G is for the Gates Foundation

Image: crooksandliars.com/karoli/gates-foundation-grants-alec-hefty-sum-educ

Bill Gates has appointed himself expert on all things education, and since he has so much money to throw at it, people are listening hard.   They are not only listening, they have crafted a national curriculum (that requires the use of computers for standardized testing, hmm...how could he benefit from that?) and passed laws and regulations related to "improving teacher quality" based on many of his ideas and his foundation's "studies."  (Hey kids--why don't we evaluate teachers using faulty data from standardized testing that's based the old tests we're throwing away and then on the new, yet-to-be-written tests for the untried and unfinished national curriculum?  Great idea, Bill!)

Gates is extremely powerful in the education reform movement, and also extremely dangerous because he does not understand the first thing about education or about how children learn.  He's given huge sums of money to ALEC to help further the corporate reform agenda that is working to dismantle our public schools.  And although he claims to respect teachers, he shows his true feelings about them in an interview he gave about "great teachers" in this statement: "In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time....That hasn't been the case for teaching." 

• Confidential Student And Teacher Data To Be Provided To LLC Run By Gates and Murdoch
• Gates Foundation Grants ALEC a Hefty Sum for "Education Reform"
• The Bill Gates Problem in School Reform
• Gates Foundation Works to Influence Education Laws Through Big Grant to ALEC
• Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill Gates
• The United Gates of America
• Bill Gates' School Crusade
• 'Race to the Top' and the Bill Gates Connection
• Bill Gates and the Corporatization of American 'Public' Schools
• Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation
• Gates Foundation: Education Strategy (Note how much of the language on the Gates Foundation site is mirrored in national education reform mandates under "Race to the Top" and waivers from NCLB requirements.)
• Bill Gates: Selling Bad Advice to the Public Schools

F is for Friedman's Dream

Time Magazine: Dec. 19, 1969

Economist Milton Friedman is the father of the school privatization movement.  He believed in a largely unregulated, unfettered free market for virtually everything and was an early champion of charter schools, choice, and vouchers.  We see evidence of his theories playing out in abundance today in every facet of public policy in the U.S.

For those who think that it's outrageous to believe that there is really an ongoing and deliberate campaign to privatize schools in the U.S., take note that Friedman's ideas are highly respected in libertarian, wealth, and power circles.  He was awarded the Nobel prize for economic science in 1976 and up until his death in 2006, he was sought after as a speaker, professor, and adviser to US government leaders and presidents.  

• Milton Friedman Biography (Hoover Institution at Stanford)
• "Public Schools: Make Them Private" by Milton Friedman
• Excerpt from the Introduction to The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, a book that explores Friedman's ideas about exploiting major crises for corporate and private profit
• Privatizing Education in New Orleans: The Commodification of Education 
• Privatizing Public Schools: Leveling the Playing Field or Political Football?
• ALEC Exposed: Milton Friedman's Little Shop of Horrors

E is for Evaluation

Corporate reformers propagandize the idea that if only we can "fix" the teachers, we can fix all of education.  Equitable funding, class size, student effort or ability, parental involvement, the impact of poverty on achievement--to the corporate reformer, none of these variables carry any import--the only variable that matters is the teacher in the classroom.  Thus, teacher evaluation is a centerpiece of the corporate reformer's plan for improving schools, and a great deal of money and energy is currently being devoted to creating new rubrics and scoring scales for judging teachers' effectiveness, which is ideally judged primarily by students' standardized test scores.  The Obama Administration, which clearly supports the corporate reform agenda, even made tying teacher evaluations to student standardized test scores a mandatory requirement for state eligibility for the Race to the Top grant/bribe.   The evaluation and testing mandate has also been extended to any state that wants to be granted a waiver from the ridiculous NCLB accountability system.

The new teacher evaluations are usually quite complex and are beginning to generate a whole new industry for corporate reformers to tap into.  Race to the Top was designed in such a way that most of the grant/bribe money states and school systems received could not be used for hiring teachers or purchasing books and supplies; instead, billions of dollars are being poured into trainings, consultants, committees, and study groups in order to create and implement the required new evaluations and Common Core curriculum.  Experienced school administrators have even been required to attend trainings run by consultants who have never worked in schools in order to learn how to implement these new evaluation systems.  Educators are being treated like they don't know anything about educating kids, and oftentimes these new evaluations are being created by people who really don't know anything about educating kids.

• Companies, Nonprofits Making Millions Off Teacher Effectiveness Push
• Nearly Half of States Link Teacher Evaluations to Tests
• Standardized Tests and Teacher Accountability: The Research
• Battle Brewing on Capitol Hill over Testing, Teacher Evaluation, and School Accountability
• Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers 
• Principals Protest Role of Testing in Evaluations
• Focus on Standardized Tests May Be Pushing Some Teachers to Cheat
• Getting Teacher Evaluation Right

Update 3/11/12: The NY Times decided to publish teacher rankings based on standardized testing in February of 2012.  This is another trend that is likely take off with test-based evaluations.

• City Teacher Data Reports are Released [NYTimes Attempts to Justify Participation in Witch Hunt]
• Reign of Error: The Publication of Teacher Data Reports in New York City 
• New York City's Flawed Data Fuels the Right's War on Teachers
• More on the Utter Stupidity of NYC's Value-Added Machinations

added 4/5/12: Storm and Fury: Teacher Evaluation Stirs a Ruckus