08.18.11
Seattle Teachers Complain About Gates Foundation Lobbyists
Summary: Gates-funded lobbyists are trying to privatise a $500 billion-per-year system (funded by US taxpayers) and teachers are unable to stop this
THIS Web site has covered this topic many times before, but the problems remain and nobody is able to do anything to stop it. The press is paralysed (bribed by the Gates Foundation) while Seattle’s teachers are keeping track of Gates monopolisation of their industry, which is a special industry because it is funded by the public (half a trillion dollars per year). Where is the Seattle Times? Counting Gates' cash?
The Gates Foundation is issuing some education-flavoured PR once in a while to create the public perception that it is helping and thereby daemonise all critics of the hidden agenda which goes on behind closed doors. It’s an easy job to do when one is buying the press, even some blogs. In any event, as we continue our catchup with the Gates Foundation’s malice we come across the following (excepts):
• Further fallout from the Seattle Channel Forum on Education
Sara Morris, the CEO of the Alliance for Education, was there and spoke. The Alliance works hand in glove with the district to push its agenda and helps channel (some might argue, launder) private funding to the district with major strings attached. I found it interesting that Morris didn’t mention her important role in the school district, but instead coyly only identified herself as ‘a mother of three kids in SPS.’ She went into detail extolling the virtues of the Strategic Plan, including the resource-draining MAP test. Of course she knew all the details of the plan very well – her organization wrote the $6 million grant proposal request to the Gates Foundation to fund the Strategic Plan.
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Morris’ organization also snuck D.C .political operation, the “National Council on Teaching Quality,” into town in 2009 and paid them $14,000 (with Gates money) to write a preconceived critical “Human Capital report” on our district’s 3,000 teachers. This was then used by the corporate reformers to try to intimidate the teacher’s union into accepting merit pay in their new contract. For Sara Morris to pretend she was merely a mother of three kids in Seattle schools was disingenuous to say the least.
• Legislative Update and Action
The Broad backed, Gates funded League of Education Voters is at it again with another one of their spam e-mails. So far they have backed both bills that propose to determine teacher layoff’s by student performance, basically test scores, and permanently fire teachers if there is a school closing, Senate Bill 5399 and House Bill 1609. They desperately want folks, under the guise that it’s all about the children and not their salaries, to call their representatives in support of Bill 5399.
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What is of particular interest to me is that his wife, Bree Dusseault, was recently hired by our superintendent as an Instructional Director. This is a new set of positions that was recently created by our superintendent. Ms. Dusseault’s background includes work at the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) which is funded by Gates, the Waltons and the Seattle Foundation. The CRPE is dong a research study for Gates now on charter schools. Hmmm, I wonder how that study will turn out.
Who is able to stop these people? The super-rich people still control society and they use the education system to prepare kids to think in a compatible fashion. █
