'A Dangerous Idea': Public School Advocates Denounce Cuomo-Gates Plan Seizing on Pandemic to 'Reimagine' New York's Education System

'A Dangerous Idea': Public School Advocates Denounce Cuomo-Gates Plan Seizing on Pandemic to 'Reimagine' New York's Education System

Educational historian Diane Ravitch wrote in her blog that Cuomo’s interest in enlisting powerful billionaires to remake New York's public systems in the wake of the pandemic does not end with Gates. The governor has called on former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to advise him on "technology utilization" for schools while former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will oversee a large-scale contact-tracing effort. Schmidt has also been named to lead Cuomo's Blue Ribbon Commission aimed at "reimagining New York State's current systems of health and education."

"The pandemic is turning into a grand opportunity for the foxes to raid the hen house under cover of darkness," wrote Ravitch. "Parents, teachers, and students want a safe and orderly return to real education taught by real teachers in real schools."

See more:  https://dianeravitch.net/2020/05/06/tell-governor-cuomo-and-bill-gates-hands-off-our-public-schools/

Did Bill Gates fund an "educational coup?"

Valerie Straus,   The Answer Sheet.

 The Washington Post.

Education historian and activist Diane Ravitch, in a post on her blog about Layton’s story, called the Gates involvement an “educational coup.”

This is the closest thing to an educational coup in the history of the United States. Our education system is made up of about 14,000 local school districts; most education policy is set at the state level. But Bill Gates was able to underwrite a swift revolution. It happened so quickly that there was very little debate or discussion. Almost every consequential education group was funded by the Gates Foundation to study or promote the Common Core standards. Whereas most businesses would conduct pilot testing of a major new product, there was no pilot testing of the Common Core. These national standards were written with minimal public awareness or participation, and at least one state — Kentucky — adopted them before the final draft was finished.

Read the entire column. Fascinating.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/06/08/did-bill-gates-fund-an-educational-coup/

Manufactured "news" about schools and education

The apparent “news site” the Heschinger Report, http://hechingerreport.org carries a post  alleging that the current law suite on teacher tenure is a good thing.  http://hechingerreport.org/content/californias-students-get-their-day-in-court_14786/  Feb. 19 date.

They are in part funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

Their self description is Informing the public through quality journalism.

If you follow the link on the story, it goes back to tntp and Michelle Rhee.

New Teacher Project

http://tntp.org/about-tntp/our-historyThe

Hired Guns on Astroturf...- Not school reform

Dissent Magazine - Spring 2012 Issue - Hired Guns on Astrotur...
If you want to change government policy, change the politicians who make it. The implications of this truism have now taken hold in the market-modeled “education reform movement.” As a result, the private funders and nonprofit groups that run the movement have overhauled their strategy. They’ve gone political as never before—like the National Rifle Association or Big Pharma or (ed reformers emphasize) the teachers’ unions. 

Devolution of a Movement

For the last decade or so, this generation of ed reformers has been setting up programs to show the power of competition and market-style accountability to transform inner-city public schools: establishing nonprofit and for-profit charter schools, hiring business executives to run school districts, and calculating a teacher’s worth based on student test scores. Along the way, the reformers recognized the value of public promotion and persuasion (called “advocacy”) for their agenda, and they started pouring more money into media outlets, friendly think tanks, and the work of well-disposed researchers. By 2010 critics of the movement saw “reform-think” dominating national discourse about education, but key reform players judged the pace of change too slow.



Read the detailed analysis of Michelle Rhee and other "reformers" who are making millions off of "school reform." 

More on how the Gates Foundation funds school performers

By Susan Ohanian.  http://susanohanian.org/show_research.php?id=419

For starters, take a look at the way the Gates Foundation is commonly portrayed: Paul Hill's A Foundation Goes to School, in Education Next, Winter 2006.

Although the Hoover Institution publishes Education Next, the business office is at Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard Kennedy School. Paul Peterson,Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, is the editor-in-chief. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution is senior editor. Finn also lists himself as "public servant." The Next mission statement takes the high road, professing that the publication "partakes of no program, campaign, or ideology. It goes where the evidence points." That said, in February 2010 the Gates Foundation gave Next $224,030 to support their Charter Initiative.

On June 7, 2007, Bill Gates, at the time, the world’s richest man, received an honorary doctorate from Harvard.

Few Degrees of Separation

Gates operates in a small world of kissing kin. Everybody is inter-connected. Dillon doesn't mention that Monique Burns Thompson, President of Teach Plus, is a co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools. Before that, she was assistant brand manager at Quaker Oats. Heather Peske, National Director of Programs, was formerly Director of Teacher Quality at Education Trust. She launched her career in education as a Teach for America corps member.

There are plenty of Ivy League graduates on their Board of Advisors, which means:

1) They have the connections to make things happen; 2) They have both of Barack Obama's ears. Obama can't seem to say no to Ivy League pundits.

Teach Plus Advisory Committee Members

• Margaret Boasberg, The Bridgespan Group [worked extensively on strategies to increase the philanthropy of high net worth individuals]

• Stacey Childress, Harvard Business School

• Rachel Curtis, Human Capital Strategies for Urban Schools [paid $2,000 a day for services on human capital for Chicago Public Schools when Arne Duncan was in charge]  more.

Gates Funds education lobbies

Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill Gates

By SAM DILLON  The New York Times.  May 21,2011.

INDIANAPOLIS — A handful of outspoken teachers helped persuade state lawmakers this spring to eliminate seniority-based layoff policies. They testified before the legislature, wrote briefing papers and published an op-ed article in The Indianapolis Star.

They described themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform — one sympathetic state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, said, “They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” They were, but they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies. To that end, the foundation is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups. The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

“We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes,” said Allan C. Golston, the president of the foundation’s United States program. “The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer.”

Bill Gates and the Soap of Education

                                 Bill Gates and Soap of Education

     Bill Gates recently claimed class-size doesn’t matter.

     Mr. Gates, I need to talk to you about soap.
    I teach fifth grade in Castroville, California, and a former fifth-grade student, Rojelio (Ro for short), sends me powerful and disturbing gifts. He is twenty-seven now and freshly released from prison.  His gifts, although welcomed because they represent an ongoing seventeen year teacher-student bond, also unnerve me. Ro says they are for “hanging with him all these years.” His gifts have included a newspaper belonging to Charles Manson (A Christian Science Monitor – go figure), and four Sudoku puzzles completed by Sirhan Sirhan. Today he gave me a bar of soap. Inscribed on it are three letters, PIA -- Prison Industries Authority.
     My student has been incarcerated for thirteen-plus years - since he was an eighth-grader. He got the newspaper and the Sudoku puzzles when he was on the same tier as Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. He played chess--a game I taught him in fifth-grade-- with both men. 

   Rojelio’s mom called me, “Mr. Karrer, Ro is coming home on Sunday. Can you straighten his ass out? We’re having a party for him. You wanna’ come?”
     Can I straighten him out? Probably not.  Will I keep on trying to help him? Yes.
So, today right after class, we met at Starbucks. He spotted me and walked to my car, big grin under his nose. He had put on lots of weight. Last time I saw him was in Salinas Valley State Prison, over two years ago. He was in ankle chains, waist chains, then chained from his waist to his ankles, and handcuffed.

Gates spends millions to promote his view of school change

Gates spends millions to sway public ( and you) on ed reform

By Valerie Strauss - Washington Post 

The Bill and  Melinda Gates Foundation is spending at least $3.5 million to create a new organization whose aim is to win over the public and the media to its market-driven approach to school reform, according to the closely held grant proposal.

The organization is tentatively called “Teaching First,” and already has a chief executive officer: Yolie Flores, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, who has championed such issues as public school choice and teacher effectiveness. Flores did not immediately return phone calls for comment. A Gates foundation spokesman said she would take over the job fulltime when her board term is up in June.

The Gates proposal lays out a strategy to win public approval for the foundation’s investment of more than $335 million in teacher effectiveness programs in four school districts that involve controversial initiatives including linking teacher pay to student standardized test scores. Critics say this “value-added” model-based test scores is unfair measure of how well a teacher is doing because there are many factors that go into how well a student does on a test.

The plan includes campaigns to reach out to parents, teachers, students, business and civic and religious leaders, and to build “strong ties to local journalists, opinion elites, and local/state policymakers and their staffs.” The plan explains how the organization will ensure “frequent placement ... in local media coverage of issues related to teacher effectiveness and equitable distribution of effective teachers” in accordance with the Gates approach. 

Read the entire piece at  http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/gates-spends-millions-to-sway.html   See posts below. 

Bill Gates tells nation’s governors that budget cuts do not have to limit school learning.

 Really Mr. Gates ? This argument is more than a little truth challenged.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/28/bill-gates-budget-cuts_n_829218.html

From earlier posts on this blog. 

Diane Ravitch  “How did right-wing ideas become the education agenda of the Obama administration?”My sense is that it has a lot to do with the administration’s connections to the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation. Although both are usually portrayed as liberal or at least Democratic, their funding priorities have merged with those of the very conservative Walton Family Foundation. I explain this curious power elite in a chapter of my book called “The Billionaire Boys Club.”

Joanne Barkan.

Got Dough? Public School Reform in the Age of Venture Philanthropy
Joanne Barkan, Dissent Magazine: "The cost of K-12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy - where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision - investing in education yields great bang for the buck."
Read the Article

I have a suggestion of how Mr. Gates could assist the schools. He, and Microsoft could pay their fair share of taxes. And, he could talk to his many billionaire friends to pay their fair share of taxes. If the rich paid their share, the entire budget deficit could be ended in two years.

While  Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. If you have “one dollar” in your wallet, you’re paying more than the “combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America“:

“I have one dollar in my wallet. That’s more than the combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America. That means somebody is gaming the system.”

Diane Ravitch v. Bill Gates on School Reform

Ravitch answers Gates

By Valerie Strauss

In a paean to Bill Gates, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter calls Diane Ravitchthe Microsoft founder's "chief adversary."

It's the world's richest (or second richest) man vs. an education historian and New York University research professor.

Gates, through his philanthropic foundation, has invested billions of dollars in education experiments and now has a pivotal role in reform efforts. Ravitch, the author of the bestselling The Death and Life of the Great American School System, has become the most vocal opponent of the Obama administration's education policy. She says Gates is backing the wrong initiatives and harming public schools.

In the Newsweek piece, Gates poses some questions aimed at Ravitch. I asked her to answer them. Below are the questions Gates asked, in bold, and the answers, in italics, that Ravitch provided in an email.

Gates: “Does she like the status quo?"
Ravitch: "No, I certainly don't like the status quo. I don't like the attacks on teachers, I don't like the attacks on the educators who work in our schools day in and day out, I don't like the phony solutions that are now put forward that won't improve our schools at all. I am not at all content with the quality of American education in general, and I have expressed my criticisms over many years, long before Bill Gates decided to make education his project. I think American children need not only testing in basic skills, but an education that includes the arts, literature, the sciences, history, geography, civics, foreign languages, economics, and physical education.

Bill Gates et al and Waiting for Superman

            When Generosity Hurts: Bill Gates, Public School Teachers and the Politics of Humiliation

Tuesday 05 October 2010

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

So-called reformers such as Michelle Rhee, who took over the District of Columbia public schools three years ago, have become iconic symbols for enacting educational policies based on a mix of market incentives such as paying students for good grades, merit pay for teachers and firing teachers en masse who do not measure up to narrow and often discredited empirically based performance measures.(18) Reform in this case is driven by a slash-and-burn management system that relies more on punishment than critical analysis, teacher and student support and social development. The hedge fund managers, billionaire industrialists and corporate vultures backing such policies appear to view teachers, unions and public schools as an unfortunate, if not threatening remnant, of the social state, and days long past when social investments in the public good and young people actually mattered and public values were the defining feature of the educational system, however flawed. This hatred of public values, public services, public schools and teachers is only intensified by a wider culture of cruelty that has gripped American society.

Read the entire post here:

http://www.truth-out.org/when-generosity-hurts-bill-gates-public-school-teachers-and-politics-humiliation63868