From Education Week Teacher, Living in Dilogue
Peggy Robertson
When I was twelve I read a book that changed my life. It was titled Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. I read it again and again. In that book, I finally saw that someone out there understood me. Ultimately, we all desperately desire to be heard and understood. Expert teachers know this; they spend every waking moment trying to figure out what makes their students tick. We watch, we observe, we truly listen and we make changes based on our students' needs.
When I was in my twenties, and a new teacher, I read another book, The Dreamkeepers, by Gloria Ladson-Billings. It rocked my world. It made me cry. The book came at a crucial time in my career as a teacher. I worked at a school "across the tracks," in a town in southern Missouri. My students were mainly African-American and many were very poor. I, like many new teachers today, got placed in a school with high need, high poverty students. It was the best job I ever had. Gloria was the voice in my head helping me along the way. She was my mentor but never knew it. She understood.
On February 17th, I attended a presentation by Diane Ravitch here in Denver, Colorado. I wanted to have her sign my copy of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, but I honestly couldn't do it. I was feeling so emotional and I knew I might unravel. Diane hears me; my experience is simply an echo of the voices of many educators out there today. She knows what today's teachers are going through. If Diane and I did talk, she would understand what was beautiful about my fifteen years in the education field as well as what was haunting. She would know why I am debating whether I should return to the education field or not. She reports the facts accurately. She is our collective voice. She listens.
Are you there, President Obama? It's me, Peggy Robertson, the voice of a former teacher. Are you truly listening? I must say, with respect, that it does not feel as though you are. I have felt hopeless during your presidency. This week, for the first time, I have hope. Watching the public workers of Madison, Wisconsin protest and ask to be heard made me sit up a bit straighter. The American people have a voice! I saw democracy in action. But are you listening? I now hear that they are asking you to join them. I hope you do.
But this is about more than Madison, Wisconsin. Madison is the first snowball. Once it starts rolling, it may be unstoppable. We've got a lot of mountains here in Colorado and I hope that snowball heads our way. The corporate education reform going on here is devastating.
My fifteen years as an educator were spent teaching in the elementary grades as well as supporting teachers and administrators in developing and refining effective instructional practices. During my five final years I suddenly became jaded. NCLB destroyed my spirit. I watched it's evil hand touch children, teachers, schools and districts.
I saw the strangle hold NCLB had on everyone. I tried to support teachers with all of the obstacles NCLB placed in our way. I watched Reading First fail. I saw principals come and go and schools get closed. I saw students caught in the crossfire. I saw the light go out in children's eyes when they were drilled continually for the state test. I worked with teachers who told me we needed to hurry up and help that child read (in kindergarten mind you) before a negative label was placed on that child; we were in a pressure cooker. I supported administrators in knowing what to look for when they observed and evaluated teachers; many of them did not know what they were seeing because they had not actually spent much time teaching. Or, they had spent time teaching subjects, such as Spanish, in a high school classroom and they were now being asked to evaluate elementary school teachers who were focusing on developing readers and writers. Such an irony - teachers evaluated by administrators who haven't taught what the teachers are teaching. The administrators were under immense pressure as they are today. The scores simply had to be good.
When I left the education profession I left angry. My beliefs about education had been trampled on. I didn't believe in what I was being required to do. Too much testing. Too many young children not being allowed to be children. Too much data being shoved down everybody's throats. I have stayed home the last four years with my youngest son, and I have watched the destruction of our American school system continue. My youngest child is ready to start school, and I wonder if I should re-enter the education profession. But, do I really want to enter the lion's den? I want to work in the education field again, but I also want to be heard and respected.
The current corporate reform taking over our public schools is handing us many more teachers, administrators and superintendents who will need immense support to do their jobs well. If the new administrators haven't taught, then how in the world can you expect them to evaluate teachers? How is a former army sergeant, now made superintendent, supposed to evaluate and support administrators? How is a teacher with five weeks training expected to support our neediest students? And, (lucky us) we have the Bush Institute training principals, in cooperation with Teach for America of course! It's insulting. All of it - it's a slap in the face to students, educators and parents.
It appears there is no point in getting a degree in education with the TFA program leading the way. And then we are told that our master's degrees are pointless too? I think about that every month when I pay my student loan bill. And this week, my eyes rolled back in my head when I heard that the U.S. Department of Education just gave fifty million dollars to the TFA program. The TFA program is a band-aid. And it hurts the neediest children when those teachers leave after their two-year contract has ended.
In your State of the Union Address you asked for more college students to go in to education. I'm sorry, but I seriously laughed when you said that. I would pay both my children money to stay out of the education field right now. It's a hostile environment. Teachers have to teach to the test. The new common core standards are developmentally inappropriate. Children get labeled as failures before they've even finished kindergarten thanks to the pressures of NCLB. And let's not forget that those five year olds don't get a nap or a recess or time for imaginative play. RTTT is punishing to teachers and to schools. Encourage my children to enter the lion's den to teach? No thank you. Your administration has shown no respect for educators, parents or students.
Are you listening Obama? The strangle hold of RTTT may result in the death of public education. Have you read Ravitch's book? Have you followed any of the research being shared on expert educator blogs across the country? What do you really know about TFAs? Merit pay? Value-added assessment? Standardized Testing?
News Flash - it's all bad. Why are you listening to Gates? What educational credentials does he have? It is so difficult to have a voice as a teacher. We don't have a lot of money so we can't buy the media, such as the new Media Bullpen, like Gates can. But we can march. And march we will. July 28th to July 31st concerned citizens will find their way to Washington D.C. to take part in the Save our Schools March and National Call to Action. Will you join us? Will you listen?
When I voted for you I voted with my heart and soul. I believed everything you said. I thought you heard me. I thought we had found a president that truly understood the needs of the American people. I don't believe that anymore. There has been too much damage done. We now have Arne Duncan (a non-educator) leading the way with the corporate reformers whispering in his ear. We have more testing, more teacher bashing and more children being hurt at the hands of corporate reform.
Are you there President Obama? Did you hear Stephen Krashen talk about poverty? Again and again? Did you hear that our international test scores are actually excellent when we look at the scores of the children not living in poverty? Do you really believe poverty has nothing to do with the woes of our public schools? Have you read the research? I could provide all the links but it doesn't seem necessary considering they are all over the internet on every single education blog I read. I don't think you are listening. I think it's going to take an uprising for you to hear us. Madison, Wisconsin, is speaking.
I am placing my faith in the American people. I am listening Madison, Wisconsin. I signed the letter. You are speaking for all of us. President Obama, please listen. Please renew the hope we all had when we elected you.
Peggy Robertson
Former Educator
Centennial, Colorado
Peggy Robertson taught kindergarten, first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth grade, beginning her career in Missouri and continuing in Kansas, for a total of ten years. She was hired by Richard C. Owen Publishers in 2001 to serve as a Learning Network Coordinator and spent the next three years training teacher leaders and administrators in educational theory and practice in the state of Colorado, as well as around the country during the summer months. In 2004 she was hired as the Literacy Coordinator by the Adams 50 School District in Westminster, Colorado. While working in Adams 50 she mentored teachers and administrators and supported them in the writing and implementation of school development plans.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/02/are_you_there_mr_president_mad.html?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d604596cdef1ba4%2C0
Showing posts with label Bill Gates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Gates. Show all posts
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Misinformation, half truths and out right education lies
From th Daily Censored
by Paul Thomas
The U.S. is floundering at the bottom of international comparisons of education, and what makes this worse is that in the grand ol’ 1950s, the U.S. was at the top—at least that is one story offered by Michelle Rhee on a recent episode of the Colbert Report.
Like the discussion of Waiting for Superman by John Legend on Bill Maher’s Real Time, the celebrity tour of Rhee, who recently lost her job as chancellor of schools in DC, raises some real problems about not only what our self-appointed educational leaders are saying about education, but also how our so-called left-wing media helps (directly and indirectly) to perpetuate misinformation about our education system—misinformation that is being promoted to mask the real issues about poverty in our culture that the political and corporate elite do not want to face.
Rhee, in her interview with Colbert, makes several sweeping claims about schools, and as is the nature of contemporary media (recognizing, of course, that Colbert is satire), she is allowed to make those claims without any evidence and without anyone raising a hand to ask, “Really?”
Let’s unpack for a second just the one claim about the U.S. being number one in education and graduation in the 1950s.
First, Rhee is following a clever playbook of the new education reform movement: Make partial claims that few people will question because they sound true. While I find the claim itself misleading, even if the claim is true, Rhee is referring to the U.S. public education system before integration and the civil rights movement impacted a public education system that had closed doors to many American citizens. In short, the education system of the 1950s was an incomplete one that shunned many people marginalized by race and poverty.
Rhee trusts that most people embrace a misguided nostalgia for the past, a nostalgia lacking evidence for such faith in a better time, but once we actually return to that Golden Era, the message then is somewhat confusing in the light of Rhee’s claims.
Let me recommend some reading: Admiral Hyman Rickover’s Swiss Schools and Ours: Why Theirs are Better (1962) and American Education, a National Failure; The problem of our schools and what we can learn from England (1963)—both built on the argument that throughout the 1950s U.S. public schools were clear failures when compared internationally (sound familiar?), and sweeping educational reform (to eradicate the leftist influence, no less) was needed to address the crisis.
Or how about Rudolf Flesch? Try reading this Time article from 1955 or Flesch’s book—Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It (1955).
The full truth, of course, is that corporate and political elites have been making the same exact charges heard from Rhee, Secretary Duncan, and Bill Gates, unwarranted and without much resistance, for at least half a century. Rhee’s misinformation is nothing new, but it is finding renewed traction because these messages are being reinforced through the cult of celebrity, and that cult of celebrity is being driven by the so-called left-wing media just as easily as anywhere else—Oprah, Maher’s Real Time, The Colbert Report.
The message must be challenged, however, and it must come from the field itself—educators and scholars alike. When the usual claims and patterns are raised, we must do as much maligned educator and activist Bill Ayers has implored us to do, “Talk back, speak up, be heard.”
Now, what are the claims, and what rebuttals must we offer?:
• All cries of educational crisis are misleading. A crisis requires drastic responses quickly; our education system is a reflection of historical patterns that require patience and nuance in facing and addressing those patterns. We do not have education crises; we have lingering and systemic social failures.
• Education leadership that has no experience or expertise doesn’t deserve to be at the head of the reform table. Celebrities—Oprah, Bill Gates, John Legend, Andre Agassi—are not experts in education just because they have fame and money. Leadership and money are not the credentials needed to drive educational reform.
• Data don’t prove much of anything when the data is cherry-picked, and incomplete. As Rhee in her Colbert interview demonstrated, the new education reform celebrities have learned the power of incomplete statistics; offer just enough data to trigger popular assumptions—as long as those popular assumptions fuel the corporate agenda. When a simplistic and obvious claim about education is made, we must always assume it is false. The truth about education is nuanced and complex—and numbers can lie.
• Let’s be more like Finland? Well let’s do that, but not the partial way Secretary Duncan, Bill Gates, and Michelle Rhee have claimed. Let’s admit the genuine influence of socialism in Finland, along with their commitment to healthcare and sex education. Let’s consider that the government pays for all teachers’ graduate courses, leading to every teacher having a Master’s degree before teaching. Let’s consider that 95% of teachers in Finland are unionized. And let’s note that Finland does not use standards-driven testing to label students, teachers, and schools. And let’s consider that childhood poverty is about 4% in Finland (while the U.S. child poverty rate is 22%).
• International comparisons of test scores? What about international comparisons of childhood poverty? When we stoop to rankings, we are always risking yet more oversimplification and distortion, but when our political and corporate elites cherry-pick rankings (test scores) while avoiding the big picture (childhood poverty rankings), we are once again falling victim to factual but misleading statistics. State schools in all countries are a reflection of social realities of those countries—not data that can be used to compare the educational quality among countries.
Historically, the political Left has been a direct and indirect supporter of public education. That tradition does not mean the Left gets a free pass.
President Obama and Secretary Duncan have abandoned democratic principles and the promise of public education for a free people; they have abdicated those principles for the lure of corporate ideology.
The so-called left-wing media is following right along. I happen to like Oprah, Bill Maher,and Stephen Colbert (and the causes they promote as well as the voices they provide our culture), but, again, that doesn’t mean they are above being called on the carpet for their negligence (and the negligence of the media across the board).
And it is negligence to allow and even embrace the distortions driving the new educational reform movement being fueled by a celebrity elite who have no business representing the education agenda of a free society that claims to value academic freedom, human empowerment, and the hope of democracy not yet fulfilled.
http://dailycensored.com/2010/12/02/the-education-celebrity-tour-legend-of-the-fall-pt-ii/
by Paul Thomas
The U.S. is floundering at the bottom of international comparisons of education, and what makes this worse is that in the grand ol’ 1950s, the U.S. was at the top—at least that is one story offered by Michelle Rhee on a recent episode of the Colbert Report.
Like the discussion of Waiting for Superman by John Legend on Bill Maher’s Real Time, the celebrity tour of Rhee, who recently lost her job as chancellor of schools in DC, raises some real problems about not only what our self-appointed educational leaders are saying about education, but also how our so-called left-wing media helps (directly and indirectly) to perpetuate misinformation about our education system—misinformation that is being promoted to mask the real issues about poverty in our culture that the political and corporate elite do not want to face.
Rhee, in her interview with Colbert, makes several sweeping claims about schools, and as is the nature of contemporary media (recognizing, of course, that Colbert is satire), she is allowed to make those claims without any evidence and without anyone raising a hand to ask, “Really?”
Let’s unpack for a second just the one claim about the U.S. being number one in education and graduation in the 1950s.
First, Rhee is following a clever playbook of the new education reform movement: Make partial claims that few people will question because they sound true. While I find the claim itself misleading, even if the claim is true, Rhee is referring to the U.S. public education system before integration and the civil rights movement impacted a public education system that had closed doors to many American citizens. In short, the education system of the 1950s was an incomplete one that shunned many people marginalized by race and poverty.
Rhee trusts that most people embrace a misguided nostalgia for the past, a nostalgia lacking evidence for such faith in a better time, but once we actually return to that Golden Era, the message then is somewhat confusing in the light of Rhee’s claims.
Let me recommend some reading: Admiral Hyman Rickover’s Swiss Schools and Ours: Why Theirs are Better (1962) and American Education, a National Failure; The problem of our schools and what we can learn from England (1963)—both built on the argument that throughout the 1950s U.S. public schools were clear failures when compared internationally (sound familiar?), and sweeping educational reform (to eradicate the leftist influence, no less) was needed to address the crisis.
Or how about Rudolf Flesch? Try reading this Time article from 1955 or Flesch’s book—Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It (1955).
The full truth, of course, is that corporate and political elites have been making the same exact charges heard from Rhee, Secretary Duncan, and Bill Gates, unwarranted and without much resistance, for at least half a century. Rhee’s misinformation is nothing new, but it is finding renewed traction because these messages are being reinforced through the cult of celebrity, and that cult of celebrity is being driven by the so-called left-wing media just as easily as anywhere else—Oprah, Maher’s Real Time, The Colbert Report.
The message must be challenged, however, and it must come from the field itself—educators and scholars alike. When the usual claims and patterns are raised, we must do as much maligned educator and activist Bill Ayers has implored us to do, “Talk back, speak up, be heard.”
Now, what are the claims, and what rebuttals must we offer?:
• All cries of educational crisis are misleading. A crisis requires drastic responses quickly; our education system is a reflection of historical patterns that require patience and nuance in facing and addressing those patterns. We do not have education crises; we have lingering and systemic social failures.
• Education leadership that has no experience or expertise doesn’t deserve to be at the head of the reform table. Celebrities—Oprah, Bill Gates, John Legend, Andre Agassi—are not experts in education just because they have fame and money. Leadership and money are not the credentials needed to drive educational reform.
• Data don’t prove much of anything when the data is cherry-picked, and incomplete. As Rhee in her Colbert interview demonstrated, the new education reform celebrities have learned the power of incomplete statistics; offer just enough data to trigger popular assumptions—as long as those popular assumptions fuel the corporate agenda. When a simplistic and obvious claim about education is made, we must always assume it is false. The truth about education is nuanced and complex—and numbers can lie.
• Let’s be more like Finland? Well let’s do that, but not the partial way Secretary Duncan, Bill Gates, and Michelle Rhee have claimed. Let’s admit the genuine influence of socialism in Finland, along with their commitment to healthcare and sex education. Let’s consider that the government pays for all teachers’ graduate courses, leading to every teacher having a Master’s degree before teaching. Let’s consider that 95% of teachers in Finland are unionized. And let’s note that Finland does not use standards-driven testing to label students, teachers, and schools. And let’s consider that childhood poverty is about 4% in Finland (while the U.S. child poverty rate is 22%).
• International comparisons of test scores? What about international comparisons of childhood poverty? When we stoop to rankings, we are always risking yet more oversimplification and distortion, but when our political and corporate elites cherry-pick rankings (test scores) while avoiding the big picture (childhood poverty rankings), we are once again falling victim to factual but misleading statistics. State schools in all countries are a reflection of social realities of those countries—not data that can be used to compare the educational quality among countries.
Historically, the political Left has been a direct and indirect supporter of public education. That tradition does not mean the Left gets a free pass.
President Obama and Secretary Duncan have abandoned democratic principles and the promise of public education for a free people; they have abdicated those principles for the lure of corporate ideology.
The so-called left-wing media is following right along. I happen to like Oprah, Bill Maher,and Stephen Colbert (and the causes they promote as well as the voices they provide our culture), but, again, that doesn’t mean they are above being called on the carpet for their negligence (and the negligence of the media across the board).
And it is negligence to allow and even embrace the distortions driving the new educational reform movement being fueled by a celebrity elite who have no business representing the education agenda of a free society that claims to value academic freedom, human empowerment, and the hope of democracy not yet fulfilled.
http://dailycensored.com/2010/12/02/the-education-celebrity-tour-legend-of-the-fall-pt-ii/
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Hillsborough exempt from reforms
From TBO.com
by Sherri Ackerman and Elaine Silerstrint
TAMPA - It looks like Hillsborough County teachers will once again dodge a proposed state law to end tenure and tie their pay strictly to performance.
That's because Hillsborough stands alone among Florida's 67 counties with a special act that protects the practice of tenure, which grants employment protections to teachers who reach a level of seniority.
Two other counties enjoy that protection, too, but it's under challenge. Not in Hillsborough. The reason: Hillsborough is at least a year ahead of the rest of Florida on key education reforms, said state Sen. Steve Wise, an education leader in the Senate.
Wise, a Jacksonville Republican, has introduced a bill that would subject all Florida school districts to a plan Hillsborough created, a $205 million overhaul of the way teachers are hired, trained, evaluated and paid.
The Hillsborough County district's seven-year plan is funded by a historic $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
"Hillsborough is going to be exempt because they have the Gates money," said Wise, chairman of the Senate's Pre-K-12 Education Committee. "They're doing the research. We believe what they're doing is the right direction to go."
So much so, Wise said, that the district will serve as a model for the state, "with a few minor exceptions."
* * * * *
It's too early to tell what Wise's Senate Bill 736 will look like once it wends its way through the Senate and House. The bill got its first thumbs-up Thursday with a 3-0 vote by the Senate Pre-K-12 committee.
But Hillsborough school officials say they are pleased it allows the district to continue its work. They also are cautious about their unique exemption.
"This is the first draft of his bill and we certainly hope that will remain," David Steele, the district's chief information and technology officer and project director of the Gates grant, wrote in an e-mail to the Tribune.
Steele is concerned the bill is heavy on accountability of teachers but light on helping them succeed.
"Our evaluation system clearly has that mentoring piece for a reason," Steele said. "The district must ensure that teachers have the supports necessary to be successful."
Wise's bill is undergoing changes even before the Legislature convenes March 8 for its 2011 session. Here are some highlights of a recent version:
•School districts and the education department would create new evaluations and a pay scale that, by 2014, would be linked to student learning gains.
•Teachers would receive one of four ratings: highly effective, effective, needs improvement or developing, and unsatisfactory.
•Fifty percent of the evaluation would be based on student performance over a three-year period. The rest would rely on best practices and professional responsibilities.
•Parents would participate in teacher evaluations.
•Evaluations would factor-in student attendance, disciplinary records, disabilities and English language proficiency.
•Parents would be notified if their child's teacher is rated unsatisfactory three consecutive years or more.
Hillsborough's evaluation system is similar, except that by 2013, student performance will account for 40 percent of the overall review.
The remaining 60 percent will be divided equally between assessments by principals and by peers or mentors, who are assigned to observe and work with each teacher.
* * * * *
The Hillsborough County school district was among the first in Florida to participate in the state's Merit Award Program, which offers financial rewards for teachers whose students have grown academically.
Originally, teacher performance levels were tied to a year's worth of student gains. Under the Gates plan, that measurement, eventually, will be stretched over three years.
In Hillsborough, education leaders are considering whether to include input from parents and students on future teacher evaluations.
"The logistics of including parents/students are difficult," Steele wrote. "I think they may write the bill thinking of a parent evaluating 'a' teacher."
In reality, he said, even elementary students have three to four teachers and a high school student has about 10.
"A parent with two high school students would have a difficult time evaluating 18 to 22 teachers, having never observed a lesson," Steele said.
Wise's bill, if approved, also would phase out tenure.
Teachers hired on or after July 1 would no longer be offered professional service contracts or tenure. Instead, they would receive a probationary contract and at least two evaluations the first year, then an annual contract that the district could choose to renew or not renew without cause.
No annual contract would be given if a teacher received two consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations, two unsatisfactory evaluations in a three-year period, or three "needs improvement" evaluations in a five-year period.
Current teachers and school administrators can choose to keep the salary schedule they have now or opt to participate in the new one. The new system allows them to earn more money faster. But they can't change their minds once they choose.
* * * * *
Teachers who have tenure now can keep it, but Wise's proposal, weakens the protection.
Tenured teachers have always faced dismissal for "just cause," which includes admitting guilt of a crime. Under Wise's bill, two years of consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations would be considered a "just cause."
Some critics argue tenure protects bad teachers because their contracts are automatically renewed unless a superintendent charges them with unsatisfactory performance.
According to one legislative analysis, during the past two years in Florida, fewer than 1 percent of classroom teachers received an unsatisfactory evaluation.
Firing them can take months if not years and can be costly for districts.
Proponents of the practice say tenure isn't the problem.
"It's not the impediment to identify and get rid of an ineffective teacher," said Jean Clements, president of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association.
Tenure merely ensures that the process of removing a teacher is fair, say supporters, who worry that without protections, the highest-paid teachers could be laid off to save money.
"What is important is the whole way that we support teachers," Clements said. "How we reflect on our practice, how to improve, how to see where to get better."
Clements has worked closely with Hillsborough school administrators and says tenure in the district will remain intact — at least for now.
Hillsborough County has had a special tenure act since 1941. The Legislature has reaffirmed it since then. S.B. 736 makes note of the special act as well as two others, in Volusia and Duval counties. Hillsborough's would be upheld, but the latter two would be repealed.
Hillsborough teachers can apply for tenure after three years as long as evaluations show they are effective in the classroom. District officials have said they can extend the probationary period to four years to weed out poor performers if necessary.
* * * * *
Wise's proposal reintroduces some provisions of Senate Bill 6, a tenure-killing act adopted by the Legislature in its 2010 session but vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist.
The new bill, however, takes a different tack.
Titled the "Race to the Top for Student Success Act," it takes its name from the federal Race To The Top program, in which Florida won a $700,000 grant after agreeing to many of the reforms outlined in Wise's bill.
Also, Wise and other committee members called for input from teachers, administrators, union leaders and others — something that didn't happen with S.B. 6. Teachers across the state rallied for its defeat.
But like its predecessor, S.B. 736 doesn't clearly define how to measure student learning gains for teachers in courses harder to quantify. These include art, music and special education.
The issue is of special concern to Gov. Rick Scott, who says his daughter is a special education teacher.
Hillsborough brought in experts from the University of Wisconsin to address this challenge with "value-added" measurements, Steele said. It's a work in progress, but the district is on track to roll out those evaluations by Aug. 31, he said.
The fear of value-added measurements is that if they don't work, they will ultimately harm the profession.
"Don't screw it up," Sarasota Classified Teachers Association President Pat Gardner warned Wise and the senate education committee Wednesday in Tallahassee. "If you evaluate teachers with value-added tables that don't work, you're going to lose the best teachers.
"And they won't come back," she said. "Everybody out there will know, don't go to Florida."
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2011/feb/12/MENEWSO1-teacher-tenure-appears-safe-in-hillsborou/news-breaking/
by Sherri Ackerman and Elaine Silerstrint
TAMPA - It looks like Hillsborough County teachers will once again dodge a proposed state law to end tenure and tie their pay strictly to performance.
That's because Hillsborough stands alone among Florida's 67 counties with a special act that protects the practice of tenure, which grants employment protections to teachers who reach a level of seniority.
Two other counties enjoy that protection, too, but it's under challenge. Not in Hillsborough. The reason: Hillsborough is at least a year ahead of the rest of Florida on key education reforms, said state Sen. Steve Wise, an education leader in the Senate.
Wise, a Jacksonville Republican, has introduced a bill that would subject all Florida school districts to a plan Hillsborough created, a $205 million overhaul of the way teachers are hired, trained, evaluated and paid.
The Hillsborough County district's seven-year plan is funded by a historic $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
"Hillsborough is going to be exempt because they have the Gates money," said Wise, chairman of the Senate's Pre-K-12 Education Committee. "They're doing the research. We believe what they're doing is the right direction to go."
So much so, Wise said, that the district will serve as a model for the state, "with a few minor exceptions."
* * * * *
It's too early to tell what Wise's Senate Bill 736 will look like once it wends its way through the Senate and House. The bill got its first thumbs-up Thursday with a 3-0 vote by the Senate Pre-K-12 committee.
But Hillsborough school officials say they are pleased it allows the district to continue its work. They also are cautious about their unique exemption.
"This is the first draft of his bill and we certainly hope that will remain," David Steele, the district's chief information and technology officer and project director of the Gates grant, wrote in an e-mail to the Tribune.
Steele is concerned the bill is heavy on accountability of teachers but light on helping them succeed.
"Our evaluation system clearly has that mentoring piece for a reason," Steele said. "The district must ensure that teachers have the supports necessary to be successful."
Wise's bill is undergoing changes even before the Legislature convenes March 8 for its 2011 session. Here are some highlights of a recent version:
•School districts and the education department would create new evaluations and a pay scale that, by 2014, would be linked to student learning gains.
•Teachers would receive one of four ratings: highly effective, effective, needs improvement or developing, and unsatisfactory.
•Fifty percent of the evaluation would be based on student performance over a three-year period. The rest would rely on best practices and professional responsibilities.
•Parents would participate in teacher evaluations.
•Evaluations would factor-in student attendance, disciplinary records, disabilities and English language proficiency.
•Parents would be notified if their child's teacher is rated unsatisfactory three consecutive years or more.
Hillsborough's evaluation system is similar, except that by 2013, student performance will account for 40 percent of the overall review.
The remaining 60 percent will be divided equally between assessments by principals and by peers or mentors, who are assigned to observe and work with each teacher.
* * * * *
The Hillsborough County school district was among the first in Florida to participate in the state's Merit Award Program, which offers financial rewards for teachers whose students have grown academically.
Originally, teacher performance levels were tied to a year's worth of student gains. Under the Gates plan, that measurement, eventually, will be stretched over three years.
In Hillsborough, education leaders are considering whether to include input from parents and students on future teacher evaluations.
"The logistics of including parents/students are difficult," Steele wrote. "I think they may write the bill thinking of a parent evaluating 'a' teacher."
In reality, he said, even elementary students have three to four teachers and a high school student has about 10.
"A parent with two high school students would have a difficult time evaluating 18 to 22 teachers, having never observed a lesson," Steele said.
Wise's bill, if approved, also would phase out tenure.
Teachers hired on or after July 1 would no longer be offered professional service contracts or tenure. Instead, they would receive a probationary contract and at least two evaluations the first year, then an annual contract that the district could choose to renew or not renew without cause.
No annual contract would be given if a teacher received two consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations, two unsatisfactory evaluations in a three-year period, or three "needs improvement" evaluations in a five-year period.
Current teachers and school administrators can choose to keep the salary schedule they have now or opt to participate in the new one. The new system allows them to earn more money faster. But they can't change their minds once they choose.
* * * * *
Teachers who have tenure now can keep it, but Wise's proposal, weakens the protection.
Tenured teachers have always faced dismissal for "just cause," which includes admitting guilt of a crime. Under Wise's bill, two years of consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations would be considered a "just cause."
Some critics argue tenure protects bad teachers because their contracts are automatically renewed unless a superintendent charges them with unsatisfactory performance.
According to one legislative analysis, during the past two years in Florida, fewer than 1 percent of classroom teachers received an unsatisfactory evaluation.
Firing them can take months if not years and can be costly for districts.
Proponents of the practice say tenure isn't the problem.
"It's not the impediment to identify and get rid of an ineffective teacher," said Jean Clements, president of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association.
Tenure merely ensures that the process of removing a teacher is fair, say supporters, who worry that without protections, the highest-paid teachers could be laid off to save money.
"What is important is the whole way that we support teachers," Clements said. "How we reflect on our practice, how to improve, how to see where to get better."
Clements has worked closely with Hillsborough school administrators and says tenure in the district will remain intact — at least for now.
Hillsborough County has had a special tenure act since 1941. The Legislature has reaffirmed it since then. S.B. 736 makes note of the special act as well as two others, in Volusia and Duval counties. Hillsborough's would be upheld, but the latter two would be repealed.
Hillsborough teachers can apply for tenure after three years as long as evaluations show they are effective in the classroom. District officials have said they can extend the probationary period to four years to weed out poor performers if necessary.
* * * * *
Wise's proposal reintroduces some provisions of Senate Bill 6, a tenure-killing act adopted by the Legislature in its 2010 session but vetoed by Gov. Charlie Crist.
The new bill, however, takes a different tack.
Titled the "Race to the Top for Student Success Act," it takes its name from the federal Race To The Top program, in which Florida won a $700,000 grant after agreeing to many of the reforms outlined in Wise's bill.
Also, Wise and other committee members called for input from teachers, administrators, union leaders and others — something that didn't happen with S.B. 6. Teachers across the state rallied for its defeat.
But like its predecessor, S.B. 736 doesn't clearly define how to measure student learning gains for teachers in courses harder to quantify. These include art, music and special education.
The issue is of special concern to Gov. Rick Scott, who says his daughter is a special education teacher.
Hillsborough brought in experts from the University of Wisconsin to address this challenge with "value-added" measurements, Steele said. It's a work in progress, but the district is on track to roll out those evaluations by Aug. 31, he said.
The fear of value-added measurements is that if they don't work, they will ultimately harm the profession.
"Don't screw it up," Sarasota Classified Teachers Association President Pat Gardner warned Wise and the senate education committee Wednesday in Tallahassee. "If you evaluate teachers with value-added tables that don't work, you're going to lose the best teachers.
"And they won't come back," she said. "Everybody out there will know, don't go to Florida."
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2011/feb/12/MENEWSO1-teacher-tenure-appears-safe-in-hillsborou/news-breaking/
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Myth of Michelle Rhee Debunked
From the washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss
Enough oxygen has been sucked out of the air about whether former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee really raised student test scores through the roof when she taught briefly at a Baltimore school. I still find more telling her admission that she taped her students' mouths shut when she didn’t know what else to do to keep them quiet. (This really happened and it would be a career killer for anybody but Rhee.)
The real issue is what she and her supporters say she accomplished but didn’t in D.C. public schools when she was chancellor for about 3 1/2 years before quitting in October when her biggest supporter, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, was ousted from office.
A myth has grown up around Rhee and her D.C. tenure that essentially has her swooping in like an avenging angel ridding the place of bad teachers and setting the troubled school system on the road to redemption. The reason it matters that the myth be dispelled is because Rhee has become a hero to state legislatures around the country who seem to think that everything she says about school reform is gospel.
If Rhee had in fact saved the school system, or even come a significant way toward that goal, nobody would be cheering more loudly than me. But she did nothing of the sort. She came to the District, talked very tough and proceeded to make a number of changes, as new school district leaders always do. Some were helpful, some weren't.
She didn't stay long enough to know if any could qualify as a success, but her major initiative, a multimillion-dollar teacher evaluation system called IMPACT, has serious flaws and as a result, there is no telling whether some of the teachers Rhee fired were really ineffective. The Rhee myth leaves no room for this reality.
Perhaps the person who knows best how much work Rhee left needs to be done is her successor, interim chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has been trying to clean up several messes Rhee left in her wake.
Henderson has already made two changes in school leadership because of Rhee’s bad decisions, and now, she faces having to implement the ruling of an independent arbitrator who concluded that Rhee improperly laid off 75 new teachers in 2008 because she didn’t follow this simple rule: She was supposed to tell the teachers why they were being let go. Pesky rules just weren't her thing.
My colleague Bill Turque reported that now the District has to find the teachers and offer them reinstatement in an appropriate job -- and give them back wages minus any earnings they have accumulated since. The total could cost the system $7.5 million.
Perhaps Rhee, who is raising $1 billion for her new anti-teachers union Students First organization, could contribute to pay for her mistake.
The debate of the last week has been over whether Rhee inflated how much her students’ test scores rose when she was a teacher at Harlem Park Elementary School. There seems to be no conclusive evidence, and, frankly, I care more about the ill-advised test obsession that drove her reform effort while she was chancellor. Standardized tests are a lousy way to measure anything, and she wanted to measure everything by the results.
The statement that the Students First organization issued to refute the allegations that she inflated student test scores had a most telling last line:
“To our members, this episode is further proof of what we’re up against and why we need your support to get the message out."
It is bewildering to imagine what Rhee thinks she is “up against.” She is the darling of the reform world. The Obama administration supports and funds her style of reform, Philanthropists have showered her with millions of dollars for her to pursue her educational dreams.
The people who need to get their message out there are the very people Rhee and other reformers have attacked: public school teachers.
Here’s part of an e-mail that was shared with a handful of people, written and sent by a veteran teacher in the Washington region, Ken Bernstein. He was responding to a critic who said that those people who do not support current education reforms only complain and offer no alternatives. That is not at all true, but that discussion is for another time.
I am publishing Bernstein’s response (edited to remove names) because I think it authentically speaks to the way many teachers are feeling. I will leave in his abbrevations but here is what they stand for: NCLB, No Child Left Behind;TFA, Teach for America; DFER, Democrats for Education Reform; NLNS, New Leaders for New Schools.
From Bernstein's e-mail:
“There is near systematic exclusion of other voices from the media.
"Yes, Diane Ravitch has gotten an audience as a result of her recent book. .... But that is swamped by the puff pieces on Rhee in Time and Newsweek, by editorials in supposedly liberal papers that support the test-centric - or should I say test-obsessed? - approach to education.
"One reason Diane Ravitch experienced the overwhelming support for her book is that for many teachers it was the first time they had heard a major voice expressing the things that really matter to them...
"We can tell lots of positive narratives. How about Lori Nazareno at Denver’s Math and Science Leadership Academy, a teacher-run school? But does the president focus on that, or does he not give a dog whistle by focusing on a school which is used to pound on teachers unions with the claim that the union rules were interfering?
And how can the President be telling people to become teachers when his Secretary of Education is agreeing with Bill Gates that masters degrees are a waste of money, when his administration supported putting language in that let TFAers and people out of similar programs be considered ‘highly qualified’ under NCLB in direct contradiction to the ruling of the 9th Circuit?
Right now the future of American public education is hanging by a thread.
Right now the administration, DFER, TFA, NLNS, Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Walton Foundation, and a whole host of other interconnected groups are pushing an untested (except where it has been tried and failed) set of approaches that will be destructive, yet the issue is how we present?
Why not ask Anthony Mullen about his experiences as NTOY [2009 National Teacher of the Year]? I remember one of his blog posts where he described that when he raised some questions he was treated like a skunk at the garden party, even though his was supposed to be the voice of America’s teachers.
The shape of the teaching profession has to change. Lots of us know that. But not in the direction being pushed by this administration.
Might I suggest that anyone who has not already done so read the new book called "Teaching 2030: What we Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools... Now and in the Future,” by Barnett Berry and a batch of teachers including the likes of Renee Moore, Ariel Sacks, Jose Vilson, Shannon C’de Baca, Cindi Rigsbee, Emily Vickery, Laurie Wasserman ....and if you do not know who every single one of those people is, is that not part of the problem....?
Heck, I want the voices of students included. I showed two brief clips from "Race to Nowhere" to my AP students. It absolutely coincides with their experience. These are highly motivated kids, taking college level government in 10th grade. They are getting burned out. And yet we are offered scare stories, international comparisons (which do not support the uses that are made for them, but that is nothing new in educational politics) with an insistence that we must do more, have higher standards at the same time as we are cutting funding (which still largely comes from local governments whose tax bases have shrunk dramatically) at the same time as supposedly we leave no child behind. Balderdash - although I would prefer stronger language.
Yes, we need to do the best job of presenting we can. But it will not matter if we cannot get access to the organs of mass media, without which it becomes harder to convince elected policy makers that we actually represent a point of view that is more commonly held by those who truly understand education.
OH, and by the way, why are so few in the media pointing out the obvious: we have been pursuing a path on education at least since 1983 that has repeatedly failed, so why do we act like the compulsive gambler and still keep doubling down again and again on the same failed approaches?
Sorry, I’m tired, and cranky.
I am spread too thin.
I am taking on even more, going to a conference cosponsored by EWA [Education Writers Association] and Carnegie on teacher quality. I am participating in a panel in my district trying to ameliorate the worst outcomes of tying teacher evaluation to student assessment. I keep writing.
Yet all of that has to take second seat behind my responsibilities to my students.
Those of us who take our teaching seriously already work too many hours.
Some of us are still willing to take on more, to ensure that the voices of teachers are heard....Peace.”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/michelle-rhee/missing-the-point-on-rhee.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Valerie Strauss
Enough oxygen has been sucked out of the air about whether former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee really raised student test scores through the roof when she taught briefly at a Baltimore school. I still find more telling her admission that she taped her students' mouths shut when she didn’t know what else to do to keep them quiet. (This really happened and it would be a career killer for anybody but Rhee.)
The real issue is what she and her supporters say she accomplished but didn’t in D.C. public schools when she was chancellor for about 3 1/2 years before quitting in October when her biggest supporter, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, was ousted from office.
A myth has grown up around Rhee and her D.C. tenure that essentially has her swooping in like an avenging angel ridding the place of bad teachers and setting the troubled school system on the road to redemption. The reason it matters that the myth be dispelled is because Rhee has become a hero to state legislatures around the country who seem to think that everything she says about school reform is gospel.
If Rhee had in fact saved the school system, or even come a significant way toward that goal, nobody would be cheering more loudly than me. But she did nothing of the sort. She came to the District, talked very tough and proceeded to make a number of changes, as new school district leaders always do. Some were helpful, some weren't.
She didn't stay long enough to know if any could qualify as a success, but her major initiative, a multimillion-dollar teacher evaluation system called IMPACT, has serious flaws and as a result, there is no telling whether some of the teachers Rhee fired were really ineffective. The Rhee myth leaves no room for this reality.
Perhaps the person who knows best how much work Rhee left needs to be done is her successor, interim chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has been trying to clean up several messes Rhee left in her wake.
Henderson has already made two changes in school leadership because of Rhee’s bad decisions, and now, she faces having to implement the ruling of an independent arbitrator who concluded that Rhee improperly laid off 75 new teachers in 2008 because she didn’t follow this simple rule: She was supposed to tell the teachers why they were being let go. Pesky rules just weren't her thing.
My colleague Bill Turque reported that now the District has to find the teachers and offer them reinstatement in an appropriate job -- and give them back wages minus any earnings they have accumulated since. The total could cost the system $7.5 million.
Perhaps Rhee, who is raising $1 billion for her new anti-teachers union Students First organization, could contribute to pay for her mistake.
The debate of the last week has been over whether Rhee inflated how much her students’ test scores rose when she was a teacher at Harlem Park Elementary School. There seems to be no conclusive evidence, and, frankly, I care more about the ill-advised test obsession that drove her reform effort while she was chancellor. Standardized tests are a lousy way to measure anything, and she wanted to measure everything by the results.
The statement that the Students First organization issued to refute the allegations that she inflated student test scores had a most telling last line:
“To our members, this episode is further proof of what we’re up against and why we need your support to get the message out."
It is bewildering to imagine what Rhee thinks she is “up against.” She is the darling of the reform world. The Obama administration supports and funds her style of reform, Philanthropists have showered her with millions of dollars for her to pursue her educational dreams.
The people who need to get their message out there are the very people Rhee and other reformers have attacked: public school teachers.
Here’s part of an e-mail that was shared with a handful of people, written and sent by a veteran teacher in the Washington region, Ken Bernstein. He was responding to a critic who said that those people who do not support current education reforms only complain and offer no alternatives. That is not at all true, but that discussion is for another time.
I am publishing Bernstein’s response (edited to remove names) because I think it authentically speaks to the way many teachers are feeling. I will leave in his abbrevations but here is what they stand for: NCLB, No Child Left Behind;TFA, Teach for America; DFER, Democrats for Education Reform; NLNS, New Leaders for New Schools.
From Bernstein's e-mail:
“There is near systematic exclusion of other voices from the media.
"Yes, Diane Ravitch has gotten an audience as a result of her recent book. .... But that is swamped by the puff pieces on Rhee in Time and Newsweek, by editorials in supposedly liberal papers that support the test-centric - or should I say test-obsessed? - approach to education.
"One reason Diane Ravitch experienced the overwhelming support for her book is that for many teachers it was the first time they had heard a major voice expressing the things that really matter to them...
"We can tell lots of positive narratives. How about Lori Nazareno at Denver’s Math and Science Leadership Academy, a teacher-run school? But does the president focus on that, or does he not give a dog whistle by focusing on a school which is used to pound on teachers unions with the claim that the union rules were interfering?
And how can the President be telling people to become teachers when his Secretary of Education is agreeing with Bill Gates that masters degrees are a waste of money, when his administration supported putting language in that let TFAers and people out of similar programs be considered ‘highly qualified’ under NCLB in direct contradiction to the ruling of the 9th Circuit?
Right now the future of American public education is hanging by a thread.
Right now the administration, DFER, TFA, NLNS, Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Walton Foundation, and a whole host of other interconnected groups are pushing an untested (except where it has been tried and failed) set of approaches that will be destructive, yet the issue is how we present?
Why not ask Anthony Mullen about his experiences as NTOY [2009 National Teacher of the Year]? I remember one of his blog posts where he described that when he raised some questions he was treated like a skunk at the garden party, even though his was supposed to be the voice of America’s teachers.
The shape of the teaching profession has to change. Lots of us know that. But not in the direction being pushed by this administration.
Might I suggest that anyone who has not already done so read the new book called "Teaching 2030: What we Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools... Now and in the Future,” by Barnett Berry and a batch of teachers including the likes of Renee Moore, Ariel Sacks, Jose Vilson, Shannon C’de Baca, Cindi Rigsbee, Emily Vickery, Laurie Wasserman ....and if you do not know who every single one of those people is, is that not part of the problem....?
Heck, I want the voices of students included. I showed two brief clips from "Race to Nowhere" to my AP students. It absolutely coincides with their experience. These are highly motivated kids, taking college level government in 10th grade. They are getting burned out. And yet we are offered scare stories, international comparisons (which do not support the uses that are made for them, but that is nothing new in educational politics) with an insistence that we must do more, have higher standards at the same time as we are cutting funding (which still largely comes from local governments whose tax bases have shrunk dramatically) at the same time as supposedly we leave no child behind. Balderdash - although I would prefer stronger language.
Yes, we need to do the best job of presenting we can. But it will not matter if we cannot get access to the organs of mass media, without which it becomes harder to convince elected policy makers that we actually represent a point of view that is more commonly held by those who truly understand education.
OH, and by the way, why are so few in the media pointing out the obvious: we have been pursuing a path on education at least since 1983 that has repeatedly failed, so why do we act like the compulsive gambler and still keep doubling down again and again on the same failed approaches?
Sorry, I’m tired, and cranky.
I am spread too thin.
I am taking on even more, going to a conference cosponsored by EWA [Education Writers Association] and Carnegie on teacher quality. I am participating in a panel in my district trying to ameliorate the worst outcomes of tying teacher evaluation to student assessment. I keep writing.
Yet all of that has to take second seat behind my responsibilities to my students.
Those of us who take our teaching seriously already work too many hours.
Some of us are still willing to take on more, to ensure that the voices of teachers are heard....Peace.”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/michelle-rhee/missing-the-point-on-rhee.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Waiting for Superman deservedly snubbed
From the Washington Posts Answer Sheet
by Valerie Stauss
The documentarians who select the films for Academy Award nominations in the feature documentary category got it right: “Waiting for Superman” was not good/accurate enough to be selected.
The snub to Davis Guggenheim’s tendentious film was well-deserved, given that classic documentaries are factual and straightforward, and don’t, as did "Superman," fake scenes for emotional impact.
Academy Award nominations are heavily political, yet this film didn’t make the cut even though President Obama called it “powerful” and welcomed to the White House the five charming students who starred in the film.
Advertising campaigns have been known to vault films into Academy contention, but not even a $2 million grant provided by the Gates Foundation to market “Superman” worked.
Though "Superman" was on the shortlist for an Academy Award in the feature documentary category, apparently the people who vote on the nominations -- people who actually make documentaries -- saw too many problems with “Waiting for Superman.”
And there are many, large and small.
Guggenheim edited the film to make it seem as if charter schools are a systemic answer to the ills afflicting many traditional public schools, even though they can’t be, by their very design. He unfairly demonized Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and gave undeserved hero status to reformer and former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Guggenheim compared schools in Finland and the United States without mentioning that Finland has a 3 percent child poverty rate and the United States has a 22 percent rate.
One scene showed a mother touring a charter school -- and saying things such as, “I don’t care if we have to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to get there at 7:45, then that’s what we will do” -- that turned out to be staged; she already knew her son didn’t get in, according to The New York Times.
Then there was the case of one of the five students featured in the film, Emily Jones, who lives on the suburban San Francisco Peninsula and who, according to "Superman," was desperate to escape her traditional public high school, Woodside High, where she would be doomed to mediocrity.
Except that it wasn’t true. In an interview with John Fensterwald of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, she said that Woodside “is a great school” that she really liked; she just liked Summit Prep Charter School better.
Late last year, in a piece on Movie Line’s Web site, editor S.T. VanAirsdale asked whether education historian Diane Ravitch’s scathing review of Superman in The New York Review of Books would derail the movie’s chances of nabbing an Oscar.
Just maybe it did.
And maybe this will help persuade those who believed that "Superman" unflinchingly showed reality that, in fact, it didn't, and that it is time to take a new look at public education that doesn't demonize teachers and traditional public schools.
(For the record, the films that did get nominations in the feature documentary category are: Exit through the Gift Shop,Gasland, Inside Job, Restrepo and Waste Land.)
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/why-oscar-snubbed-superman---.html?wprss=answer-sheet
by Valerie Stauss
The documentarians who select the films for Academy Award nominations in the feature documentary category got it right: “Waiting for Superman” was not good/accurate enough to be selected.
The snub to Davis Guggenheim’s tendentious film was well-deserved, given that classic documentaries are factual and straightforward, and don’t, as did "Superman," fake scenes for emotional impact.
Academy Award nominations are heavily political, yet this film didn’t make the cut even though President Obama called it “powerful” and welcomed to the White House the five charming students who starred in the film.
Advertising campaigns have been known to vault films into Academy contention, but not even a $2 million grant provided by the Gates Foundation to market “Superman” worked.
Though "Superman" was on the shortlist for an Academy Award in the feature documentary category, apparently the people who vote on the nominations -- people who actually make documentaries -- saw too many problems with “Waiting for Superman.”
And there are many, large and small.
Guggenheim edited the film to make it seem as if charter schools are a systemic answer to the ills afflicting many traditional public schools, even though they can’t be, by their very design. He unfairly demonized Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and gave undeserved hero status to reformer and former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Guggenheim compared schools in Finland and the United States without mentioning that Finland has a 3 percent child poverty rate and the United States has a 22 percent rate.
One scene showed a mother touring a charter school -- and saying things such as, “I don’t care if we have to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to get there at 7:45, then that’s what we will do” -- that turned out to be staged; she already knew her son didn’t get in, according to The New York Times.
Then there was the case of one of the five students featured in the film, Emily Jones, who lives on the suburban San Francisco Peninsula and who, according to "Superman," was desperate to escape her traditional public high school, Woodside High, where she would be doomed to mediocrity.
Except that it wasn’t true. In an interview with John Fensterwald of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, she said that Woodside “is a great school” that she really liked; she just liked Summit Prep Charter School better.
Late last year, in a piece on Movie Line’s Web site, editor S.T. VanAirsdale asked whether education historian Diane Ravitch’s scathing review of Superman in The New York Review of Books would derail the movie’s chances of nabbing an Oscar.
Just maybe it did.
And maybe this will help persuade those who believed that "Superman" unflinchingly showed reality that, in fact, it didn't, and that it is time to take a new look at public education that doesn't demonize teachers and traditional public schools.
(For the record, the films that did get nominations in the feature documentary category are: Exit through the Gift Shop,Gasland, Inside Job, Restrepo and Waste Land.)
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/why-oscar-snubbed-superman---.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Is Bill Gates Trying to Steal Our Schools?
From Bloomberg Bussiness Week
It's been two years since Bill Gates left his day-to-day role at Microsoft to concentrate on supervising the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—and his new enterprise is booming. Headquartered in a converted check-processing center in Seattle's Eastlake neighborhood, the 10-year-old foundation plans to move into a 900,000-square-foot campus and visitors' center near the city's Space Needle next spring. The Gates Foundation opened a London office this year; it also has offices in Washington, Delhi, and Beijing, and 830 employees around the world, up from about 500 in 2008. With assets of $33.9 billion as of Dec. 31, 2009, and America's two richest people—Gates and Warren Buffett—as trustees, the foundation plans to spend $3 billion in the next five to seven years on education. If there's such a thing as a charity behemoth, the Gates Foundation is it.
While its efforts in global health are widely applauded, its record in America's schools has been more controversial. Starting in 2000, the Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its first big project, trying to revitalize U.S. high schools by making them smaller, only to discover that student body size has little effect on achievement.
It has since shifted its considerable weight behind an emerging consensus—shared by U.S. Education Secretary and Gates ally Arne Duncan—that quality of teaching affects student performance and that increasing achievement is as simple as removing bad teachers, identifying good ones, and rewarding them with more money. On this theory, Gates is investing $290 million over seven years in the Tampa, Memphis, and Pittsburgh school districts as well as a charter school consortium in Los Angeles. The largest chunk of money, $100 million, will go to Tampa's Hillsborough County school district, the eighth-largest in the U.S., with 192,000 students and 15,000 teachers. These carefully selected programs, which will favor or penalize teachers depending on whether students make larger or smaller gains than their test scores in prior years would have predicted, are intended as models that, if proven successful, can be rolled out nationwide.
The Gates agenda is an intellectual cousin of the Bush administration's 2002 No Child Left Behind law, which required all public schools—though not individual teachers—to make "adequate yearly progress" on student test scores. Some opponents of No Child Left Behind questioned its faith in data; are scores too narrow a gauge of how well kids are learning? Gates sees nothing wrong in relying on quantitative metrics. "Every profession has to have some form of measurement," he said in a late June interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. "Tuning that, making sure it's fair, getting the teachers so they're enthused about it" are the keys.
Still, the prospect of such measurement makes some educators and academic researchers uneasy. They contend that factors such as school leadership and culture exert a powerful influence on student achievement. Moreover, rating individual teachers based on their classroom's test results may be better suited to little red schoolhouses than today's large urban schools, where teachers team up, aides and tutors pitch in, and students come and go frequently.
While cities such as Denver and Cincinnati have experimented with paying teachers for performance, the Gates initiative—called Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching—marks the largest and most comprehensive effort to evaluate teachers in all grades and subjects based on student test gains. "The people at Gates believe there is a window right now," says Michael S. McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, which supports education research. "They have in Washington an administration that's broadly sympathetic to their view. They have the attention of the American people, wanting dramatic improvement in the schools. Bill and Melinda Gates want to see results—not just in their lifetimes, but in the next few years."
Small schools, false start
The last thing you'd expect from an organization headed by Bill Gates is a math mistake. Yet, according to Wharton School statistician Howard Wainer, the foundation may have misread the numbers when it arrived at its first prescription for American education. Wainer, who used the foundation as a case study in his 2009 book, Picturing the Uncertain World, says it seized on data showing small schools are overrepresented among the country's highest achievers and started pouring money into creating small high schools and subdividing big ones. Tom Vander Ark, a former schools superintendent in Washington state who was tapped to oversee the foundation's educational arm, was—and remains—a booster of small schools. The Gates Foundation declined comment on Wainer's assertion and research.
Gates, Buffett to megarich: Give it away
..From Pierre S. du Pont, who gave more than $6 million to train teachers and build 120 public schools in Delaware in the 1920s, to the Rockefeller family, which funded child development research that helped lay the groundwork for the Head Start program, corporate leaders have long promised to ride to the rescue of public education. One of the highest-profile efforts came in 1993, when publisher Walter Annenberg gave $500 million—matched by $600 million in gifts from other sources—to strengthen urban, rural, and arts education, only to be stymied in some school districts by rapid changes of leadership and direction.
In the past, says University of Michigan historian Maris A. Vinovskis, benefactors "were not as prescriptive about how they wanted their money spent." Now a new generation of philanthropic billionaires, including Gates, homebuilding and insurance entrepreneur Eli Broad, members of the Walton family that founded Wal-Mart Stores, and former hedge fund manager Julian Robertson, want public education run more like a business. Charter schools, independent of local school districts and typically free of unionized teachers, are one of their favorite causes. "We don't know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that," Broad said last year at a public event in Manhattan. "But what we do know about is management and governance."
Small schools promised an alternative to the impersonal bureaucracy of traditional high schools, which Gates in a 2005 speech proclaimed "obsolete." But according to Wainer, adherents overlooked a troublesome fact: Small schools are overrepresented among the lowest as well as highest achievers. Why? Because the smaller a school, the more likely its overall performance can be skewed by a few good or bad students.
Wainer says big high schools, for all their problems, outperform small ones. Scale lets them offer more advanced classes, electives, and extracurricular activities. With Gates funding, one Denver high school split into three and lost so many students that it shut down in 2006. It reopened a year later as a single school, without the foundation's support.
In November 2008, Bill Gates publicly backtracked, acknowledging in a speech in Seattle that "simply breaking up existing schools into smaller units often did not generate the gains we were hoping for." Still, the foundation has not renounced its original mission. Gates credits smaller schools for their proficiency at boosting attendance and decreasing violence. "So we absolutely believe in the small schools thing," he says. "Calling that a failure is not fair."
The experience taught the foundation the value of humility. "The Gates people are dramatically more attentive to evidence," says McPherson of the Spencer Foundation, "and more willing to consider that they need to keep learning than they were when they started out."
As it became clear that small schools alone weren't the solution, Gates installed new leadership, naming Vicki Phillips, who served as Secretary of Education for the state of Pennsylvania and superintendent of schools in Portland, Ore., to replace Vander Ark in 2007. After a yearlong reassessment, Phillips swung the foundation behind the next big wave in education reform—evaluating teachers based on student test score gains. One of her key moves was enlisting Harvard University economist Thomas Kane as deputy director of education for data and research. Kane had co-authored an influential 2006 study of 150,000 students in grades 3-5 in Los Angeles that analyzed just how vital teacher quality is to student performance. Having a teacher ranked in the top 25 percent four years in a row "would be enough to close the black-white test score gap," the study found. It made a strong recommendation seemingly borrowed from corporate America: Teachers who ranked in the bottom quarter after their first two years in the classroom should be fired.
The Gates-funded plan in Tampa will put teachers on the spot starting this school year. Of the $100 million that the foundation is pouring into the Hillsborough County school system, at least $60 million will go to teachers. With that cash comes a new evaluation system: 40 percent of the grade will be based on student learning gains as measured by standardized tests, 60 percent on observations by the school principal and teachers from elsewhere in the district. Highly rated teachers could earn as much in their fourth or fifth year as colleagues with 20 years' experience who opt to stick with the traditional pay scale. The aim is to spur teachers to adopt best practices and learn from colleagues who are more effective in handling disruptions or instilling particular concepts, according to Gates. "It's an incentive to identify the exemplars," he says. Teachers at the bottom will have to improve or face immediate consequences. "We anticipate there will be teachers who are no longer in the profession in Hillsborough County," says schools superintendent MaryEllen Elia. "They will be told, 'This is not the place for you.' "
Hillsborough currently terminates 0.5 percent of its teaching force annually. More than 99 percent of Hillsborough teachers were rated satisfactory or outstanding in 2007-2008, and 98 percent of those eligible received tenure. So how will a group that's received almost nothing but positive reviews react to a more rigorous evaluation based on student improvement? One logical response is to narrow instruction to the content and techniques needed to pass tests, at the cost of encouraging creativity, curiosity, or complex analysis. "This is likely to take teaching to the test to a new level," says Harvard education professor Daniel Koretz.
Wainer, the statistician who spotted the mathematical fallacy behind the small schools movement, is also skeptical. "It's conceivable you could get a value-added score to work at an elementary level, but how can you do it at a high school?" he asks. "How should my physics gain score match against your French score? Was Mozart a better musician than Babe Ruth was a hitter?"
Judging teachers on student performance creates a litany of such practical problems, from how to assess progress in subjects such as art, shop, or phys ed to accounting for the mobility of inner-city families. In Memphis, where Gates has invested $90 million, schools superintendent Kriner Cash says one-third of students move during the year, which means their gains can't necessarily be credited to one school, much less one teacher. Giving several tests a year can sort out each teacher's contribution, he says. Still, ratings may be tainted if frequent transience requires teachers to integrate newcomers and adjust to departures.
Teacher report cards
Studies of teacher effectiveness show much variability. Few instructors stay at the top or bottom statistically year after year. A study of five Florida districts from 2000 to 2005, including Hillsborough, found that only half the teachers ranked in the top 20 percent one year were in the top 40 percent the next. Tying teacher jobs to student gains "isn't as simple and straightforward as some people think it is," says Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers in Washington, a recipient of Gates funding. "We're a bit concerned that others aren't raising these kinds of issues. We're also concerned, if you do raise these issues, it's seen as making excuses or pulling back from commitments."
Gates' approach risks alienating teacher unions, which typically have negotiated pay based on seniority and advanced degrees. In April, under union pressure, Florida Governor Charlie Crist vetoed a plan that would also have tied teacher salaries to test score results. When Bill Gates addressed the national convention of the 1.5 million-member American Federation of Teachers on July 10 in Seattle, a small group of teachers walked out, though he also received several standing ovations. "One of the things that we learned through the small schools initiative is that we've got to work with the unions," Melinda Gates told Bloomberg Businessweek. "That takes a lot of up-front work, but it's absolutely crucial."
As a condition of funding, the foundation required Hillsborough and the other districts to cooperate with local unions. In a union-friendly move, Hillsborough agreed to tell teachers in advance when peers will observe their lessons, making positive evaluations more likely. By contrast, in a nationally acclaimed program in Cincinnati, teachers give two lessons before evaluators without prior notice.
"If you tell teachers ahead of time that they're going to be observed, they'll just say to the class, 'OK, kids, somebody's coming in, I expect you to behave, raise your hand when you ask a question, and if you do well we'll have a party the next day,' " says JoAnn Parrino, a teacher at Chamberlain High School in Tampa. "The only way to tell a good teacher is to go into their classroom spontaneously."
David Steele, chief information and technology officer for the district, says the decision to notify teachers was made because it didn't want to "play gotcha." Also, he says, a pop-in can waste the evaluator's time: "What if the teacher is showing a movie that day?"
Despite the opportunity to increase their income, teachers nationwide are skeptical of Gates' agenda. In a national survey of 40,000 teachers co-sponsored by the Gates Foundation and released in March, 36 percent said that tying pay to performance is not at all important in retaining good teachers, while only 8 percent said it's essential. And 30 percent said it would have no effect on student achievement—triple the proportion that said it would have a very strong impact.
"The Gates Foundation was very surprised," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "They asked the question in a way they thought they'd get a positive result, and they got a very negative result." On the contrary, says Gates spokesman Christopher Williams, the foundation was heartened that a significant portion of teachers do believe in merit pay.
In 2007, a year after the foundation gave $21.6 million to Chicago public schools, Melinda Gates toured the system with its then-chief, Arne Duncan. "I was extremely impressed with what he was doing," she says. "We started our relationship then."
Friends in Washington
Today, the Gates Foundation and Education Secretary Duncan move in apparent lockstep. Two of Duncan's top aides, Chief of Staff Margot Rogers and Assistant Deputy Secretary James H. Shelton III, came from the foundation and were granted waivers by the administration from its revolving-door policy limiting involvement with former employers. Vicki Phillips, who heads the foundation's education programs, and Duncan participated from 2004 to 2007 in the Urban Superintendents Network, a group of a dozen school leaders who met twice a year at weekend retreats co-funded by Gates.
When the federal government made $4.35 billion in federal Race to the Top awards available—favoring applicants that agree to link teacher pay to test score gains, increase the number of charter schools, and adopt common curriculum standards—the Gates Foundation paid for consultants to prepare applications for 24 states, as well as the District of Columbia. One of two winners announced so far is Tennessee, which had help from Gates. The state will receive about $500 million from the Obama administration.
The Gates Foundation, which bankrolled development of the common curriculum standards, is also funding outside evaluations—by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education—of those same standards. The Boston-based business group is expected to release its report before the Massachusetts Board of Elementary & Secondary Education meets on July 21 to choose between the new standards preferred under Race to the Top and revisions to existing state criteria, considered among the most rigorous in the country.
Williams, the Gates spokesman, says the foundation frequently pays for independent assessments of its programs and doesn't seek to dictate their conclusions.
."The Gates folks are well aware of our independence and, I think, incorruptibility," says Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education think tank. Still, Finn says, the alliance between the government and the country's richest foundation could discourage dissent. "I've become suspicious of the phrase 'public-private partnership,' " he says. "It comes off the tongue as an undisputed good thing. It's actually a disputed good thing."
As a private entity that doesn't answer to voters, Gates can back initiatives that are politically dicey for the Obama administration, such as uniform standards, says Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy. In the past, states' rights advocates have blocked federal efforts for a national curriculum. Gates "was able to do something the federal government couldn't do," Jennings says.
At the same time, the rapport between the federal government and the largest private education funder is raising concerns that competing ideas are getting squeezed out. "It's like a mind meld between Arne Duncan and the Gates Foundation," says former U.S. Assistant Education Secretary Diane Ravitch, whose 2010 book, 'The Death and Life of the Great American School System,' criticizes Gates for exerting "vast power and unchecked influence" over American education. If she had access to resources like Gates', says Ravitch, she'd save parochial schools that have been effective for inner-city kids but are suffering from church cutbacks.
The alliance between the Gates Foundation and the government raises other issues, too. Drew Gitomer, a researcher with the Educational Testing Service, says the foundation may be rushing a $45 million study that involves videotaping math, English, and biology lessons by nearly 3,000 teachers in the just-ended and upcoming school years. (The project lets teachers watch their lessons—and student reactions to them—to identify effective techniques, like football coaches breaking down game film.) The foundation plans to preview its findings this fall, which could help state Race to the Top winners design teacher evaluation programs.
The study "is very much fast-tracked," says Gitomer, whose role in the study is to assess teachers. "There's a feeling this is the opportune time. In a better world, it might have been nice to pilot some of these things. There's some risk associated with moving that quickly."
Phillips says the foundation maintains "appropriate firewalls." While members of its staff testify before Congress and keep tabs on federal and state policy, the foundation doesn't lobby or influence government decisions on grants, she says. Asked whether the appointment of Brad Jupp, a senior program adviser at the Education Department, to an advisory committee for the Gates teacher videotaping study violated the foundation's firewalls, Phillips said, "It's one of those fine lines we walk constantly." When the foundation approached Jupp, he initially expressed interest in serving on the committee, he said in an e-mail. After Bloomberg Businessweek asked Phillips about it, Jupp declined the position. He said he changed course on the advice of the department's ethics counsel.
Both Melinda and Bill Gates contest the notion that there is anything amiss in the foundation's relationship with the federal government. All the foundation wants is results, says Bill Gates, however they are achieved. "If people have particular ideas for improving schools, those experiments will get funded," he says. Duncan's spokesman, Peter Cunningham, says the foundation's agenda "is very much aligned with the Obama Administration agenda. We partner with them on a whole host of things."
Selling the plan
If Hillsborough district official Anna Brown had been graded on her May presentation to teachers at Tampa's Chamberlain High School about the Gates plan, she would have gotten an incomplete. One teacher of 12th graders wanted to know if she would be penalized for senior slump. Music instructors questioned the district's decision to evaluate them on their students' grasp of music theory instead of instrumental proficiency. Brown got thoroughly grilled about the new system and didn't have all the answers.
Kathy Jones, a 35-year veteran who teaches Advanced Placement world history, asked how the district could measure her students' improvement since they don't take a prerequisite course or a pretest. When Brown said PSAT scores as well as exams in other social studies courses could provide a baseline, Jones scoffed: "I don't see how it's even possible."
The testy atmosphere illustrates the challenges for Hillsborough—and the Gateses—as they translate theory into practice. The foundation has worked hard to bring teachers on board. Gates is paying $1,500 apiece to more than 600 Hillsborough teachers whose lessons are being videotaped. Says Cassie Schroeder, an eighth-grade language arts teacher at Giunta Middle School in Tampa: "I put it toward my credit cards."
Hillsborough teachers complain that they already have a pay-for-performance plan, and they don't like it: the State of Florida's Merit Award Program, which gives 5 percent bonuses based on student test score gains in the prior year. Because of limited funding, teachers within each subject compete for awards. Arlene Castelli, principal of Giunta, says teachers are embarrassed to win the bonuses. "If you can't boast about an award, what good is it?" she asks. "I don't like pitting teachers against each other."
That, in the end, is one of the major worries about the Gates plan: that it will encourage teachers to think narrowly in their own interests, to not only "teach to the test" but also refrain from the cooperative efforts that are essential to the education process. At Giunta, two-thirds of the 1,134 students in sixth through eighth grades are black or Hispanic, almost three-fourths come from poor families, and low achievers in math take two classes, regular and intensive, with different teachers. Before state testing in March, students on the bubble of passing or failing—about 20 percent of each grade—attend extra sessions with teachers who drill them on their weaknesses. Like a baseball player who won't bunt to advance a teammate, a teacher may think twice about giving a student extra help if a colleague gets the credit—and the pay raise. "We don't want teacher evaluation to get in the way of student achievement," says Castelli. "Who's to say the parents didn't work with the children at night? Who's to say the child didn't mature? Or the child blew off the test the year before?"
Shrugging off "the commune-type approach," Bill Gates says that excellence demands individual accountability. In his speech to the American Federation of Teachers, Gates struck an evangelical tone as he appealed for faith in his initiative. "You owe it to your profession and your students to make sure that tenure reflects more than the number of years spent in the classroom," he said. "It should reflect the quality of the work you do in the classroom."
Later, he added: "Sometimes the most difficult act of leadership is not fighting the enemy; it's telling your friends it's time to change."
msnbc.msn.com/id/38282806/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/
It's been two years since Bill Gates left his day-to-day role at Microsoft to concentrate on supervising the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—and his new enterprise is booming. Headquartered in a converted check-processing center in Seattle's Eastlake neighborhood, the 10-year-old foundation plans to move into a 900,000-square-foot campus and visitors' center near the city's Space Needle next spring. The Gates Foundation opened a London office this year; it also has offices in Washington, Delhi, and Beijing, and 830 employees around the world, up from about 500 in 2008. With assets of $33.9 billion as of Dec. 31, 2009, and America's two richest people—Gates and Warren Buffett—as trustees, the foundation plans to spend $3 billion in the next five to seven years on education. If there's such a thing as a charity behemoth, the Gates Foundation is it.
While its efforts in global health are widely applauded, its record in America's schools has been more controversial. Starting in 2000, the Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its first big project, trying to revitalize U.S. high schools by making them smaller, only to discover that student body size has little effect on achievement.
It has since shifted its considerable weight behind an emerging consensus—shared by U.S. Education Secretary and Gates ally Arne Duncan—that quality of teaching affects student performance and that increasing achievement is as simple as removing bad teachers, identifying good ones, and rewarding them with more money. On this theory, Gates is investing $290 million over seven years in the Tampa, Memphis, and Pittsburgh school districts as well as a charter school consortium in Los Angeles. The largest chunk of money, $100 million, will go to Tampa's Hillsborough County school district, the eighth-largest in the U.S., with 192,000 students and 15,000 teachers. These carefully selected programs, which will favor or penalize teachers depending on whether students make larger or smaller gains than their test scores in prior years would have predicted, are intended as models that, if proven successful, can be rolled out nationwide.
The Gates agenda is an intellectual cousin of the Bush administration's 2002 No Child Left Behind law, which required all public schools—though not individual teachers—to make "adequate yearly progress" on student test scores. Some opponents of No Child Left Behind questioned its faith in data; are scores too narrow a gauge of how well kids are learning? Gates sees nothing wrong in relying on quantitative metrics. "Every profession has to have some form of measurement," he said in a late June interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. "Tuning that, making sure it's fair, getting the teachers so they're enthused about it" are the keys.
Still, the prospect of such measurement makes some educators and academic researchers uneasy. They contend that factors such as school leadership and culture exert a powerful influence on student achievement. Moreover, rating individual teachers based on their classroom's test results may be better suited to little red schoolhouses than today's large urban schools, where teachers team up, aides and tutors pitch in, and students come and go frequently.
While cities such as Denver and Cincinnati have experimented with paying teachers for performance, the Gates initiative—called Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching—marks the largest and most comprehensive effort to evaluate teachers in all grades and subjects based on student test gains. "The people at Gates believe there is a window right now," says Michael S. McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, which supports education research. "They have in Washington an administration that's broadly sympathetic to their view. They have the attention of the American people, wanting dramatic improvement in the schools. Bill and Melinda Gates want to see results—not just in their lifetimes, but in the next few years."
Small schools, false start
The last thing you'd expect from an organization headed by Bill Gates is a math mistake. Yet, according to Wharton School statistician Howard Wainer, the foundation may have misread the numbers when it arrived at its first prescription for American education. Wainer, who used the foundation as a case study in his 2009 book, Picturing the Uncertain World, says it seized on data showing small schools are overrepresented among the country's highest achievers and started pouring money into creating small high schools and subdividing big ones. Tom Vander Ark, a former schools superintendent in Washington state who was tapped to oversee the foundation's educational arm, was—and remains—a booster of small schools. The Gates Foundation declined comment on Wainer's assertion and research.
Gates, Buffett to megarich: Give it away
..From Pierre S. du Pont, who gave more than $6 million to train teachers and build 120 public schools in Delaware in the 1920s, to the Rockefeller family, which funded child development research that helped lay the groundwork for the Head Start program, corporate leaders have long promised to ride to the rescue of public education. One of the highest-profile efforts came in 1993, when publisher Walter Annenberg gave $500 million—matched by $600 million in gifts from other sources—to strengthen urban, rural, and arts education, only to be stymied in some school districts by rapid changes of leadership and direction.
In the past, says University of Michigan historian Maris A. Vinovskis, benefactors "were not as prescriptive about how they wanted their money spent." Now a new generation of philanthropic billionaires, including Gates, homebuilding and insurance entrepreneur Eli Broad, members of the Walton family that founded Wal-Mart Stores, and former hedge fund manager Julian Robertson, want public education run more like a business. Charter schools, independent of local school districts and typically free of unionized teachers, are one of their favorite causes. "We don't know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that," Broad said last year at a public event in Manhattan. "But what we do know about is management and governance."
Small schools promised an alternative to the impersonal bureaucracy of traditional high schools, which Gates in a 2005 speech proclaimed "obsolete." But according to Wainer, adherents overlooked a troublesome fact: Small schools are overrepresented among the lowest as well as highest achievers. Why? Because the smaller a school, the more likely its overall performance can be skewed by a few good or bad students.
Wainer says big high schools, for all their problems, outperform small ones. Scale lets them offer more advanced classes, electives, and extracurricular activities. With Gates funding, one Denver high school split into three and lost so many students that it shut down in 2006. It reopened a year later as a single school, without the foundation's support.
In November 2008, Bill Gates publicly backtracked, acknowledging in a speech in Seattle that "simply breaking up existing schools into smaller units often did not generate the gains we were hoping for." Still, the foundation has not renounced its original mission. Gates credits smaller schools for their proficiency at boosting attendance and decreasing violence. "So we absolutely believe in the small schools thing," he says. "Calling that a failure is not fair."
The experience taught the foundation the value of humility. "The Gates people are dramatically more attentive to evidence," says McPherson of the Spencer Foundation, "and more willing to consider that they need to keep learning than they were when they started out."
As it became clear that small schools alone weren't the solution, Gates installed new leadership, naming Vicki Phillips, who served as Secretary of Education for the state of Pennsylvania and superintendent of schools in Portland, Ore., to replace Vander Ark in 2007. After a yearlong reassessment, Phillips swung the foundation behind the next big wave in education reform—evaluating teachers based on student test score gains. One of her key moves was enlisting Harvard University economist Thomas Kane as deputy director of education for data and research. Kane had co-authored an influential 2006 study of 150,000 students in grades 3-5 in Los Angeles that analyzed just how vital teacher quality is to student performance. Having a teacher ranked in the top 25 percent four years in a row "would be enough to close the black-white test score gap," the study found. It made a strong recommendation seemingly borrowed from corporate America: Teachers who ranked in the bottom quarter after their first two years in the classroom should be fired.
The Gates-funded plan in Tampa will put teachers on the spot starting this school year. Of the $100 million that the foundation is pouring into the Hillsborough County school system, at least $60 million will go to teachers. With that cash comes a new evaluation system: 40 percent of the grade will be based on student learning gains as measured by standardized tests, 60 percent on observations by the school principal and teachers from elsewhere in the district. Highly rated teachers could earn as much in their fourth or fifth year as colleagues with 20 years' experience who opt to stick with the traditional pay scale. The aim is to spur teachers to adopt best practices and learn from colleagues who are more effective in handling disruptions or instilling particular concepts, according to Gates. "It's an incentive to identify the exemplars," he says. Teachers at the bottom will have to improve or face immediate consequences. "We anticipate there will be teachers who are no longer in the profession in Hillsborough County," says schools superintendent MaryEllen Elia. "They will be told, 'This is not the place for you.' "
Hillsborough currently terminates 0.5 percent of its teaching force annually. More than 99 percent of Hillsborough teachers were rated satisfactory or outstanding in 2007-2008, and 98 percent of those eligible received tenure. So how will a group that's received almost nothing but positive reviews react to a more rigorous evaluation based on student improvement? One logical response is to narrow instruction to the content and techniques needed to pass tests, at the cost of encouraging creativity, curiosity, or complex analysis. "This is likely to take teaching to the test to a new level," says Harvard education professor Daniel Koretz.
Wainer, the statistician who spotted the mathematical fallacy behind the small schools movement, is also skeptical. "It's conceivable you could get a value-added score to work at an elementary level, but how can you do it at a high school?" he asks. "How should my physics gain score match against your French score? Was Mozart a better musician than Babe Ruth was a hitter?"
Judging teachers on student performance creates a litany of such practical problems, from how to assess progress in subjects such as art, shop, or phys ed to accounting for the mobility of inner-city families. In Memphis, where Gates has invested $90 million, schools superintendent Kriner Cash says one-third of students move during the year, which means their gains can't necessarily be credited to one school, much less one teacher. Giving several tests a year can sort out each teacher's contribution, he says. Still, ratings may be tainted if frequent transience requires teachers to integrate newcomers and adjust to departures.
Teacher report cards
Studies of teacher effectiveness show much variability. Few instructors stay at the top or bottom statistically year after year. A study of five Florida districts from 2000 to 2005, including Hillsborough, found that only half the teachers ranked in the top 20 percent one year were in the top 40 percent the next. Tying teacher jobs to student gains "isn't as simple and straightforward as some people think it is," says Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers in Washington, a recipient of Gates funding. "We're a bit concerned that others aren't raising these kinds of issues. We're also concerned, if you do raise these issues, it's seen as making excuses or pulling back from commitments."
Gates' approach risks alienating teacher unions, which typically have negotiated pay based on seniority and advanced degrees. In April, under union pressure, Florida Governor Charlie Crist vetoed a plan that would also have tied teacher salaries to test score results. When Bill Gates addressed the national convention of the 1.5 million-member American Federation of Teachers on July 10 in Seattle, a small group of teachers walked out, though he also received several standing ovations. "One of the things that we learned through the small schools initiative is that we've got to work with the unions," Melinda Gates told Bloomberg Businessweek. "That takes a lot of up-front work, but it's absolutely crucial."
As a condition of funding, the foundation required Hillsborough and the other districts to cooperate with local unions. In a union-friendly move, Hillsborough agreed to tell teachers in advance when peers will observe their lessons, making positive evaluations more likely. By contrast, in a nationally acclaimed program in Cincinnati, teachers give two lessons before evaluators without prior notice.
"If you tell teachers ahead of time that they're going to be observed, they'll just say to the class, 'OK, kids, somebody's coming in, I expect you to behave, raise your hand when you ask a question, and if you do well we'll have a party the next day,' " says JoAnn Parrino, a teacher at Chamberlain High School in Tampa. "The only way to tell a good teacher is to go into their classroom spontaneously."
David Steele, chief information and technology officer for the district, says the decision to notify teachers was made because it didn't want to "play gotcha." Also, he says, a pop-in can waste the evaluator's time: "What if the teacher is showing a movie that day?"
Despite the opportunity to increase their income, teachers nationwide are skeptical of Gates' agenda. In a national survey of 40,000 teachers co-sponsored by the Gates Foundation and released in March, 36 percent said that tying pay to performance is not at all important in retaining good teachers, while only 8 percent said it's essential. And 30 percent said it would have no effect on student achievement—triple the proportion that said it would have a very strong impact.
"The Gates Foundation was very surprised," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. "They asked the question in a way they thought they'd get a positive result, and they got a very negative result." On the contrary, says Gates spokesman Christopher Williams, the foundation was heartened that a significant portion of teachers do believe in merit pay.
In 2007, a year after the foundation gave $21.6 million to Chicago public schools, Melinda Gates toured the system with its then-chief, Arne Duncan. "I was extremely impressed with what he was doing," she says. "We started our relationship then."
Friends in Washington
Today, the Gates Foundation and Education Secretary Duncan move in apparent lockstep. Two of Duncan's top aides, Chief of Staff Margot Rogers and Assistant Deputy Secretary James H. Shelton III, came from the foundation and were granted waivers by the administration from its revolving-door policy limiting involvement with former employers. Vicki Phillips, who heads the foundation's education programs, and Duncan participated from 2004 to 2007 in the Urban Superintendents Network, a group of a dozen school leaders who met twice a year at weekend retreats co-funded by Gates.
When the federal government made $4.35 billion in federal Race to the Top awards available—favoring applicants that agree to link teacher pay to test score gains, increase the number of charter schools, and adopt common curriculum standards—the Gates Foundation paid for consultants to prepare applications for 24 states, as well as the District of Columbia. One of two winners announced so far is Tennessee, which had help from Gates. The state will receive about $500 million from the Obama administration.
The Gates Foundation, which bankrolled development of the common curriculum standards, is also funding outside evaluations—by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education—of those same standards. The Boston-based business group is expected to release its report before the Massachusetts Board of Elementary & Secondary Education meets on July 21 to choose between the new standards preferred under Race to the Top and revisions to existing state criteria, considered among the most rigorous in the country.
Williams, the Gates spokesman, says the foundation frequently pays for independent assessments of its programs and doesn't seek to dictate their conclusions.
."The Gates folks are well aware of our independence and, I think, incorruptibility," says Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education think tank. Still, Finn says, the alliance between the government and the country's richest foundation could discourage dissent. "I've become suspicious of the phrase 'public-private partnership,' " he says. "It comes off the tongue as an undisputed good thing. It's actually a disputed good thing."
As a private entity that doesn't answer to voters, Gates can back initiatives that are politically dicey for the Obama administration, such as uniform standards, says Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy. In the past, states' rights advocates have blocked federal efforts for a national curriculum. Gates "was able to do something the federal government couldn't do," Jennings says.
At the same time, the rapport between the federal government and the largest private education funder is raising concerns that competing ideas are getting squeezed out. "It's like a mind meld between Arne Duncan and the Gates Foundation," says former U.S. Assistant Education Secretary Diane Ravitch, whose 2010 book, 'The Death and Life of the Great American School System,' criticizes Gates for exerting "vast power and unchecked influence" over American education. If she had access to resources like Gates', says Ravitch, she'd save parochial schools that have been effective for inner-city kids but are suffering from church cutbacks.
The alliance between the Gates Foundation and the government raises other issues, too. Drew Gitomer, a researcher with the Educational Testing Service, says the foundation may be rushing a $45 million study that involves videotaping math, English, and biology lessons by nearly 3,000 teachers in the just-ended and upcoming school years. (The project lets teachers watch their lessons—and student reactions to them—to identify effective techniques, like football coaches breaking down game film.) The foundation plans to preview its findings this fall, which could help state Race to the Top winners design teacher evaluation programs.
The study "is very much fast-tracked," says Gitomer, whose role in the study is to assess teachers. "There's a feeling this is the opportune time. In a better world, it might have been nice to pilot some of these things. There's some risk associated with moving that quickly."
Phillips says the foundation maintains "appropriate firewalls." While members of its staff testify before Congress and keep tabs on federal and state policy, the foundation doesn't lobby or influence government decisions on grants, she says. Asked whether the appointment of Brad Jupp, a senior program adviser at the Education Department, to an advisory committee for the Gates teacher videotaping study violated the foundation's firewalls, Phillips said, "It's one of those fine lines we walk constantly." When the foundation approached Jupp, he initially expressed interest in serving on the committee, he said in an e-mail. After Bloomberg Businessweek asked Phillips about it, Jupp declined the position. He said he changed course on the advice of the department's ethics counsel.
Both Melinda and Bill Gates contest the notion that there is anything amiss in the foundation's relationship with the federal government. All the foundation wants is results, says Bill Gates, however they are achieved. "If people have particular ideas for improving schools, those experiments will get funded," he says. Duncan's spokesman, Peter Cunningham, says the foundation's agenda "is very much aligned with the Obama Administration agenda. We partner with them on a whole host of things."
Selling the plan
If Hillsborough district official Anna Brown had been graded on her May presentation to teachers at Tampa's Chamberlain High School about the Gates plan, she would have gotten an incomplete. One teacher of 12th graders wanted to know if she would be penalized for senior slump. Music instructors questioned the district's decision to evaluate them on their students' grasp of music theory instead of instrumental proficiency. Brown got thoroughly grilled about the new system and didn't have all the answers.
Kathy Jones, a 35-year veteran who teaches Advanced Placement world history, asked how the district could measure her students' improvement since they don't take a prerequisite course or a pretest. When Brown said PSAT scores as well as exams in other social studies courses could provide a baseline, Jones scoffed: "I don't see how it's even possible."
The testy atmosphere illustrates the challenges for Hillsborough—and the Gateses—as they translate theory into practice. The foundation has worked hard to bring teachers on board. Gates is paying $1,500 apiece to more than 600 Hillsborough teachers whose lessons are being videotaped. Says Cassie Schroeder, an eighth-grade language arts teacher at Giunta Middle School in Tampa: "I put it toward my credit cards."
Hillsborough teachers complain that they already have a pay-for-performance plan, and they don't like it: the State of Florida's Merit Award Program, which gives 5 percent bonuses based on student test score gains in the prior year. Because of limited funding, teachers within each subject compete for awards. Arlene Castelli, principal of Giunta, says teachers are embarrassed to win the bonuses. "If you can't boast about an award, what good is it?" she asks. "I don't like pitting teachers against each other."
That, in the end, is one of the major worries about the Gates plan: that it will encourage teachers to think narrowly in their own interests, to not only "teach to the test" but also refrain from the cooperative efforts that are essential to the education process. At Giunta, two-thirds of the 1,134 students in sixth through eighth grades are black or Hispanic, almost three-fourths come from poor families, and low achievers in math take two classes, regular and intensive, with different teachers. Before state testing in March, students on the bubble of passing or failing—about 20 percent of each grade—attend extra sessions with teachers who drill them on their weaknesses. Like a baseball player who won't bunt to advance a teammate, a teacher may think twice about giving a student extra help if a colleague gets the credit—and the pay raise. "We don't want teacher evaluation to get in the way of student achievement," says Castelli. "Who's to say the parents didn't work with the children at night? Who's to say the child didn't mature? Or the child blew off the test the year before?"
Shrugging off "the commune-type approach," Bill Gates says that excellence demands individual accountability. In his speech to the American Federation of Teachers, Gates struck an evangelical tone as he appealed for faith in his initiative. "You owe it to your profession and your students to make sure that tenure reflects more than the number of years spent in the classroom," he said. "It should reflect the quality of the work you do in the classroom."
Later, he added: "Sometimes the most difficult act of leadership is not fighting the enemy; it's telling your friends it's time to change."
msnbc.msn.com/id/38282806/ns/business-bloomberg_businessweek/
Sunday, January 23, 2011
The false education narrative continues
From Truth-out.org
by Adam Bessie
Recently, I had the honor of being dubbed a "vapid champion of the status quo" by American Enterprise Institute (AEI) resident education scholar Frederick Hess, a widely published, renowned advocate of the free-market public school "reform" movement, one that has reached the mainstream with the popularity "Waiting for Superman." Hess has published numerous books; he's on the head of national organizations and even hobnobbed with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at a recent event for AEI. To my shock, Hess made time to write in his blog about me, a lowly assistant professor of English at a community college with a blog audience of a few hundred.
The conflict was over a cover story in The Oakland Tribune, in which the reporter pointed out the role that teacher pay played in creating budget problems. Hess was cited as a nonpartisan education expert, which I took issue with in my blog - not because he shouldn't have been cited in the article, but because the reporter failed to point out to readers that he is a scholar for a neoconservative think tank, one that is a strong proponent of the pro-corporate education "reform" movement and that states on its official website: "The government's authority to tax and regulate represents a growing encroachment on the private sector." In other words, Hess is paid to advocate for a fiscally conservative, free-market educational ideology, a fact the reporter neglected to mention, and one that readers deserved to know so they could best evaluate his perspective.
In response, Hess lambasted me, framing me as someone who stands in the way of real reform, a stodgy supporter of the "status quo," the establishment standing in the way of reform. Hess reveals a prevalent attitude among free-market education advocates: that if you don't support their reform - if you don't support a capitalist, competitive approach to education replete with extensive testing - you don't support students, or improving education in general.
Hess - and the corporate reformers, such as Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee - present the public with a false choice: that there is, on the one hand, the "status quo," one that doesn't work, and, on the other, their "reform" movement, which is the only pathway out of our morass of mediocrity. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has unquestioningly bought into this limited conception of educational reform.
Corporate Reformatory School
The word "reform" itself is a linguistic trap. At face, it assumes that something is profoundly wrong with our public schools, a commonplace belief in the wake of "Waiting for Superman." Further, it suggests a way to fix this wrongness - discipline. Think of a "reformatory school," a military-style institution where frustrated parents ship their bad children, who are then molded - literally re-formed - into good children through discipline. The public school system, in this case, is like an ill-behaving child, in need of a ruler on the wrist and a 5 o'clock wake-up call to get it disciplined, remolded and reformed so it'll say, "Yes, ma'am" when called on.
But most of all, "reform" is a gracefully ambiguous term - formless, even - one that implies an urgency, a need for discipline, for fixing, but it is a term that doesn't suggest what, exactly, is wrong. The word "reform" is an empty shell, one that could suggest any number of problems, innumerable diagnoses - without identifying a single one. Thus, the listener can insert whatever idea she likes into "reform," whatever she thinks is wrong with the schools, whether it is "bad teachers" or unhealthy school lunches.
Join the movement for truth - support brave, independent reporting today by making a contribution to Truthout.
Who can disagree with reform? Who can be against helping children stuck in a bad school system?
What the corporate reformers have done well is to essentially trademark "reform," branding in the public mind their diagnosis of what's wrong with schools and the harsh, chemotherapeutic remedy.
They own reform.
Rhee Goes Rogue
What's wrong with the school system, according to corporate reformers, is the bad teachers, their unions and "special interests," as Rhee claims practically unchallenged in her Newsweek cover story and across the corporate media, including in "Waiting for Superman," which earned ample air time on Oprah's "Shocking State of Our Schools." The corporate media has adopted this diagnosis, as is best illustrated in Tom Brokaw's segment in "Education Nation," an NBC special applauding the corporate reformers featuring Rhee and Gates (Gates also appeared in "Waiting for Superman"). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was also one of the sponsors of Education Nation, and Gates was a star of his own show. Not surprisingly, Brokaw - a reporter, not a pundit - claims, as fact, that there is a "teacher establishment," which is part of the problem, echoing Rhee and other corporate reformers sponsoring the event.
Given this diagnosis, the corporate reform remedy is obvious: take down the "teacher establishment," a sentiment that sounds surprisingly similar to that of the Tea Party bent on taking down the Washington establishment. Much like Sarah Palin, Rhee frames herself as a rogue agent of change, with the forces of the establishment aligned against her, against "reform." We hear the same David and Goliath sentiment echoed in the mainstream media again, in a Time Magazine editorial by education policy analyst Andrew Rotherham in " 'Waiting for Superman': Education Reform Isn't Easy." He claims that "despite all the attention ["Waiting for Superman"] is bringing to education, there are still more reasons to bet against reform than for it." "Reform," in this case, is the corporate reformers' policies. And again, "reform" is being stopped by the "teachers unions" and other special interests, which have put "a lot of money to keep various reforms at bay." Rotherham writes a blog that is underwritten, in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
In essence, Gates and other corporate reformers have heavily bankrolled a media blitzkrieg to convince the public our schools need "reform," and that the free-market, test-heavy, privatized pathway is the only logical definition of reform. Joanne Barkan, reporting in Dissent Magazine, makes transparent how Gates - and other "venture philanthropists" - have created this successful propaganda campaign through extensive invisible (and visible) funding, Koch-Brothers-style. On the one hand, Gates uses his extensive funding to hire out hidden proxy bloggers - like Rotherham - to spread the "reform" message. And, on the other, the corporate media is wary of casting a critical eye on these positive "reform voices," as they are stuck in the linguistic trap of "reform." Barkan cites Hess, who found in a study of national corporate media that the "press ... handles philanthropies with kid gloves." For every one negative account, Hess found in his ten year study from 1995 to 2005, there were thirteen positive ones - which explains, in part, why the corporate media has highlighted the efforts of "reformers" with applause and why Hess himself got a pass during his interview with The Oakland Tribune.
And again: who can be against "reform?"
Waiting for Alyssa Milano
"In view of the money and power now arrayed on behalf of the ideas and programs I will criticize, I hope it is not too late," are the fateful final words in the introduction of Diane Ravitch's 2010 book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System." Ravitch, however, is not critiquing the "special interests" aligned against reform, but the reform movement itself, of which she was a former elite member. She switched sides after extensively studying the results of No Child Left Behind and is now convinced that these reform efforts are "undermining education."
Ravitch is convinced that by relentlessly testing children and by pitting schools against schools, teachers against teachers, parents against parents and children against children, we are diminishing the quality of learning that happens in schools and undermining the foundations of a democratic society. And while Ravitch has relentlessly promoted this well-supported perspective - such that Hess acknowledged her as the most visible education scholar based on her publications and mentions in media - she still has made little dent in the public mind and in the corporate reform "status quo."
Why?
Besides the considerable money and political clout behind it, the corporate reform movement - much like the Tea Party - has a compelling narrative package: a hero (Rhee), villains (teachers' unions) and poor, innocent victims (children). Like the Tea Party, the reformers have adopted a David and Goliath stance and evoked it again and again. That stance is appealing to a country that currently feels a lot like David beaten senselessly by Goliath. This powerful, human narrative was brought to life on the big screen with "Waiting for Superman," repeated in major media outlets and even tweeted by "Who's the Boss?" star Alyssa Milano to her million-plus followers. The story is so emotionally potent that it feels like fact - it must be true, especially to many that, like Milano, know nothing about real issues in education and are championing a cause they do not understand.
The corporate reformers have reached the hearts of the public, blinding them with a beautifully rendered fiction.
Even though Ravitch is very visible, even though she has powerful data and analysis to support her conclusions, which are widely published and read, she hasn't been successful in capturing the public imagination, as there is no story - no hero or villain - for the American public to easily grasp, to reduce into a simple plot with an obvious moral. There is no heartwarming tale to sell newspapers or to draw viewers to the evening news or sob-filled theatres.
Yet, until Alyssa Milano is tweeting Ravitch, the corporate takeover of our schools will continue, reforming public education - and our children - to behave well in the free-market.
http://www.truth-out.org/lets-not-reform-public-education67006
by Adam Bessie
Recently, I had the honor of being dubbed a "vapid champion of the status quo" by American Enterprise Institute (AEI) resident education scholar Frederick Hess, a widely published, renowned advocate of the free-market public school "reform" movement, one that has reached the mainstream with the popularity "Waiting for Superman." Hess has published numerous books; he's on the head of national organizations and even hobnobbed with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at a recent event for AEI. To my shock, Hess made time to write in his blog about me, a lowly assistant professor of English at a community college with a blog audience of a few hundred.
The conflict was over a cover story in The Oakland Tribune, in which the reporter pointed out the role that teacher pay played in creating budget problems. Hess was cited as a nonpartisan education expert, which I took issue with in my blog - not because he shouldn't have been cited in the article, but because the reporter failed to point out to readers that he is a scholar for a neoconservative think tank, one that is a strong proponent of the pro-corporate education "reform" movement and that states on its official website: "The government's authority to tax and regulate represents a growing encroachment on the private sector." In other words, Hess is paid to advocate for a fiscally conservative, free-market educational ideology, a fact the reporter neglected to mention, and one that readers deserved to know so they could best evaluate his perspective.
In response, Hess lambasted me, framing me as someone who stands in the way of real reform, a stodgy supporter of the "status quo," the establishment standing in the way of reform. Hess reveals a prevalent attitude among free-market education advocates: that if you don't support their reform - if you don't support a capitalist, competitive approach to education replete with extensive testing - you don't support students, or improving education in general.
Hess - and the corporate reformers, such as Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee - present the public with a false choice: that there is, on the one hand, the "status quo," one that doesn't work, and, on the other, their "reform" movement, which is the only pathway out of our morass of mediocrity. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has unquestioningly bought into this limited conception of educational reform.
Corporate Reformatory School
The word "reform" itself is a linguistic trap. At face, it assumes that something is profoundly wrong with our public schools, a commonplace belief in the wake of "Waiting for Superman." Further, it suggests a way to fix this wrongness - discipline. Think of a "reformatory school," a military-style institution where frustrated parents ship their bad children, who are then molded - literally re-formed - into good children through discipline. The public school system, in this case, is like an ill-behaving child, in need of a ruler on the wrist and a 5 o'clock wake-up call to get it disciplined, remolded and reformed so it'll say, "Yes, ma'am" when called on.
But most of all, "reform" is a gracefully ambiguous term - formless, even - one that implies an urgency, a need for discipline, for fixing, but it is a term that doesn't suggest what, exactly, is wrong. The word "reform" is an empty shell, one that could suggest any number of problems, innumerable diagnoses - without identifying a single one. Thus, the listener can insert whatever idea she likes into "reform," whatever she thinks is wrong with the schools, whether it is "bad teachers" or unhealthy school lunches.
Join the movement for truth - support brave, independent reporting today by making a contribution to Truthout.
Who can disagree with reform? Who can be against helping children stuck in a bad school system?
What the corporate reformers have done well is to essentially trademark "reform," branding in the public mind their diagnosis of what's wrong with schools and the harsh, chemotherapeutic remedy.
They own reform.
Rhee Goes Rogue
What's wrong with the school system, according to corporate reformers, is the bad teachers, their unions and "special interests," as Rhee claims practically unchallenged in her Newsweek cover story and across the corporate media, including in "Waiting for Superman," which earned ample air time on Oprah's "Shocking State of Our Schools." The corporate media has adopted this diagnosis, as is best illustrated in Tom Brokaw's segment in "Education Nation," an NBC special applauding the corporate reformers featuring Rhee and Gates (Gates also appeared in "Waiting for Superman"). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was also one of the sponsors of Education Nation, and Gates was a star of his own show. Not surprisingly, Brokaw - a reporter, not a pundit - claims, as fact, that there is a "teacher establishment," which is part of the problem, echoing Rhee and other corporate reformers sponsoring the event.
Given this diagnosis, the corporate reform remedy is obvious: take down the "teacher establishment," a sentiment that sounds surprisingly similar to that of the Tea Party bent on taking down the Washington establishment. Much like Sarah Palin, Rhee frames herself as a rogue agent of change, with the forces of the establishment aligned against her, against "reform." We hear the same David and Goliath sentiment echoed in the mainstream media again, in a Time Magazine editorial by education policy analyst Andrew Rotherham in " 'Waiting for Superman': Education Reform Isn't Easy." He claims that "despite all the attention ["Waiting for Superman"] is bringing to education, there are still more reasons to bet against reform than for it." "Reform," in this case, is the corporate reformers' policies. And again, "reform" is being stopped by the "teachers unions" and other special interests, which have put "a lot of money to keep various reforms at bay." Rotherham writes a blog that is underwritten, in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
In essence, Gates and other corporate reformers have heavily bankrolled a media blitzkrieg to convince the public our schools need "reform," and that the free-market, test-heavy, privatized pathway is the only logical definition of reform. Joanne Barkan, reporting in Dissent Magazine, makes transparent how Gates - and other "venture philanthropists" - have created this successful propaganda campaign through extensive invisible (and visible) funding, Koch-Brothers-style. On the one hand, Gates uses his extensive funding to hire out hidden proxy bloggers - like Rotherham - to spread the "reform" message. And, on the other, the corporate media is wary of casting a critical eye on these positive "reform voices," as they are stuck in the linguistic trap of "reform." Barkan cites Hess, who found in a study of national corporate media that the "press ... handles philanthropies with kid gloves." For every one negative account, Hess found in his ten year study from 1995 to 2005, there were thirteen positive ones - which explains, in part, why the corporate media has highlighted the efforts of "reformers" with applause and why Hess himself got a pass during his interview with The Oakland Tribune.
And again: who can be against "reform?"
Waiting for Alyssa Milano
"In view of the money and power now arrayed on behalf of the ideas and programs I will criticize, I hope it is not too late," are the fateful final words in the introduction of Diane Ravitch's 2010 book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System." Ravitch, however, is not critiquing the "special interests" aligned against reform, but the reform movement itself, of which she was a former elite member. She switched sides after extensively studying the results of No Child Left Behind and is now convinced that these reform efforts are "undermining education."
Ravitch is convinced that by relentlessly testing children and by pitting schools against schools, teachers against teachers, parents against parents and children against children, we are diminishing the quality of learning that happens in schools and undermining the foundations of a democratic society. And while Ravitch has relentlessly promoted this well-supported perspective - such that Hess acknowledged her as the most visible education scholar based on her publications and mentions in media - she still has made little dent in the public mind and in the corporate reform "status quo."
Why?
Besides the considerable money and political clout behind it, the corporate reform movement - much like the Tea Party - has a compelling narrative package: a hero (Rhee), villains (teachers' unions) and poor, innocent victims (children). Like the Tea Party, the reformers have adopted a David and Goliath stance and evoked it again and again. That stance is appealing to a country that currently feels a lot like David beaten senselessly by Goliath. This powerful, human narrative was brought to life on the big screen with "Waiting for Superman," repeated in major media outlets and even tweeted by "Who's the Boss?" star Alyssa Milano to her million-plus followers. The story is so emotionally potent that it feels like fact - it must be true, especially to many that, like Milano, know nothing about real issues in education and are championing a cause they do not understand.
The corporate reformers have reached the hearts of the public, blinding them with a beautifully rendered fiction.
Even though Ravitch is very visible, even though she has powerful data and analysis to support her conclusions, which are widely published and read, she hasn't been successful in capturing the public imagination, as there is no story - no hero or villain - for the American public to easily grasp, to reduce into a simple plot with an obvious moral. There is no heartwarming tale to sell newspapers or to draw viewers to the evening news or sob-filled theatres.
Yet, until Alyssa Milano is tweeting Ravitch, the corporate takeover of our schools will continue, reforming public education - and our children - to behave well in the free-market.
http://www.truth-out.org/lets-not-reform-public-education67006
Friday, January 21, 2011
Education Matters calls for Oprah Winfrey Boycott
Perhaps the biggest appeal Oprah Winfrey has for her millions of fans is her every woman demeanor. She comes across as someone you could sit down and have coffee with, there is an innate connection. Unfortunately when it comes to education and what to do next Ms. Winfrey proves how disconnected she is.
Her stance on education reform puts her squarely in the billionaires for education reform, blame the teacher camp. Her solutions like theirs are punitive and seek to dismantle public schools. In effect whenever she talks about education she snubs her nose at the hundreds of thousands of hard working dedicated professionals nationwide and the children they teach too.
I think it is time we snubbed our noses back.
I think it’s time we said Ms. Winfrey when you want to talk about education bring teachers on your show, not billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckenberg, or public school hating film directors like David Guggenheim. Teachers more than them will have a better idea what works and what doesn’t. Even Oprah’s education idol Michelle Rhee only spent three years in a class room, before her running a Teach or America like program landed her the chancellorship of Washington D.C.s schools, of which I will add, her tenure was so polarizing that when the people of the capital voted for a new mayor in reality they were voting against her.
Oprah Winfrey has a powerful soap box which she could use for positive change but instead she has used it to denigrate teachers and public education. As a teacher I say enough and hope all other teachers and people who care about and believe in public schools will say enough as well
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Her stance on education reform puts her squarely in the billionaires for education reform, blame the teacher camp. Her solutions like theirs are punitive and seek to dismantle public schools. In effect whenever she talks about education she snubs her nose at the hundreds of thousands of hard working dedicated professionals nationwide and the children they teach too.
I think it is time we snubbed our noses back.
I think it’s time we said Ms. Winfrey when you want to talk about education bring teachers on your show, not billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckenberg, or public school hating film directors like David Guggenheim. Teachers more than them will have a better idea what works and what doesn’t. Even Oprah’s education idol Michelle Rhee only spent three years in a class room, before her running a Teach or America like program landed her the chancellorship of Washington D.C.s schools, of which I will add, her tenure was so polarizing that when the people of the capital voted for a new mayor in reality they were voting against her.
Oprah Winfrey has a powerful soap box which she could use for positive change but instead she has used it to denigrate teachers and public education. As a teacher I say enough and hope all other teachers and people who care about and believe in public schools will say enough as well
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Follow the money
From the Idypendent
By John Tarelton
Led by a band of billionaires, the school-reform movement has gained increasing momentum during the past decade, spreading its reach into urban communities across the country. But instead of truly transforming public schools, private funders want to restructure them. They insist running schools like a business is the solution. At stake is not only control over hundreds of billions of dollars in local, state and federal funding, but also the future of the next generation of schoolchildren.
Bill Gates
Net Worth: $50 billion
Using the Gates Foundation as his instrument, the Microsoft co-founder has channeled tens of millions of dollars into transforming large high schools through the schools-within-a-school model. Critics say boutique public schools tend to enroll (or “cream”) the best students while receiving more per-pupil funding than their large-school counterparts. Gates has also allocated large sums of money to help fuel the growth of charter schools.
During the 2008 presidential election the Gates and Broad foundations teamed up to spend $24 million to influence public education policy. Their shared message: Expand charter schools and tie teacher pay to student performance on standardized tests. President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has tapped top Gates Foundation officers to be his chief of staff and to head the agency’s Office of Innovation and Improvement. Foundation officers are also spearheading the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, which promises aid to cash-strapped states that eliminate caps on charter schools and agree to place even greater emphasis on standardized testing. “It is not unfair to say that the Gates Foundation’s agenda has become the country’s agenda in education,” says Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education
A former professional basketball player and veteran of many pickup basketball games with Obama, the Harvard-educated Duncan has no formal experience as an educator. As CEO of the Chicago school system from 2001 to 2008, Duncan oversaw more than 60 school closings primarily in people of color neighborhoods while rapidly opening charter schools. The Gates Foundation funneled $63.2 million into the Chicago schools during Duncan’s tenure and now Duncan is taking the “Chicago model” nationwide with the help of top aides recruited from the Gates and Broad Foundations.
Spencer Robertson
The son of a hedge-fund billionaire who has donated $10 million to Mayor Bloomberg’s school projects since 2003, Spencer Robertson opened the PAVE Charter Academy in 2008 inside P.S. 15, a successful elementary school in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Tensions further escalated when the DOE recently announced that PAVE would be allowed to expand inside P.S. 15 over the next five years, even though Robertson has received $26 million from the DOE to build his own school. Robertson’s wife Sarah, the head of the board at Girls Prep Charter School, was at the center of a similar controversy when the school recently sought to expand inside public school facilities in the Lower East Side.
James Shelton
Assistant Deputy Director of Education, Director of Office of Inn ovation and Improvement, DOE
Following Obama’s election, Shelton moved seamlessly from deputy director of education at the Gates Foundation to a post at the DOE as assistant deputy director overseeing a variety of grant programs that assist charter schools. Operating at the nexus of the public, private and nonprofit sectors, Shelton previously worked at Knowledge Universe, where he launched, acquired and operated education-related businesses. Shelton’s former Gates Foundation colleague Margot Rogers now serves as Duncan’s chief of staff.
Eli Broad
Net Worth: $5.4 Billion
Broad, a Los Angeles-based billionaire who made his fortune in insurance and real estate, has been at the forefront of the school restructuring movement over the past decade. Using the foundation that bears his name, he has pushed aggressively for schools to be run more like businesses. The Broad (pronounced like “road”) Foundation has seeded charter schools across the country, including in New York. It has also developed a number of programs to train school administrators, including the Broad Superintendent Academy, which instructs business, nonprofit, military, government and education leaders in how to manage urban school districts. A number of top officials at the New York City’s Department of Education have received Broad training. Speaking at the 92nd Street Y in New York City last year, Broad summarized his approach: “We don’t know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that. But what we do know about is management and governance.”
The Waltons
(Christy, Jim, Alice, S. Robson)
Net Worth: $79.4 billion
The Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart is the single biggest investor in charter schools in the United States, giving a total of $150.3 million during 2007-08. In New York, the Walton group has provided $15 million in construction funding plus more than $1 million per year for operating costs in recent years to help the Brighter Choice charter school network establish eight new schools in Albany, according to the Albany Times Union. Meanwhile, Gov. David Paterson has received contributions totaling $55,900 from Christy Walton, as he pushes legislation to lift New York’s current statewide cap of 200 charter schools.
Eva Moskowitz
Moskowitz, a former Upper East Side councilmember with close ties to the Bloomberg administration, earns more than $300,000 annually for running a chain of four small charter schools in Harlem. Like Spencer Robertson, Moskowitz has sparked protests in the predominantly people-of-color community she operates in as her schools move into existing neighborhood schools. Last April, the Broad Foundation awarded Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network $1 million over two years to support its four existing Harlem Success schools and to help it open 40 new schools in the New York City area over the next 10 years.
Joanne Weiss
Director, Race to the Top program, DOE
Joanne Weiss served as a director and chief operating officer for the New School Venture Fund from 1998 to 2008 before being appointed to head the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. Using venture philanthropy largesse provided by Broad, Gates and other wealthy individuals, Weiss helped incubate networks of privately controlled charter schools and charter management organizations as well as organizations to mold new teachers and principals in the education reform movement’s technocratic image.
Michael Milken and Larry Ellison
Net worth: $2 billion and $27 billion
Michael Milken dominated Wall Street in the 1980s using junk bonds to fuel that decade’s merger mania before landing in federal prison for violating securities laws. Now, Milken has gone into the education business as chairman, co-founder and driving force behind Knowledge Universe, a multinational conglomerate that operates for-profit day-care centers and schools and makes interactive educational toys. Ellison, CEO of Oracle, co-founded the company with Milken.
Democrats for Education Reform
Established by four New York-based hedge-fund millionaires active in the charter school movement — Whitney Tilson, Charles Ledley, John Petry and Ravanel Boykin Curry IV — this political action committee seeks to build and solidify support for corporate educationreform initiatives inside the Democratic Party, lest it be tempted to heed the concerns of teacher unions or other critics of running schools like a business.
Michael Bloomberg
Net Worth: $17.5 billion
Bloomberg spent $75 million to win the New York mayoralty in 2001. Since then, he has used his Midas-like wealth to dominate the city’s political process while pursuing a top-down, data-driven vision of school reform. When New York won the 2007 Broad Prize for Urban Education, education historian Diane Ravitch described it as “a prize conferred by one billionaire on another.”
Rev. Al Sharpton
Sharpton began preaching the gospel of school reform in 2008 when he joined forces with New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to found the Educational Equality Project (EEP). Last fall, Sharpton went on a five-city road trip with “odd couple” buddy Newt Gingrich as well as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to tout the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. Sharpton’s support for the school reform cause has also yielded its earthly rewards. According to a March 2009 report by Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News, Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN) received a $500,000 donation immediately following the establishment of EEP. Sharpton’s benefactor: Plainfield Asset Management, a Connecticut-based hedge fund, where former schools Chancellor Harold Levy is a managing director. The donation came at a time Sharpton was set to pay $1 million in back taxes and penalties he and NAN owed.
Sources: Forbes 2009 Fortune 400, Gates Foundation, newschools.org, The New York Times, Broad Foundation, gothamschools.org, Walton Family Foundation, Albany Times Union, Chicago Public Schools, rethinkingschools.org, wsws.org, U.S. Department of Education, Knowledge Universe, forbes.com, Ed Week, New York Sun, edwize.org, New York Daily News, ednotesonline.org.
By John Tarelton
Led by a band of billionaires, the school-reform movement has gained increasing momentum during the past decade, spreading its reach into urban communities across the country. But instead of truly transforming public schools, private funders want to restructure them. They insist running schools like a business is the solution. At stake is not only control over hundreds of billions of dollars in local, state and federal funding, but also the future of the next generation of schoolchildren.
Bill Gates
Net Worth: $50 billion
Using the Gates Foundation as his instrument, the Microsoft co-founder has channeled tens of millions of dollars into transforming large high schools through the schools-within-a-school model. Critics say boutique public schools tend to enroll (or “cream”) the best students while receiving more per-pupil funding than their large-school counterparts. Gates has also allocated large sums of money to help fuel the growth of charter schools.
During the 2008 presidential election the Gates and Broad foundations teamed up to spend $24 million to influence public education policy. Their shared message: Expand charter schools and tie teacher pay to student performance on standardized tests. President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has tapped top Gates Foundation officers to be his chief of staff and to head the agency’s Office of Innovation and Improvement. Foundation officers are also spearheading the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, which promises aid to cash-strapped states that eliminate caps on charter schools and agree to place even greater emphasis on standardized testing. “It is not unfair to say that the Gates Foundation’s agenda has become the country’s agenda in education,” says Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education
A former professional basketball player and veteran of many pickup basketball games with Obama, the Harvard-educated Duncan has no formal experience as an educator. As CEO of the Chicago school system from 2001 to 2008, Duncan oversaw more than 60 school closings primarily in people of color neighborhoods while rapidly opening charter schools. The Gates Foundation funneled $63.2 million into the Chicago schools during Duncan’s tenure and now Duncan is taking the “Chicago model” nationwide with the help of top aides recruited from the Gates and Broad Foundations.
Spencer Robertson
The son of a hedge-fund billionaire who has donated $10 million to Mayor Bloomberg’s school projects since 2003, Spencer Robertson opened the PAVE Charter Academy in 2008 inside P.S. 15, a successful elementary school in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Tensions further escalated when the DOE recently announced that PAVE would be allowed to expand inside P.S. 15 over the next five years, even though Robertson has received $26 million from the DOE to build his own school. Robertson’s wife Sarah, the head of the board at Girls Prep Charter School, was at the center of a similar controversy when the school recently sought to expand inside public school facilities in the Lower East Side.
James Shelton
Assistant Deputy Director of Education, Director of Office of Inn ovation and Improvement, DOE
Following Obama’s election, Shelton moved seamlessly from deputy director of education at the Gates Foundation to a post at the DOE as assistant deputy director overseeing a variety of grant programs that assist charter schools. Operating at the nexus of the public, private and nonprofit sectors, Shelton previously worked at Knowledge Universe, where he launched, acquired and operated education-related businesses. Shelton’s former Gates Foundation colleague Margot Rogers now serves as Duncan’s chief of staff.
Eli Broad
Net Worth: $5.4 Billion
Broad, a Los Angeles-based billionaire who made his fortune in insurance and real estate, has been at the forefront of the school restructuring movement over the past decade. Using the foundation that bears his name, he has pushed aggressively for schools to be run more like businesses. The Broad (pronounced like “road”) Foundation has seeded charter schools across the country, including in New York. It has also developed a number of programs to train school administrators, including the Broad Superintendent Academy, which instructs business, nonprofit, military, government and education leaders in how to manage urban school districts. A number of top officials at the New York City’s Department of Education have received Broad training. Speaking at the 92nd Street Y in New York City last year, Broad summarized his approach: “We don’t know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that. But what we do know about is management and governance.”
The Waltons
(Christy, Jim, Alice, S. Robson)
Net Worth: $79.4 billion
The Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart is the single biggest investor in charter schools in the United States, giving a total of $150.3 million during 2007-08. In New York, the Walton group has provided $15 million in construction funding plus more than $1 million per year for operating costs in recent years to help the Brighter Choice charter school network establish eight new schools in Albany, according to the Albany Times Union. Meanwhile, Gov. David Paterson has received contributions totaling $55,900 from Christy Walton, as he pushes legislation to lift New York’s current statewide cap of 200 charter schools.
Eva Moskowitz
Moskowitz, a former Upper East Side councilmember with close ties to the Bloomberg administration, earns more than $300,000 annually for running a chain of four small charter schools in Harlem. Like Spencer Robertson, Moskowitz has sparked protests in the predominantly people-of-color community she operates in as her schools move into existing neighborhood schools. Last April, the Broad Foundation awarded Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network $1 million over two years to support its four existing Harlem Success schools and to help it open 40 new schools in the New York City area over the next 10 years.
Joanne Weiss
Director, Race to the Top program, DOE
Joanne Weiss served as a director and chief operating officer for the New School Venture Fund from 1998 to 2008 before being appointed to head the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. Using venture philanthropy largesse provided by Broad, Gates and other wealthy individuals, Weiss helped incubate networks of privately controlled charter schools and charter management organizations as well as organizations to mold new teachers and principals in the education reform movement’s technocratic image.
Michael Milken and Larry Ellison
Net worth: $2 billion and $27 billion
Michael Milken dominated Wall Street in the 1980s using junk bonds to fuel that decade’s merger mania before landing in federal prison for violating securities laws. Now, Milken has gone into the education business as chairman, co-founder and driving force behind Knowledge Universe, a multinational conglomerate that operates for-profit day-care centers and schools and makes interactive educational toys. Ellison, CEO of Oracle, co-founded the company with Milken.
Democrats for Education Reform
Established by four New York-based hedge-fund millionaires active in the charter school movement — Whitney Tilson, Charles Ledley, John Petry and Ravanel Boykin Curry IV — this political action committee seeks to build and solidify support for corporate educationreform initiatives inside the Democratic Party, lest it be tempted to heed the concerns of teacher unions or other critics of running schools like a business.
Michael Bloomberg
Net Worth: $17.5 billion
Bloomberg spent $75 million to win the New York mayoralty in 2001. Since then, he has used his Midas-like wealth to dominate the city’s political process while pursuing a top-down, data-driven vision of school reform. When New York won the 2007 Broad Prize for Urban Education, education historian Diane Ravitch described it as “a prize conferred by one billionaire on another.”
Rev. Al Sharpton
Sharpton began preaching the gospel of school reform in 2008 when he joined forces with New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to found the Educational Equality Project (EEP). Last fall, Sharpton went on a five-city road trip with “odd couple” buddy Newt Gingrich as well as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to tout the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. Sharpton’s support for the school reform cause has also yielded its earthly rewards. According to a March 2009 report by Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News, Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN) received a $500,000 donation immediately following the establishment of EEP. Sharpton’s benefactor: Plainfield Asset Management, a Connecticut-based hedge fund, where former schools Chancellor Harold Levy is a managing director. The donation came at a time Sharpton was set to pay $1 million in back taxes and penalties he and NAN owed.
Sources: Forbes 2009 Fortune 400, Gates Foundation, newschools.org, The New York Times, Broad Foundation, gothamschools.org, Walton Family Foundation, Albany Times Union, Chicago Public Schools, rethinkingschools.org, wsws.org, U.S. Department of Education, Knowledge Universe, forbes.com, Ed Week, New York Sun, edwize.org, New York Daily News, ednotesonline.org.
Friday, January 14, 2011
How our schools are being stolen from us
From the Dissent, with a nod to Mike Klonsky's Small Talk Blog
By Joanne Barkan
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.
Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making. And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don’t rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher. Other foundations—Ford, Hewlett, Annenberg, Milken, to name just a few—often join in funding one project or another, but the education reform movement’s success so far has depended on the size and clout of the Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate.
Every day, dozens of reporters and bloggers cover the Big Three’s reform campaign, but critical in-depth investigations have been scarce (for reasons I’ll explain further on). Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that the reforms are not working. Stanford University’s 2009 study of charter schools—the most comprehensive ever done—concluded that 83 percent of them perform either worse or no better than traditional public schools; a 2010 Vanderbilt University study showed definitively that merit pay for teachers does not produce higher test scores for students; a National Research Council report confirmed multiple studies that show standardized test scores do not measure student learning adequately. Gates and Broad helped to shape and fund two of the nation’s most extensive and aggressive school reform programs—in Chicago and New York City—but neither has produced credible improvement in student performance after years of experimentation.
To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
Drilling students on sample questions for weeks before a state test will not improve their education. The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot be replicated to serve millions of low-income children. Yet the reform movement, led by Gates, Broad, and Walton, has convinced most Americans who have an opinion about education (including most liberals) that their agenda deserves support.
Given all this, I want to explore three questions: How do these foundations operate on the ground? How do they leverage their money into control over public policy? And how do they construct consensus? We know the array of tools used by the foundations for education reform: they fund programs to close down schools, set up charters, and experiment with data-collection software, testing regimes, and teacher evaluation plans; they give grants to research groups and think tanks to study all the programs, to evaluate all the studies, and to conduct surveys; they give grants to TV networks for programming and to news organizations for reporting; they spend hundreds of millions on advocacy outreach to the media, to government at every level, and to voters. Yet we don’t know much at all until we get down to specifics.
Pipelines or Programs
The smallest of the Big Three,* the Broad Foundation, gets its largest return on education investments from its two training projects. The mission of both is to move professionals from their current careers in business, the military, law, government, and so on into jobs as superintendents and upper-level managers of urban public school districts. In their new jobs, they can implement the foundation’s agenda. One project, the Broad Superintendents Academy, pays all tuition and travel costs for top executives in their fields to go through a course of six extended weekend sessions, assignments, and site visits. Broad then helps to place them in superintendent jobs. The academy is thriving. According to the Web site, “graduates of the program currently work as superintendents or school district executives in fifty-three cities across twenty-eight states. In 2009, 43 percent of all large urban superintendent openings were filled by Broad Academy graduates.”
The second project, the Broad Residency, places professionals with master’s degrees and several years of work experience into full-time managerial jobs in school districts, charter school management organizations, and federal and state education departments. While they’re working, residents get two years of “professional development” from Broad, all costs covered, including travel. The foundation also subsidizes their salaries (50 percent the first year, 25 percent the second year). It’s another success story for Broad, which has placed more than two hundred residents in more than fifty education institutions.
In reform-speak, both the Broad Academy and Residency are not mere programs: they are “pipelines.” Frederick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, described the difference in With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy Is Reshaping K–12 Education (2005):
Donors have a continual choice between supporting “programs” or supporting “pipelines.” Programs, which are far more common, are ventures that directly involve a limited population of children and educators. Pipelines, on the other hand, primarily seek to attract new talent to education, keep those individuals engaged, or create new opportunities for talented practitioners to advance and influence the profession.…By seeking to alter the composition of the educational workforce, pipelines offer foundations a way to pursue a high-leverage strategy without seeking to directly alter public policy.
Once Broad alumni are working inside the education system, they naturally favor hiring other Broadies, which ups the leverage. A clear picture of this comes from Los Angeles. The foundation is based there and exerts formidable influence over the LA Unified School District (LA Unified), the second largest in the nation. At the start of 2010, Broad Residency alums working at LA Unified included Matt Hill, who oversees the district’s Public School Choice project that turns schools over to independent managers (Broad pays Hill’s $160,000 salary); Parker Hudnut, executive director of the district’s innovation and charter division (Kathi Littmann, his predecessor, was also a Broad resident); Yumi Takahashi, the budget director; Marshall Tuck, chief executive of the nonprofit that manages schools for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Mark Kieger-Heine, chief operating officer of the same nonprofit; and Angela Bass, its superintendent of instruction. In June 2010, the Board of Education hired Broad Academy alumnus John Deasy as deputy superintendent of LA Unified (he’s a likely candidate for the superintendent’s job). At the time of hiring, Deasy was deputy director of education at the Gates Foundation.
Broad casts a long shadow over LA Unified, but other foundations also invest. A $4.4 million grant from the LA-based Wasserman Foundation, $1.2 million from Walton, and smaller grants from Ford and Hewlett are paying the salaries of more than a dozen key senior staffers in the district. They work on projects favored by the foundations.
Philanthropists Are Royalty
On September 8, 2010, the Broad Foundation announced a twist on the usual funding scenario: the Broad Residency had received a $3.6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. According to Broad’s press release, the money would go “to recruit and train as many as eighteen Broad Residents over the next four years to provide management support to school districts and charter management organizations addressing the issue of teacher effectiveness.” Apparently Broad needs Gates in order to expand one of its core projects. The truth is that the Gates Foundation could fully subsidize all of Broad’s grant-giving in education, as well as that of the Walton Family Foundation. Easily—it’s that outsized. Since Warren Buffett gave his assets to Gates, the latter is more than six times bigger than the next largest foundation in the United States, Ford, with $10.2 billion in assets.
Now is the moment for me to address the inevitable objection. Many people, including leftists, consider it unseemly, even churlish, to criticize the Gates Foundation. Time and again, I’ve heard, “They do good work on health care in Africa. Leave them alone.” But the Gates Foundation has created much the same problem in health funding as in education reform. Take, for example, the Gates project to eradicate malaria.
On February 16, 2008, the New York Times reported on a memo that it had obtained, written by Dr. Arata Kochi, head of the World Health Organization’s malaria programs, to WHO’s director general. Because the Gates Foundation was funding almost everyone studying malaria, Dr. Arata complained, the cornerstone of scientific research—independent review—was falling apart.
Many of the world’s leading malaria scientists are now “locked up in a ‘cartel’ with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,” Dr. Kochi wrote. Because “each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others,” he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals “is becoming increasingly difficult.”
The director of global health at Gates responded predictably: “We encourage a lot of external review.” But a lot of external review does not solve the problem, which is structural. It warps the work of most philanthropies to some degree but is exponentially dangerous in the case of the Gates Foundation. Again, Frederick Hess in With the Best of Intentions:
…[A]cademics, activists, and the policy community live in a world where philanthropists are royalty—where philanthropic support is often the ticket to tackling big projects, making a difference, and maintaining one’s livelihood.
…[E]ven if scholars themselves are insulated enough to risk being impolitic, they routinely collaborate with school districts, policy makers, and colleagues who desire philanthropic support.
…The groups convened by foundations [to advise them] tend to include, naturally enough, their friends, allies, and grantees. Such groups are less likely than outsiders to offer a radically different take on strategy or thinking.
…Researchers themselves compete fiercely for the right to evaluate high-profile reform initiatives. Almost without exception, the evaluators are hired by funders or grantees….Most evaluators are selected, at least in part, because they are perceived as being sympathetic to the reform in question.
Hess found that the press, too, handles philanthropies with kid gloves. One study reviewed how national media outlets (the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and Associated Press) portrayed the educational activities of major foundations (Gates, Broad, Walton, Annenberg, and Milken) from 1995 to 2005. The study revealed “thirteen positive articles for every critical account.” Hess had three explanations for the obliging attitude of the supposedly disinterested press: a natural inclination to write positively about “generous gifts,” the routine tendency to affirm “professionally endorsed school reforms,” and the difficulty of finding experts who will publicly criticize the foundations.
The cozy environment undermines all players—grantees, media, the public, and the foundations themselves. Without honest assessments, funders are less likely to reach their goals. According to Phil Buchanan, executive director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, “If you want to achieve the greatest possible positive impact, you've got to figure out how to hear things from people on the ground who might know more than you about some pretty important things” (Seattle Times, August 3, 2008).
No Silver Bullet
The sorry tale of the Gates Foundation’s first major project in education reform has been told often, but it’s key to understanding how Gates functions. I’ll run through it briefly. In 2000 the foundation began pouring money into breaking up large public high schools where test scores and graduation rates were low. The foundation insisted that more individual attention in closer “learning communities” would—presto!—boost achievement. The foundation didn’t base its decision on scientific studies showing school size mattered; such studies didn’t exist. As reported in Bloomberg Businessweek (July 15, 2010), Wharton School statistician Howard Wainer believes Gates probably “misread the numbers” and simply “seized on data showing small schools are overrepresented among the country's highest achievers….” Gates spent $2 billion between 2000 and 2008 to set up 2,602 schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia, “directly reaching at least 781,000 students,” according to a foundation brochure. Michael Klonsky, professor at DePaul University and national director of the Small Schools Workshop, describes the Gates effect this way:
Gates funding was so large and so widespread, it seemed for a time as if every initiative in the small-schools and charter world was being underwritten by the foundation. If you wanted to start a school, hold a meeting, organize a conference, or write an article in an education journal, you first had to consider Gates (“Power Philanthropy” in The Gates Foundation and the Future of Public Schools, 2010).
In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn’t produced strong results. They didn’t mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power couple had a new plan: performance-based teacher pay, data collection, national standards and tests, and school “turnaround” (the term of art for firing the staff of a low-performing school and hiring a new one, replacing the school with a charter, or shutting down the school and sending the kids elsewhere).
To support the new initiatives, the Gates Foundation had already invested almost $2.2 million to create The Turnaround Challenge, the authoritative how-to guide on turnaround. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called it “the bible” for school restructuring. He’s incorporated it into federal policy, and reformers around the country use it. Mass Insight Education, the consulting company that produced it, claims the document has been downloaded 200,000 times since 2007. Meanwhile, Gates also invested $90 million in one of the largest implementations of the turnaround strategy—Chicago’s Renaissance 2010. Ren10 gave Chicago public schools CEO Arne Duncan a national name and ticket to Washington; he took along the reform strategy. Shortly after he arrived, studies showing weak results for Ren10 began circulating, but the Chicago Tribune still caused a stir on January 17, 2010, with an article entitled “Daley School Plan Fails to Make Grade.”
Six years after Mayor Richard Daley launched a bold initiative to close down and remake failing schools, Renaissance 2010 has done little to improve the educational performance of the city's school system, according to a Tribune analysis of 2009 state test data.
…The moribund test scores follow other less than enthusiastic findings about Renaissance 2010—that displaced students ended up mostly in other low performing schools and that mass closings led to youth violence as rival gang members ended up in the same classrooms. Together, they suggest the initiative hasn't lived up to its promise by this, its target year.
Last fall, Daley announced that he wouldn’t run again for mayor; Ron Huberman, who replaced Duncan as schools CEO, announced that he would leave before Daley; and Rahm Emanuel, preparing to run for Daley’s job, announced that he would promote another privately funded reform campaign for Chicago’s schools. “Let’s raise a ton of money,” he told the Chicago Tribune (October 18, 2010). Eminently doable.
Investing for Political Leverage
The day before the first Democratic presidential candidates’ debate in 2007, Gates and Broad announced they were jointly funding a $60 million campaign to get both political parties to address the foundations’ version of education reform. It was one of the most expensive single issue efforts ever; it dwarfed the $22.4 million offensive that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth mounted against John Kerry in 2004 or the $7.8 million that AARP spent on advocacy for older citizens that same year (New York Times, April 25, 2007). The Gates-Broad money paid off: the major candidates took stands on specific reforms, including merit pay for teachers. But nothing the foundations did in that election cycle (or could have done) advanced their agenda as much as Barack Obama’s choice of Arne Duncan to head the Department of Education (DOE). Eli and Edythe Broad described the import in The Broad Foundations 2009/10 Report:
The election of President Barack Obama and his appointment of Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as the U.S. Secretary of Education, marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned.
With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments—charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time, and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.
Arne Duncan did not disappoint. He quickly made the partnership with private foundations the defining feature of his DOE stewardship. His staff touted the commitment in an article for the department’s newsletter, The Education Innovator (October 29, 2009):
…The Department has truly embraced the foundation community by creating a position within the Office of the Secretary for the Director of Philanthropic Engagement. This dedicated role within the Secretary’s Office signals to the philanthropic world that the Department is “open for business.”
Within weeks, Duncan had integrated the DOE into the network of revolving-door job placement that includes the staffs of Gates, Broad, and all the thinks tanks, advocacy groups, school management organizations, training programs, and school districts that they fund. Here’s a quick look at top executives in the DOE: Duncan’s first chief of staff, Margot Rogers, came from Gates; her replacement as of June 2010, Joanne Weiss, came from a major Gates grantee, the New Schools Venture Fund; Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali has worked at Broad, LA Unified School District and the Gates-funded Education Trust; general counsel Charles P. Rose was a founding board member of another major Gates grantee, Advance Illinois; and Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement James Shelton has worked at both Gates and the New Schools Venture Fund. Duncan himself served on the board of directors of Broad’s education division until February 2009 (as did former treasury secretary Larry Summers).
How to Set Government Policy
Nothing illustrates the operation of Duncan’s “open for business” policy better than the administration’s signature education initiative, Race to the Top (RTTT). The “stimulus package” included $4.3 billion for education, but for the first time, states didn’t simply receive grants; they had to compete for RTTT money with a comprehensive, statewide proposal for education reform. It is no exaggeration to say that the criteria for selecting the winners came straight from the foundations’ playbook (which is, after all, Duncan’s playbook). To start, any state that didn’t allow student test scores to determine (at least in part) teacher and principal evaluations was not eligible to compete. After clarifying this, the 103-page application form laid out a list of detailed criteria and then additional priorities for each criterion (“The Secretary is particularly interested in applications that…”). Key criteria included
(C)(1) Fully implementing a statewide longitudinal data system
(D)(2) Improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance [this is followed by criteria for evaluating performance based on student test scores]
(E) Turning around the lowest-achieving schools
(F)(2) Ensuring successful conditions for high-performing charter schools and other innovative schools
States were desperate for funds (in the end, thirty-four applied in the two rounds of the contest). When necessary, some rewrote their laws to qualify: they loosened or repealed limits on the number of charter schools allowed; they permitted teacher and principal evaluations based on test scores. But they still faced the immense tasks of designing a proposal that touched on all aspects of K–12 education and then writing an application, which the DOE requested (but did not require) be limited to 350 pages. What state has resources to gamble on such a venture? Enter the Gates Foundation. It reviewed the prospects for reform in every state, picked fifteen favorites, and, in July 2009, offered each up to $250,000 to hire consultants to write the application. Gates even prepared a list of recommended consulting firms. Understandably, the other states cried foul; so did the National Conference of State Legislatures: Gates was giving some states an unfair advantage; it was, in effect, picking winners and losers for a government program. After some weeks of reflection, Gates offered the application money to any state that met the foundation’s eight criteria. Here, for example, is number five: “Does the state grant teacher tenure in fewer than three years? (Answer must be “no” or the state should be able to demonstrate a plan to set a higher bar for tenure).”
Who says the foundations (and Gates, in particular) don’t set government policy?
On October 9, 2009, Edward Haertel, chair of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) sent a letter-report to Arne Duncan to express BOTA’s concern about the use of testing in RTTT’s requirements.
Tests often play an important role in evaluating educational innovations, but an evaluation requires much more than tests alone. A rigorous evaluation plan typically involves implementation and outcome data that need to be collected throughout the course of a project.
REFLECTING “A consensus of the Board,” the nineteen-page letter went on to review the many scientific studies that demonstrate the pitfalls of using standardized test scores as a measure of student learning, teacher performance, or school improvement. BOTA recommended that the DOE use these studies to revise the RTTT plan. Unfortunately, as Haertel explained in his cover note, “Under National Academies procedures, any letter report must be reviewed by an independent group of experts before it can be publicly released, which made it impossible to complete the letter within the public comment period of the Federal Register notice [for RTTT’s proposed regulations].” The scientists needed a peer review of their work, so they missed the Federal Register deadline, and that meant Duncan could ignore their recommendations—which he did. Haertel’s letter (www.nap.edu/catalog/12780.html) makes for poignant reading in the twenty-first century: science imploring at the feet of ideology.
Other Ways to Invest for Political Influence
Private foundations are not allowed to lobby government directly, but they can, and all do, “share the lessons of their work” with lawmakers and their staffs. As the RTTT story shows, the Big Three also intervene more directly in policy and politics in ways available only to the mega-rich.
Consider the case of school reform in Washington, D.C. Former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee battled the teachers’ union in acrimonious contract negotiations for more than two years; she wanted greater control over evaluating and firing teachers. Her breakthrough move was to get $64.5 million from the Broad, Walton, Robertson, and Arnold foundations to finance a five-year, 21.6 percent increase in teachers’ base salary. The union took the money in exchange for giving Rhee some of the changes she wanted. The money came with a political restriction: the foundations could withdraw their pledges if there was a “material change” in the school system’s leadership. When critics challenged the legality of the arrangement (Hadn’t Rhee negotiated a deal that served her personal financial interests?), the chancellor found a way to shuffle funds and spend on a schedule that made the leadership clause irrelevant. The foundations’ attempt to dictate who would be D.C. schools chancellor failed, but their investment paid off with highly publicized (and, the foundations hoped, precedent setting) concessions in a union contract.
On the question of who controls public schools, the Big Three much prefer mayoral control to independent school boards: a mayor with full powers can push through a reform agenda faster, often with less concern about the opposition. On August 18, 2009, the New York Post quoted Bill Gates on mayoral control: “The cities where our foundation has put the most money is where there is a single person responsible.” In the same article, the Post broke the news that Bill Gates had “secretly bankrolled” Learn-NY, a group campaigning to overturn a term-limit law so that Michael Bloomberg could run for a third term as New York City mayor. Bloomberg’s main argument for deserving another term was that his education reform agenda (identical to the Gates-Broad agenda) was transforming city schools for the better. Gates put $4 million of his personal money into Learn-NY. “The donation helped pay for Learn-NY's extensive public-relations, media, and lobbying efforts in Albany and the city.” The Post also reported that Eli Broad had donated “millions” to Learn-NY. Since Bloomberg’s reelection, however, the results of one study after another have shown that his reform endeavors are not producing the positive results he repeatedly claims.
In its “advocacy and public policy” work, the Gates Foundation also funnels money to elected officials through their national associations. The foundation has given grants to the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, National Conference of State Legislatures, United States Conference of Mayors, National Association of Latino Elected Officials Education Fund, and National Association of State Boards of Education. They’ve also funded associations of high nonelected officials, such as the Council of Chief State School Officers (see gatesfoundation.org).
Ventures in Media
On October 7 and 8, 2010, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a two-part investigation by Robert Fortner into “the implications of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s increasingly large and complex web of media partnerships.” The report focused on the foundation’s grants to the PBS Newshour, ABC News, and the British newspaper the Guardian for reporting on global health. Of course, all three grantees claim to have “complete editorial independence,” but the ubiquity of Gates funding makes the claim disingenuous. As Fortner observes, “It is the largest charitable foundation in the world, and its influence in the media is growing so vast there is reason to worry about the media’s ability to do its job.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, too, questioned the foundation’s bankrolling of for-profit news organizations and its “growing involvement with journalism” (October 11, 2010). Neither publication mentioned that Gates is also developing partnerships with news and entertainment media to promote its education agenda.
Both Gates and Broad funded “NBC News Education Nation,” a week of public events and programming on education reform that began on September 27, 2010. The programs aired on NBC News shows such as “Nightly News” and “Today” and on the MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo TV networks. During the planning stages, the producers of Education Nation dismissed persistent criticism that the programming was being heavily weighted in favor of the Duncan-foundation reform agenda. Judging by the schedule of panels and interviews, Education Nation certainly looked like a foundation project. The one panel I watched—”Good Apples: How do we keep good teachers, throw out bad ones, and put a new shine on the profession?”—was “moderated” by Steven Brill, a hardline opponent of teachers’ unions and promoter of charter schools. The panel did not belong on a news show.
Gates and Broad also sponsored the documentary film Waiting for Superman, which is by far the ed reform movement’s greatest media coup. With few exceptions, film critics loved it (“a powerful and alarming documentary about America’s failing public school system,” New York Times, September 23, 2010). Critics of the reform agenda found the film one-sided, heavy-handed, and superficial.
In 2009 the Gates Foundation and Viacom (the world’s fourth largest media conglomerate, which includes MTV Networks, BET Networks, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and hundreds of other media properties) made a groundbreaking deal for entertainment programming. For the first time, a foundation wouldn’t merely advise or prod a media company about an issue; Gates would be directly involved in writing and producing programs. As a vehicle for their partnership, the foundation and Viacom (with some additional funds from the AT&T Foundation) set up a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization called the Get Schooled Foundation. The interpenetration of foundations and the spawning of new ones is endless. In July 2010, Get Schooled hired Marie Groark, then senior education program officer at Gates, as its executive director. Among its initiatives, Get Schooled lists Waiting for Superman, which is produced by Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of Viacom. This is how the New York Times (April 2, 2009) described the Gates-Viacom deal:
Now the Gates Foundation is set to expand its involvement and spend more money on influencing popular culture through a deal with Viacom….It could be called “message placement”: the social or philanthropic corollary to product placement deals in which marketers pay to feature products in shows and movies. Instead of selling Coca-Cola or G.M. cars, they promote education and healthy living….Their goal is to weave education-theme story lines into existing shows or to create new shows centered on education.
The Hubris That Comes from Power
On June 15, 2010, Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes announced the results of the “Grantee Perception Report,” which the foundation had commissioned from the Center for Effective Philanthropy. The center, a nonprofit research group, has rattled the foundation world with surveys that show how grantees evaluate a funder and also how that evaluation compares to the evaluations of other funders. Some 1,020 Gates grantees, active between June 1, 2008, and May 31, 2009, responded to the survey. On questions relating to the experience of working with Gates, the foundation got bad grades. “Lower than typical ratings,” Raikes wrote.
Many of our grantee partners said we are not clear about our goals and strategies, and they think we don’t understand their goals and strategies.
They are confused by our decision-making and grant-making processes.
Because of staff turnovers, many of our grantee partners have had to manage multiple Program Officer transitions during the course of their grant, which creates more work.
Finally, they say we are inconsistent in our communications, and often unresponsive.
The report intrigued me because it shows another aspect of how Gates operates on the ground. More important, it helps explain why the Big Three can keep marketing and selling reforms that don’t work. Certainly ideology—in this case, faith in the superiority of the private business model—drives them. But so does the blinding hubris that comes from power. You don’t have to listen or see because you know you are right. One study after another sends up a red flag, but no one in the ed reform movement blinks. Insanity, defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, applies here.
Can anything stop the foundation enablers? After five or ten more years, the mess they’re making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they’ll say, “Oops, that didn’t work” and step aside. But the damage might be irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open, an extreme degree of “teaching to the test,” demoralized teachers, rampant corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. Who could possibly clean up the mess?
All children should have access to a good public school. And public schools should be run by officials who answer to the voters. Gates, Broad, and Walton answer to no one. Tax payers still fund more than 99 percent of the cost of K–12 education. Private foundations should not be setting public policy for them. Private money should not be producing what amounts to false advertising for a faulty product. The imperious overreaching of the Big Three undermines democracy just as surely as it damages public education.
Joanne Barkan, who graduated from public schools in Chicago, lives and writes in Manhattan and on Cape Cod. Her next article on education will focus on teachers and their unions.
*The Broad and Walton foundations had endowments of about $1.4 billion and $2 billion, respectively, in 2008 (the latest available figures, according to the Foundation Center). The Gates Foundation had an endowment of $33 billion as of June 2010, with an additional $30 billion from Warren Buffett, spread out over multiple years in annual contributions (from gatesfoundation.org). The Broad endowment comes primarily from the sale of SunAmerica to AIG in 1999; the Walton endowment from Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.; and the Gates endowment from Microsoft.
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781
By Joanne Barkan
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.
Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making. And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don’t rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher. Other foundations—Ford, Hewlett, Annenberg, Milken, to name just a few—often join in funding one project or another, but the education reform movement’s success so far has depended on the size and clout of the Gates-Broad-Walton triumvirate.
Every day, dozens of reporters and bloggers cover the Big Three’s reform campaign, but critical in-depth investigations have been scarce (for reasons I’ll explain further on). Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that the reforms are not working. Stanford University’s 2009 study of charter schools—the most comprehensive ever done—concluded that 83 percent of them perform either worse or no better than traditional public schools; a 2010 Vanderbilt University study showed definitively that merit pay for teachers does not produce higher test scores for students; a National Research Council report confirmed multiple studies that show standardized test scores do not measure student learning adequately. Gates and Broad helped to shape and fund two of the nation’s most extensive and aggressive school reform programs—in Chicago and New York City—but neither has produced credible improvement in student performance after years of experimentation.
To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
Drilling students on sample questions for weeks before a state test will not improve their education. The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot be replicated to serve millions of low-income children. Yet the reform movement, led by Gates, Broad, and Walton, has convinced most Americans who have an opinion about education (including most liberals) that their agenda deserves support.
Given all this, I want to explore three questions: How do these foundations operate on the ground? How do they leverage their money into control over public policy? And how do they construct consensus? We know the array of tools used by the foundations for education reform: they fund programs to close down schools, set up charters, and experiment with data-collection software, testing regimes, and teacher evaluation plans; they give grants to research groups and think tanks to study all the programs, to evaluate all the studies, and to conduct surveys; they give grants to TV networks for programming and to news organizations for reporting; they spend hundreds of millions on advocacy outreach to the media, to government at every level, and to voters. Yet we don’t know much at all until we get down to specifics.
Pipelines or Programs
The smallest of the Big Three,* the Broad Foundation, gets its largest return on education investments from its two training projects. The mission of both is to move professionals from their current careers in business, the military, law, government, and so on into jobs as superintendents and upper-level managers of urban public school districts. In their new jobs, they can implement the foundation’s agenda. One project, the Broad Superintendents Academy, pays all tuition and travel costs for top executives in their fields to go through a course of six extended weekend sessions, assignments, and site visits. Broad then helps to place them in superintendent jobs. The academy is thriving. According to the Web site, “graduates of the program currently work as superintendents or school district executives in fifty-three cities across twenty-eight states. In 2009, 43 percent of all large urban superintendent openings were filled by Broad Academy graduates.”
The second project, the Broad Residency, places professionals with master’s degrees and several years of work experience into full-time managerial jobs in school districts, charter school management organizations, and federal and state education departments. While they’re working, residents get two years of “professional development” from Broad, all costs covered, including travel. The foundation also subsidizes their salaries (50 percent the first year, 25 percent the second year). It’s another success story for Broad, which has placed more than two hundred residents in more than fifty education institutions.
In reform-speak, both the Broad Academy and Residency are not mere programs: they are “pipelines.” Frederick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, described the difference in With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy Is Reshaping K–12 Education (2005):
Donors have a continual choice between supporting “programs” or supporting “pipelines.” Programs, which are far more common, are ventures that directly involve a limited population of children and educators. Pipelines, on the other hand, primarily seek to attract new talent to education, keep those individuals engaged, or create new opportunities for talented practitioners to advance and influence the profession.…By seeking to alter the composition of the educational workforce, pipelines offer foundations a way to pursue a high-leverage strategy without seeking to directly alter public policy.
Once Broad alumni are working inside the education system, they naturally favor hiring other Broadies, which ups the leverage. A clear picture of this comes from Los Angeles. The foundation is based there and exerts formidable influence over the LA Unified School District (LA Unified), the second largest in the nation. At the start of 2010, Broad Residency alums working at LA Unified included Matt Hill, who oversees the district’s Public School Choice project that turns schools over to independent managers (Broad pays Hill’s $160,000 salary); Parker Hudnut, executive director of the district’s innovation and charter division (Kathi Littmann, his predecessor, was also a Broad resident); Yumi Takahashi, the budget director; Marshall Tuck, chief executive of the nonprofit that manages schools for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Mark Kieger-Heine, chief operating officer of the same nonprofit; and Angela Bass, its superintendent of instruction. In June 2010, the Board of Education hired Broad Academy alumnus John Deasy as deputy superintendent of LA Unified (he’s a likely candidate for the superintendent’s job). At the time of hiring, Deasy was deputy director of education at the Gates Foundation.
Broad casts a long shadow over LA Unified, but other foundations also invest. A $4.4 million grant from the LA-based Wasserman Foundation, $1.2 million from Walton, and smaller grants from Ford and Hewlett are paying the salaries of more than a dozen key senior staffers in the district. They work on projects favored by the foundations.
Philanthropists Are Royalty
On September 8, 2010, the Broad Foundation announced a twist on the usual funding scenario: the Broad Residency had received a $3.6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. According to Broad’s press release, the money would go “to recruit and train as many as eighteen Broad Residents over the next four years to provide management support to school districts and charter management organizations addressing the issue of teacher effectiveness.” Apparently Broad needs Gates in order to expand one of its core projects. The truth is that the Gates Foundation could fully subsidize all of Broad’s grant-giving in education, as well as that of the Walton Family Foundation. Easily—it’s that outsized. Since Warren Buffett gave his assets to Gates, the latter is more than six times bigger than the next largest foundation in the United States, Ford, with $10.2 billion in assets.
Now is the moment for me to address the inevitable objection. Many people, including leftists, consider it unseemly, even churlish, to criticize the Gates Foundation. Time and again, I’ve heard, “They do good work on health care in Africa. Leave them alone.” But the Gates Foundation has created much the same problem in health funding as in education reform. Take, for example, the Gates project to eradicate malaria.
On February 16, 2008, the New York Times reported on a memo that it had obtained, written by Dr. Arata Kochi, head of the World Health Organization’s malaria programs, to WHO’s director general. Because the Gates Foundation was funding almost everyone studying malaria, Dr. Arata complained, the cornerstone of scientific research—independent review—was falling apart.
Many of the world’s leading malaria scientists are now “locked up in a ‘cartel’ with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,” Dr. Kochi wrote. Because “each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others,” he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals “is becoming increasingly difficult.”
The director of global health at Gates responded predictably: “We encourage a lot of external review.” But a lot of external review does not solve the problem, which is structural. It warps the work of most philanthropies to some degree but is exponentially dangerous in the case of the Gates Foundation. Again, Frederick Hess in With the Best of Intentions:
…[A]cademics, activists, and the policy community live in a world where philanthropists are royalty—where philanthropic support is often the ticket to tackling big projects, making a difference, and maintaining one’s livelihood.
…[E]ven if scholars themselves are insulated enough to risk being impolitic, they routinely collaborate with school districts, policy makers, and colleagues who desire philanthropic support.
…The groups convened by foundations [to advise them] tend to include, naturally enough, their friends, allies, and grantees. Such groups are less likely than outsiders to offer a radically different take on strategy or thinking.
…Researchers themselves compete fiercely for the right to evaluate high-profile reform initiatives. Almost without exception, the evaluators are hired by funders or grantees….Most evaluators are selected, at least in part, because they are perceived as being sympathetic to the reform in question.
Hess found that the press, too, handles philanthropies with kid gloves. One study reviewed how national media outlets (the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and Associated Press) portrayed the educational activities of major foundations (Gates, Broad, Walton, Annenberg, and Milken) from 1995 to 2005. The study revealed “thirteen positive articles for every critical account.” Hess had three explanations for the obliging attitude of the supposedly disinterested press: a natural inclination to write positively about “generous gifts,” the routine tendency to affirm “professionally endorsed school reforms,” and the difficulty of finding experts who will publicly criticize the foundations.
The cozy environment undermines all players—grantees, media, the public, and the foundations themselves. Without honest assessments, funders are less likely to reach their goals. According to Phil Buchanan, executive director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, “If you want to achieve the greatest possible positive impact, you've got to figure out how to hear things from people on the ground who might know more than you about some pretty important things” (Seattle Times, August 3, 2008).
No Silver Bullet
The sorry tale of the Gates Foundation’s first major project in education reform has been told often, but it’s key to understanding how Gates functions. I’ll run through it briefly. In 2000 the foundation began pouring money into breaking up large public high schools where test scores and graduation rates were low. The foundation insisted that more individual attention in closer “learning communities” would—presto!—boost achievement. The foundation didn’t base its decision on scientific studies showing school size mattered; such studies didn’t exist. As reported in Bloomberg Businessweek (July 15, 2010), Wharton School statistician Howard Wainer believes Gates probably “misread the numbers” and simply “seized on data showing small schools are overrepresented among the country's highest achievers….” Gates spent $2 billion between 2000 and 2008 to set up 2,602 schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia, “directly reaching at least 781,000 students,” according to a foundation brochure. Michael Klonsky, professor at DePaul University and national director of the Small Schools Workshop, describes the Gates effect this way:
Gates funding was so large and so widespread, it seemed for a time as if every initiative in the small-schools and charter world was being underwritten by the foundation. If you wanted to start a school, hold a meeting, organize a conference, or write an article in an education journal, you first had to consider Gates (“Power Philanthropy” in The Gates Foundation and the Future of Public Schools, 2010).
In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn’t produced strong results. They didn’t mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power couple had a new plan: performance-based teacher pay, data collection, national standards and tests, and school “turnaround” (the term of art for firing the staff of a low-performing school and hiring a new one, replacing the school with a charter, or shutting down the school and sending the kids elsewhere).
To support the new initiatives, the Gates Foundation had already invested almost $2.2 million to create The Turnaround Challenge, the authoritative how-to guide on turnaround. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called it “the bible” for school restructuring. He’s incorporated it into federal policy, and reformers around the country use it. Mass Insight Education, the consulting company that produced it, claims the document has been downloaded 200,000 times since 2007. Meanwhile, Gates also invested $90 million in one of the largest implementations of the turnaround strategy—Chicago’s Renaissance 2010. Ren10 gave Chicago public schools CEO Arne Duncan a national name and ticket to Washington; he took along the reform strategy. Shortly after he arrived, studies showing weak results for Ren10 began circulating, but the Chicago Tribune still caused a stir on January 17, 2010, with an article entitled “Daley School Plan Fails to Make Grade.”
Six years after Mayor Richard Daley launched a bold initiative to close down and remake failing schools, Renaissance 2010 has done little to improve the educational performance of the city's school system, according to a Tribune analysis of 2009 state test data.
…The moribund test scores follow other less than enthusiastic findings about Renaissance 2010—that displaced students ended up mostly in other low performing schools and that mass closings led to youth violence as rival gang members ended up in the same classrooms. Together, they suggest the initiative hasn't lived up to its promise by this, its target year.
Last fall, Daley announced that he wouldn’t run again for mayor; Ron Huberman, who replaced Duncan as schools CEO, announced that he would leave before Daley; and Rahm Emanuel, preparing to run for Daley’s job, announced that he would promote another privately funded reform campaign for Chicago’s schools. “Let’s raise a ton of money,” he told the Chicago Tribune (October 18, 2010). Eminently doable.
Investing for Political Leverage
The day before the first Democratic presidential candidates’ debate in 2007, Gates and Broad announced they were jointly funding a $60 million campaign to get both political parties to address the foundations’ version of education reform. It was one of the most expensive single issue efforts ever; it dwarfed the $22.4 million offensive that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth mounted against John Kerry in 2004 or the $7.8 million that AARP spent on advocacy for older citizens that same year (New York Times, April 25, 2007). The Gates-Broad money paid off: the major candidates took stands on specific reforms, including merit pay for teachers. But nothing the foundations did in that election cycle (or could have done) advanced their agenda as much as Barack Obama’s choice of Arne Duncan to head the Department of Education (DOE). Eli and Edythe Broad described the import in The Broad Foundations 2009/10 Report:
The election of President Barack Obama and his appointment of Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as the U.S. Secretary of Education, marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned.
With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments—charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time, and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.
Arne Duncan did not disappoint. He quickly made the partnership with private foundations the defining feature of his DOE stewardship. His staff touted the commitment in an article for the department’s newsletter, The Education Innovator (October 29, 2009):
…The Department has truly embraced the foundation community by creating a position within the Office of the Secretary for the Director of Philanthropic Engagement. This dedicated role within the Secretary’s Office signals to the philanthropic world that the Department is “open for business.”
Within weeks, Duncan had integrated the DOE into the network of revolving-door job placement that includes the staffs of Gates, Broad, and all the thinks tanks, advocacy groups, school management organizations, training programs, and school districts that they fund. Here’s a quick look at top executives in the DOE: Duncan’s first chief of staff, Margot Rogers, came from Gates; her replacement as of June 2010, Joanne Weiss, came from a major Gates grantee, the New Schools Venture Fund; Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali has worked at Broad, LA Unified School District and the Gates-funded Education Trust; general counsel Charles P. Rose was a founding board member of another major Gates grantee, Advance Illinois; and Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement James Shelton has worked at both Gates and the New Schools Venture Fund. Duncan himself served on the board of directors of Broad’s education division until February 2009 (as did former treasury secretary Larry Summers).
How to Set Government Policy
Nothing illustrates the operation of Duncan’s “open for business” policy better than the administration’s signature education initiative, Race to the Top (RTTT). The “stimulus package” included $4.3 billion for education, but for the first time, states didn’t simply receive grants; they had to compete for RTTT money with a comprehensive, statewide proposal for education reform. It is no exaggeration to say that the criteria for selecting the winners came straight from the foundations’ playbook (which is, after all, Duncan’s playbook). To start, any state that didn’t allow student test scores to determine (at least in part) teacher and principal evaluations was not eligible to compete. After clarifying this, the 103-page application form laid out a list of detailed criteria and then additional priorities for each criterion (“The Secretary is particularly interested in applications that…”). Key criteria included
(C)(1) Fully implementing a statewide longitudinal data system
(D)(2) Improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance [this is followed by criteria for evaluating performance based on student test scores]
(E) Turning around the lowest-achieving schools
(F)(2) Ensuring successful conditions for high-performing charter schools and other innovative schools
States were desperate for funds (in the end, thirty-four applied in the two rounds of the contest). When necessary, some rewrote their laws to qualify: they loosened or repealed limits on the number of charter schools allowed; they permitted teacher and principal evaluations based on test scores. But they still faced the immense tasks of designing a proposal that touched on all aspects of K–12 education and then writing an application, which the DOE requested (but did not require) be limited to 350 pages. What state has resources to gamble on such a venture? Enter the Gates Foundation. It reviewed the prospects for reform in every state, picked fifteen favorites, and, in July 2009, offered each up to $250,000 to hire consultants to write the application. Gates even prepared a list of recommended consulting firms. Understandably, the other states cried foul; so did the National Conference of State Legislatures: Gates was giving some states an unfair advantage; it was, in effect, picking winners and losers for a government program. After some weeks of reflection, Gates offered the application money to any state that met the foundation’s eight criteria. Here, for example, is number five: “Does the state grant teacher tenure in fewer than three years? (Answer must be “no” or the state should be able to demonstrate a plan to set a higher bar for tenure).”
Who says the foundations (and Gates, in particular) don’t set government policy?
On October 9, 2009, Edward Haertel, chair of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) sent a letter-report to Arne Duncan to express BOTA’s concern about the use of testing in RTTT’s requirements.
Tests often play an important role in evaluating educational innovations, but an evaluation requires much more than tests alone. A rigorous evaluation plan typically involves implementation and outcome data that need to be collected throughout the course of a project.
REFLECTING “A consensus of the Board,” the nineteen-page letter went on to review the many scientific studies that demonstrate the pitfalls of using standardized test scores as a measure of student learning, teacher performance, or school improvement. BOTA recommended that the DOE use these studies to revise the RTTT plan. Unfortunately, as Haertel explained in his cover note, “Under National Academies procedures, any letter report must be reviewed by an independent group of experts before it can be publicly released, which made it impossible to complete the letter within the public comment period of the Federal Register notice [for RTTT’s proposed regulations].” The scientists needed a peer review of their work, so they missed the Federal Register deadline, and that meant Duncan could ignore their recommendations—which he did. Haertel’s letter (www.nap.edu/catalog/12780.html) makes for poignant reading in the twenty-first century: science imploring at the feet of ideology.
Other Ways to Invest for Political Influence
Private foundations are not allowed to lobby government directly, but they can, and all do, “share the lessons of their work” with lawmakers and their staffs. As the RTTT story shows, the Big Three also intervene more directly in policy and politics in ways available only to the mega-rich.
Consider the case of school reform in Washington, D.C. Former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee battled the teachers’ union in acrimonious contract negotiations for more than two years; she wanted greater control over evaluating and firing teachers. Her breakthrough move was to get $64.5 million from the Broad, Walton, Robertson, and Arnold foundations to finance a five-year, 21.6 percent increase in teachers’ base salary. The union took the money in exchange for giving Rhee some of the changes she wanted. The money came with a political restriction: the foundations could withdraw their pledges if there was a “material change” in the school system’s leadership. When critics challenged the legality of the arrangement (Hadn’t Rhee negotiated a deal that served her personal financial interests?), the chancellor found a way to shuffle funds and spend on a schedule that made the leadership clause irrelevant. The foundations’ attempt to dictate who would be D.C. schools chancellor failed, but their investment paid off with highly publicized (and, the foundations hoped, precedent setting) concessions in a union contract.
On the question of who controls public schools, the Big Three much prefer mayoral control to independent school boards: a mayor with full powers can push through a reform agenda faster, often with less concern about the opposition. On August 18, 2009, the New York Post quoted Bill Gates on mayoral control: “The cities where our foundation has put the most money is where there is a single person responsible.” In the same article, the Post broke the news that Bill Gates had “secretly bankrolled” Learn-NY, a group campaigning to overturn a term-limit law so that Michael Bloomberg could run for a third term as New York City mayor. Bloomberg’s main argument for deserving another term was that his education reform agenda (identical to the Gates-Broad agenda) was transforming city schools for the better. Gates put $4 million of his personal money into Learn-NY. “The donation helped pay for Learn-NY's extensive public-relations, media, and lobbying efforts in Albany and the city.” The Post also reported that Eli Broad had donated “millions” to Learn-NY. Since Bloomberg’s reelection, however, the results of one study after another have shown that his reform endeavors are not producing the positive results he repeatedly claims.
In its “advocacy and public policy” work, the Gates Foundation also funnels money to elected officials through their national associations. The foundation has given grants to the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, National Conference of State Legislatures, United States Conference of Mayors, National Association of Latino Elected Officials Education Fund, and National Association of State Boards of Education. They’ve also funded associations of high nonelected officials, such as the Council of Chief State School Officers (see gatesfoundation.org).
Ventures in Media
On October 7 and 8, 2010, the Columbia Journalism Review ran a two-part investigation by Robert Fortner into “the implications of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s increasingly large and complex web of media partnerships.” The report focused on the foundation’s grants to the PBS Newshour, ABC News, and the British newspaper the Guardian for reporting on global health. Of course, all three grantees claim to have “complete editorial independence,” but the ubiquity of Gates funding makes the claim disingenuous. As Fortner observes, “It is the largest charitable foundation in the world, and its influence in the media is growing so vast there is reason to worry about the media’s ability to do its job.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, too, questioned the foundation’s bankrolling of for-profit news organizations and its “growing involvement with journalism” (October 11, 2010). Neither publication mentioned that Gates is also developing partnerships with news and entertainment media to promote its education agenda.
Both Gates and Broad funded “NBC News Education Nation,” a week of public events and programming on education reform that began on September 27, 2010. The programs aired on NBC News shows such as “Nightly News” and “Today” and on the MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo TV networks. During the planning stages, the producers of Education Nation dismissed persistent criticism that the programming was being heavily weighted in favor of the Duncan-foundation reform agenda. Judging by the schedule of panels and interviews, Education Nation certainly looked like a foundation project. The one panel I watched—”Good Apples: How do we keep good teachers, throw out bad ones, and put a new shine on the profession?”—was “moderated” by Steven Brill, a hardline opponent of teachers’ unions and promoter of charter schools. The panel did not belong on a news show.
Gates and Broad also sponsored the documentary film Waiting for Superman, which is by far the ed reform movement’s greatest media coup. With few exceptions, film critics loved it (“a powerful and alarming documentary about America’s failing public school system,” New York Times, September 23, 2010). Critics of the reform agenda found the film one-sided, heavy-handed, and superficial.
In 2009 the Gates Foundation and Viacom (the world’s fourth largest media conglomerate, which includes MTV Networks, BET Networks, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and hundreds of other media properties) made a groundbreaking deal for entertainment programming. For the first time, a foundation wouldn’t merely advise or prod a media company about an issue; Gates would be directly involved in writing and producing programs. As a vehicle for their partnership, the foundation and Viacom (with some additional funds from the AT&T Foundation) set up a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization called the Get Schooled Foundation. The interpenetration of foundations and the spawning of new ones is endless. In July 2010, Get Schooled hired Marie Groark, then senior education program officer at Gates, as its executive director. Among its initiatives, Get Schooled lists Waiting for Superman, which is produced by Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of Viacom. This is how the New York Times (April 2, 2009) described the Gates-Viacom deal:
Now the Gates Foundation is set to expand its involvement and spend more money on influencing popular culture through a deal with Viacom….It could be called “message placement”: the social or philanthropic corollary to product placement deals in which marketers pay to feature products in shows and movies. Instead of selling Coca-Cola or G.M. cars, they promote education and healthy living….Their goal is to weave education-theme story lines into existing shows or to create new shows centered on education.
The Hubris That Comes from Power
On June 15, 2010, Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes announced the results of the “Grantee Perception Report,” which the foundation had commissioned from the Center for Effective Philanthropy. The center, a nonprofit research group, has rattled the foundation world with surveys that show how grantees evaluate a funder and also how that evaluation compares to the evaluations of other funders. Some 1,020 Gates grantees, active between June 1, 2008, and May 31, 2009, responded to the survey. On questions relating to the experience of working with Gates, the foundation got bad grades. “Lower than typical ratings,” Raikes wrote.
Many of our grantee partners said we are not clear about our goals and strategies, and they think we don’t understand their goals and strategies.
They are confused by our decision-making and grant-making processes.
Because of staff turnovers, many of our grantee partners have had to manage multiple Program Officer transitions during the course of their grant, which creates more work.
Finally, they say we are inconsistent in our communications, and often unresponsive.
The report intrigued me because it shows another aspect of how Gates operates on the ground. More important, it helps explain why the Big Three can keep marketing and selling reforms that don’t work. Certainly ideology—in this case, faith in the superiority of the private business model—drives them. But so does the blinding hubris that comes from power. You don’t have to listen or see because you know you are right. One study after another sends up a red flag, but no one in the ed reform movement blinks. Insanity, defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, applies here.
Can anything stop the foundation enablers? After five or ten more years, the mess they’re making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they’ll say, “Oops, that didn’t work” and step aside. But the damage might be irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open, an extreme degree of “teaching to the test,” demoralized teachers, rampant corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. Who could possibly clean up the mess?
All children should have access to a good public school. And public schools should be run by officials who answer to the voters. Gates, Broad, and Walton answer to no one. Tax payers still fund more than 99 percent of the cost of K–12 education. Private foundations should not be setting public policy for them. Private money should not be producing what amounts to false advertising for a faulty product. The imperious overreaching of the Big Three undermines democracy just as surely as it damages public education.
Joanne Barkan, who graduated from public schools in Chicago, lives and writes in Manhattan and on Cape Cod. Her next article on education will focus on teachers and their unions.
*The Broad and Walton foundations had endowments of about $1.4 billion and $2 billion, respectively, in 2008 (the latest available figures, according to the Foundation Center). The Gates Foundation had an endowment of $33 billion as of June 2010, with an additional $30 billion from Warren Buffett, spread out over multiple years in annual contributions (from gatesfoundation.org). The Broad endowment comes primarily from the sale of SunAmerica to AIG in 1999; the Walton endowment from Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.; and the Gates endowment from Microsoft.
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781
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