Michelle Rhee to speak to legislature, I wonder if she will mention tape

This not local Florida teachers is who Rick Scott is turning too for help. -cpg

From the Huffington Post

by pete Zucker

Sorry if I am late for the party. I'm thinking back to September when I posted on Twitter about a speech Michelle Rhee had made at the Columbia Heights Education Campus in Washington DC.

Rhee before a gathering was recounting her early days as an educator and the miscues that we all have made. I recall, now with a smile, of sending thirty-five fifth graders to the closet at once at dismissal time.

According to audio made by Rhee at the CHEC and reported by Alexander Russo and the Washington Post, Rhee said she, "took little pieces of masking tapes and put them on everybody's lips." At this point in her story the crowd laughs. She goes on to explain that, "their skin is coming off and that they are bleeding," and the crowd still is laughing. This is just wrong.

So why after three months or so of this being reported am I finally sharing my two cents? I guess it is seeing the launching of MichelleRheefirst.org er, I meant, Studentsfirst.org. Even though what Michelle Rhee did can be attributed to inexperience, as an educator, and even more so as a parent, I am uncomfortable about this having happened.

But what has gotten me most riled up, gotten my gander up, has bunched up my Fruit of the Looms is that a close, close person to me in another state has been reassigned because he dared to joke about taping students mouths. Now don't get me wrong, it was stupid to joke in this way. No doubt about it. But it should not involve a police investigation.

I decided to Google past transgressions of teachers taping students mouths and wondered if these teachers were able to skate by as did Michelle Rhee. The names are not meant to "out" these teachers in no shape or form. These names, the accusations are widely available. It is only meant to "out" Michelle Rhee.

In 2008, Pamela Dahnke was terminated for taping a student's mouth shut. She was an eighth-grade health and nutrition teacher at Battle Ground Middle School in West Lafayette, Ind. Did she get the same treatment as Michelle Rhee?

In 2009, Laura Gatlin, a first grade teacher in Cleveland County, Ark. was accused of taping students mouth and to the chair. Her lawyer's comment is here. Has she been afforded the same accolades and laughter as Michelle Rhee?

In 2006, in Katy, Texas, Jennifer Silva reportedly taped some the mouths of several students. When the superintendent got wind, he notified her he would recommend she was terminated. Why was she recommended for termination yet, Michelle Rhee is seen as the savior of education?

Just earlier this year, a teacher was accused of duct taping a student's mouth in Mishawaka, Ind. This student has Asperger's syndrome. The website, care2.com reported, "There are certainly many creative things that people do with duct tape. But using it on a child's mouth, and on the mouth of a child on the autism spectrum, is (serious understatement) not one of them." Does this feel as vehement about what Michelle Rhee did and will care2.com lead the charge to make sure that Michelle Rhee is no longer near students?

And in January 2008, a well-liked Driscoll School, Brookline, MA, science teacher, Christopher Huggins , is out of a job last week after allegedly duct-taping a 12-year-old girl's mouth during class. Michelle Rhee is not well liked. Why isn't she removed from the entire scene?

In 2009, a first grade teacher at Spaulding Elementary School, Emily Metcalfe, in Townsend, Mass., used duct tape on several students' mouths. The principal was quoted as saying, "The superintendent went on to say that the teacher may have thought at first this was a joke, but that there was a lack of professional judgment." Didn't Michelle Rhee show a lack of judgment?

I am in no way condoning, nor condemning what these teachers had done. They have every single right to be proven guilty, not to prove their innocence. That is how the American system works. But, does the punishment fit the crime? Especially in light of Michelle Rhee's acknowledgment of what she has done and the education reformers sweeping it under the rug? Do these teachers not deserve the same benefit of the doubt and second chance that Michelle Rhee has received? No one in this country is above the law!

What is especially galling to me is that no one -- not Oprah, not Bill Gates, not any of the high falutin' power brokers that either interview Michelle Rhee, work with her, or pal around with her -- will bring this abuse of children up with her.

This is all too chilling and reminds me, and for those who are old enough, of when Richard Nixon appeared with David Frost in 1977 when Nixon uttered those famous words: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-zucker/michelle-rhee-and-masking_b_801339.html

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

Like Charter Schools or not, You are Paying for them

From the Dallas Morning News

by Terrance Chea

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — As cash-strapped school districts lay off teachers and close campuses, publicly funded charter schools are flourishing and altering the landscape of public education.

Despite a painful economic downturn, the charter school movement is expanding rapidly across the country with support from the Obama administration, wealthy donors such as Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, and the highly publicized documentary "Waiting for Superman."

Charter schools typically receive a mixture of public and private money and operate free of many regulations that govern traditional public schools in exchange for achieving promised results.

Nationwide, less than 4 percent of public school students are enrolled in charters, but that number is expected to rise significantly because of increased financial and political support.

More than a dozen states loosened restrictions on charters over the past year for a chance to win a share of the federal $4.3 billion Race to the Top school reform competition.

The number of charter schools grew by 6.7 percent to 4,936 in 2009-2010 and is projected to increase by 7.5 percent in the current school year, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

The 2010-11 growth is expected to be dramatic in states such as Florida with a 12 percent increase, Illinois with a 14 percent rise and New York with a 20 percent jump, according to the association's projections.

"Families that have options are increasingly choosing charter schools over traditional schools," said Peter Groff, who heads the national association.

California saw a 15 percent increase, with a 115 new campuses despite budget woes that led to mass teacher layoffs and shuttered traditional schools, according to the California Charter School Association.

Many charter schools are boosting the academic achievement of disadvantaged students, but critics say charters siphon students and resources away from traditional public schools, result in greater racial segregation, block access to certain groups of students and operate without proper oversight.

"What we're seeing basically is an effort to impose deregulation and the free market into education," said Diane Ravich, an education historian at New York University. "The fascination with charters among philanthropists and Wall Street has diverted the attention away from tackling the hard problems of public education."

Charter schools are growing most rapidly in urban districts with struggling schools and large numbers of poor, minority students. In 16 districts, more than one in five public school students attend charters, with 36 percent in Detroit, 38 percent in Washington, D.C. and 61 percent in New Orleans, according to the national alliance.

Much of the growth is being driven by charter management organizations that have received multimillion-dollar grants from the Obama administration and foundations funded by philanthropists such as Gates, Charles Schwab, Eli Broad and Reed Hastings.

San Francisco-based KIPP, the Knowledge Is Power Program, plans to double its national network of schools to 200 over the next decade.

Aspire Public Schools, California's largest charter school operator with 30 campuses, plans to open as many as 45 new campus over the next decade, said CEO James Willcox.

The Oakland-based nonprofit, which offers kindergarten through high school, was recently named one of the world's 20 most improved schools systems — one of only three in the U.S. — by the consulting firm McKinsey and Co. after producing impressive results on standardized tests.

Aspire officials say nearly all of its students are accepted at four-year colleges, and most are their first in their families to attend. They attribute that high rate to smaller schools and class sizes, a longer school day and school year, and its relentless "College for Certain" culture.

"Our entire program from kindergarten all the way through high school is geared toward getting youngsters to go to college and get a college degree," Willcox said.

At ERES Academy, an Aspire K-8 school in Oakland, every classroom is named after a college and students eat in University Hall.

Jorge Lopez, a senior at California College Preparatory Academy in Berkeley, said he didn't think college was possible for him before he came to the Aspire-run high school. He's now poised to be the first in his family to get a college education.

"Upon coming here I found out that college is where you want to be at," said Lopez, 17. "My parents tell me it's an honor that I'm leading the family, that I'm being an example for them."

But not all charter schools produce strong academic results.

A 2009 study by Stanford University found that only 17 percent of charter schools performed significantly better than traditional public schools while 37 percent performed worse and 46 percent showed no big difference.

A 2010 study by the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project found that charter schools tend to be more racially segregated than traditional schools.

"Charter schools are publicly funded schools, and we need to make sure students of all backgrounds have access to them," said study co-author Erica Frankenberg, an education professor at Pennsylvania State University.

Oakland Unified School District has seen a major expansion of charters over the past decade, when it spent years under state control because of financial mismanagement. The district is now home to more than 30 charter schools.

Betty Olson-Jones, head of the Oakland teachers union, complains many charters recruit top students and get rid of poor performers, boosting the schools' test scores and saddling traditional schools with a disproportionate number of students with disabilities, behavior problems and poor English language skills.

"You end up with schools that are filled with kids that are really struggling," Olson-Jones said.

http://hosted2.ap.org/txdam/b6c334cfd6284371a1e338bf311d6c17/Article_2011-01-21-Charter%20School%20Boom/id-da93743e01034d408a74cadedf7366a3

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

The Education Narrative (rough draft)

There is an education narrative being rammed down the people’s throats by the powers-that-be. Prominent citizens like Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush and their proxies are telling it. Like most snake oil salesman they weave a smooth tale using cherry picked facts and figures and enticing sound bites and blurbs to get their way and in doing so have made teachers and their unions the boogey men of the story. Watch out parents they shout as they like wise make enticing promises.

The truth however is they are using cherry picked stats and figures to try and convince, make that to try and scare Joe and Judy public into believing the narrative that their children are getting a substandard education and that the future of America is at stake and that it is all teachers fault. If we could just get rid of five percent of the bad teachers we could have dramatic improvements but the teachers unions are trying to protect bad teachers. We want to give vouchers to all parents so they can have school choice but the teachers unions are against them. We want to reward the top teachers with merit pay, how can the unions be against more money for thier best members but they are. Our education ranking in the world has steadily dropped over the last quarter century it must be because we have bad teachers. Why can’t we be more like Finland? On and on they go. Well friends not since a snake convinced a naive young girl to take a bite of an apple has their been such a masterful con job been perpetrated.

Until the recent recession you couldn’t give a teaching job away as there were always openings. Does anybody remember how they were advertising in Canada and India to find teachers, does anybody remember the push to get people from the business world to enter the classroom? I do. Of course we want our best and our brightest in the classroom but you know what else we want, we want the willing to be there to. Are there teachers that should be replaced, yes of course there are just like there are people in every profession that would serve it best by not being in it. Unions however are not protecting bad teachers they are just making sure that teachers get due process and in my home town that only kicks in after they have proved themselves for three years. That’s right at any time during a teachers first three years at the end of one they can be let go. But say we did somehow identify and get rid of the worse five percent, not the five percent the admin doesn’t like because they more often than the worse suffer the consequences of speaking up or being innovative who would we replace them with?

Another stat the ant-teacher mongers like to throw out is that education draws just under a quarter of our top graduates that means the most of our kids are being taught by someone other than a teacher with a high grade point average. First I am not sure if straight G.P.A. should be a factor but why is this a bad thing. Are 23 percent of the nations top grads entering law enforcement, or medicine or business or any other field? I don’t think so and if the stat is right that means over a fifth or our supposed best and brightest are choosing education over the thousands and thousands of other careers out there. But instead of celebrating that it’s used as an indictment against teachers. Teachers can’t win at the top, not enough of the best grads enter education and they can’t win at the bottom, the unions are protecting bad teachers.
Then they compare us to industrialized countries like Finland that have zoomed past us in the international industrial rankings. This to must e the teachers and their unions fault they scream protecting all those bad teachers and resisting reforms. They don’t tell you that if we factor out kids that live in poverty our ranking zooms all the way to second and about the countries they are comparing us to. It’s true that Finland draws the vast amount of its staff from the top third of college graduates but the ed deformers fail to mention that teachers in Finland are paid substantially more than their American counterparts, there classes are very small, they play a role in policy and curriculum and are one of the most highly unionized groups around. Comparing teachers in both countries is not like comparing apples and oranges it’s like comparing apples to a five-course meal, with America being the apple.

What about vouchers? How can people who really care about children and education be against them after all they give parents the choice to do what they feel is best for their children. Sounds pretty seductive right especially in Florida where they are promising parent five thousand five hundred dollars. The problem is charter schools and their private school counter parts despite the fact that they can pick and choose who they allow in and don’t have to play by the same rules as their public school counter parts haven’t been found to do any better, in fact for the most part they are found to do the same or worse. Furthermore the universal voucher system will amount to welfare for the well off program as it siphons much needed money away from already cash starved public schools. We don’t get to pick our police, our fire department, our military our meat inspectors and so many other things but for some reason the powers-that-be will have you believe it is better to abandon public schools.

You want proof unions are against education reform those spinning the anti-teacher narrative ask. Well look at merit pay, how can they be against merit pay for the nations best teachers. The thing with merit pay is like school choice it sounds very enticing but like school choice often becomes no choice merit pay can be very misleading. The one-year I received merit pay I knew there were a dozen teachers better than me that didn’t. The one-year I didn’t receive merit pay I knew there were a dozen teachers worse than me that did. So often it comes down to whom the principal likes or whatever perception he has but worse than that it there is no relationship between those who receive merit pay and their children doing better.

The anti-teacher narrative has more holes in it than a colander but somehow it is gaining traction and teachers have gone from valued members of society to borderline pariahs holding the country back. Teachers who I remind you the vast majority work many untold and un paid extra hours, who donate their time and resources to other peoples children as often theirs wait in extended day or in front of the television why they take home papers to grade or work on lesson plans. Teachers who give so much and frankly throughout time have received so little have become the bad guys of the narrative while the policy makers, politicians absentee parents and children raised without a sense of respect or a willingness to work get a pass.

Furthermore it’s worse. Do you know where Mayor Bloomberg and Jeb Bush and many of those selling the anti teacher story sent their children? They sent them to private schools, which tout teachers experience and smaller class sizes as selling points, two things the ed deformers have recently been minimizing. Jeb Bushes family and Bill Gates have made millions and stand to make millions more on the education reforms they are selling (standardized tests and virtual, computer based, schools). Also do you know how many of the people selling the teachers union bad, teachers substandard story have been teachers and actually been in classrooms? Well of Florida Governor Rick Scott’s education team only one is a teacher and he works at a virtual school. Of the leaders mentioned in the opening only Michelle Rhee was a teacher and she came up through Teach for America which some have renamed Teach for a while because of the staggeringly high amount of participants who serve their two years and then leave. This is who is writing the education narrative, those that have had nothing to do with teaching and those that would seek to profit off of it.

Northeast Florida Schools jilted again

It’s funny how when you are rich people will listen to you even when you speak about subjects that didn’t make you rich. The thing is who doesn’t cringe when an actor or a singer gives their opinion about something political? Well I am cringing now, you see Bill Gates, he who made billions on computer software has thrown has hat into the education arena and people are listening, though I think it’s more because of the money he throws around rather than what he is saying.

He recently said when talking about teacher experience, why would I pay somebody more to cut my lawn just because they have been cutting lawns longer. That’s right folks to him kids are as important as having his lawn cut and teachers are the equivalent of the little black kid with chubby cheeks that I pay ten bucks to do so, and let me tell you I get what I pay for. Experience and advanced degrees have no place in Bill Gates world, they don’t matter at all. What do you think? Can you think of a place or a job where education and/or experience might matter?

Well Bill Gates has already sunk his hooks into Florida by giving Hillsborough County a 100 million dollar strings attached grant and now he seeks to expand his influence. His foundation will be here in Florida holding talks, they will be held in January in Tallahassee, Panama City, Gainesville, West Palm Beach, Orlando and Naples. They are being supported by Village Square, a nonprofit organization that promotes civility in public discourse, more so however if your way of thinking is on the right. Fair enough though right, we should all be talking about education even if our point of views don’t always sync up but did you notice what city was left off the map. If you immediately said Jacksonville you are right.

The foundation has decided to snub the 23rd largest school district in the entire nation and is unconcerned with what the 1.5 million residents of North Florida have to say. I guess they don’t have time for us what with visiting the huge metropolitan areas of Naples, Panama City and West Palm Beach. It’s also my guess the foundation, which will of course be giving its suggestions to the Governor, picked areas where the opinions they already have will be reinforced.

I think this is a bit shameful, why can’ they do one more or six more talks after all the foundation can afford it and their suggestions may influence what happens to children all throughout the state not just in those areas visited. That’s what I say, though since I am not rich, or an actor or a singer, just somebody who has been a public school teacher for a decade my opinion probably won’t carry much weight. After all, teachers experience don’t seem to matter not even when the subject is teaching.

Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher

Education's Trojan Horse

The Gates Foundation is already here in Florida and is seeking to expand it's influence. -cpg

By Julie Cavanaugh, Special Education Teacher in Red Hook, Brooklyn


The season of giving is upon us. In the month of December, most Americans find themselves ignited with a civic spirit and generously give of their time, their talent, and their treasure. At my little school in Red Hook, Brooklyn we aim to make giving a value that is present throughout the year. Our school, and hundreds of schools across New York City and the country, participate in the Penny Harvest, a Common Cents program.

The Penny Harvest is a program that is aimed at igniting the civic spirit of a new generation and teaches children about the importance of philanthropy. Students harvest pennies throughout the fall. Common Cents turns those pennies into dollars and the children turn those dollars into good deeds. Common Cents awards each school's "Student Roundtable" a grant. Roundtable students engage in a democratic process to identify local and global needs and design service projects and make donations to causes they, and their school as a whole, feel are important. Students at my school have assisted BARC animal shelter here in Brooklyn, they have created a certified bird habitat, and have started a GRRReen Campaign at our school, which includes holding an annual GO GRRReen festival to increase their community's environmental awareness.

The children in my school have certainly learned what philanthropy is through our partnership with Common Cents; we have been named a School of Excellence because, school-wide, our children engage in a myriad of service projects and programs, which ultimately empowers them to make a positive difference in their world. From my perspective -- as an urban educator -- empowerment is the most important element of a program that serves children and families who have historically been disempowered. All too often, decisions are made for subsections of our citizenry without their input; often, the decisions being made do not wholly benefit those they are intended for. If only we worked to empower those that have been so often left behind, we could engage in policy discussions that would move our society forward. Instead, we ignore the actual stakeholders, particularly when it comes to education policy, creating results that are often not beneficial to the intended targets.

As the saying goes, "Nothing about us, without us," and I love those who have added to the end, "...is for us."

Our students are well on their way to becoming engaged, and thoughtful citizens. They have learned that everyone has something to give, no matter how small. More importantly they have learned that giving is an act that reminds us all of our interconnectedness; that our efforts should be spent benefiting the many, not the few, and that when even one of our citizens suffers, we all suffer. The grown-ups who largely consider themselves philanthropists today, particularly edu-philanthropists, could use a lesson from my students.

From Gates, to Broad, to Bloomberg, edu-philanthropists have been pouring their time, talent and treasure into education. They tout themselves as education reformers, but, largely, their dollars are not simply good deeds. Instead, their gifts are thinly veiled attacks on our public education system. Edu-philanthropy is education's Trojan horse.

Edu-philanthropists cloak themselves in the slogan of reform and civil rights, they have gained access to our public education system with their wealth, and they seek to dismantle our public education system from the inside. They deliver shiny new trophies to poor communities in the form of charter schools, but all that glitters is not gold. Their covert operations seek to destroy unions with ideas such as merit pay, because their oligarchy cannot survive if there is a vibrant middle class of "commoners." With healthcare and pensions, who can question their authority? They insert ideas of 'choice' and 'accountability' with jingoistic appeals to freedom and opportunity, but these words are merely masks for "vouchers" and "data," which will further sort and separate our children, creating a more disparate system than we already have. Their ideas are born out of a free-market ideology that only reinforces the roles of privilege and subordination in our country, roles true believers in education seek to eliminate.

There is an obvious economic benefit for the privileged few to control our public education system. For one, they can privatize it and gain access to, in their words, the "untapped K-12 market." Secondly, by controlling the education sector, they can maintain the disproportionate distribution of wealth in our country.

Recently there has been push back from us "commoners," those of us who actually have children in, or teach in, the public education system. One of the greatest examples of this was the defeat of Mayor Fenty in Washington, D.C. Even in this case however, where the voice of the people whose children's education is at stake was so strong in rejecting the "reforms" of Fenty and Rhee, edu-philanthropists sat in waiting to make sure their ideas for education reform, with the dual carrot-and-stick of their millions in funding, stayed in place. Is it considered philanthropy when the targets of your gift giving are loudly saying, "No thanks!"?

This is a gift horse we should look in the mouth. Edu-philanthropists speak of education reforms that go against the ideals they uphold for their own children or the children of their peers. They speak of policies that limit the job security, wages, pensions, and health care of working folks while they sit on their millions. What may seem like a gift, is actually a sneak attack on our public education system.

Taken from the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-cavanagh/educations-trojan-horse_b_786589.html