The Gates Foundation is a nice-looking tax evasion apparatus. Gates has already used it to evade literally billions of dollars in tax payments (he is not alone, as Bush-era tax cuts made it even legal) and at the same time he glorified himself, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars paid to press organisations, blogs etc. to help launder the Gates Brand€®. Gates is rapidly becoming richer and richer, so the myth of giving is a myth, that is all. It is usually taxpayers who foot the bill for his endeavours; he is there just to steal credit and collect a profit. Now we find that the financial chief of this apparatus decides to quit and along with him quits another top executive. He is yet another top official who quits on his own. Others spoke a little negatively after they had left. Some did complain about what they saw, but would not go into specifics (gag orders and conditions are often part of the departure). They did this perhaps despite the non-disparagement clauses. A Microsoft and Gates fan site said:
Two top execs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are stepping down: Dick Henriques is leaving the organization after four years as CFO, while Martha Choe is moving on after spending ten years with the foundation.
Leigh Morgan will take over Choe’s responsibilities in the newly created role of chief operating officer. She is new to the foundation, coming from , San Francisco, where she was an associate chancellor.
Transition for all four leaders will begin immediately and continue through late September.
Hoping to line up the support of teachers, the Gates Foundation education chief is now urging states to wait two years before using Common Core tests to make decisions about teacher performance.
Like many do-gooders, Bill Gates is obsessed with the problem of inequality. However, Common Core's way of trying to overcome inequality is by dumbing down all U.S. students and pretending, like the Lake Wobegon kids, that all children are above average.
Reacting to the growing opposition to Common Core, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest money bag for Common Core, is now urging states to have a two-year moratorium on all states and school districts about to make any high-stakes decisions based on tests aligned to the new standards.
The overhaul is funded by a $450,000 grant from Next Generation Learning Challenges, a program backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Piedmont was singled out for the funding because of the changes it’s made over the past five years, through its use of laptop computers.
TODAY’S education reformers believe that schools are broken and that business can supply the remedy. Some place their faith in the idea of competition. Others embrace disruptive innovation, mainly through online learning. Both camps share the belief that the solution resides in the impersonal, whether it’s the invisible hand of the market or the transformative power of technology.
Common Core is a federal government power grab disguised as a “revamping” of our nation’s educational system — an educational system that, with all its flaws, managed to produce people who put a man on the moon and gave the world the Internet.
Why is it that by 2011, 45 states (blue and red) had officially adopted the Common Core State Standards, yet in 2013 62 percent of Americans said they’d never even heard of it. Why did the governors who adopted Common Core do it without discussing, disclosing or debating it with their taxpaying constituents, the very people it concerns the most?
As with anything political, follow the money.
Bill Gates is the major player in Common Core. In 2013 alone, he contributed over $200 million to encourage the creation and adoption of Common Core. Pure altruism on his part? No, merely an investment in Gates’ Inbloom, which stood to make $2 to $5 per student for the privilege of participating in the student data-mining scheme, despite being listed as a nonprofit entity.
Inbloom Corp. has thankfully been shut down permanently due to the avalanche of parental objections about student privacy. There’s no force in nature more powerful than a mother’s instinct to protect her children from a perceived threat. (Common Core is quickly becoming the proverbial ‘third rail’ for the elected.)
Other recipients of Gates’ “dollars” are the National Governor’s Association, the Fordham Institute, Achieve, Inc., the U.S. Department of Education, the Council of Chief State School Officers, the Foundation for Excellence in Education and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Wow! Those billions are buying a lot of “reform” for our children, don’t you think?
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The Pearson Data Solutions-Gates connection is also a matter of interest. Pearson’s role in Common Core is data-mining. Joy Pullman, Heartland Institute education research fellow, states; “The Administration has essentially rewritten federal privacy regulations without the approval of Congress — to claim that information on children can be shared without parental knowledge or consent … As part of the agreements signed between state governments and the federally backed consortia, data gathered on children at school will be provided to the organizations. As an example of the types of data being sought, is information on student behavior, their attitudes, their persistence, their discipline and so forth — a lot of non-academic things that a lot of parents aren’t comfortable with.
“The real goal is social engineering,” Pullman said. “I don’t like to use explosive sorts of things like that, but this is very obvious — the goal is to create a workforce that responds to the needs of the 21st century, as determined by the central planners.”
Diane Ravitch, a leading education expert who is now a research professor of education at NYU and has been writing about the controversy on her blog, states: “I’m sorry, I think this is madness. Is there a mad scientist or psychologist advising the Gates Foundation? Does Dr. Moreau work in Gates’ lab in Seattle?”