THE Boston Globe has some new coverage about Bill Gates’ hijack of the United States education system. This helps Gates and Microsoft too (children raised only with Windows in sight). The paper cites Ravitch's new book, which we previously wrote about in [1, 2, 3]. To quote from the Boston Globe:
Bill Gates’s risky adventure
[...]
But in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System’’ Ravitch writes that Gates and other so-called venture philanthropists, including Eli Broad, are experimenting thoughtlessly. There is no proof, she writes, that Gates is on the right track now any more than he was from 2000-2008, when he pumped about $2 billion into a campaign to restructure large American high schools into smaller schools. That effort, writes Ravitch, was marginal at best.
Ravitch argues that high-flying, unaccountable philanthropists are dictating the country’s public school agenda through their grant-making instead of listening to the field. The “current obsession with making our schools work like a business,’’ writes Ravitch, “threatens to destroy public education.’’
Gates may be innovation-happy, but he is hardly laying waste to the nation’s public education system. If anything, he is seeding it for future success in ways similar to his funding of biotechnology research to improve the yields of crops in developing nations. Of course, his agricultural effort has its share of critics, too.
As for his limitless power, Gates says his charter school work is possible only in states where the public and lawmakers are willing to support experimentation. His home state of Washington, he adds, has blocked the creation of charter schools.
“The education system is always decided politically,’’ said Gates. “If she (Ravitch) thinks foundations are dictating, I don’t see it.’’
It’s not quite so simple. The pressure is mounting on school systems to conform to the foundations’ visions, especially when the current trend is to fund projects with measurable outcomes, not discretionary grants. And pushing back against the big foundations, or modifying their requirements based on local knowledge, was a lot easier a decade ago when the foundations were smaller and less bureaucratic.
In the story, Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen is cited as pushing legislation that made student test scores 50 percent of annual teacher evaluations, something critical for Race to the Top."Bredesen points to an earlier development in his state, that, he says, had 'broken the ice.' In 2009, the Gates foundation provided a $90 million grant to the Memphis school system — the state's largest — on the condition that teachers there allow 35 percent of their performance ratings to be based on student test scores."
--Confidential Microsoft document [PDF]