Bill Gates sure is a popular guy. He is appearing this afternoon at the national conference of the American Federation of Teachers in Seattle, after having recently been the keynote speaker at the annual National Charter School convention.
Just this week, Warren Buffett announced he was giving an additional $1.6 billion to the Gates Foundation, which already had a $35 billion endowment; by far the largest in the nation.
In the past eight years, the foundation has spent nearly $4 billion promoting his personal education agenda; at first providing subsidies to districts that would agree to close down large neighborhood high schools and start small schools in their place; and now encouraging the rapid and widespread proliferation of charter schools. Gates also is aggressively promoting efforts to create programs that link teacher evaluation and compensation to standardized test scores.
And his generosity has not merely been expressed through his foundation. In 2008, he contributed four million dollars to help persuade state legislators to extend mayoral control in New York City .
In other words, he supported mayoral control because it allowed him to impose his large-scale experiments on inner city public school students, without fear of resistance from communities; instead, he has only to convince one person. No wrestling with elected school boards, nor with parents who resent having their children's schools closed, privatized, or otherwise radically transformed; no need to bother with any of the messy artifacts of democracy which might stand in his way.
According to publicity materials put out by the Gates Foundation, it has "improved 2,602 schools, engaged 40 school districts, and reached at least 781,000 students."
Actually, it has reached lot more students than that, as its small schools initiative had a profound impact on inner city schools with the most disadvantaged children.
In recent years the Gates initiative has turned districts upside-down, at first establishing as many small schools as possible, creating thousands of new administrator jobs, eating up classroom space, and compelling the neediest kids who were excluded from the new small schools to travel long distances to attend even more overcrowded large schools in worse conditions than before, relegating those schools to failure.
The small schools created in their place, with several schools sharing one building, were forced to fight fiercely over scarce space, losing science labs, art rooms, libraries, and intervention spaces in the process. The same situation is now unfolding in NYC as the rapidly proliferating charter schools are wedged into public school buildings. As a result, the existing public school, with much higher concentrations of English language learners, special needs students, and homeless children, is now in many cases forced to provide instruction and mandated services in hallways and closets.
Such large-scale experiments on children would never be allowed similar fields like public health, where first carefully controlled pilot studies must be performed, with the informed consent of parents, to ensure that the proposed interventions have positive results, and the risk of collateral damage is minimal. Consider the consent and experimentation protocols enforced when trials for new drugs are undertaken; or the consent and monitoring procedures that were used in developing and implementing the Salk vaccine program against polio, despite the urgency to battle the epidemic of a devastating disease.
Now the US Department of Education under Arne Duncan has taken up the Gates agenda, writ large, but with a perhaps better sense of public relations, calling this single-minded approach "innovation" rather than experimentation.
Former Gates officials fill the high ranks of the department; including Jim Shelton, former education program director at the foundation and now Assistant Deputy Secretary for "Innovation and Improvement". Joanne Weiss has already been promoted from heading its "Race to the Top " fund to become Duncan's chief of staff. Weiss was formerly COO of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which finances charter school expansion with dollars provided by Gates.
Not surprisingly, the $4.3 billion federal "Race to the Top fund" and the other grants being doled out by the US DOE are pushing states to eliminate their caps on charter schools, to forcibly close many schools and/or mandate that they fire their teaching staff; then turning them over to charter school operators or start new schools in their place while adopting teacher evaluation systems linked to standardized test scores.
After pretty much setting the priorities for the administration, the Gates Foundation then stepped in and "helped" states write their applications for the "Race to the Top" funds. Along the way, numerous states, in the midst of plunging tax revenues, changed their laws on charter schools and teacher evaluation to qualify for these funds.
All this, despite the fact that an expert panel from the National Academy of Sciences pointed out that there was no research backing for this agenda, and urged caution before the federal government essentially bribed cash-strapped states to enact its provisions.
Since the panel's findings had to go through a lengthy peer review process, as does all good science, it did not make the short deadline that the US DOE set for public feedback on the "Race to the Top" proposals, leaving them free to ignore it.
When George W. Bush adopted environmental policies that ignored the scientific consensus from expert bodies like the National Academy of Sciences, he rightfully got blasted by advocates and the mainstream media. Where was the outrage when the NAS experts on testing and evaluation were ignored by the Obama administration? Instead, there was ....silence. The NAS warning was pretty much ignored, as educators and politicians were steamrolled by an undemocratic oligopoly of the deep-pocketed Gates Foundation and elected officials (some authoritarian types like NYC's Bloomberg, others merely weak-kneed and cowed by the inside-the-beltway group think.).
But the Gates Foundation has been quite clever in ignoring or suppressing evidence that contradicts its corporate mindset.
In 2002, the foundation commissioned a survey through Public Agenda that asked teachers and parents about their views on small schools, before launching its big offensive. While the vast majority of parents and teachers responded that they believed that class size was more important than school size, the Foundation was not deterred from going forward with its goal of foisting small schools on the nation.
Small schools may or may not be preferable, yet whatever the size of the school, it is the classroom where most learning takes place, and the size of the class is thus an even more critical factor. Unlike the earlier generation of small school proponents, Gates never made class size an explicit, core element of his reforms, but instead focused on the more amorphous buzzwords of "rigor, relevance and relationships."
In 2006, Gates again commissioned a study, called "The Silent Epidemic", which found that three fourths of the high school dropouts surveyed responded that they would have been deterred from leaving school if they had been offered smaller classes:
While some of the students' best days in school were when teachers paid attention to
them, many others had classes that were so big that teachers did not know their names. In our
focus groups, participants repeated again and that they believed smaller class sizes would have helped ensure that teachers maintained order in the classroom and would have provided more individual attention. .... the need for smaller class sizes and more personal instruction emerged more than 12 separate times from the participants in our four focus groups Seventy-five percent of survey participants agreed that smaller classes with more one on one teaching would have improved students' chances of graduating.
Yet again, such findings did not seem to influence their policies, or lead them to encourage school officials to make smaller classes an essential element in their reform.
Subsequently, in independent evaluations of the small school initiative commissioned by the foundation, the value of class size came up repeatedly in interviews with students and teachers, as either the most critical aspect of their new schools, or as a focal point for dissatisfaction when despite their expectations, class sizes remained too large or had increased over time. Some of the new small schools failed miserably; while others succeeded, but when I asked the researchers who wrote these studies why they had not examined class size to determine its possible relationship to these schools' ability to improve student engagement and achievement, they responded that they had not been allowed by the Gates foundation to include this as a factor in their analysis.
There is scant evidence that the Gates Foundation bases its initiatives on solid research in other areas as well. For example, Tom Toch, co- founder of Education Sector, an influential DC think tank, did a study of charter management organizations (CMO's). Toch concluded after two years of investigation that the CMO's were unlikely to be able to maintain quality while expanding as rapidly as Gates, the NewSchools Venture fund, and others were recommending. Toch is quoted as saying that after his conclusions were changed,
"I removed my name from the report because a good deal of my analysis was removed and, as published, the report does not reflect my research findings on the current status and future prospects of charter management organizations."
[Clarification: Tom Toch emphasizes that the changes in his report were not made at the behest of the Gates Foundation.]
What is the next experiment Gates is likely to foist on our schools? It looks to be online learning, as the new magical answer to "personalized" instruction, without the unfortunate need to actually hire any teachers. This practice has been once again pioneered in NYC schools through the discredited practice of "credit recovery," in which students are encouraged to spend a few days online, cutting and pasting their answers into a software program, in order to quickly gain the credits they need to graduate, even if they have failed all their courses and/or never attended class. (See here and here for how this scam is now operating in NYC schools.)
Watch out, America! You have nothing to lose but your public school system, at the hands of the richest man in the country who, like a spoiled child carelessly playing with toys, breaks one after another.
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I wonder...
1). NO textbooks for students to read (possibly because so many textbooks given to students disappear, and are never returned?).
2). Students unprepared to come to school to learn (no notebooks, pens/pencils).
3). High absenteeism rates - I have heard some of the most incredible stories from parents/guardians explaining why they did not send their children to school.
4). An "anything goes" attitude- yes, we have rules, but students flagrantly break these rules, as a matter of course, with no consequence.
5). Poor work ethics- Why should these students BOTHER to put time into learning, when they KNOW that they'll be passed along, anyway? Yes, I have been TOLD to change failing grades by administrators.
Classroom management? A joke- I cannot undo in the limited time that I have with these students years of being allowed to run rampant without discipline or consequences.
The vogue in our nation appears to be trending towards blaming TEACHERS for all the ills of society. What has happened to the FABRIC of our society that seeks to single out a group as scapegoats, in order to avoid personal responsibilities for education and learning? Apologies to the many parents/guardians that actually DO assume responsibility for their children's education. In my experience, I have seen too many that do not.
I got laid-off last year from my white collar job and I wanted to do something which will contribute to the "real" economy. I wanted to become a teacher in a public school ,and an urban one in apoor community and try to make a difference in atleast few kids' lives.. But on doing research, I am having second thoughts. Seems schools will become more like phony corporations. Here I am going to work for less pay and will have all kinds of meddling from the people who haven't spend a good deal of time in classrooms lecturing me how to run things.I am thinking maybe it is better to work in a real corporation (the white collar job atleast paid me very well).
These are two good elements of actual school reform that Gates support with greater resources.
He should drop the rest of education agenda.
Duncan, Gates continue on this path. Why doesn't old Bill give every poor kid in American a computer. Right now we have kids we cannot finish their homework because they can't get to a computer. How about sending you fine money to rebuild schools and after school programs?
For shame, business is running the government rather than the other way around. Worked well with Wall Street and BP. Let's give them our kids for experimentation and profit.
If something isn't working the way it ought to be working, it would seem to be common sense to try and fix whatever the problem is. You don't like the way Bill Gates and Co. are proposing that these problems be fixed, and that's fine. Still, if you don't support the changes that Gates is trying to put forward, you've got to at least try to find some changes that you could support. And, simply put, that entails more than saying that a teacher's entry level salary should start at $50,000 per year.
Now, I graduated from a big inner-city high school, Lowell High School in San Francisco, CA, that was home to over 2500 students and currently enrolls near 2,700 students, so I don't believe that the size of a school is inherently the problem, and I don't think the Obama Administration believes size is the problem either. Still, when the Obama Administration is putting forward the actual funding for many of these ideas, is doing so with the neccesary strings attached to these ideas, and "education reform advocates" don't even want to come to the table, I see a serious credibility gap emerging. But that's just me.
thanks for your comment, Leonie Haimson
Still, the fact of the matter is class size isn't the only thing wrong with the public school system. To put things bluntly, in my experience, there have just been a decent number of teachers who shouldn't be in the classroom, whether it be because they need some assistance learning how to manage a classroom, have been teaching for so long that they no longer care about trying to educate young people, or because they were just never meant to be teachers in the first place. There are probably many other things that also impact public education, but that's the one that sticks out, foremost, to me. Until "education reforms" start to actually acknowledge that the problem with the public school system goes beyond smaller class sizes, nothing's ever going to be done to improve it, Democratic administration or Republican administration.
"On January 1, 1643, by unanimous vote, Dedham authorized the first taxpayer-funded public school, 'the seed of American education.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedham,_Massachusetts
Now, instead of fostering public health care, we are looking to eliminate the public education system that grew from that seed, planted before the US was even born.
Makes one wonder, if we destroy public education now, and this half-baked education "Reform" movement fails ... How long will it take to rebuild a system we could have invested in and fixed (with stimulus funds that seem un-ending for Wall St.)?
Notice how Gates NEVER avails himself to the public for questioning, and refuses to participate in public debate? American's eyes are glossed over b/c of his wealth.
The Gates Foundation is discussed by Diane Ravitch in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She informs us that the Gates Foundation increased its spending on "advocacy work" from $276K in 2002 to $57 million in 2005.
"Writing about the foundation's efforts to ‘broaden and deepen its reach,’ [Erik W.] Robelen noted [Education Week, 2006] that almost everyone he interviewed was getting Gates money…but never in the history of the United States was there a foundation as rich and powerful as the Gates Foundation. Never was there one that sought to steer state and national policy in education. And never before was there a foundation that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving almost no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence."
In the 1950s, the Caucasian population in the U.S. was 90 percent. Today it is 75 percent. This is at the center of what drives the principal movers behind ed "reform." Gates, Obama, Duncan, et al. are maneuvered by these movers.
Only in America.
These people are in the process of accelerating "economic triage" in which the declining proportion of good-paying, high-skilled jobs will be reserved for those students who are being "truly educated" at private and elite public schools. The inferior "test-prep" agenda which bases the pedagogically fraudulent "data" standardized test scores serves as a way of diverting the concerns of working parents who hope that better test scores will lead to better job opportunities for their children. If they realized that they were being given a con job, they might consider other, more "active" forms of political and social protest than simply lobbying for more money for charter and public schools. So long as schools are used as the scapegoats for an increasingly economically unjust society, people like Gates will continue to play the "divide and conquer" game between anxious, involved, conscientious parents and a school system which is failing their children as an economic system is failing them. I believe that smaller classrooms can improve learning, but a child who grows up in economic hopelessness and social dysfunction is less likely to be a willing learner than those who see some economic and social rewards for their efforts.
One can hope!
This Dumbing Down is not an easy thing to change, neither is it easy to to change the Sabbath back to Saturday. However, parents can consider home schooling their children for starters, and then organizing to make changes. Good thought out article Leonie. :)
On the other hand, the public education system in this country is a wreck. I wish it was as simple as over-sized classrooms. That may indeed be a contributing factor; however, I think the major culprit is something that you and I can't change, the general spirit of our society. We have become a greedy, arrogant and selfish people. We have accepted the wars that have been injected into our society such as the race, class and gender clashes. The drugs and entertainment are also major distractions. We now have a society who is more concerned with being entertained than the production of food and fiber. We now have a society where parents cannot correct the teaching of the media, public schools and the agenda that they seemed to have adopted.