The Gates Foundation Exposed. Part II

In Part I, we discussed the size and scope of the Gates Foundation, and it's subjective approach to reform. In this part we'll take a closer look at his current effort to promote corporate education reforms.

Gates is now moving on to his next article of faith in his quest to reform public education - attacking teacher seniority and professional education requirements. If it's not the school structure, it must be the teacher to blame goes the new thinking.

The Gates agenda is an intellectual cousin of the Bush administration's 2002 No Child Left Behind law, which required all public schools-though not individual teachers-to make "adequate yearly progress" on student test scores. Some opponents of No Child Left Behind questioned its faith in data; are scores too narrow a gauge of how well kids are learning? Gates sees nothing wrong in relying on quantitative metrics. "Every profession has to have some form of measurement," he said in a late June interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. "Tuning that, making sure it's fair, getting the teachers so they're enthused about it" are the keys.

After the Small Schools Initiative debacle, Gates hired a new leader, Vicki Phillips, who in turn hired Tom Kane. Kane had authored a study using high stakes testing results, which concluded that "Teachers who ranked in the bottom quarter after their first two years in the classroom should be fired."

Gates, with this flawed study in hand, set about deploying his checkbook to cash strapped school districts prepared to take a gamble. One such district is Hillsbrough County Public Schools in Florida. Hillsbrough agreed to, among many other provisions, "Empower principals in the recruitment and dismissal of teachers based on performance".

The corporate reform doesn't stop there however, the distrcit also hired 2 outsiders, at some expense to assist with the 7 year reform implementation

The new positions being considered today will cost $223,202 in salaries and benefits for two years; a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation would pay for about half that, while the school district would pick up about 25 percent. The other 25 percent would be paid by The Broad Foundation, an entrepreneurial philanthropic group that offers residencies for experienced private industry executives interested in a career switch to public education.

The two candidates being recommended are Jamal Jenkins, a former Chrysler executive who worked in human resources and has experience as a recruiter, and Donald Dellavia, a former plant manager for the H.J. Heinz Co.

If you're wondering what an executive from a bankrupt car company, and a ketchup plant manager can offer public education, you're probably not alone.

In our final Part, we'll take a look at some of the other efforts the Gates Foundation is making, including those in Ohio.

The Gates Foundation Exposed. Part I

If you are reading this article, it's likely you have heard of Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, maker of the Windows operating system for PCs. He's a multi-billionaire entrepreneur, turned philanthropist.

His charitable Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent millions of dollars on various causes including malaria and AIDS research, human rights, the environment, and also education. It's his efforts to apply corporate education reforms to US public education that we want to focus on in this series.

At a time when education budgets are being slashed, the Gates Foundation is wielding hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the education reform debate. In 2009 alone the Foundation spent $373 million on its education agenda, of which $78 million was devoted to corporate reform advocacy. This money was spread far and wide, to non-profits, PR firms, governments and education departments throughout the country.

Some might argue that this money could lead to improved schools, but many of the goals of the Foundation are based not on sound science, but ideology and gut instinct. Take for example an early initiative the Foundation pursued, to the tune of $2 billion - the Small Schools Initiative.

Based upon nothing more than a belief that breaking up low performing schools into much smaller student blocks would produce wildly improved student achievement, Gates set upon spending his money to convince schools to break up. But after billions of dollars and years of experimentation on students, Gates himself admits the endeavor has not produced the desired benefits

Now, Bill Gates has acknowledged that the results have been "disappointing" too. Gates shared the information. Here's what he said in his speech:

"In the first four years of our work with new, small schools, most of the schools had achievement scores below district averages on reading and math assessments. In one set of schools we supported, graduation rates were no better than the statewide average, and reading and math scores were consistently below the average. The percentage of students attending college the year after graduating high school was up only 2.5 percentage points after five years. Simply breaking up existing schools into smaller units often did not generate the gains we were hoping for."

The evidence is clear that smaller impersonal schools are no more effective than larger impersonal schools.

One can easily see that one man, with strong convictions and deep pockets, can have major impacts on public policy. Even when exercising the best of intentions, a little caution and humility should be assumed; else serious damage could be wrought.

In part II of our series, we'll look at some of the reforms Gates and his Foundation are now pursuing, which could have far more damaging consequences to schools, students and their teachers.

Part two can be read here.
Part three can be read here.

How Blueberries changed a corporate reformer

Via out friends at American Society Today, comes a short video of how a teacher in the audience changed a corporate education reformers mind. The video starts out slow, but the pay-off at the end is well worth it.

I was dead meat, but I wasn't going to lie to the lady. I said "ma'am I would send them back"

Not a young women, she sprang to her feet, she points her finger at me. She says "that's right, you would send them back. We can never send back the blueberries our suppliers send to us".

"We take 'em big, small, rich, poor, hungry, abused, brilliant, homeless, with bad vision, poor hearing, bad teeth, creative, cautious, frightened, with ADHD, English as a second language - and that's why it's not a business - it's school!"

Yeah - Blueberries Pal! Blueberries!

How Socrates would fare on new teacher evaluation plan

This is a pretty entertaining piece

The upstart Gates-funded organization Educators 4 Excellence has just put forth a proposal for teacher evaluations in New York City. They would accord 25 percent of the evaluation to student value-added growth data; 15 percent to data from local assessments; 30 percent to administrator observations; 15 percent to independent outside observations; 10 percent to student surveys; and 5 percent to support from the community.

The observations, they say, should follow a rubric. What sort of rubric should this be? The proposal states:

Observations should focus on three main criteria:

1. Observable teacher behaviors that have been demonstrated to impact student learning. For example, open-ended questions are more effective at improving student learning than closed questions.

2. Student behaviors in response to specific teacher behaviors and overall student engagement.

3. Teacher language that is specific and appropriate to the grade level and content according to taxonomy, such as Bloom’s. For example, kindergarten teachers should use different language than high school biology teachers.

Let’s see how Socrates might fare under these conditions. As I recall, he asked a fair number of closed questions. He did this to show his interlocutors a contradiction between what they assumed was true and what they subsequently reasoned to be true.

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BASA and OASBA urge legislators to reinstate merit pay

BASA and OASBA sent a letter to the General Assembly urging budget bill conference committee members to reinstate teacher merit pay and RIF provisions. They clearly see it as a way to reduce salaries for teachers.

BASA/OASBA HB153 Final Memo

You should continue to send emails and make phone calls to your legislators and urge them to keep these SB5 like provisions out of the budget.

Michele Rhee, stranger to the truth

Here's Michele Rhee. In her own words and voice

"In fact the children that are in school today will be the first generation of Americans who will be less educated than their parents were"

Ahem.

That's the longitudinal student performance trend in NAEP reading average scores for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students.

That's the longitudinal student performance trend in NAEP mathematics average scores for 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students.

Those are not difficult graphs to read, and neither show any declines for current students vs their parents performance, in fact - it's the opposite. Why Rhee wants to lie about the data in order to fire teachers is a mystery only she can answer - but that is her agenda, and it is not supported by the facts.