There’s so much bad news about public schools. When one article makes you want to pop the cork and dance in the streets, it is easy to get excited.
Don’t. The tables haven’t really been turned.
The LA Times Editorial criticizes the Gates Foundation for their poor philanthropic use of billions of dollars spent on school reforms.
They disparage them for failing in three areas:
- Small Schools
- Teacher Effectiveness
- Common Core
They just now figured this all out?
We’ve been here before. Remember the 2006 Business Week article “Bill Gates Gets Schooled” by Jay Greene and William J. Symonds?
That article described how difficult Gates found it to break up schools. But they still did their damage.
Then there was the American Enterprise’s criticism of the Gates Foundation and their failed involvement with the Philadelphia School of the Future. The school threw away books, along with the library, and was an abysmal disaster.
A few weeks later the school was left to reinvent itself.
Gates went on to supply teachers in Tampa and Memphis and other places earbuds so they could learn to be more effective by listening to directions from the back of the room.
Now and then the print media, usually partly funded by Gates and his ilk, will look like it finally understands Bill Gates and his ineffective influence on teachers, students and public schools.
To have such reporting by the LA Times, a news outlet which,–as Anthony Cody who follows Gates and has written a book about his influence on education reminded us, was the newspaper that first printed teachers student test performance–is false hope.
We also can’t help but remember the death of Rigoberto Ruelas, a caring teacher who taught in Los Angeles who commit suicide and was said to be despondent after those scores were printed.
The newspaper analyzed seven years of student test scores in English and math to determine how much students’ performance improved under about 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers. Based on The Times’ findings, Ruelas was rated “average” in his ability to raise students’ English scores and “less effective” in his ability to raise math scores. Overall, he was rated slightly “less effective” than his peers.
I think it is more than the Times suddenly seeing the error of their ways. I think it’s a distraction. The Times makes no mention of all the other areas where Gates-backed influence is felt.
He is supporting reform groups a-plenty. There are so many Gates backed nonprofits destroying public education it is hard to keep track.
Gates helps fund Relay Graduate School of Education, which is out to destroy teacher preparation programs.
Gates has always been for charters, like KIPP, despite the array of problems they display.
Even more worrisome—could the article be diverting our attention from Gates’s support of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning known as iNacol and Competency, Proficiency-Based, Personalized Learning, etc., otherwise known as constant mastery testing of basic skills for all students?
While many parents deserve praise for their efforts to opt their children out of the old-fashion draconian standardized testing, this new online continuous assessment is the wave of the future. Read all about it and don’t be deceived. These drastic changes to schooling are not proven.
Competency-Based education is a real threat to public schools and it is happening much faster than those of us who support public schools can fathom.
How many years will it take? How many teachers will lose their jobs or quit because there is no more role for them to play in a child’s learning?
How long will it be before teachers are no more and students sit online all day to learn? How many more public schools will close to make way for online charters?
How many more children will have their schooling disrupted by unproven experiments funded by the Gates Foundation—without any expert feedback by real educators and parents?
This article is right in what it prints, but it leaves a whole lot out. It means nothing. Most of us already know all it says. It says nothing new.
The real news is that Gates won’t be done until there are no more public schools or real educators.
Unless the U.S. government investigates his influence, which is hardly likely since Gates has his people embedded in the U.S. Department of Education, public schools will continue to go down the road to extinction. No major news article will stop it at this point.
It will take a miracle. No. Wrong word.
“It will take all of us paying attention and speaking out to push back on harmful reforms.”
Thank you for this, Nancy! Could not agree more.
While I agree with much of what you’ve said here, and there is no argument that Bill Gates and his foundation have been arguably THE MOST destructive forces against public education, “miracle” is too strong a word to use here.
“Miracle” is the word we use to describe the one person who survived a airplane crash that killed the other 450 human beings on board.
“Miracle” is what happened in the New Testament when Jesus Christ supposedly turned one fish and loaf of bread into enough to feed multitudes of starving people.
“Miracle” implies something entirely out of our control, something to be hoped or prayed for, as if we mere mortals were powerless to stop something from happening, despite our most diligent, determined and passionate efforts.
So, saying only a miracle could “save us” from the awful machinations of The Privatizers and Gates in particular is not accurate. In fact, it only discourages any of us who are opposed to his actions to lay down and give up. We’re people. We can do amazing things, especially when we’re focused, determined and have strategically planned and executed things well ahead of time.
No struggle is easy. Hence the name. But giving up at the outset—and not acknowledging those few and far between “victories” for our side isn’t doing anything to help, unless you think that hoping for miracles is TRULY the only way to prevent the worst from happening.
We love you and your wonderful and inspiring blog, but saying that only a miracle could help is similar to some of my relatives whose ONLY vision of breaking out of their poverty ridden existence is buying lottery tickets and hoping for the best!
You’re right! And I apologize. I actually did think about that when I wrote it but was in a bad mood.
How about, “It will take all of us paying attention and speaking out to push back on harmful reforms?”
There are a lot of good things happening and much push back. (Although a little miracle might help too).
Sorry to be negative, but thanks for helping to put me back on the right track.
Also, my concern involves the many people who believe this (LA Times article) is some kind of turning point…the whole point of this post is to say that it isn’t. I don’t think people should be misled.
Common Core’s original sin was assuming a completely broken system. Its mortal sin was prescribing an over-bearing, over-reaching, over-everything resolution to an educational reality that is actually well understood … one that has actually been overwhelmingly successful.
Common Core fanatics … led by Gates …. cobbled together cherry-picked data, then taffied it into a macabre premise that tattooed our national educational institutions as outright losers … destined to be surpassed by Asian geniuses or northern Europeans wizards who, to my recent recall, are hardly Edens of innovation and creativity. But the truth is unimportant it seems. Perception is the game’s name.
So the faulty premise was swallowed whole … and what followed was an array of proposals which were followed by a battalion of so-called experts who proposed a bounty of wretched prescriptions that have produced … chaos. How lovely.
Any conscious observer of the last decade has learned that we now live in a constant state of alarm. And that state of alarm has been accompanied by an almost maniacal set of reactions … many of which are absolutely bizarre but still championed by a cadre of true believers.
By all accounts, the heavens should have already collapsed and mankind should have been buried alongside its prehistory brethren … to later be unearthed by a band of Common Core savior-survivors who will no doubt chronicle our doom in some 23rd century mini-series they’ll view on their brain-implanted video transceptors. There the saga of the Great Common Core will detail the collapse of the once mighty American society and its epic educational funk-out as predicted by the early 21st century gurus who saw it all on the horizon. What marvelous fiction. I’ll be forever sad that I missed this historical calamity.
The Common Core alarmists are using the specter of national collapse as a beefy excuse to upend an existing practice that has, in rather short historical time, brought this nation to planetary prominence. And it’s not the first such calamity to be inflated nationally. It’s just the catastrophe de-jeuer … and it would be hysterically funny were it not so dangerous.
What’s especially rich in irony is that all sorts of education interest groups have swallowed the Common Core death-spiral forecast … and then provide us all with an expansive list of its failed remedies. I suspect the poor folks really doesn’t even quite understand the issue at all. Which puts them in perfect league with those Common Core comrades who are similarly clueless.
What ails our schools is what ails our nation. We have fallen off the proverbial wagon of values and responsibility. We actually know our errors and our missteps, but we’ve clouded our own reality with layers of nonsense excuses and even more nonsensical remedies like Common Core. Serious introspection is not in favor anymore. There seems to be no end to our foolishness.
Were it so that our schools were rancid and rotting places of learning … how is it that the rest of the world still sees a special sparkle here? And how is that peoples from all over this world drift here for all of the possibilities they clearly do not see in their current circumstances? Where’s THAT data? Where’s the elusive premise for THAT reality?
Common Core is a prescription for a problem that doesn’t exist … except in the minds of those who spend their days pin-pricking this nation endlessly … hounding us all into either a state of shame or alarm. Or both.
It’s now time to delay this fast-tracked debacle as each day reveals exceptional nonsense from curriculum design, sham teacher evaluations, and the displacement of rather simple but vital developmental activities such as the arts … and even recess. And almost all of the horror … from manic testing to intrusive data collection … has been designed by mostly classroom-allergic gurus with the thinnest of actual teaching credentials.
It’s time to dismember this educational Frankenstein before the horror paralyzes us all … and puts a generation or more in academic shock.
Denis Ian
Thank you for the nice rundown, Denis. Your leading sentence really resonates with me, “Common Core’s original sin was assuming a completely broken system.” I think everything wrong with the reforms today come from that sentence. Schools had problems but most were doing well. Poor schools had the problems.
Am I right in laying ‘big history’ at Gates doorstep?
The ill-advised belief that all public schools were failing started long before the Gates Foundation became involved in school reform.
No one listens to teachers in the classroom. We should also be chastising the administrators who choose NOT to get political and say NO to all the ‘improvements’ and reforms which waste valuable tax dollars and only line the pockets of the education vendor/peddlers who are selling their ‘programs’ for improvement. Gates may have intended well, but in practice these changes have made the classroom LESS child-friendly and hindered teachers from focusing on their students. Again, teachers need resources, smaller class sizes, financial support(raises) and respect in order to continue to perform at their best in the classroom each day. Let us teach!!!! Quit telling us how, when and what to teach…..it AIN’ T helping the cause. You will have destroyed our public schools — the ultimate goal it seems for those trying to cash in on the business of educating. This American dream has been stolen from us.
Small class sizes, especially for K-3rd grade and resources are certainly important. It is too bad the Gates Foundation doesn’t seem to understand the importance of a democratic public school system. Also, tech is important but research shows it works best with good teachers who are well-prepared. Thanks, LJ
I will back up Denis’ statement here by suggesting that the whole of NCLB school reform was premised on the theory that teachers are BAD, students are FAILING, and schools are BROKEN. Big money investors like Gates simply jumped enthusiastically onto these negative descriptors and have never let go. Until we take back the language of education and quit hurting ourselves by repeating these ideas….that we must find and eliminate bad teachers, that we must fix test-score-proven failing students, that we must see all of our school system as untenably broken….we sill continue to be fodder for those who would invade public education.
Well-said, Ciedie! NCLB was severe and inaccurately generalized all schools and teachers as failing. I think this went back to A Nation at Risk.