RAVITCH: Time for Congress to Investigate Bill Gates’ Public Education Coup
Last edited Tue Jun 10, 2014, 11:56 AM - Edit history (1)
I wholeheartedly agree with the intent here.
The problem is, who in Congress isn't bought by the privatizers of public education? The corruption is bipartisan and goes all the way to the White House.
To investigate, you need investigators who aren't involved in the crime being investigated.
[b]The idea that the richest man in America can purchase and--working closely with the U.S. Department of Education--impose new and untested academic standards on the nation's public schools is a national scandal. A Congressional investigation is warranted.
The close involvement of Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the law was broken.
Thanks to the story in the Washington Post and to diligent bloggers, we now know that one very rich man bought the enthusiastic support of interest groups on the left and right to campaign for the Common Core.
Who knew that American education was for sale?
Who knew that federalism could so easily be dismissed as a relic of history? Who knew that Gates and Duncan, working as partners, could dismantle and destroy state and local control of education?
The revelation that education policy was shaped by one unelected man, underwriting dozens of groups. and allied with the Secretary of Education, whose staff was laced with Gates' allies, is ample reason for Congressional hearings.
I have written on various occasions (see here and here) that I could not support the Common Core standards because they were developed and imposed without regard to democratic process. The writers of the standards included no early childhood educators, no educators of children with disabilities, no experienced classroom teachers; indeed, the largest contingent of the drafting committee were representatives of the testing industry. No attempt was made to have pilot testing of the standards in real classrooms with real teachers and students.. The standards do not permit any means to challenge, correct, or revise them.
In a democratic society, process matters. The high-handed manner in which these standards were written and imposed in record time makes them unacceptable. These standards not only undermine state and local control of education, but the manner in which they were written and adopted was authoritarian. No one knows how they will work, yet dozens of groups have been paid millions of dollars by the Gates Foundation to claim that they are absolutely vital for our economic future, based on no evidence whatever.
Why does state and local control matter? Until now, in education, the American idea has been that no single authority has all the answers. Local boards are best equipped to handle local problems. States set state policy, in keeping with the concept that states are "laboratories of democracy," where new ideas can evolve and prove themselves. In our federal system, the federal government has the power to protect the civil rights of students, to conduct research, and to redistribute resources to the neediest children and schools.
Do we need to compare the academic performance of students in different states? We already have the means to do so with the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It has been supplying state comparisons since 1992.
Will national standards improve test scores? There is no reason to believe so. Brookings scholar Tom Loveless predicted two years ago that the Common Core standards would make little or no difference. The biggest test-score gaps, he wrote, are within the same state, not between states. Some states with excellent standards have low scores, and some with excellent standards have large gaps among different groups of students.
The reality is that the most reliable predictors of test scores are family income and family education. Nearly one-quarter of America's children live in poverty. The Common Core standards divert our attention from the root causes of low academic achievement.
Worse, at a time when many schools have fiscal problems and are laying off teachers, nurses, and counselors, and eliminating arts programs, the nation's schools will be forced to spend billions of dollars on Common Core materials, testing, hardware, and software.
Microsoft, Pearson, and other entrepreneurs will reap the rewards of this new marketplace. Our nation's children will not.
Who decided to monetize the public schools? Who determined that the federal government should promote privatization and neglect public education? Who decided that the federal government should watch in silence as school segregation resumed and grew? Who decided that schools should invest in Common Core instead of smaller classes and school nurses?
These are questions that should be asked at Congressional hearings.
dianeravitch | June 9, 2014 at 8:00 am | Categories: Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, US Education | URL: http://wp.me/p2odLa-833
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blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)Democrats, but far from all, leapt off the train.
Gotta say, Bill Gates has had a lot of help from both of the two largest political parties, including Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne "Rhee" Duncan.
yurbud
(39,405 posts)littlemissmartypants
(22,569 posts)Sognefjord
(229 posts)And a disgrace.
pnwmom
(108,955 posts)but the rest will soon follow.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2014/04/25/washington-nclb-waiver
Well, let's go now to Washington state, which is now the first state to have its No Child Left Behind waiver revoked. The waivers were issued to 42 states and the District of Columbia after a general agreement that the federal law was flawed, and another education policy would be enacted by the Obama administration. But yesterday Education Secretary Arne Duncan revoked the waiver in Washington state, saying conditions for keeping it weren't met.
With the loss of the waiver, districts lose control of how $38 million in federal education funding is spent, and the schools will be considered failing. Let's explain. Ann Dornfeld is education reporter for KUOW, part of the HERE AND NOW contributors network in Seattle. And Ann, briefly tell us, why did Secretary Duncan revoke the waiver?
ANN DORNFELD: Well, those No Child Left Behind waivers came with strings attached. One was that states had to sign on to the Common Core State Standards, and another was that they had to tie student test scores to teacher evaluations. Now currently Washington requires that student growth be linked to those evaluations, but the state leaves it up to districts to decide how that student growth is measured.
YOUNG: And so some...
DORNFELD: Duncan said that's not good enough, it has to be test scores, and the legislature didn't change the law to fit the federal mandate, so he told Washington state that there will not be another waiver next school year.
yurbud
(39,405 posts)JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Bill Gates is brilliant. He is also a college drop-out who attended private schools at least after the age of 13.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
He lacks experience with public schools.
The Common Core pushes some of the children who do not perform well in the public schools on the Common Core tests out of the classrooms into homeschooling. I know some children whose mother was encouraged to try to home-school them because they were not performing as the teachers wanted in the public school. The children are at least of normal intelligence. But their scores might have brought down the school stores. Never mind that their mother and father both work.
How many of those pushed-outs will lose out on education because their parents don't have the time or the dedication to make sure their children learn something even if it doesn't meet the standards of the exceptionally gifted Bill Gates and his foundation?
Wouldn't it be better to offer each child the opportunity to perform at his or her own best level in a public school?
As I understand it, some charter schools and private schools are exempt from having to administer the Common Core tests?
Is that true?
I favor public education for all.
yurbud
(39,405 posts)bananas
(27,509 posts)Why would Bill Gates abandon such a successful strategy?
Why expect a leopard to changes its spots?
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish",[1] also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.
<snip>
The strategy's three phases are:[11]
- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the 'simple' standard.
- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
The U.S. Department of Justice, Microsoft critics, and computer-industry journalists[1][12][13] claim that the goal of the strategy is to monopolize a product category. Such a strategy differs from J. Allard's originally proposed strategy of embrace, extend then innovate both in content and phases. Microsoft claims that the original strategy is not anti-competitive, but rather an exercise of its discretion to implement features it believes customers want.[14]
<snip>