Buying the So-called Ed Press: Bill and Melinda Drop a Half Million on Chalkbeat

Purpose: to inform low-income parents and parents of color in Newark, Detroit, and New York about K-12 education

Amount: $525,042

Sure -- to really "inform" low-income parents of color or to propagandize for ed deform policies of Bill Gates?

I remember back when I used to go to Gotham/Chalkbeat events when we raised questions about their donors the response was that Randi also gives them money and even that I had given them $50. Trying to equivocate what Randi and I might give with Gates alone makes the reporting more than suspect.

I think it important to understand and analyze what biased coverage is and Chalkbeat must be looked at as much as what they don't cover as what they do and how they do or don't do it. We know Gates is against opt out so watch CB coverage of that issue - it will be subtle how they lean in to Gates' issues. And you will never see a word of criticism about all the Gates failures in ed policy. We know Gates is not pro-Trump so we might see a more aggressive crit of Betsy DeVos than we saw about Duncan and King -- even though when you shake those trees a lot of the same crap comes out of the leaves.

Gates Foundation: How We Work

Grant

Chalkbeat, Inc.

---

Date: October 2016
Purpose: to inform low-income parents and parents of color in Newark, Detroit, and New York about K-12 education
Amount: $525,042
Term: 18
Topic: Global Policy & Advocacy
Program: United States
Grantee Location: New York, New York
Grantee Website: http://www.chalkbeat.org
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2016/10/OPP1159098

Bill and Melinda Gates' Faux Theories Exposed: Paving The Road to Hell — And Other Gates Foundation Initiatives

As Bill Gates sees many of his health and education initiatives go up in smoke -- oh, if only those billions had gone into reducing class size -- Daniel Katz joins other bloggers in ripping apart the basic premises under which Gates operates. (And let's never forget his best friend Randi.)

For instance, Melinda Gates makes this asinine statement:

It may surprise you–it was certainly surprising to us–but the field of education doesn’t know very much at all about effective teaching. We have all known terrific teachers. You watch them at work for 10 minutes and you can tell how thoroughly they’ve mastered the craft. But nobody has been able to identify what, precisely, makes them so outstanding.

Katz answers by pointing to just how much the field of education knows about effective teaching -- but those darn pesky kids and lousy school administration plus any number of factors get in the way.

 What does Mrs. Gates risk missing in her ten minute assessment?

• The lesson that worked very well in the first period but worked far less well in the third period.
• The day when the lesson plan was simply off base.
• The work that teacher did outside of the classroom determining what students knew, selecting teaching and learning strategies that would help them build upon that, figuring out what would help the teacher know the students had learned.
• ANY of the uncertainty in the previously described process and the necessity to pivot if that uncertainty disrupts the plan.
• How the teacher self assesses and with what information.
• The week when that teacher has sick children at home, cannot get enough sleep, and has little time to plan.
• The week disrupted by excessive standardized testing or mandatory field tests of examinations.
• ANYTHING, really, beyond being impressed by Razzle Dazzle without thinking about substance.

These points by Katz really resonate with me --- at times I thought I had the best of times as a teacher -- and a few hours later -- or even the next period - I was the worst. No one can tell me that I would not be a better teacher in a class of 22 than in a class of 30 - or that I was often a better teacher in the morning than in the late afternoon. That was why I tried to get schedules that piled up morning teaching. When we had late lunch at 12:30 if I had an afternoon prep I would go straight on from 8:40. After lunch I had to work so much harder to focus the kids --- the breaks broke the magic.

Paving The Road to Hell — And Other Gates Foundation Initiatives

Towards the end of last year, the Seattle Times provided coverage of the Gates Foundation’s report on the tenth anniversary of its global health initiative. After a decade of effort and a billion dollars invested, Bill Gates admitted that despite the investment he had been “pretty naive” about how long it would take to significantly improve public health outcomes in the developing world. Most notable was Gates’ admission that the problems in his approach were not merely ones about overcoming scientific hurdles, but rather they seriously underestimated the challenges of implementing highly technological “solutions” in countries where the majority of the population lack secure access to routine infrastructure which, in the words of Dr. David McCoy of Queen Mary University in London, are “the barriers to existing solutions.”
Both Peter Greene of the Curmudgucation blog and Anthony Cody of Living in Dialogue have written excellent pieces on this somewhat quiet but very important admission by Bill Gates.  Greene astutely notes that Gates’ realization of his limitations does not actually lead him to understand why his approach is flawed:

Gates wants to use systems to change society, but his understanding of how humans and culture and society and communities change is faulty. It’s not surprising that Gates is naive– it’s surprising that he is always naive in the same way. It always boils down to “I really thought people would behave differently.” And although I’ve rarely seen him acknowledge it print, it also boils down to, “There were plenty of people who could have told me better, but I didn’t listen to them.”
The non-success of Grand Challenges is just like the failure of the Gates Common Core initiative. Gates did not take the time to do his homework about the pre-existing structures and systems. He did not value the expertise of people already working in the field, and so he did not consult it or listen to it. He put an unwarranted faith in his created systems, and imagined that they would prevail because everyone on the ground would be easily assimilated into the new imposed-from-outside system. He became frustrated by peoples’ insistence on seeing things through their own point-of-view rather than his. And he spent a huge amount of money attempting to impose his vision on everybody else.

This is an important observation because it shows that there is a flawed perspective rooted at the heart of the Gates Foundation, and while the man and the institution may be able to recognize failures, they are not inclined to understand why they have failed.  Anthony Cody also recognizes this observation as he lines up quotes from the central figures at the Gates Foundation that demonstrate little regard for the knowledge about teaching held by teachers and wonders if the “humility” earned in Grand Challenges project will translate to humility about the foundation’s approach to education reform. 

Read Katz in full here and also see

Related

Gates' Money and Privacy Activism -- Opposition to Ed. Reform Hits the MainstreamIn "Activism"

Open Letter to President Obama -- You Are Listening to the Wrong PeopleIn "Activism"

What Education "Reformers" Do Not Understand About Teaching and LearningIn "Common Core"

Acievement First Concentration Camp Policies Supported by Gates Foundation

Actually, I would describe Achievement First more as a southern plantation circa 1850. But no one should be surprised that the Gates Foundation is based on a southern plantation mentality. I love it that they are so willing to connect themselves to Achievement First which exposes what Gates is all about. Really think about the AF name. "Achievement" before even the welfare of the child. But "achievement' really means achieving wealth for the gang running the operation.

In the final stages of making our film response to Gates supported "Waiting for Superman' we had the chance to interview former Achievement First parents. Leonie and I expected to do a quick 15 minute interview but instead were riveted for almost 2 hours of horror stories. A few days later I interviewed our pal Khem Irby (who has left us to cause trouble for ed deformers down in North Carolina). We only used a few minutes in the film but you can see all the interviews below. The video we shot was used by activist groups opposing AF in Rhode Island to defeat some of their plans to take over a swath of schools in Providence. (I'm posting links at the bottom of this post -- really watch some of these interviews and get your rage up.)

Pat Dobosz, a Brooklyn pre-k teacher in Williamsburg writes:

Here is an article about this despicable place. We had an AF charter at my school for about four years.

State education board to review Achievement First's discipline policies | The CT Mirror

This article by Sarah Darer really gets into the weeds of the Gates/AF/TFA connection. Oh, and TFA also has that southern pre-Civil War mentality too.
 

A Window Into Gates Foundation Dystopia 

http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/ctnj.php/archives/entry/a_window_into_the_bill_and_melinda_gates_foundation_dystopia/#.UbwIGekKDW4.facebook

by Sarah Darer Littman | Jun 13, 2013

Sarah Darer Littman

In 1948, sociologist Robert K.Merton coined the phrase “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.” “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come ‘true.’ The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning,” Merton wrote.

A database engineer friend helped me realize this phrase described the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in education reform during a discussion of the information I’d received under a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the foundation’s $5 million grant to the city of Hartford last December.
Here’s how it works: Mr. and Mrs. Gates have a dangerous combination of billions of dollars and strong ideas about how to reform public schools, despite having no background in education and sending their own children to private school. Their foundation commissions research to prove their ideas are correct. Based on research the Gates Foundation pays for, it makes grants to implement their ideas. In the grant documentation, the Foundation specifies: “The Compact City Partner . . . agree(s) to participate in research and information gathering efforts with the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington, which is currently engaged with the foundation to support the project.”
What the Gates Foundation means by “engaged with” is “funded by.” The CRPE also receives funds from the usual pro-charter school names, i.e. The Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Interestingly, it also receives funds from the U.S. Department of Education.
Lo and behold, CPRE produces “research” that supports the claims and beliefs of the Foundation. A prime example: the PR piece put out by Achieve Hartford in April: entitled, “Improving Student Outcomes and Opportunities in Hartford Public Schools.”
The “research” came with a warning: “This piece, however, is limited in that it cannot directly attribute any of the changes to any particular reform initiative. A more-detailed longitudinal analysis of progress made before and after the district initiated its reforms, and controlling for important factors, would be needed to more precisely and confidently attribute the changes to specific initiatives. Moreover, this piece has not yet undergone a thorough peer review.”

Yet armed with this non-peer reviewed data to back up their initial faulty assumptions, the Gates Foundation and its partners continue the reign of error. 

Witness how Hartford Schools Superintendent Christina Kishimoto used the “facts” in this non-peer reviewed research report to call for another Achievement First charter school in Hartford. 

Perhaps that’s because the Gates grant calls for “AF, HPS and JA to work together” to advocate for “equitable state funding” and “access to facilities” for public charter schools. In fact, the grant proposal even mentions “the district’s close relationship with state educational efforts.” That wouldn’t have anything to do with Achievement First’s relationship with Stefan Pryor, state Commissioner of Education and co-founder of the Amistad Academy, would it? It couldn’t possibly.

Another component of the grant is for the expansion of Achievement First’s Residency Program, with the aim of allowing for “the direct and explicit transfer of best practices” from the “high performing” charter to the “traditional district context.”
But since the grant was awarded, we’ve learned a bit more about Achievement First’s high performing methods and best practices.  Thanks to the New Haven Independent, we know that Amistad’s claim of 100 percent college acceptance actually means a 43 percent attrition rate from the students who started in 9th grade four years earlier.

We’ve also learned that Achievement First is indisputably ranked first in Connecticut by a huge margin in the suspension students of kindergarten age.

Amy Burns, a licensed professional counselor specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of children, adolescents, and families was skeptical of the Achievement First approach.

“As a general rule, we never put a child in time-out longer than about 1 minute per year of age, so these 90-minute or more time outs for kids would not be an effective punishment, especially with younger children. Developmentally speaking, if a kindergartner is put in this ‘break room’ all day, it is unlikely that they will remember what they did to get put in time out by the end of the punishment. It would be much more effective to use 5 minutes of isolation, as the child will not be reinforcing the undesired behavior,” Burns said. “What works even better than punishing inappropriate behaviors is rewarding positive behaviors. Using something like a token economy punctuated by appropriate use of time out will produce much better results than sending these kids away for the day.”

But even more disturbing to this mom of a young adult who went through school with an IEP was the news of how Achievement First mistreated students with special needs.

Earlier this week a new federal agreement was announced in settlement of a civil rights complaint filed by Greater Hartford Legal Aid Inc. on behalf of students with disabilities at Achievement First Hartford Academy Middle School. The complaint alleged that students with disabilities were spending too many hours out of the classroom for disciplinary reasons because of behaviors that were related to their disability.
In one particularly shocking story, “Johanna Rodriguez, whose eighth-grade son was included in the civil rights complaint, said her son was suspended and at home for most of last year, while this year she said he was suspended in school most of the time in a room set aside for students who are removed from class because of a behavior issue. For lesser offenses, he was given ‘re-orientation’ where he could remain in class, but had to wear a white shirt and other students were not allowed to talk to him.”

Charters like Achievement First call themselves “public schools,” yet they appear to be operating outside the statutes — like the state Department of Education’s Educator’s Code of Professional Responsibility, which states that an educator shall: Section 1 (K) Apply discipline promptly, impartially, appropriately and with compassion, and furthermore, lists under unprofessional conduct that an educator shall not Section (f) (D) Emotionally abuse students.”

Perhaps this is a consequence of Achievement First’s “close alliance” with Teach for America, whose “corps members and alumni play an integral role at Achievement First.” Whereas, district teachers must be certified, TFA corps members are considered too “elite for such niceties. They undergo a mere five weeks of training at TFA’s Summer Institute. Clearly, dealing with special education issues and the complexities of complying with the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) is not adequately addressed during that training.  

As school counselor Christina Ketchem pointed out: “Most of the time, special needs kids struggle to fit in anyway, so excluding them or singling them out publicly will only exacerbate any existing issues.” Burns called the white shirt shaming “wildly inappropriate” and wrote that “most of these children who have mental illness already feel isolated and a target of their peers; this is a modernization of the ‘dunce cap’ of education of old, and should be stopped immediately.”  

Alfie Kohn, a leading author and lecturer on education, is even more blunt.
“Anyone who punishes children by suspending them repeatedly, confining them, or stigmatizing and publicly humiliating them is either deeply ignorant about how to help kids or is more concerned with the adults’ convenience than with doing what’s in the best interest of the students. Or I suppose there’s a third possibility, which is that the school deliberately mistreats challenging kids in the hope that they’ll give up and withdraw, thereby allowing the school to weed out students with special needs so Achievement First can boast about its results. If the Gates Foundation is funding schools that engage in practices like this, that’s a strong argument for us to resist its involvement in education.”

A spokesperson for Hartford Public Schools responded to questions about the suspension rates Friday: “Hartford Public Schools doesn’t accept high suspension rates among elementary school students and has been working with Achievement First to assertively address the problem.” The Gates Foundation opted not to comment for this op-ed.

At next Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting in Hartford, there will be a second reading of a plan to create another Achievement First school in the city for 2014-15 — part of the Gates Foundation plan. Given what we have learned about Achievement First’s methods and “success,” is this really the most effective way to spend our education tax dollars, when teachers in the district schools are paying for their own photocopy paper and don’t have enough books?

Sarah Darer Littman is an award-winning columnist and novelist of books for teens. Long before the financial meltdown, she worked as a securities analyst and earned her MBA in Finance from the Stern School at NYU. 

Here are the videos embedded with 3 former Achievement First parents. You might want to watch them directly at Vimeo to get better results by clicking on the links in the titles.



Achievement First Charter School Parents Speak Out: Why they removed their children Part 1 from Grassroots Education Movement on Vimeo.



Achievement First Charter School Parents Speak Out: Why they removed their children Part 2 from Grassroots Education Movement on Vimeo.


Achievement First Charter School Parents Speak Out: Why they removed their children Part 3 from Grassroots Education Movement on Vimeo.


Charter School Parent Part 4 from Grassroots Education Movement on Vimeo.

Bill Gates Tells Us Why His High School Was a Great Learning Environment

Hi Norm,

I'm a regular reader.  I wrote the piece below for a chat board:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002807175 & someone told me I should send it to education bloggers, so I am.  Feel free to use it if you think it's of interest.

Bill Gates Tells Us Why His High School Was a Great Learning Environment

Bill's high school was Seattle's most elite private school, Lakeside, current tuition $28K (not including food, books, bus, laptop, and field trips).

A bargain, compared to some eastern private schools, but about equal to the median income of all US workers:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/20/us-incomes-falling-as-optimism-reaches-10-year-low_n_1022118.html

Lakeside has a lovely campus that looks kind of like a college campus:






- Faculty is nearly equally balanced between men & women (i.e. Lakeside pays well);
- 79% of faculty have advanced degrees;
- 17% are "faculty of color" (half the students are "students of color," cough, Asian)
- Student/teacher ratio: 9 to 1
- Average class size: 16
- High school library = 20,000 volumes
- 24 varsity sports offered
- New sports facility offers cryotherapy & hydrotherapy spas
- Full arts program with drama, various choruses, various band including jazz band, chamber orchestra

Bill says Lakeside was great because the teachers pushed the students to achieve (and when you push students to achieve, of course they do, especially when you challenge them to read your college thesis and your ten favorite books -- what student wouldn't rise to such a fascinating challenge...):

Rigor absolutely defined my Lakeside experience. Lakeside had the kind of teachers who would come to me, even when I was getting straight A's, and say: "When are you going to start applying yourself?" Teachers like Ann...One day, she said: "Bill, you're just coasting. Here are my ten favorite books; read these. Here's my college thesis; you should read it." She challenged me to do more. I never would have come to enjoy literature as much as I do if she hadn’t pushed me.

Bill says Lakeside was great because the education was relevant to real life:

Relevance also was a big part of my Lakeside education. The most common image of a bad education is a sullen kid, slumped in a desk saying: "When am I ever going to use this?"
The teachers here did everything to make their lessons matter....Years before other schools recognized the importance of computers, the Lakeside Mothers Club came up with the money to buy a teletype that connected over the phone lines with a GE time-sharing computer...

The school could have shut down the terminal, or they could have tightly regulated who got to use it. Instead, they opened it up. Instead of teaching us about computers in the conventional sense, Lakeside just unleashed us...

Lakeside introduced me to computers. They allowed me to teach a class in computers. They hired me to write a scheduling program. It didn’t have to work that way. They could have hired an outside computer expert to do the scheduling system. Teachers could have insisted that they teach classes on computing, simply because they were the teachers and we were the students...

Bill says Lakeside was great because of relationships:

Finally, I had great relationships with my teachers here at Lakeside. Classes were small. You got to know the teachers. They got to know you. And the relationships that come from that really make a difference...

Relationships include the ones developed in Lakeside's Global Learning Program. Bill thinks it's important that rich kids see how poor people in other countries live...poor neighbors in *this* country, not so much...

I’m really excited about the Global Service Learning Program, which will send Lakeside students on extended trips to developing countries to learn about the people and the issues they face...I believe if we could get the same kind of visibility for health problems around the world, so that rich people saw millions of impoverished mothers burying babies who died from causes we can prevent—we would insist that something be done, and we would be willing to pay for it...We need to see what’s happening—only then will we stop ignoring our neighbors and start helping them.

Bill says: I want as many students as possible, from as many different backgrounds as possible, to enjoy a Lakeside education.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/bill-gates-2005-lakeside.aspx


Bill is funding financial aid for talented students who can meet Lakeside's rigorous entrance requirements.

Bill is funding schooling for "ordinary" students too -- but what does Bill want for these "ordinary" students?

Bill says for ordinary students, class size doesn't matter:

http://www.alternet.org/story/149232/where_does_billionaire_monopolist_bill_gates_get_off_saying_bigger_class_size_and_fewer_teachers_is_the_education_solution/?page=2

Bill is funding Teach for America, because for ordinary students, teacher training and advanced degrees don't matter, 5 weeks training & a BA is plenty:

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2163§ion=Article

Bill is funding high-stakes testing, which stresses students, teachers and schools and crowds out class time & district money for actual teaching, the arts, and sports. Ordinary students don't need those things.

Bill is also funding Common Core, which will dictate a national curriculum to the extent that every school in the country will be on the same page of the same book or computer program at the same time. So no chance for students to be "unleashed," or go with the flow of the students' interests, as was Bill's lucky experience at Lakeside.

Once Common Core is instituted there will be even more standardized tests -- high-stakes standardized tests in every subject!! At least 20% more testing time!! And these tests will determine whether a student passes or fails, whether a school passes or fails, and whether a teacher has a job or not.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/04/the_common_core_the_technocrat.html

Bill thinks when schools and teachers fail his tests, the school should be dissolved, the teachers should be fired, and someone else should come in and give it a shot, perhaps in a charter school open to anyone on a lottery system.

Because stability and relationships aren't so important for ordinary students as they are for the kind of students who go to Lakeside.

Maybe the charter school can rent a church basement, or "co-locate" in a public school and push the public school students into classrooms located in supply closets or down in the boiler room.

Because decent facilities don't matter so much to ordinary students.

Bill Gates wants to keep a central database of all student information:

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/

Far from allowing students to be "unleashed" & learn through "relevant" experiences like Bill did, Bill Gates is funding Orwellian electronic devices which will monitor students' attention to his canned lessons, and cameras in classrooms to make sure teachers are sticking to the canned lessons:

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/06/wiring_our_students.html

Bill is going to make a lot of money on all the things he's imposing on ordinary students...but that's another OP. Suffice to say that Bill's schools won't be hiring students to write computer programs for them, or anything else. They'll be hiring private contractors for big bucks.

What can we conclude from the kind of education Bill supports at Lakeside and the kind of education Bill supports for ordinary students? Not only Bill, but all the rest of the elite prep-school educated "Education Deform" crowd?

I think it's pretty obvious.

 

 

Will UFT Renounce This Deal? Randi on the Board: Confidential Student And Teacher Data To Be Provided To LLC Run By Gates and Murdoch

UPDATED: 11PM - SEE FOLLOW-UP on Norms Notes:
How the feds are tracking your kid


I'm bringing this up again. This article by Leonie Haimson on Huffington is so disturbing given that Randi Weingarten has endorsed this and is on the board.

What can you do? BRING THIS UP IN YOUR SCHOOL. WHEN THE UNON SENDS IN A SHILL DEMAND THE UFT RENOUNCE THIS.

How about a reso at the DA? Then see if Mulgarten defends it. Bet he does.

Oh yes. And those slugs NY STATE ED/Regent Merryl Tisch and John King just love this.

Confidential Student And Teacher Data To Be Provided To LLC Run By Gates and Murdoch

 Leonie Haimson

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie-haimson/confidential-student-and-_b_1156701.html?mid=55

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the NY Board of Regents approved the state's sharing of student and teacher information with a new national database, to be funded by the Gates Foundation, and designed by News Corp's Wireless Generation. Other states that have already agreed to share this data, according to the NY State Education Department, include Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Louisiana and Massachusetts.

All this confidential student and teacher data will be held by a private limited corporation, called the Shared Learning Collaborative LLC, with even less accountability,  which in July was awarded $76.5 million by the Gates Foundation, to be spent over 7 months. According to an earlier NYT story,  $44 million of this funding will go straight into the pockets of Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch's News Corp and run by Joel Klein.

The Regents approved this project, despite the NY State Comptroller's veto this summer of the State Education Department's proposed no-bid contract to Wireless to build a state-wide data system, apparently because the state is not paying money to participate. The Comptroller -- and the public as well -- had opposed this contract, in large part because of privacy concerns and the involvement of Murdoch's company,  which is still embroiled in a major phone-hacking scandal in the UK.

Here is what SED writes, in explanation of their intent to share this confidential data:

The cost of the development of the SLC will be the responsibility of the SLC, not New York State. Consistent with the Comptroller's concerns regarding Wireless Generation, no New York State funds will be paid directly or indirectly to Wireless Generation or any of its subsidiaries for the development of these SLC services... As mentioned above, each state and school/district will retain sole ownership of its data. Only anonymous data will be used for SLC system development. As in any system development project, a limited number of authorized vendors will need to access actual educational data for system operation and improvements.

Including Wireless, one must assume. But this is not all. Here is more from the SED document:

The Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) is a consortium of states organized to help increase the benefits and long-term sustainability of data, curriculum, and instructional improvement initiatives. The SLC is facilitated by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and has received initial funding from the Carnegie Corporation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Participating states include Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Massachusetts.
A primary purpose of the SLC is to help promote the efficient expenditure of taxpayer funds by coordinating the efforts of multiple states to provide for the common needs of all participating states, including shared infrastructure and services that integrate, deliver, and display educational data and curriculum resources for educators, students, and families. Legally binding agreements will ensure that each state's data remain separate and distinct from the data of all other states...

Along with  Wireless, some of the other companies involved will be two consulting companies: Alvarez and Marsal, who were behind the disastrous reorganization of NYC school bus routes in the winter of 2007, and McKinsey, which led the first reorganization of the NYC Department of Education in 2003, which included dissolving the community district structure (contrary to law) and totally ignoring any parent input.
Here is an excerpt from a Gates' fact sheet about this project:

In addition to making instructional data more manageable and useful, this open-license technology, provisionally called the Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI), will also support a large market for vendors of learning materials and application developers to deliver content and tools that meet the Common Core State Standards and are interoperable with each other and the most popular student information systems.

In other words, companies will be making more money off our kids' test scores.
Meanwhile, it is not reassuring that the Gates document says that "the long-term governance model" of this national database "is still in development."
They add a standard disclaimer, that "Designing protections for student privacy will be addressed throughout the development of the system, and data access and usage models will be designed to support compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and other privacy laws" without any assurances of how this will be achieved.
SED adds:

The SLC is making plans for its long-term governance, including the protection of data privacy and security; the development of a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization structure; and the articulation of a business model for long-term fiscal sustainability. This work will be guided by participating states and informed by input from a panel of expert advisors, including Cheryl Vedoe, President and CEO of Apex Learning; David Riley, President of the Alembic Foundation and an open source technology expert; Dr. Michael Lomax, President and CEO of the United Negro College Fund; Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers; Michael Horn, Co-founder and Executive Director for Education at Innosight Institute; and Andrew Rotherham, Co-founder and Partner of Bellwether Education Partners.

I wonder how many of those organizations receive funding from Gates.
Where are the independent experts on privacy, and even more importantly, the input of parents, who really should be allowed to opt out of this national database?

Follow Leonie Haimson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/leoniehaimson

Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/. And make sure to check out the side panel on the right for important bits.

"No Excuses" Bill Gates Makes Excuses for His Ed Deform Failures

Do I need to remind you of the rousing reception our own 800 plus Unity Caucus delegates to the AFT convention last year in Seattle gave Bill Gates while booing and hooting at the people who walked out?

• THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
• JULY 23, 2011

Was the $5 Billion Worth It?

A decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks teachers, charters—and regrets.

http://on.wsj.com/nKjGSO

NYC Teacher and former GEM activist Seung Ok comments

It's interesting how Gates seems to give every excuse in the book for why he "failed" to drastically improve academic achievement despite the time and money spent on his mission.

His first excuse is that compared to the cumulative 600 billion dollars in government spending on public schools, he only had 5 billion to spend. Of course, he is talking as if that 5 billion was equally scattered among all the public schools in the United States. We know that his small school models had enough funding and opportunity to test whether his experiment would work, which by his own admission, did not meet his standards.

Then he and the writer of the article suggest that it was the powerful teacher unions that thwarted the success of Gates foundation initiatives. But later on, even Gates admits there seems to be no correlation between student achievement and the strength of unions in particular states. Although suprisingly, the two states he mentioned as being strong union states, Massachusetts and New York, are ranked # 2 and #5, respectively by NAEP results in student performance.

If it sounds like a man who is grabbing at straws, he is. He admits as much when talking about measuring teacher effectiveness. I was slightly embarassed for him, when he mentioned the movie, "To Sir, With Love" as an inspiration for his new initiative in taping teachers in real classroom settings. You don't see the president of the United States saying," I watched the movie Saving Private Ryan", and then proceed to discuss how the war in Afganistan can be won. What presidents usually do is to talk with military experts, diplomatic advisers, academics, political advisers, etc.

But not this guy - he wants to watch hours and hours of tape on military engagements in the mountains of Afganistan and write a report on how soldier effectiveness can be rated. The thing is, if he were really a scientist, I'd say fine - but he isn't one really. What he is - is a businessman. Unfortunately, what business knows about computer chips and factory output doesn't translate into the complex lives of human beings.

So what is Gates thinking, that through extensive studying he can produce a script? If student A yawns, then teacher Does B, then student A goes to Harvard. Certainly teachers know there are a variety of ways to redirect a students attention back to a lesson. But we also know, that no single method may work on the same student on successive days. We also know that there are a thousand other factors affecting a student's attention span - hunger, problems at home, lack of glasses, ADD, abuse, neglect, peer pressure, depression, anxiety, illness, etc. - most things things that the video camera will unlikely catch.

But teachers welcome any new insight into practices that may make our jobs easier. If our students perform well, they are happier, and are nicer to us. It may be hard for Gates to accept, but most teachers - for some inane reason - do measure their happiness at their jobs by the performance of their students. This is why areas with low academic performance are also known as hard-to-staff districts. Unfortunately, the teachers who are dedicated enough to stay, are punished by the likes of Gates and Bloomberg with ridicule and closure.

And as far as KIPP charter schools being an inspiration - maybe Gates should put on the scientist cap for a second and try to figure out what is the X factor - the "independent variable" - the one thing that is different from the control group (public schools). Well, any budding scientist knows that conclusions are invalid when there is more than one difference between the two groups. Now we know that charter schools have a self selected sample of students with motivated and involved parents. We also know they "engourage" students they deem disruptive or having learning disabilities to transfer to public schools. Even though most charter schools have non-unionized teachers - is seems that watching these teachers is as unilluminating to Gates as watching Sidney Potier's character in To Sir, With Love.

So please, Mr. Gates, get out your popcorn and your notepad and please do write up a lab report for the rest of us. And a personal pedagogical request - I've always been stumped by the appearance of doodling that occurs on desks - especially in the back rows. I'm very interested in knowing whether they tend to occur in the beginning, middle, or end of the period. Thank you.

Gates Report Touting "Value-Added" Reached Wrong Conclusion

Gee, expect an honest accounting from anything associated with Bill Gates? This comes from Susan Ohanian and is worth reading. Also check out my piece on value-added in the Indypendent, which seems to have gotten a number of hits beyond the usual. (My Article on Teacher Value-Added Data Dumping in The Indypendent.)

Susan Notes: http://susanohanian.org/show_research.php?id=392

NOTE: After reading my introduction here, please click through to the National Education Policy Center site. Rothstein's review reads better there. I post it  here, for historical purpose. My intent, as always, is to keep a record of assaults on public schools. But go read it at the National Educational Policy Center site. They are doing excellent work on the behalf of public schools, and we want their "hits" to soar.

In a wowser of a technical review, Rothstein finds that The Gates Foundation study on teachers' value-added performance "is an unprecedented opportunity to learn about what makes an effective teacher. However,"there are troubling indications that the Project's conclusions were predetermined." [Emphasis added.] This, of course, comes as no surprise to teachers across the land, but it's good to have a respected scholar, somebody with no horse in the race, say it. Rothstein finds:

In fact, the preliminary MET results contain important warning signs about the use of value-added scores for high-stakes teacher evaluations. These warnings, however, are not heeded in the preliminary report, which interprets all of the results as support for the use of value-added models in teacher evaluation.

And more:

The results presented in the report do not support the conclusions drawn from them. This is especially troubling because the Gates Foundation has widely circulated a stand-alone policy brief (with the same title as the research report) that omits the full analysis, so even careful readers will be unaware of the weak evidentiary basis for its conclusions.5

Rothstein characterizes the Gates report conclusions as "shockingly weak" and points to how the part they released to the press hid this weakness.

Is it any surprise that the Gates study doesn't even bother to review existing research literature on the topic? When one's results are "predetermined," (Rothstein's term), such a review would, of course, be a waste of time.

AND "[T]he analyses do not support the report's conclusions. Interpreted correctly, they undermine rather than validate value-added-based approaches to teacher evaluation."[emphasis added]

Review of: Learning About Teaching
by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
December 10, 2010
Reviewed by Jesse Rothstein (University of California, Berkeley)
January 13, 2011

Summary - MORE http://susanohanian.org/show_research.php?id=39

Check out Norms Notes for more on this issue.

Value-Minus for Bill Gates

David Pogue writes on tech in Thursday's NY Times:

With the money Microsoft has spent on failed efforts to design hardware, you could finance a trip to Mars. Its failures make up quite a flop parade: WebTV. Spot Watch. Ultimate TV. Ultra Mobile PC. Tablet PC. Smart Display. Portable Media Center. Zune. Kin phone. If this were ancient Greece, you’d wonder what Microsoft had done to annoy the gods.

And then there's this: Office for Mac Isn’t an Improvement

Office 2011 for Mac, the first new version of Microsoft's software suite in several years, is disappointing.

So, isn't this the same guy who is telling everyone how to run the nation's schools? He looks familiar. I think I ran into him hanging out with Randi in Seattle at the AFT convention.

Oh, Valerie!

Every day I check my fabulous blog roll. I look up and an hour (or more) has passed and the item I was going to blog about has turned to mush. So I often end up copying and pasting links.

Thus, my deterioration as a blogger with something of his own to say. Everybody else seems to be saying it first. And better.

Today, Valerie Strauss at The Answer Sheet, has such a delicious post that I have printed it out, shredded it and sprinkled the pieces all over my morning toast. Mmmm, Mmmm, Good!

Here are just a few tidbits from How billionaire donors harm public education to wet your appetite:

Today the foundation set up by billionaires Eli and Edythe Broad is giving away $2 million to an urban school district that has pursued education reform that they like. On Friday a Florida teacher is running 50 miles to raise money so that he and his fellow teachers don’t have to spend their own money to buy paper and pencils, binders (1- and 2-inch), spiral notebooks, composition books and printer ink.
Together the two events show the perverted way schools are funded in 2010.
-----
Very wealthy people are donating big private money to their own pet projects: charter schools, charter school management companies, teacher assessment systems.
-----
What this means is that these philanthropists -- and not local communities -- are determining the course of the country's school reform efforts and which education research projects get funded. As Buffalo Public Schools Superintendent James A. Williams said in an interview: "They should come out and tell the truth. If they want to privatize public education, they should say so.”
-----

That none of their projects is grounded in any research seems not to be a hindrance to these big donors. And they never try to explain why it is acceptable for them to donate to other causes -- the arts, medicine, etc. -- without telling doctors and artists what to do with the money. Only educators do they tell what to do.
-----
[$2 million] is the same amount of money that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave away earlier this year to a company simply to market the education film “Waiting for Superman,” which portrays a distorted idea of the root causes of the problems facing urban school districts as well as the solutions.
-----
Surely these philanthropists think they are helping. But they don't understand education and have been somehow led to believe that "the answer" is specific and around the corner: a longer school day; a longer school year; charter schools; technology; standardized tests in every subject; assessing teachers by standardized test scores; for-profit education; training new college graduates for five or six weeks as teachers and then sending them into the toughest schools in America.
The fact is that there is no strong research to show that any of those elements will do much to help education, and many will actually hurt.
-----
let’s not imagine for a minute that the millionaires and billionaires giving out all this money are doing anything other than making it harder to fix the public schools that America needs.

Now on get over there and read the whole thing.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/how-billionaire-donors-are-har.html#more

Commentary on Mike Winerip Column - Updated

Update Aug.12, 8am: Susan Ohanian gets into the people running Teach Plus.

Mike Winerip's must read regular Monday ed column - this one was another full of food for thought - (Lesson Plan in Boston Schools: Don’t Go It Alone) touched on what looks like a good thing - on the surface. Even my wife who barely notices ed stuff commented that it seems like a good idea to bring in teams of experienced teachers in schools being redesigned. So let's do a little parsing:

Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest-performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the $3.4 billion in federal grant money.
From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most. In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around — the teachers — and not always fair. Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don’t know the old staff.

Yes, the evils of Race to the Bowels of Hell. One of the themes of the article is that many experienced teachers don't want to go to these turnarounds.

Asked about applying to one of the city’s 12 turnaround schools, Lisa Goncalves, a first-grade teacher with seven years’ experience, said, “I’d be hesitant to go alone.” 

Said Celine Coggins, the chief executive of Teach Plus, which developed the idea and is financed by the Gates Foundation: “I think teachers want to know they’re not going into a school alone as a hero.”

 Bong! Bong!! Warning bells going off - THE GATES FOUNDATION. We know things like reducing class size can't be part of this solution.

So here is their supposed solution to the problem turn arounds that dump out the old and end up with scads of newbies.

And that is the simple idea behind a new program that is being used to staff three of the turnaround schools in Boston: you don’t go alone. Rather than have the principal fill the slots one by one, the Boston schools have enlisted the help of a nonprofit organization, Teach Plus, to assemble teams of experienced teachers who will make up a quarter of the staff of each turnaround school come fall. The teams will spend two weeks working together this summer. While teaching a full load, they will serve as team leaders for their grades and specialty areas like English immersion. They will work 210 days versus the normal 185 and get paid $6,000 extra a year. On average they have eight years’ experience.

I love this line:

“It’s like jump-starting a culture at these schools,” said Carol R. Johnson, Boston superintendent of schools.

Right Ms. Johnston. Follow the Gates and ed deform mantra: "it's about changing the culture of the school, not inadequate resources" and you will end up where all the other Gates initiatives are ending up.

Well, here is what I told my wife. It won't work."What would you do," she asked?

"I'd bring in the team but leave the old staff in place. See what happens if you increase the resources of the school by say 20%. Why not? Billions are being tossed down the toilet. Let Gates fund that. But he won't. Because success would prove the ed deform plan to be as false as George Washington's teeth.

CORE and Unity on Charter Schools - Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Chicago-based Lee Sustar, who I got to hang with at the press table at the AFT convention, does a penetrating analysis of the AFT convention – and links to reports from George Schmidt's Substance, Ed Notes and Leonie's HufPost article on Bill Gates, "The Most Dangerous Man in America".

Lee's piece is long but well worth reading. Lee writes for the Socialist Worker, associated with ISO (International Socialist Organization). We have been working closely with a number of ISO teachers here in NYC.

Lee goes beyond the Bill Gates issue and touches on the major Weingarten sell-outs in Colorado and beyond. This is information every single one of you should share with every single colleague in your school and beyond. Just send them a link to this ed notes post.

Before you delve into it, I want to highlight the area that I have been emphasizing – the flash points between the two big caucuses - Chicago's CORE and New York's Unity.

Lee writes:

While not formally part of the opposition--CTU President Karen Lewis joined the union's ruling Progressive Caucus and won election as an AFT vice president--there were frictions between the Chicago delegation and Weingarten's home union local, the United Federation of Teachers in New York City.

The main disagreements were over convention resolutions on charter schools--where the Chicagoans wanted to call for a moratorium on charters as a form of privatization, the New York delegation insisted on restating the AFT's support for charter schools as a matter of school choice, and prevailed.

For the moment, the debate over charters, teacher evaluation and merit pay may fade to the background as the Chicago teachers gear up to fight the threat of layoffs. But the AFT's pursuit of partnership even as teachers are under their greatest attack in decades will inevitably lead to a struggle over the future of teacher unionism.

Read the above carefully and connect the dots to the story on the firing of the 10 key teachers at the Merrick Charter School in Queens that were trying to organize for the UFT. This charter school is founded by the head of the NY State Senate Malcolm Smith, who I bet the UFT has endorsed in the past and maybe even is endorsing again - he has no opposition so it is a mute question. The UFT has a press conference today at 1pm on this issue. See our updated post from last night:

Malcolm Smith founded charter school fires UFT teachers- Mulgrew threatens law suit

It seems the UFT would be going wild in Albany over this outrage, calling for Smith's head. But I bet they are too timid to do this. So a law suit is all they can threaten.

So how does this connect, aside from exposing the bankrupt policy of the UFT's total focus on political action?

Chicago/CORE called for an moratorium on charter schools at the AFT convention because they undermine public schools.

The AFTUFT/Unity gang supports charters along with a policy of organizing charter school teachers. How is that working out so far? Chicago people have pointed to how few charters have been organized and also point to how even when they are, there are individual contracts signed, which dilutes the power of a big union. Another bankrupt strategy of the UFT/AFT.

I was asked last night by a parent activist if the UFT had issued a press release or has any notice of the press conference and I said I only knew about it from her.

"Why not," she asked?

"Because they are very nervous these firings will kill off any organizing they are doing as charter school teachers realize the UFT has no real ability to protect them from retaliation. So the UFT is doing a semi-public relations gambit and threatening a law suit which can take a bit of time and do no good to the teachers who were fired." This entire thing can turn out to be a major PR disaster for the UFT/AFT.

The Merrick situation must be sending a chill in a very hot July down the spine of the UFT/AFT strategy because it is in the belly of the beast - with heavy Democratic black politicians associated with the firings. By the way, the charter school is managed by for profit Victory Schools which just hired Michael Duff away from the DOE. Victory also took a pound of flesh from another Malcolm Smith founded school in Rockaway - Peninsula Prep. Rockaway's local paper, The Wave, has been claiming that the closing of Beach Channel HS was related to a land grab by Smith for his charter.

The NY Times did a major front page expose on the Floyd Flake/Smith/Greg Meeks scams a few weeks ago.

Make sure to check out the Resolutions Chicago suggested at the AFT:

Chicago Teachers Union Resolution at AFT Convention

I usually include entire articles here for those too lazy to link or with slow networks. But I'm saving some scrolling space on the blog on the assumption that you all will read every word of Lee's article. There will be a high stakes test to follow.

The wrong partner for our schools

Lee Sustar looks at the implications of the "partnership" between American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

July 22, 2010

http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/22/wrong-partner-our-schools

Bill Gates at the AFT - 1984 - UPDATED

UPDATE: July 17 2pm

This comment from TFA Friend... This comes from 1984? Wow, I wasn't even born yet. -- made me think I have to do some background on the historical perspective of the Orwellian year 1984 and the brilliance of the Apple commercial in that context - an attack on the corporate culture of IBM - Gates and Microsoft were just a short time away from replacing IBM as the monopoly power. There is so much irony in that commercial, which was shown only once at the Super Bowl. It was the first shot in Apple's introduction of the mouse and the graphical interface on the MAC - revolutionary. More irony in that Gates copied all the ideas from the Mac for Windows - another term for the graphical interface. So the idea to use that commercial to parody the Gates appearance at the AFT seems magical.

Reminder to the younger gen - Orwell wrote "1984" in 1949 pointedly directed at the totalitarian regimes - Hitler, Stalin, etc . and how they controlled the minds of people. When we actually reached 1984, the corporatization was becoming more of a threat, as we have seen in education.

I may put up a longer historical retro this weekend on Norms Notes and link back here.



July 17, 1am
The brilliant idea was hatched over dinner Sunday night in Seattle with George Schmidt and some CORE members — to use the famous 1984 Apple Super Bowl commercial, an intro to the Macintosh and a takedown of IBM and Microsoft, to parody Bill Gates' appearance at the AFT convention where Unity Caucus drones cheered him on while a small band resisted. What a perfect metaphor for what occurred. Monday AM I emailed David Bellel with the idea and voila, by the time I got home Tuesday morning he had it ready. A few refinements on my end and here it is. All you Gates Windows supporters, come on over to the Mac and see how easy all this stuff is to do. Enjoy!




URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYQzoDy_ocA

12th Russian in Spy Probe Was Microsoft Employee

Truth stranger than fiction? You just can't make this stuff up. Or can you?

If the teachers at the convention had any idea how much money Gates has put into developing non-unionized charter schools

There has been much ado about something over the Gates appearance at the AFT convention, which Ed Notes covered along with Chicago-based Substance (more than a little bit of fun hanging with George Schmidt for 5 days - and it was an honor to have one of the newly elected CTU officers tell me we are two of a kind. Here is a link to a piece on the Substance site a few days before the convention

Praising New Orleans for busting the New Orleans union. Attacking Houston public schools while praising KIPP's anti-union charter schools... Why should this man address the AFT convention Friday? Bill Gates in his own words in a June 29, 2010 Chicago speech

By John Kugler - July 6th, 2010

Two weeks before his scheduled speech to the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers, billionaire Bill Gates was in Chicago to address the The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (http://www.publiccharters.org). The meeting, . . . More

Read the other pieces as they come up at Substance.


Sharon Higgins (The Perimeter Primate), who came through long distance from Oakland to help prep the Gates leaflet - Bill Gates- Vulture Philanthropist: A Trojan Horse in the AFT Hours (download the pdf.) at the AFT convention sent this comment. Let's point out that Sharon is NOT a teacher (for those ed deformers who think only rank and file teachers are critical) but an activist parent who has been so supportive. Sharon had cut out about a third of my usual verbiage. We may send her all our leaflets to knock off the wordiness. (The leaflet did get quoted by a right-wing think tank. (Gates Leaflet Makes News.)

The Perimeter Primate has left a new comment on your post "AFT Gates- California teacher chastises Randi for ...":

If the teachers at the convention had any idea how much money Gates has put into developing non-unionized charter schools, and that his vision includes an extreme reduction in the membership -- and power -- of their union, they might not have been so willing to cheer for him.

But like most Americans who aren't studying what is really going on, I'm sure 99.9% of the teachers were uninformed and clueless. They behaved like the people they are: typical Americans who were super-excited to see a famous celebrity. Seeing Bill Gates in person was the thrilling part of the convention that they later told their families about.

As an urban public school parent, supporter of teachers, and pro-public school activist, I believe that the larger concerns the resisters have are perfectly valid and deserve to be acknowledged and discussed -- at a venue other than in blogs. The opponents of today's "ed reform" desire to be heard but are constantly being ign ored and shut out. They aren't wealthy enough to pay Charlie Rose to do a five-part series on their side of the story, like Eli Broad can.

Just because the resisters are fewer in number at this time, does not make their concerns any less valid; I suspect they are going to turn out to have been the bellwether.

Bill Gates is an unelected individual who has been manipulating public policy from behind the scenes by making use of his extreme wealth. His lack of willingness to engage in a transparent, public debate with people who oppose what he is doing -- and who do have legitimate opinions, concerns, as well as data and historical accounts to present -- is what makes it necessary for the resisters to react in a loud and angry way.

It appears to me that Weingarten is aiding and abetting Gates' undemocratic ways.

If Bill Gates is truly interested in doing what's best for America's public school future, he should purchase one hour of pr imetime airtime and present a show featuring himself debate Diane Ravitch.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

There is a lot more stuff flying about Gates' appearance. NYC Educator has been doing one superb piece after another - go look at them all over the last 10 days or so. Here is a goodie:
Technical Difficulties and another on the Randi/Unity/AFT slavish bowing to Gates: We're Havin' a Party. There are many teacher comments of outrage at Randi's actions.

Nate G a member of CORE/Chicago tweeted that Randi did some comparison to Gandi to justify Gates appearance at the Illinois state breakfast: Twitter feed on Gates appearance at AFT convention

Leonie did a powerful piece at Huffington: most dangerous man in America.

And followed up on her listserve with:suggestion for all and question to teacher re Gates' comments

Gary B. laid waste to Gates and the DOE with humor at the NYC Parent blog: The Eleventh Agent

And of course there's the great David B photoshop job that captures the essense with Randi (Eve) tempting Adam (AFT teachers) with the Gates apple. - Randi the Temptress.

Prepare yourself. Parse the language of Gates, even in this speech which he moderated somewhat for the audience. Gates' end game is to tie your salaries to the performance of your kids.
Go forth and read it all. Everything you can. Prepare yourself to battle the Unity machine scum who will invade your schools and will justify the entire scenario. Pass around the videos I made to your colleagues. I still think our union leaders are the real Trojan Horses.

The Underbelly: Teacher Pay Linked to Student Evaluations

"If I were a veteran teacher in Hillsborough, I would take to the hills, now!" Leonie Haimson


There was much talk and excitement post Gates speech about Bill Gates and the AFT Innovation Fund. Hillsborough was a major point of contact - or attack. Read Leonie's post carefully to see where this is headed. Pay scales based on the results on tests. It is worth checking out Valerie Strauss' posts at WaPo.


I also have some links to Ed Week and EIA from AFT and NEA - though as always, EIA is anti-union and Ed Week's Sawchuk has to be parsed.

My huffington post piece has been reprinted by Valerie Strauss and is in her WaPost blog today:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/bill-gates-troubling-involveme.html

please go there and leave a comment!

See also in today's Post the article below; which sort of proves my point.

Since January 2008, more than 250 Gates grants have targeted causes such as charter schools, testing research, data systems, science and math education and common academic standards...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has recruited some key aides from the charity, described the foundation as "one of many stakeholders really interested in seeing things get better. I appreciate their commitment and stick-to-itiveness. They're in this for the long haul."

So the Gates foundation is one of the key stakeholders; but where are public school parents? Nowhere to be found.

The Wapost reporter goes into length about the new Gates-supported teacher eval system in Hillsborough:

Every year, teachers here will be evaluated on a formula based on student achievement gains (40 percent), principal observation (30 percent) and peer observation (30 percent). By 2013, a four-tier pay scale will take effect that will reward high performers regardless of their academic degrees or years of experience -- a major break from precedent. Veteran teachers will be allowed to remain in the seniority-based pay scale or opt into the new one. New teachers will not have a choice and will be subject to more rigorous scrutiny before gaining tenure.

I predict the system will be totally unreliable; as based 40% on test score gains, (which fluctuate wildly from year to year, and are reliant on many factors out of the teachers' control. ) Only 30% will be based on peer evaluation, by full time teacher"evaluators" expert in using "data", and none on the views of parents and/or students, who obviously don't count in these people's minds.

And as all merit pay schemes have shown so far, it will be an awful waste of money and probably wreck morale as 20 year veterans will see their incomes slide up and down.

Also see this, not from this piece but another; http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/tenured-or-not-hillsborough-targets-weak-teachers/1083411

"Hillsborough officials told the foundation they expected to fire at least 5 percent of the district's 8,500 tenured teachers each year for low performance, once a new evaluation system is established. ....With more precise evaluations, they predicted rating at least 15 percent of all teachers as "performing well below expectations" and in need of further support or dismissal."

If I were a veteran teacher in Hillsborough, I would take to the hills, now!

Leonie Haimson

AFT Gates- California teacher chastises Randi for actions at Gates Protests

AFT Gates- Randi chastised for actions by California teacher



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkSSSYQuIcs

Video - Bill Gates at the AFT: Bringing in a Trojan Horse

Who is the real Trojan Horse?

Here is a rough video of low quality I put together very quickly. First a small demo outside before the speech, then Randi's intro of Gates to rousing cheers, the most vociferous from most of the 800 Unity Caucus people who were there on our dues, the walkout to Unity led jeers and the song na-na-hey-hey-goodbye, selections from Gates' speech with some commentary from me, and the final demo outside as people left. Here is the direct link if it is slow loading:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6Ezri0pVOg