rating, they can kill you based on your style vs their style.
etc, etc. etc.
And why is there nothing I can do as their Union rep? The Hillsborough Teacher’s Union is a full participant and support of this nonsense.

So, I filed to run for School Board. Someone has to stop this.

Categories Florida, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

Cody to Gates; What Should We Measure?

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2013 //
16

Anthony Cody advises Bill gates that test scores are not the best measure of effectiveness.

Here he tells Gates
what really matters.

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Bill Gates: Data Will Solve the World’s Biggest Problems

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2013 //
33

Bill Gates shared his wisdom about how to solve the world’s biggest problems with readers of the Wall Street Journal. It is likely to encourage the worst instincts of the business world, which needs constantly to be reminded that human needs are more important than profit, and not everything that counts can be measured.

How do does Gates believe the world’s problems can be solved? Measurement!

Even though many researchers have ridiculed his massive investment in measuring teacher effectiveness, Bill doesn’t know it. He still thinks that if you mix a certain proportion of test scores, observations, and student surveys, you can solve the teacher quality problem. And how does he know that the problem is solved? Because test scores went up in Eagle County, Colorado.

If test scores were all there was to measuring education quality, he might have a point. But as Governor Jerry Brown stated so eloquently in his state of the state speech last week, the goal of education is not easily reduced to data.

Brown said:

“In the right order of things, education—the early fashioning of character and the formation of conscience—comes before legislation. Nothing is more determinative of our future than how we teach our children. If we fail at this, we will sow growing social chaos and inequality that no law can rectify. ”

How do you measure the fashioning of character and the formation of conscience?

Governor Brown said:

“The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child. We seem to think that education is a thing—like a vaccine—that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children.”

Which matters most? The young person with high test scores or the young person with character and conscience?

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Good News: Pushback to Corporate Reform

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2013 //
9

Anthony Cody reflects on a year in which the voices of parents and teachers are at last being heard.

The foundations and the U.S. Department of Education and ALEC were having a field day, pushing untried and noxious policies without debate, until 2012.

Then things got interesting.

Reform hero Tony Bennett was upset by a National Board Certified Teacher in Indiana.

Cody spoke truth to power in his dialogue with the Gates Foundation.

Friends, we are finding our voice.

The public is beginning to understand.

Be strong.

Bad ideas eventually collapse, especially when they have no record of success and a long history of failure and demoralization.

Persist.

Categories ALEC, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Parents, Beware! Is Your Child for Sale?

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2013 //
41

This appeared on the New York City parent blog:

NYC Public School Parents
Independent voices of New York City public school parents
FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 2013

Parents beware! NY and eight other states plan to share your child’s confidential school records with private corporations without your consent!

New York is one of five states that have agreed to share confidential NYC student and teacher data in Phase I with the “Shared Learning Collaborative” or SLC, a project of the Gates Foundation.

The other states and districts in Phase I include North Carolina (Guilford Co.), Colorado (Jefferson Co.), Illinois (Unit 5 Normal and District 87 Bloomington) and Massachusetts (Everett). Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana are in Phase II, according to the Gates Foundation, intend to start piloting the system in 2013.

The data to be shared will include the names of students, their grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and likely race, ethnicity, free lunch and special education status as well.

These records are to be stored in a massive electronic data bank, being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corporation. News Corporation is owned by Rupert Murdoch and has been found to illegally violate the privacy of individuals in Great Britain and in the United States.

Over the next few months, the Gates Foundation plans to turn over all this personal data to another, as yet unnamed corporation, headed by Iwan Streichenberger, the former marketing director of a company called Promethean that sells whiteboards, based in Atlanta GA.

This new corporation intends to make this confidential student information available in turn to commercial enterprises to help them develop and market their “learning products.” This new corporation is supposed to be financially sustainable by 2016, which means either states, districts or vendors will have to pay for its upkeep and maintenance. All this is happening without parental knowledge or consent.

There are serious questions as to whether this plan complies with the federal law protecting student privacy, called FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), which allows states or districts to disclose students’ personally identifiable education records without parental consent only in very limited circumstances and under stringent conditions, none of which apply in this case.
Moreover, we have learned that this confidential information is to be put on a cloud managed by Amazon.com, with few if any protections against data leakage.

After our press conference with our attorney, Norman Siegel in October, the NY State Education Department finally released its contract with the Gates Foundation. As we feared, it only reaffirmed our concerns about the lack of privacy for children, the weak protections against data leakage, and the denial of the parental right to consent. Here is a letter from our attorneys expressing our concerns.

We believe that any state that enters into an agreement with the Shared Learning Collaborative, or its successor corporation, should at the very least be obligated to:

Release its contract with the Gates Foundation, notify all parents of the impending disclosure of their children’s confidential records, and provide them with the right to consent;

Hold public hearings for parents to be able to express their concerns about the plan’s potential to risk their children’s privacy, security and safety;

Explain how families can obtain relief if their children are harmed by improper use or accidental release of this information, including who will be held financially responsible;

Affirm that they will respect the privacy rights of public schoolchildren more than the interests of the Gates Foundation, News Corporation, or any other company or vendor with whom this confidential information may be shared.

Please see below; video of Khem Irby, parent activist in North Carolina, speaking before the Guilford school board about this issue last week.

Here is a fact sheet with this information you can download and distribute. You can also leave a comment on the Gates website here, if you think parents should have the right to consent.

For more information, please email us at info@classsizematters.org or call us at 212-674-7320.

Leonie Haimson at 1/18/2013

Categories For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Parents, Students

$50 Million. 3 Years. No Clue.

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2013 //
41

Gary Rubinstein, the brilliant math teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, has done it again.

He has dissected the Gates MET study–the one that says test scores are better at determining teacher quality than observations–and he says that the data in the study don’t make the point that has been widely reported.

Gene Glass, Research Professor at the University of Colorado, takes apart the MET study, and like Gary, says that the $50 million was a waste.

I wonder when Gates will abandon his mission to find the perfect metric to measure teacher quality. It isn’t working anywhere; it has perverse incentives; it is inaccurate and unreliable.  How long will he stick with this failed idea?

Just think how many musical instruments that $50 million would have bought, how many librarians could have been rehired, how many after-school programs might have been funded.

 

 

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Seattle Writer Challenges Bill Gates to Be Consistent

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2013 //
26

A reader sent the following observation:

Here’s a devastating article that points up Bill Gates’ hypocrisy when it comes to the variation between what he demands for his own children, and what he subjects children from lower income communities:

THE SEATTLE TIMES’ Danny Westneat takes Gates to task for promoting policy all over the country that jacks class size sky high, with Gates using the common-sense-defying logic that kids will fare better in larger classes.

Well, Westneat sends his own kids to public schools, and will eventually attend Garfield High School (in the news of late). These are the schools that—once Gates has his way—will have obscenely large class sizes… A bit fed up, Weastneat did what perhaps no other writer has yet dared to do:

he investigated the two rich kids’ private school where Gates sends his own children and—doncha know it? —these schools major selling point is that they have… wait for it… EXTREMELY SMALL CLASS SIZES:

WESTNEAT: “I bet (Gates) senses deep down as a parent that pushing more kids into classes isn’t what’s best for students. His kids’ private-sector grade school has 17 kids in each room. His daughter’s high school has 15. These intimate settings are the selling point, the chief reason tuition is $25,000 a year — more than double what Seattle schools spends per student.”

Calling out Gates’ hypocrisy, Weastneat ends the article with a knockout finish:

WEASTNEAT: “Bill, here’s an experiment. You and I both have an 8-year-old. Let’s take your school and double its class sizes, from 16 to 32. We’ll use the extra money generated by that — a whopping $400,000 more per year per classroom — to halve the class sizes, from 32 to 16, at my public high school, Garfield.

“In 2020, when our kids are graduating, we’ll compare what effect it all had. On student achievement. On teaching quality. On morale. Or that best thing of all, the “environment that promotes relationships between teachers and students.”

“Deal? Probably not. Nobody would take that trade. Which says more than all the studies ever will.”

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Testing, Washington State

Gary Rubinstein: Gates’ MET Study Is Wrong

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2013 //
30

Gary Rubinstein took a close look at the new Gates’ study of teacher evaluation and says it is wrong. The media takeaway is tat in evaluating teachers, test scores are more reliable than observations. But Gary, who teaches mathematics at Stuyvesant High School in New York City, says it isn’t so.

Bill Gates has put $50 million into finding the ideal way to evaluate teachers.

Gary concludes: “It seems like the point of this ‘research’ is to simply ‘prove’ that Gates was right about what he expected to be true. He hired some pretty famous economists, people who certainly know enough about math to know that their conclusions are invalid.”

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations
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