tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14707730.post223346727022001686..comments2024-02-24T19:49:45.687-05:00Comments on Schools Matter: Bill Gates, the Oligarchs' OligarchJames Hornhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04462754705431590571noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14707730.post-38301604034841395852010-07-11T12:54:05.104-04:002010-07-11T12:54:05.104-04:00Thanks for this informative post. Things tie toget...Thanks for this informative post. Things tie together more and more.<br /><br />Leonie Haimson wrote a good piece about Gates yesterday, too: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie-haimson/the-most-dangerous-man-in_b_641832.html<br /><br />I added this in the comments there to highlight the other things Gates is buying with his money:<br />---<br />The Gates Foundation is discussed by Diane Ravitch in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She informs us that the Gates Foundation increased its spending on "advocacy work" from $276K in 2002 to $57 million in 2005.<br /><br />"Writing about the foundation's efforts to ‘broaden and deepen its reach,’ [Erik W.] Robelen noted [Education Week, 2006] that almost everyone he interviewed was getting Gates money…but never in the history of the United States was there a foundation as rich and powerful as the Gates Foundation. Never was there one that sought to steer state and national policy in education. And never before was there a foundation that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving almost no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence." <br />---<br /><br />And Joel Shatzky added this insight in his comment to her piece:<br /><br />The inferior "test-prep" agenda which bases the pedagogically fraudulent "data" standardized test scores serves as a way of diverting the concerns of working parents who hope that better test scores will lead to better job opportunities for their children. If they realized that they were being given a con job, they might consider other, more "active" forms of political and social protest than simply lobbying for more money for charter and public schools.<br />---<br />Here in Oakland, parents have been sold the bill of goods and its hard to get them to realize that there is more to their child's education than the schools' test scores. Parents will actually get hostile and defensive if their fixation on test scores is challenged, esp. if they are low-income and Black or Latino and the challenger is middle-class and White (as can be expected). The conversation goes nowhere.The Perimeter Primatehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12619173438763495716noreply@blogger.com