IN THE PREVIOUS POST we explained just how the Gates Foundation was changing coverage in the press. A lot of publications are up for sale, if not literally then metaphorically. By dropping some money here and there, Gates does in fact ensure that he receives the coverage he wants. At stake we have the integrity of the press, which in turn shapes the minds of many people. It's about perception.
This is why I didn’t watch NBC’s propaganda extravaganza starring Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Michael Bloomberg, Joel Klein and a host of others brought to you by Bill Gates and Eli Broad .
In her overview of NBC’s corporate, one-sided reform-fest, “Education Indoctrination,” Leonie Haimson, founder of Class Size Matters and member of Parents Across America (PAA), wrote: “Indeed, the vast majority of panelists appear to have been pre-selected by the Gates and Broad Foundations, Education Nation’s co-sponsors, who by spending billions have been able to impose their rigid prescriptions on the nation’s urban public schools.”
These elements of SERVE would not work for our students or our community and should not be accepted by the teachers. And teachers, even though you are being bombarded by messages brought to you by Broad-backed and Gates funded faux roots organizations, such as the Alliance, Our Schools’ Coalition and Stand for Children, know that we as parents support you during these negotiations and consider you a precious resource in the development of our children.”
The Alliance for Education has been paying for these school board retreats. And where does the Alliance get its’ money from?– the Gates and the Broads.
Why, at a time when the corporate ed reformers have turned the national Klieg lights on the humblest of professional teachers and declared them failures and demanded they perform miracles, are these same enterprises (Broad, Gates, Goodloe-Johnson, Carlyle et al) out of the other side of their mouths pushing for uncredentialed, inexperienced “teachers” to take on our most challenging schools?
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I did some research and was surprised to discover that Teach for America, Incorporated is actually a multimillion-dollar enterprise. It is funded by all the usual suspects and then some: Gates, Broad, the (WalMart) Waltons, Dells, (the Gap) Fishers. Its founder sits on the board of directors of the Broad Foundation (alongside Seattle’s Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson), one of the unelected, unqualified but main drivers of education policy in America right now.
Robert Wright is no slouch and he has done his homework well for this opinion piece. One line we like is: "none of Gates’s competitors ever confused him with Mr Rogers." This is as true for his work at the Gates Foundation as it is at Microsoft.
Bill was interviewed by Toronto's national newsmagazine. He wants to change the world with charter schools, though of course he didn't go to one and doesn't send his kids to one. You see, Bill thinks it is all the unions' and teachers' fault.
To foster that kind of collaboration, the Gates Foundation will be establishing a “district-charter compact” program that forces both sides to publicly commit to working together to benefit students. The funding level and details of Gates' District-Charter Compact has not been announced and will not be until the end of this year. But under the plan, charter schools would agree to do things like making sure they solve all students, such as English-language learners and special education students, and districts would help give charters access to facilities and help eliminate barriers, such as inflexible bus schedules.
Has there been any thought to renaming your publication to “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Chronicle of Philanthropy”??
The Washington Post and Huffington Post are reporting that ed reform poster girl and key figure in the pro-charter, teacher-trashing “Waiting for Superman” movie by Davis Guggenheim, will announce her resignation Wednesday morning.
The NCTQ report, bought and paid for by Bill Gates and a report done by CRPE, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a foundation funded by Bill Gates to provide all with the NCTQ Report and all things charter schools . And the Caldwell Report? I had never heard of it. I called on my best data gatherers by cell and asked them if they had come across the report and both said “No”.
I goggled it later and came up with all sorts of entries but nothing pertaining to teachers, teaching or merit pay. If someone else can find a report relevant to teaching or education referred to as the Caldwell Report, please let me know.
And where were all of the teachers in this “Education Session”? This was the PTA, the Parents and Teachers Association. Had we thrown them out with the bathwater too? There was someone in the “Education Session” who said she was a teacher. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from her about student testing and merit pay and how it was all such a great idea. She was young so I was giving her the benefit of the doubt. As it came up later during the general assembly, she was a Teach for America teacher and during her two minutes said “Rhee did some good things while she was in DC”, like fire 271 teachers and replace them with Teach for America recruits? A ringer? Possibly.
After the “Education Session” was a presentation in the ballroom to be given by the senior Bill Gates. You just can’t seem to get away from those folks these days. I decided to take a break and not hear about how we should all vote for Bill 1098 basically to pay for all of this ed reform that they are pushing. Bill Gates, Sr. wants to make sure that the Gates Foundation doesn’t have to keep forking over the dollars to maintain their idea of education.
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It was all starting to fall into place. So much for the PTA being an advocate for my child, they had become advocates for the Gates and the Broads and the hedge fund millionaires. They had sold our children out for a few shekels, high stakes testing, merit pay, union busting, and charter schools. That was all part of the package. Gates had provided the PTA with all of the “research” material that they would need to sell their ideas. The deed was done and the troops, or rather the Stepford Wives, would be marching forward into the offices of the state legislators and other policy makers waving their notebooks filled with data.
These electoral losses and the recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll suggest that the "reform" movement led by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, DFER, hedge-fund managers, and the Obama administration lacks a base of popular support. But now begins the next phase of the movement, as its public relations campaign goes into high gear with the release this week of "Waiting for Superman."
Winfrey has used her show — twice in one week — as a platform against public education. She first hosted billionaire Bill Gates to discuss his "philanthropy" in education, as he promoted the new anti-public education propaganda film Waiting for Superman.
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For example, the Facebook founder's donation of $100 million to the Newark, New Jersey school district will almost certainly require — according to The New York Times — that the school institute these reforms, much like Bill Gates' donation of $100 million to the Tampa Hillsborough County School District — and the $90 million to the Memphis school district — had the same types of strings attached.
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Ravitch summarized the chapter:
“The Billionaires Boys Club is a discussion of how we’re in a new era of the [billionaire] foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations — the Walton Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations — Gates, Broad and Walton — are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the U.S. Department of Education. We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding."
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For example, the President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randy Weingarten, sent a friendly invitation to Bill Gates to address the AFT convention, where Gates was allowed to deceive the teachers about the intentions of his multi-billion dollar "investment" in "reforming" education.
Gates’ ideas about education — blaming teachers for everything — ignores what most teachers already know: the main predictor for a student’s success is social-economic background. Rich students outperform poor students for many different reasons: less stress, more resources, parental help, etc. Ignoring this obvious fact exposes the billionaires’ profit motive behind their fake charity.
How the poll was conducted
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Stanford University's participation was made possible by a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Pittsburgh teachers want more say in how they teach, more time in the classroom and better mentoring, according to a survey released Tuesday and commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
A remarkable series of graphs, commissioned by the Gates Foundation.
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Produced by The Guardian and the Gates Foundation, the charts are draw from the Millennium Development Report Card. Basically, it shows how well countries are performing on key development metrics, relative to their GDP.
