The
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent a few billion on remaking public
schools in the United States.
Strangely, they have not attempted to introduce
the kind of student-centered education that they own children experience at
Lakeside Academy in Seattle. Instead, they want everything and everyone to be
tested and data-driven, including the privately managed charter schools in
which they have invested.
They don’t “give” money to public schools, as
philanthropists of an earlier generation do. They give money to be used only as
they direct: on high-stakes testing, on evaluation of teachers by test scores,
on the uniform adoption of the Common Core standards, and on schools willing to
follow their directions.
Needless to say, neither Bill nor Melinda has ever
been a teacher. Yet they consider themselves to be experts in what and how to
teach.
In this article, Carol Burris reviews the couple’s recent national conference, at which they announced that they are pleased with what they have done and have no intention of changing their approaches. In other words, they called a press conference to say “Stay the course.”
Clearly, they have not noticed that 220,000 students in
New York state opted out of the state tests in protest of an overemphasis on
standardized tests. Nor have they noticed the protests from all sides of the
political spectrum against the coup engineered by Bill Gates to impose the
Common Core on the nation without bothering to respect the views of the public
(i.e., democracy).
Burris,
the new executive director of the Network for Public Education, says that Bill
and Melinda point to Kentucky, Denver, and Washington, D.C. as their evidence
for the success of their reforms.
She carefully dissects each of these examples
and demonstrates that they have only been listening to their “yes” men and
women. Denver has stagnated for the past decade despite near-total control by
Gates-style reformers; Washington, D.C. continues to have staggeringly large
achievement gaps between different racial and ethnic groups; Burris shows that
Kentucky’s improvements began long before the introduction of the Common Core.
(Hmmm, Kentucky is one of the few states that doesn’t have charter schools,
which may explain why communities are very invested in their public schools.)
Carol
says that this is what she learned from their interview with PBS journalist
Gwen Ifill:
From
this interview, three things seem clear.
Bill and Melinda Gates do not understand teaching and learning, yet they comfortably assume an air of expertise.They view victory as the implementation of their reforms and while they claim to be all about the metrics, they only select examples that suit their purpose.The first couple of reform neither appreciate nor respect the role of democracy plays in the governance public schools.
They
demonstrate the old maxim that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
They
also demonstrate that they have a problem with democracy; it threatens to
derail some of their fabulous ideas.
It was clear that the couple worry that the democratic process can undo their reforms. As Bill Gates wryly observed at the end of the interview, “The work can go backwards….nobody votes to un-invent our vaccine.”
This
statement is a bold assertion of Gates’ arrogance. Nothing that his foundation
has done to American public schools is comparable to a vaccine against disease.
If you listen to parents and teachers, the Gates’ obsession with
standardization and testing is the disease, not the vaccine.
Our
only hope to find a vaccine for the standardized testing disease, which is a
mental aberration that distorts the purpose of education, is democracy, not the
Gates Foundation. The public must vote for candidates who promise to make
public education more like Lakeside, not a processing machine that ignores the
interests and needs of children.
