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