Frizzle Sizzle had this comment on ICE-Mail:
"...in my last chapter elections I was the first at my school to expose the fact that Bill Gates' goal is to privatize our school system AND now tinker and alter tenure in our contract."
Well of course the chapter wouldn't know about Gates and the privatization movement if they read anything the UFT puts out. Gates is their partner. Their collaborator. Some Vichyssoise, anyone?
The UFT could be the great educator of the membership
and the public. But the leadership purposely doesn't connect the dots. Some people think they are stupid. Or bamboozled. Not so. They know exactly what they are doing. Collaborating in letting the air out of the teacher labor movement. Not that they like doing it. But they have no choice. No strategy for fighting off the data testing. Or the charters. Or the merit pay. No strategy at all. And no prospect for developing a strategy. So they are left with nothing more than a holding action and the bet they can hold onto power and get what they can out of using their control over the membership to get what they need for the top oligarchy.Susan O has an article from WAPO and a comment:
Ohanian Comment:
schools. This agenda includes For teacher "effectiveness," read "test scores." This is one more step in the Gates use of venture philanthropy, marching lockstep in the neoliberal agenda to corporatizedeprofessionalizing teachers. Under the neoliberals, control of schools shifts from teachers, parents, and communities to private foundations, corporations, and investors. Under neoliberals, public schools are a business, students are consumers. Teachers? They are lackeys operating at the will of the system stocked by principals who must become entrepreneurs. This money is dirty, buying the soul of a school and eating it alive.
Here are some excerpts from the WAPO article:
For the [Gates] foundation, a central player in school reform, the initiative reflects an evolution in strategy. Several years ago, it concentrated on breaking large high schools into smaller, more personal academic communities. That effort had mixed results. In a conference call, Melinda Gates, co-chair of the foundation, said she and Microsoft founder Bill Gates had discovered that innovation takes long-term commitment because school systems are often "entrenched" in their ways and teachers "siloed in their classrooms." "We have been in this work for almost a decade" she said. "We've learned a lot about what works. . . . Let's focus on the thing that actually matters the most, which is the teacher." (Gates serves on the board of the Washington Post Co.)
If you watched the Sat nite live opening where the Chinese Pres asks Obama to kiss him. "I like being kissed when someone is screwing me," he says as he bends over and assumes the position.
Can Mulgrew and the Unity leadership crew kiss a 100,000 or so working UFT members without getting chapped lips?
Bill Gates has hidden his rabid pursuit of Microsoft Corporation profits behind schemes for education "reform". The best thing he could do for the children of this country and their chance to be effectively educated is to stop plying them with his Zunes and Xboxes and stop pushing absurd levels of data collection done with Microsoft software on their schools.
ReplyDeleteGates likes to call America's public high schools obsolete. He’s half right. Our schools are becoming obsolete inside a system that has enriched him beyond all reason while millions of other human beings struggle just to survive. His obscene wealth in the face of desperate poverty in D.C. and around the world is a symptom of a deadly economic malady. His oil-dependent global economy is obsolete. It has begun to breakdown and will in time collapse and when it does the myth of the benevolent and wise Bill Gates will thankfully die with it.