"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Sunday, June 08, 2014

Bill Gates Steps from Behind the Curtain in Hopes of Saving Common Core

The Gates Foundation has provided Lindsay Layton of the Washington Post a story that is intended put a band-aid on the bleeding out of the Common Core Standards.  It's worth reading for an appreciation of how desperate Gates is to save his billion dollar baby from going down the drain, like his other self-serving educational thought disorders.

With access to Gates and a bit of polished skullduggery on how David Coleman and Gene Wilhoit took the corporate case for Achieve, Inc. standards to Bill and Melinda for funding, Gates and the oligarchs hope to relieve the Obama Administration from blame for the corporate-socialist takeover of school curriculum. 

Gates as chief oligarch steps forward to claim credit, himself, which helps to dispell the earlier false claims about the existence of "state standards" and myths of teacher involvement in the making of this massive national mess.  Such forthrightness, however, does nothing to make the Corporate Core any less embedded in the federal takeover of public education but, rather, helps us to understand how the federal agenda became the Gates agenda, and vice versa.  The mutual parasitism does nothing but further expose the another dimension of corporate socialism at the highest levels.  Making totalitarianism a corporate responsibility is not likely to palliate those who steadfastly believe in public control of public schools.

In the video below, which should be watched a few times to catch the body language and glancing eyes of the aging geek-in-chief of education, please note that Gates wants a "super set" of common core standards for his own children, which we may guess may include all the literature, ideas, social studies, play, field trips, etc. that children at, say, Sidwell Friends get.  Which would make them uncommon, far removed from the gritty, test-based, techno manual core orientations being readied for the unwashed herds.  

And does anyone besides Bill Gates believe that the research he sponsors is intended to get anything other than the conclusion that he wants??

Update June 12: Gates's latest desperation strategy to save the rotted CC:  move forward with the testing but wait 2 years for it to be used to fire teachers, hold back students, and close schools.   As Ravitch said, "If the sanctions and punishments tied to test scores are wrong now — promoting teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, cheating and gaming the system — the sanctions and punishments will still be wrong two years from now."



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