Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gates Monitor: February 2011 on Bill Gates-Funded Lobbyists Who Drive US Education Agenda

Summary: TFA lobbying and other Gates-funded groups that harm teachers, for control and for profit

LAST YEAR we wrote about TFA [EN | ES], the Gated-funded group that would help him privatise education (not just put Microsoft, Office and Windows in the classrooms and inside children's minds at taxpayers' expense). The Seattle Education blog has some updates on this lobbying group, as well as others that are funded by Bill Gates through the Gates Foundation. It's about business, not charity. Here is some of the latest:



Why I am not a defender of the ‘status quo’ in education — because the ‘status quo’ is failed ed reforms

The status quo is national public education policy largely determined by unelected billionaires with zero expertise in education. “Venture philanthropists” Eli Broad and Bill Gates spend millions shaping public education policy. Formers staffers from the Gates Foundation now seed the Obama Administration’s Department of Education.

“Two of Duncan’s top aides, Chief of Staff Margot Rogers and Assistant Deputy Secretary James H. Shelton III, came from the [Gates] foundation and were granted waivers by the Administration from its revolving-door policy limiting involvement with former employers.”– “Bill Gates’ School Crusade,” July 15, 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek.

Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and former chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, are both former members of the Broad board of directors. The “Broad Prize for Urban Education” is a trophy and large cash sum awarded annually by the private Broad Foundation to school districts performing to its liking. In its 2009-10 Annual Report, Broad boasts that the trophy itself “resides at the U.S. Department of Education.”

You couldn’t ask for a better symbol of the infiltration of private corporate interests into federal government.

Have Mr. Broad or Mr. Gates been elected to public office, or to direct education policy? Do either have any expertise or experience in public education? No and no. Do either seek genuine parent input? No.


Teach for America’s Wendy Kopp is Coming to Town

The League for Education Voters, LEV, that same Broad-backed, Gates’ funded organization that brought us Kevin Johnson, a big proponent of charter schools who spoke to a mostly African-American audience in an African-American church in Seattle and by the way, the only event that was not held at the MOHAI Museum, Steve Barth with KIPP, and my personal favorite, Ben Austin with the Parent Trigger, is now sponsoring an evening with Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, Inc. (TFA), to extol the virtues of her organization.


Seattle TV Audience Gives Big Thumbs-Down to School Superintendent’s “Strategic Plan” (& Supt. Goodloe-Johnson Misses Another Public Forum)

Also in the audience (most of the speakers were not identified by affiliation): Liv Finne of the conservative, business-centric Washington Policy Center, Michael DeBell and Steve Sundquist, the past and current presidents of the Seattle School Board, Estela Ortega from El Centro de la Raza, Chris Korsmo and I believe Lisa Macfarlane from the League of Education Voters (LEV), the Gates-funded group that has jumped on the ed reform bandwagon, teachers, parents, bloggers, including Charlie Mas and Melissa Westbrook from the Seattle Public Schools community blog, Sara Morris and Solynn McCurdy from the Alliance for Education (another Gates-funded, pro-corporate ed reform entity), school board candidate Michelle Buetow, and others.


What Works

I believe that if you’re going to talk the talk you need to walk the walk.

You won’t see that with Obama’s choice of schools for his children or Gates for his children. Their talk is for other people’s children, not their own.


Proposed House Bill 1609: More of the Same But Worse

This new bill proposed by, among others, our own Representative Reuven Carlyle who was instrumental in pushing through the ed reform Bill 6696 with the help of the Washington and Seattle PTA and the usual list of Broad backed, Gates funded suspects, states that when there are budget cuts and a reduction in force (rif) is required, that teachers should be fired based on their “performance”.


These teachers are not attacking Gates; they are defending themselves from Gates' attack on their occupation and their children's education. This is reactionary.

Recent Techrights' Posts

People Used to Talk
If pets can live a measurably happy life without gadgets and "apps", why can't humans?
Rust is Starting to Seem More Like Microsoft-hosted "Digital Maoism", Not a Legitimate Effort to Improve Security
Maybe this is very innocent, but they seem to have taken a solid, stable program from a high-profile Frenchman and looked for ways to marry it with GitHub, i.e. Microsoft/NSA
Finland, Lithuania, and Latvia Fortify Their Digital Border With GNU/Linux
This month's data from statCounter is particularly interesting near the Baltic Sea
 
LLM Slop Attacks Not Only Sites of Free Software Projects But Also Bug Reporting Systems (Time-wasting, in Effect "DDoS")
Microsoft, the leading purveyor and promoter of slop, is a cancer
The Richard Stallman (RMS) "European Tour" Carries on In Spite of the Nuremberg Incident
Some people spoke about how they saw yesterday's talk
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 07, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 07, 2025
The CoC Means the Founder of GNU/Linux Cannot Talk and a 72-Year-Old Man With Cancer is Somehow a "Safety" Risk?
Those who don't like RMS are not forced to attend his talks
Gemini Links 07/05/2025: A Shopping Spree and Digital Gardening
Links for the day
Links 07/05/2025: Pegasus Guilty and a Path Towards EU Without Russian Energy
Links for the day
Outsourcing GNU/Linux to Microsoft GitHub Promoted by Microsoft LLM Slop and Army Officers
Something doesn't seem right
Weaponisation of For-Profit Dockets - Part III: No More Media Lawsuits From Brett Wilson LLP This Year, One Can Only Guess Why
People leak a lot of material to Techrights because they know, based on the track record, that the sources will be protected and whatever gets published will stay online, in full, no matter how stubborn an effort (even lawsuits and blackmail) will be sent its way
Gemini Links 07/05/2025: Adopting GrapheneOS, Further Enshittification of Flickr
Links for the day
Links 07/05/2025: CISA Gutted, Debt-Saddled (Likely Insolvent) 'Open' 'AI' (Proprietary Slop) Faking Its Financial State Again
Links for the day
The European Patent Office (EPO) Has a Very Profound Corruption Issue, Far More Urgent an Issue Than Pronouns
a rather long document
Richard Stallman Gives Public Talk at Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic
"For programs that you could run, and for network services that could do your own computing, under what circumstances is it reasonable to trust them?"
Today We Turn 18.5
The eighteenth "and a half" anniversary
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, May 06, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, May 06, 2025
Microsoft Finally Admits That XBox is ****
In this case, "enshittification" is an understatement
Another Wave of Microsoft Layoffs Comes Shortly. Microsoft Propaganda Sites and Slopforms Powered by Microsoft LLMs Already Spew Out Face-Saving Nonsense.
Based on last month's leak, some very extensive layoffs are now imminent [...] Perhaps we can expect a lot of noise, some of it spewed out by bots, to distract from or belittle the impending mass layoffs
Ubuntu Becomes Microsoft GitHub, Based on Decision Made by British Army Officer
You're hopeless, Canonical
Slopwatch: Microsoft Slop, Anti-Linux Slop, and IBM Marketing Itself as a Slop Company
Microsoft-controlled LLM spewing out garbage about "Linux"
Links 06/05/2025: Microsoft's Assassination of Skype After Years of Failure, Slop Hallucinations Are Getting Worse
Links for the day
Links 06/05/2025: Changing Places and StarGrid for PalmOS
Links for the day
Windows and Microsoft Causing Serious Data Breaches, Media Rushes to Blame That on "Linux" Somehow
While selling us some rusty old propaganda about how moving to Microsoft GitHub (Rust) will improve security
Making Site Archives More Easily Accessible (Approaching 50,000 Blog Posts)
Efforts to censor us have always backfired badly
Weaponisation of For-Profit Dockets - Part II: Hiding Behind Lawyers and Barristers Who Lack Standards so as to Engage in Classic Corporate Extortion
They're trying to scare people and they misuse their licence to operate
Links 06/05/2025: LLMs/Chatbots Attract More Scrutiny (Getting Worse Over Time), PwC Has Many Layoffs
Links for the day
Thanks for listening. How can this Morse feed be further improved?
Right now any and all feedback on the audio would be helpful
statCounter: Bing's Market Share Lower Right Now Than It Was When LLM Hype Began (With "Bing Chat")
If anybody gains at Google's expense in search, it is BRICS' alternatives such as Yandex
Gemini Links 06/05/2025: Failure and Proxmox Cluster
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, May 05, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, May 05, 2025