"A More Misleading Article on Education Would be Hard to Write". Money Quote on Ed Reformer Article.

Still waiting for a breeze of common sense in education reform.

It was 108 degrees in St. Louis on Friday.  Our heat wave has been unbearable as it has in many parts of the country.  Intense heat creates short fuses in those who read articles containing education reform talking points rolled out by Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee and Bill Gates.  These talking points are long on spin and short on common sense and fact.

I came across an article about how both candidates should agree on educational reform plans.  It is an example of the spin vs fact model.  If heatstroke wasn't giving me a headache, the article written by Richard Whitmire entitled To the Presidential Contenders: Why Not Agree on Education? certainly would.  The original link I was going to use was from Education Views but trying to access it now gives a 404 error code.  It must have given the editors there a headache as well.  I was able to track in down through the Huffington Post:

When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, that state distinguished itself by dramatically raising standards and making sure more students moved to a richer curriculum. Romney didn’t launch those reforms, but he made sure they enjoyed a steady tailwind. Credit due to Romney.

Obama tacked right with Race to the Top, which offered financial carrots to states that designed real teacher evaluations and opened their doors for innovative charter schools. Defying the wishes of the unions is not easy for a Democratic president. Credit due to Obama.

There is a huge difference about these educational reforms not noted in the article: 

• Massachusetts state standards were set by Massachusetts.  
• Race to the Top mandates are federally driven in which teacher evaluations are tied to test scores based on private consortia standards, not state created. 

As to Whitmire praising Obama for standing up to the teachers' unions?

Susan Ohanian writes about how "defying the teachers unions" isn't so difficult for a Democratic president since AFT will be investing $10 Million into the educational reform movement controlled by the educational corporatists.  Apparently the teachers' unions are hitching their stars to the administration's plan.  Obama has union support (since he is a Democrat) and the unions will profit from the corporate takeover of education, just like Rhee and Gates.  That's considered some feat by Obama?

Gee, what does Obama need to do to have the unions not support him? These reforms which have been declared onerous in terms of teacher evaluations don't cause union leadership to blink much.  Read about the NEA's  summer convention in Washington DC and its support of this administration (Republican teachers uneasy at Obama-themed union convention):

NEA leaders have been urging members to hold house parties to educate their friends about why Obama, who addressed the convention Thursday by telephone to thank teachers for their support, deserves a second term. So it wasn't really a surprise that the union showed its support for Obama so overtly at the convention. After all, 72 percent of delegates at last year's NEA convention voted to endorse Obama for re-election -- the earliest the group has ever endorsed in a presidential election cycle. 

Obama supports Race to the Top.  (I hope he is remembered for RTTT as George Bush is for NCLB...not fondly).  Unlike Romney's educational support of state standards, RTTT was devised by the National Governor's Association and the Common Core State Standards Initiative to centralize education and develop a national curriculum.  Think of it as No Child Left Behind on steroids.  It's the expansion of federal control into state and local control of schools.

Several of the Huffington Post readers had the same reaction to Whitmire's article:

A more misleading article on education would be hard to write.
There's some good stuff there. Obviously, higher standards are a good thing. So is less remediation in college.

But then there are some prescriptions for making things worse. You praise RTTT? It's made teacher evaluations less accurate and introduced other impediments to education into schools. Charter schools? They're less effective than traditional public schools. We should be getting rid of the ones we've got, not creating more. Raise teacher quality? Probably not necessary, but we certainly wouldn't manage that with TFA "teachers"; when you allow someone who's only really qualified to be a sub or a classroom aide to pose as a teacher, that represents a LOWERING of standards.

Obama and Romney do seem to agree greatly on public education. Both of them seem eager to degrade or destroy it. And most of your recommendations would be an effective way to go about doing that. 

and

The main problem in educational policy today is that we're pursuing failed ideas from the past, on steroids:

1) Make kids memorize more faster, call it "rigor," and claim that prepares kids for the 21st century. 2) Use carrots and sticks to push students and teachers, despite ample evidence that this is a second rate approach.
3) Make high-stakes tests the centerpiece of it all, despite its longtime failures.
4) Keep claiming that market-based policies will create widespread excellence in something as complex as education, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Heavens, McDonald's can't even reliably deliver hot and crispy french fries!

Whitmire lauds TFA and charter schools, despite no evidence that either improves learning in real apples-to-apples comparisons. Scale up either approach and quality likely goes down noticeably while further de-stabilizing public education. I posted a longer piece today at EdWeek Online, on why dramatically scaling up charters will hurt more than it helps. The public sector simply does some things better than the private sector does, including educating the masses.

So, what we really need is vigorous disagreement about the continuation of failed policies such as NCLB and RttT.

P.S. When you control for poverty, American kids in 0-10% poverty schools would have been #1 in the world on the 2009 PISA reading test, outperforming all other nations. American schools are actually performing very well, considering the much harsher conditions they face. Thus, there is no reason for radical policy changes. 

(You can read more about Whitmire here and his approval of reformers like Rhee and charter schools).

The jig is up.  Taxpayers are tired of education reform talking points (from both presidential candidates) making little sense, creating more debt for more mandates (RTTT/Common Core) which are worse than the original mandates (NCLB), and requiring the tracking of student/family personal data that has NOTHING to do with education.  I hope this heatwave breaks soon and we can breathe in the air of common sense.  These reforms and less than factual ed reform articles are oppressive just like our current temperatures.

"Education is the Wild West and There is Alot of Money to be Made". Is this the underlying philosophy of education "reform"?

Yesterday we wrote a piece likening Bill Gates to Pac-Man as he eats educational stakeholders in his quest for his educational vision. The taxpayers, parents, students, unions, teachers, administrators, state educational offices, etc are being replaced for Gates' vision of US public education models.

Gates is spending a fortune paying governors and states so they will adopt common core standards, which will then necessitate the expansion of the state longitudinal data systems. Software companies will reap the windfall, as well as Pearson, an educational publishing company that partners with the Gates Foundation. With the mandate of these new assessments having to be completed on line, the computer and assessment companies will realize an infusion of cash. Where this cash will come from is still a question that hasn't been answered; most observers believe the computers mandated will have to be bought by individual school districts which are presently strapped for cash. The districts won't be able to ask their states for assistance as they are pinching pennies themselves.

With the standards and assessments being controlled by private consortia, the ability for the taxpayers to have any say in what their children will be taught (or not taught) is extremely slight, if not impossible.

Susan Ohanian has been following Gates' educational quest for many years and she has posted extensively on The Gates Foundation providing huge infusions of cash to states for their purposes. Ohanian has written an extensive supplement to the latest NY Times article on Gates' involvement and she chronicles how this influence has just about taken over the constitutional rights of states to set educational policy, and how we are on the verge of a national curriculum (which, by the way, is illegal):

In June 2006, Joshua Benton of the Dallas Morning News reported that within the Texas Education Agency, contracts often were not competitively bid but depended on whom one knew at the Gates Foundation. Diane Ravitch was on target in a July 30, 2006 Los Angeles Times piece: "In light of the size of the foundation's endowment, Bill Gates is now the nation's superintendent of schools. He can support whatever he wants, based on any theory or philosophy that appeals to him." This was positioned as an opinion piece and there was no follow-up from the education press.

Dillon's mention that National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CSSEO) received "millions of dollars" is rather like identifying half a dozen root canals as "a dental procedure." Since January 2008, Gates has shelled out more than $35 million to the Council of Chief School Officers and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, the two primary organizations charged with drafting and promoting common standards. Daniel Goldman's Bill Gates' School Crusade (Bloomberg Businessweek, 7/15/10) was one of two articles I found revealing that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation "bankrolled the development of the common curriculum standards." Golden observed that our U. S. Department of Education and the Gates Foundation "move in apparent lockstep" on an agenda which is "an intellectual cousin of the Bush administration's 2002 No Child Left Behind law."
These are just a few of the examples she offers on who the Gates Foundation has been funding in education. Here is her connection to the "school choice" industry and the Gates Foundation:

We--you and I--are paying for Gates' pet projects. Kenneth Saltman points out something few people seem to realize: For every ten dollars given by the Gates Foundation, four dollars is lost from the public wealth in taxes. The philanthropist’s dollars would otherwise go to the public in the form of taxes. So a big chunk of all that money Gates is spending to get teachers on script, destroy tenure, and standardize curriculum is actually OUR money; Bill Gates is using our tax dollars to mold America. And part of the plan--well on its way-- is to de-professionalize teachers. Saltman calls on readers "to stop applying business metaphors and logic to educational thinking derived from discredited market fundamentalism." Such terms as choice, monopoly, turnaround, efficiency need to be dropped in favor of public language and assumptions. Taxpayers are subsidizing (as tax-free) an organization bent on undermining their best interests. [See Kenneth Saltman's The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy and Philip Kovacs' edited collection, The Gates Foundation and the Future of U. S. "Public" Schools.

This is a takeover of education. Gates and others can couch it in terms of choice and turnaround schools, etc, but the fact remains, these models of providing education and the delivery and setting of standards/assessments/curriculum is being set by private companies, the National Governor's Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

Capitalism is a great theory and when it works as it was intended to do, it helps this country operate in a positive business manner. However, the Gates idea of education and setting certain companies in line to deliver the services is crony capitalism:

A description of capitalist society as being based on the close relationships between businessmen and the state. Instead of success being determined by a free market and the rule of law, the success of a business is dependent on the favoritism that is shown to it by the ruling government in the form of tax breaks, government grants and other incentives.

Ohanian goes on to describe the web of players in this crony capitalism venture. It's stunning and here are just a few of the organizations:


The National PTA received $1 millon grant to mobilize parents for the Common Core Standards in four states. -- Dec. 2, 2009 The May 18, 2011 Education Week (which gets its own Gates funding, as in $2,534,757 in 2005, another $100,000 in 2005, and $1,997,280 in 2009.) ran a ¾ page ad from ASCD. It was presented in the form on an opinion piece by Executive Director Gene R. Carter offering strong support of the Common Core. The ad doesn’t mention that The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $3 million to ASCD> "to support that group's efforts to help education leaders and educators themselves understand the standards and implement them." -- The Journal, April 5, 2011

You might just want to rethink if your local PTA really needs funds for pet projects when the national organization is pushing "reform" which takes parental and taxpayer control away and lines up with crony capitalists. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association Foundation (NEA) have also received substantial amounts to support Gates' agenda, which has evolved into the Department of Education's agenda. She has many more organizations and think tanks listed funded by the Gates Foundation.

When did it become appropriate for billionaires to set educational policy? Has it been occurring in incremental steps and this is the last grasp of control? There is a theory why this "concern" about the "educational crisis" is being addressed by the billionaire community. When the dotcom bubble burst, the next area to make money was in...education. It probably has less to do with a desire to "help the children" as it is to "make money". In fact, Scott Joftus, closely aligned with Bill Gates and his foundation since the early years of 2000, had this to say about education in an article aptly titled "Is the Stimulus Really "No Consultant Left Behind" "?:

That metaphor is an apt one for the market as well. In the fall of 2009, Mr. Joftus was contacted by a former contractor who was working for Global Partnership Schools, a new school turnaround venture funded by GEMS Education, a Dubai-based company founded by entrepreneur Sunny Varkey. The caller was hoping to obtain copies of Mr. Joftus’ contract for school improvement services in Kansas.

“You know we’re in a new era when school turnaround firms in the U.S. are being funded out of the Middle East,” Joftus said. “To me, that says there’s money to be made. I call this period the Wild West in education.”

"There's money to be made...and school turnaround firms in the US are being funded out of the Middle East...there's money to be made". Does anyone still believe this is all for the children?

Bill Gates is eating the Constitution and buying the players to implement the change HE wants for HIS ends. He and his cronies will become quite wealthy and powerful. The taxpayers, students and parents...schools, administrators, teachers....well, they'll be operating under one man's vision. And the irony is our tax dollars are funding a plan in which we had no voice and works against individualism and true education. This is not how a republic is to operate, is it? And why is our government complicit in this plan?

Bill Gates is the Pac-Man of Education Reform. He's Eating the Constitution.

Remember the Pac-Man game? It introduced Americans to video games, replacing arcade games such as pinball, foosball and skeeball. What's the difference between current video games and the old fashioned mechanical games?

Video games are computerized and do not having moving parts, such as balls or pucks. Everything is contained in a screen and the movement is a blip. You are controlling the movement but it's more of a passive control and takes only fingers on a stick or pad to create movement. Physical movement is minimal in video games; the game itself is in a screen, rather than involving balls and a person directing that move in an overtly physical manner. Video games perhaps could be considered activity through a simulation setting vs actual physical action.

Is that what is happening in education? The taxpayers, parents and students have for quite some time been in a simulated educational program. Taxes have been paid into a system in which taxpayers have little to no voice and minimal effect. Parents can complain about objectionable material taught to their students but since it is set by the state and not the district, these objections are often futile for change. Students are taught to the test so the school won't lose funding and the real goal of education is whittled down to basic test questions. School "reform" options are crafted by lobbying groups and PACs, not the local communities in which they are located.

Teachers, administrators, superintendents and state educational agencies discover they are further drawn into the simulation of education. Their hands are tied by No Child Left Behind, students are not tested or taught to as individuals, rather as subsets, and federal regulations strangle innovation. Throw Common Core standards (heavily funded by Bill Gates) into this equation, and the perfect video game of public education emerges.

Bill Gates has become the Pac-Man of the United States Public Education system!

He's been named as a gobbling Pac-Man as early as 1991:


Hey everyone. I've just posted my latest project called Pac-MANager (which moves Bill Gates around as Pac-Man as he tries to "eat up" the competition) on PSC, which includes a lot of stuff that different people on this forum helped me with -- thanks all!

Back then Gates was eating up business competition. Now he is eating the traditional stakeholders in education: students, parents, taxpayers, school districts, etc. that he considers competition to his educational vision. How is Gates sating his appetite for educational control?

We and other bloggers have been writing about Gates' idea of philanthropy. Unlike previous philanthropists, these new philanthropists drive the reform, rather than leaving organizations to do so. The New York Times published findings from a graduate student who has studied how Gates is taking over education:

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.

Bill Gates is not stingy with his money and the vast amount given to various entities buy acquiescence for his vision:

The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy.

Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency. Few policy makers, reporters or members of the public who encounter advocates like Teach Plus or pundits like Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute realize they are underwritten by the foundation.

“It’s Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who said he received no financing from the foundation. (emphasis added)

What does this vast amount of money buy?

The foundation paid a New York philanthropic advisory firm $3.5 million “to mount and support public education and advocacy campaigns.” It also paid a string of universities to support pieces of the Gates agenda. Harvard, for instance, got $3.5 million to place “strategic data fellows” who could act as “entrepreneurial change agents” in school districts in Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere. The foundation has given to the two national teachers’ unions — as well to groups whose mission seems to be to criticize them.

“It’s easier to name which groups Gates doesn’t support than to list all of those they do, because it’s just so overwhelming,” noted Ken Libby, a graduate student who has pored over the foundation’s tax filings as part of his academic work.

What might be an effective method to demonize teacher unions?

While the foundation has given money to both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, totaling about $6.3 million over the last three years, some of its newer initiatives appear aimed at challenging the dominance that unions have exercised during policy debates. Last year, Mr. Gates spent $2 million on a “social action” campaign focused on the film “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” which demonized Randi Weingarten, the president of the federation.

"Waiting for Superman" and screenings for legislators were concerns we wrote about in this past legislative session and the multi-million dollars poured into the school choice movement. "Waiting for Superman" was touted as a grassroots movie, but the mass infusion of cash and influence is far removed from grassroots philosophy. Most of the grassroots comments from various blogs about "education reform" mention the desire to abolish the Department of Education and not so much about charters, trigger options and the redistribution of teachers. The movie and school choice movement have been shown to be a carefully orchestrated public relations move:

A document describing plans for the group, posted on a Washington Post blog in March, said it would mobilize local advocates, “establish strong ties to local journalists” and should “go toe to toe” with union officials in explaining contracts and state laws to the public.

But to avoid being labeled a “tool of the foundation,” the document said the group should “maintain a low public profile.”

The Gates Foundation has been exposed for what it is: a version of the Pac-Man game eating all the unnecessary and cumbersome stakeholders in its way for the quest of remaking the United States educational system:

Gates Memo to Support "Race to the Top"

Note that Gates tells applicants what questions will be asked--and what the answers must be. This is their view of education in a nutshell.

The Gates Foundation had already handpicked 15 states to receive $250,000 each to help them apply for Race to the Top funds: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas. Now, probably because of whining of "unfair," they're offering a bone to the other 35 states --if they can answer "Yes, master," enough times.

See the Gates memo here.

September 23, 2009

This is how our government is operating. It used to be tycoons like Gates wanted to eat their business competition for a larger piece of the business pie; now they want to control the government in which they operate. This is a Pac-man version of our constitutional right to self-govern being eaten up by special interests. Taxpayers have been co-opted in the past by educational unions (even the retiring NEA counsel states it's not for the children or because it has a vision for great public education for every child) and now it's Bill Gates and his funding of think tanks, professors, software companies, governors and even the Department of Education. Watch this video by retiring NEA counsel Bob Chanin, and substitute Gates' names and organizations he's funded:

The United States Public Education System has become one big huge power grab by special interests such as the Federal Government (isn't this interesting how it has become a special interest), the unions and the corporations. In the meantime, the student, taxpayer and parents are not receiving a quality education focused on education and use of these taxes is not free of these special interests. Education is centered not so much on teaching sound educational material; rather, much of education today teaches politically correct theories and is delivered in a way that will make hedge funders, venture capitalists, and technology companies quite wealthy.

This is a great history lesson on how not to let control of your local school district be given to a state agency, then a federal agency and then to a consortia controlled by Gates money. Stop the money train to all these organizations (government, union and private), bring it down to the local level (where it belongs) and then maybe, just maybe, the dialogue can begin about authentic educational reform.