Archives for category: Gates Foundation, Bill Gates
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A Message for Reformers

By dianeravitch
December 29, 2012 //
38

This is a message for corporate reformers from Katie Osgood.

I hope it will be read carefully by the folks at Democrats for Education Reform, Stand for Children, ALEC, Teach for America, Education Reform Now, StudentsFirst, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Dell Foundation, Bellweather Partners, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Heartland Institute, the NewSchools Venture Fund, and, of course, the U.S. Department of Education.

Please forgive me if I inadvertently left your name off the list of the reform movement. If I did, read it anyway.

Katie Osgood teaches children in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. She knows a lot about how children fail, how they suffer, and how our institutions and policies fail them.

Please read her short essay. Help it go viral if you can.

Categories ALEC, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Stand for Children, Students, Teach for America TFA

The Ultimate Reform School!

By dianeravitch
December 28, 2012 //
11

Drop whatever you are doing, and read this. EduShyster serves up a delightful portrait of an award-winning school in Minneapolis that embodies every new reform strategy. And here is the best part: It hasn’t opened yet! It won’t open until next September and it is already a great success!

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, On-Line Education, Privatization

Merry Christmas from EduShyster

By dianeravitch
December 25, 2012 //
2

This is a wonderful gift catalogue that will give you laughs and solace on this special day.

EduShyster has created some priceless selections for the discerning shopper of edu-shlock.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Humor, Klein, Joel, Teach for America TFA

Beware of Foundations Bearing “Gifts”

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2012 //
17

Sarah Darer Littman has a good idea. She thinks that journalists in Connecticut should do investigative journalism and not just write what they find in the press release.

Case in point: the recent gift of $5 million from the Gates foundation to Hartford schools.

Littman calls the grant a Trojan horse because it commits the district to adopt practices that the foundation favors. These will be costly, such as a specific, expensive assessment system.

There was a time when foundations actually made gifts. They gave the recipient X dollars to do what the recipient wanted to do. It’s different now. Now the foundation decides what the recipient ought to do, and offers money to carry out the foundation’s wishes.

In some cases, the foundation offers a recipient $100,000 to do something that will eventually cost the school district millions of dollars.

The great puzzle is why so many school districts line up and ask for the money.

Categories Broad Foundation, Connecticut, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Is Privatization the Purpose of “Great Schools Compact?”

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2012 //
4

Should Philadelphia close more district schools and open more charters? Can the district schools learn from charters? Can the charters learn from district schools? Are low scores caused by the schools? Are scores the best measure of school quality?

Read about the heated debate in Philadelphia surrounding the Gates-funded “Great Schools Compact.”

And be sure to scan the comments.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Philadelphia, Privatization

Jersey Jazzman and a Generation of Mendacity

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2012 //
3

Jersey Jazzman has his plate full just trying to keep up with the nonsense and prevarication now tumbling from the mouths of reformers. . In this post, he corrects a self-proclaimed member of “the new majority,” who wrote in the Washington Post that young teachers are just itching to be judged by the test scores of their students.

He belongs to a Gates-funded group of young teachers who glory in the idea that teachers with less than 10 years experience are “the new majority.” Gates drops a million or more on groups like this who push the unions to endorse Gates’ ideas.

The young fellow corrected here by the Jazzman chastises the Chicago Teachers Union for striking for more pay and tenure, but that’s not why they struck. He might start by getting his facts straight. JJ offers him help.

He might read this to learn more about why 90% of his brothers and sisters in Chicago authorized a strike. That is, 90% of all the CTU members voted to strike, and they were 98% of all those who cast a ballot. Surely, some of that number were young teachers too.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, Unions

Gates Assists Jindal “Reforms”

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2012 //
16

The Jindal reforms of 2012 are among the most hostile to teachers of any legislation passed in recent years. Under the terms of the law, every teacher’s job hinges on student test scores, which count for 50% of the teacher’s evaluation.

As readers of this blog know, the Jindal reforms are hostile not only to teachers but to public education, in that more than half the students in the state are eligible for vouchers, and dozens if not hundreds of charters will open, draining resources from public education.

Why would anyone outside the fringes of the far-right facilitate this bold attack on a democratic institution?

The Gates Foundation has just awarded $300,000 to Jefferson Parish to assist in implementing test-based accountability for teachers.

When I met with a very high-ranking official of the Gates Foundation last year, he insisted that the foundation was not supportive of high-stakes testing. I think there is a disconnect here. The foundation is helping a district implement a law that promises to fire teachers based on the test scores of their students.

The same is true in Florida, where a Republican legislature passed legislation that stripped away all job protections from teachers and tied their future to test scores. Hillsborough County in Florida is one of the Gates Foundation’s major teacher evaluation sites.

I wonder: how many years must we wait before we see “a great teacher” in every classroom in those sites that take the advice of the Gates Foundation?

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Wireless Generation Wins Common Core Contract

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2012 //
27

From NYC Parent blog (by Leonie Haimson):

Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch/run by Joel Klein, Wins the $4.9M Contract to develop the software that will be used to report & analyze results for the new #CommonCore Assessments – both the interim and “summative” exams being developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium for 25 states (blue states in map below.)

Wireless is also developing the software/ infrastructure for the Gates-funded Shared Learning Collaborative, which is collecting confidential student & teacher data in states throughout the country, including NYS, & planning to turn this information over to for-profit commercial ventures, without parental consent, to help companies develop and market their “learning products.” The information will include among other things, names, addresses, grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and learning disability status.

The SLC has now named a new CEO, Iwan Streichenberger, who is going to direct SLC’s transition from a project to a nonprofit enterprise; to “ manage the technology and related services.”

Streichenberger was formerly the Chief Marketing Officer of a for-profit company called Promethean, where he was “responsible for product development, marketing, and sales strategy for the education technology company’s newest division.

He says he will “look forward to telling the story about the transformative technology we are building and how we are working with our industry partners to help education technology achieve its potential for students” and will be speaking about this at the SXSW Edu conference in Austin Texas March 4-7.

Here we go.

http://shar.es/6uSxE

Wireless Generation Wins Contract for Common Assessments

By Jason Tomassini on November 29, 2012 12:00 PM | No comments

As the two consortia developing assessments around the Common Core State Standards move closer to the tests’ adoption, for the 2014-15 school year, they are starting to award contracts that will shape how the assessments look and operate. On Wednesday, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium announced that the software used to report and analyze results from its assessments will be developed by Wireless Generation, the education software company.

Wireless Generation will partner with Educational Testing Service (ETS) on the contract. The terms of the contract were not disclosed, but the Request for Proposal stipulated the project could not exceed $4.9 million. Smarter Balanced’s projects are funded through a four-year, $175 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

The reporting system will be used for the common assessments students will take in Smarter Balanced’s 25 member states (you can view those states in the map below). The system will collect data from interim and summative assessments given to students and also track their progress toward college and career readiness, as determined by the individual standards. The data will be available to administrators and teachers as well as parents, according to a news release from Smarter Balanced. Schoolwide and districtwide reports will also be available.

The entire system will be open source, which means other computer programmers can build applications using the software’s source code. For instance, Moodle is an open source learning management platform that is used as the framework for companies like Moodlerooms.

Early next year, the public will have a chance to provide input on the system requirements. You can read the Request for Proposal here, and Wireless Generation’s winning proposal here, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Some important notes regarding Wireless Generation. News Corporation, the international media conglomerate implicated in a widespread phone hacking scandal last year, owns 90 percent of Wireless Generation, which is part of the company’s new Amplify education business. Since the acquisition, for $360 million in November 2010, concerns over possible connections between Wireless Generation’s data operations and its parent company have arose. In response, Wireless Generation has pointed out that its data operations are independent from News Corp. and the company has always complied with the many laws governing student data, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In August 2011, the company did lose a $27 million contract to develop assessment tracking software for New York state education department because of the scandal embroiling News Corp.’s newspaper division.

(Larry Berger, a co-founder and executive chairman of Wireless Generation, serves on the board of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit corporation that publishes Education Week.)

In somewhat related news, the Brown Center on Education Policy, at the Brookings Institution, released a report Wednesday on the cost of state assessments around the country, including a recommendation for states to join testing consortia in order to lower costs. Read more about it here.

Leonie Haimson

Executive Director

Class Size Matters

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New York, NY 10011

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leonie@classsizematters.org

http://www.classsizematters.org

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Follow me on twitter @leoniehaimson

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Categories Common Core, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Klein, Joel, Race to the Top, Testing

A Student Activist Joins the Honor Roll

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2012 //
9

Stephanie Rivera is a junior at Rutgers University preparing to become a teacher.

Stephanie was one of the leading forces in creating Students United for Public Education, a new organization in which students are joining to stand up against the privatizers, profiteers and naysayers now besieging our public schools.

She has her own blog, where she regularly debates other students who support corporate reform policies.

Stephanie is an activist on behalf of the teaching profession and on behalf of social and educational equity.

She joins our honor roll as a hero of public education because she has bravely taken on powerful forces and dared to ask hard questions.

She understands that teaching is hard work, and that it is a profession, not a pastime.

I admire her spunk, her willingness to debate, her energy, and her courage.

The future belongs to you, Stephanie, and to all the other students who understand that public education belongs to them as a democratic right to build their future.

It must not become a plaything for Wall Street and billionaires, nor a stepping stone for politicians, nor a profit center for entrepreneurs.

It belongs to you and your generation. Preserve and strengthen it for future generations, doors open to all by right.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Honor Roll, Students, Teach for America TFA, US Education

What Happened to Public Education in 2012 Elections

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2012 //
13

Joanne Barkan has written an excellent summary of how public education fared in the recent elections.

Barkan knows how to follow the money. Her article “Got Dough?” showed the influence of the billionaires on education policy.

She begins her analysis of the 2012 elections with this overview of Barack Obama’s embrace of GOP education dogma:

“Barack Obama’s K-12 “reform” policies have brought misery to public schools across the country: more standardized testing, faulty evaluations for teachers based on student test scores, more public schools shut down rather than improved, more privately managed and for-profit charter schools soaking up tax dollars but providing little improvement, more money wasted on unproven computer-based instruction, and more opportunities for private foundations to steer public policy. Obama’s agenda has also fortified a crazy-quilt political coalition on education that stretches from centrist ed-reform functionaries to conservatives aiming to undermine unions and privatize public schools to right-wingers seeking tax dollars for religious charters. Mitt Romney’s education program was worse in only one significant way: Romney also supported vouchers that allow parents to take their per-child public-education funding to private schools, including religious schools.”

Barkan’s analysis shows significant wins for supporters of public education–the upset of uber-reformer Tony Bennett in Indiana, the repeal of the Luna laws in Idaho, and the passage of a tax increase in California–and some significant losses–the passage of charter initiatives in Georgia and Washington State.

The interesting common thread in many of the key elections was the deluge of big money to advance the anti-public education agenda.

Even more interesting is how few people put up the big money. If Barkan were to collate a list of those who contributed $10,000 or more to these campaigns, the number of people on the list would be very small, maybe a few hundred. If the list were restricted to $20,000 or more, it would very likely be fewer than 50 people, maybe less.

This tiny number of moguls is buying education policy in state after state. How many have their own children in the schools they seek to control? Probably none.

The good news is that they don’t win every time. The bad news is that their money is sometimes sufficient to overwhelm democratic control of public education.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, California, Charter Schools, Colorado, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, K12 Inc., Michigan, Privatization, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Unions, US Education, Vouchers, Walton Foundation
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