Gates and Zuckerberg Take Direct Aim at Children

Bill Gates began his purchased reforms of education policy and practices in 2000, and his repeated failures in this arena have not altered his determination to turn American schools into technology-dependent, business-modeled training camps, to turn American teachers into disposable contract middle managers who are laser-focused on the bottom line--test scores, and to convert children into eager culturally-sterilized recipients of the global economic mindset of personal sacrifice toward an eventual corporate reward. 

Of course, what I mean by "failure" needs some explaining, for not everyone affected by the Gates philanthropic ventures in education has been negatively affected.  Even though the Gates Foundation reforms have done nothing to raise achievement levels, and they have done nothing to staunch the shameful resegregation of American schools, and they have done nothing to build or renew support for public education, the Gates initiatives have been wildly successful in promoting the privatization of public schools, dependence on high tech and big data, and the marketing of thousands of corporate product lines in curriculum, testing, professional development, and teacher preparation.  

In short, Gates initiatives over the years have been used to feather the nests of Gates's own businesses, along with the thousands of entrepreneurs and hangers-on who trail the Gates army as it moves in and occupies the various sectors of the education landscape.  

There is nothing new in my critique.  More extensive criticism of Gates's giving has been delivered by the social advocacy group, Global Justice Now, whose 54 page report in 2016 examines the darker side of Bill and Melinda's giving business.  Here are three allegations from the report aimed at the Gates Foundation:

• It provides a disproportionate amount of funding to health organizations in high-income countries, "exacerbating unequal research and development infrastructures between poor and rich regions." The report cites as an example the foundation's "overwhelming focus" on developing and promoting new vaccines at the expense of already-proven preventative measures for diseases that most affect poverty-stricken areas.
• Its projects are primarily "vertically funded interventions targeted at specific diseases or health problems" and do little to strengthen public health systems, leaving underdeveloped nations ill-equipped to combat the root causes of disease. The report backs this claim with comments from Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), who said in an interview with The New York Times that the WHO's budget is "driven by what I call donor interests." This limits the organization's ability to maintain fixed support staff "to build response systems" when there is no active health emergency. Adds the report: "The inference in Chan’s remarks is that the WHO, whose largest donor is [the Gates Foundation,] is unable to respond adequately to ebola and other disease outbreaks because donor interests prevent it from being able to build public health systems in developing countries.
• It "prioritizes support for corporations." The report notes that the Gates Foundation has funded a huge number of projects for major corporations—including Monsanto, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Coca-Cola—and that the corporations often stand to profit. According to the report, the foundation has owned or still owns shares in some of the corporations it funds. "The foundation is profiting from its investments in corporations which contribute to social and economic injustice," reads the report.

And most importantly, perhaps, Global Justice Now points out that the strategic giving on a massive level is aimed, too, to buy the silence of would-be critics of the Gates army.  There's no better examples than AFT and NEA, whose leaders have been bribed to support a Gates-led war to cororatize schools.  Both have accepted multi-million dollar grants from Gates and have partnered with Gates-linked corporations to involve teachers in advancing the Common Core, the war waged by the Business Roundtable and funded by Gates to impose a stupidifying sameness to American schooling, while constructing many new layers of profitable bureaucracy within the educational corporate complex.

And there are many other examples here.

Now we find the two dollar-fortified armies of Gates and Zuckerberg converging to wage a new corporate education war, this time with a primary focus to remap the neurological paths of children through psychological interventions beginning at an early age and proceeding through the schooling years.  From the AP: 

Tech moguls Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday they will team up to help develop new methods for kids with trouble learning — an effort that will include dabbling into child brain science. . . .The effort is now seeking information and ideas from across sectors, from education and academia to business, technology and medicine. Future investments based on that information are expected, but no dollar amount has been set.

Part of the oligarchs' dream, of course, is to develop and deploy the psychological equivalent of individual surveillance cameras that can interactively monitor the choices, behaviors, preferences, and levels of involvement of children and adolescents, and to further develop learning algorithms that can intervene to redirect individual behavior or thoughts when they move outside acceptable parameters.  

The idea that disadvantaged children struggle to learn because of poor executive brain function involving memory, thinking flexibility, and behavioral issues related to autism and other attention disorders has long been lamented by social workers and health advocates.

The joint project by Gates and Zuckerberg details possible ways to mitigate those shortcomings

Among the ideas is using games and technology simulations to support teachers and family, and tracking progress in certain vulnerable student populations such as kids with disabilities or those who are learning English as a second language.

In effect, Gates and Zuckerberg are intent upon eliminating the debilitating effects of poverty on learning, while doing nothing to eliminate child poverty aside from rewiring children's brains to make them behaviorally immune to inequality and mistreatment.

What could go wrong!

Ravitch Embraces TURN Agenda, Openly This Time

The Union Reform Network (TURN) was established as a joint venture among Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and the leadership of NEA and AFT.  TURN was created with millions of dollars from Gates and Broad, and the new "reform network" they created aimed to co-opt and use the teachers' unions as essential levers to advance corporate education reform agendas and the corporate political agenda of dismantling the hard-earned rights and benefits of teachers.

Those goals have not changed over the past 20 years, even if the rhetoric has been fine-tuned to appeal to unsuspecting teachers enticed by phrases like "teacher-led visions."

Earlier this month, TURN issued its most explicit version yet of its long-standing goals, this time with objectives included, along with some of the strategies that TURN intends to use.  Within a few days of TURN's publication of its new document, Diane Ravitch posted her support of the TURN agenda, as spelled out in the latest proclamation, Our TURN: Revitalizing Public Education . . .:

It is a good report. It refutes the common refrain from corporate reformers that there is no alternative to their cramped and toxic practice of high-stakes testing and school choice. It is a public school response to the Betsy DeVos’ belief in the free market of charter schools and vouchers for religious schools.

This is a worthy presentation of a well-resourced public school system, staffed by experienced teachers whose collective voices are represented in the policymaking process, and whose voices carry more weight than those of the politicians who write unreasonable and impossible mandates. 

Along with her glowing assessment, Ravitch posted a most saccharine "Rationale" from the TURN document, along with even more syrupy "Vision" from Our TURN . . . 

Here's the "Vision:"

As teachers and teacher unionists, we believe that teaching and learning can be transformed if we embrace a new vision of education that rests on four pillars, each of which bears equal weight:

1. If we want schools to prepare student to be career and college ready, thoughtful citizens, and reflective human beings, then schools should be safe, learner-centered and well-resourced to serve the needs of each individual student.

2. If teachers are the most important in-school determinant of student learning, then teaching must be recognized as a true profession.

3. If America needs to tap into the talents of all students, irrespective of their background, then educational excellence must be inclusive and education redesign must be accompanied by changes in other aspects of students’ lives.

4. If all education policy must ultimately be about enhancing opportunities for students to learn, then collective bargaining (and other forms of collaborative decision-making) between teachers and management should always aim to advance student learning.

The Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), a coalition of teachers and teacher union leaders from AFT and NEA union locals, was founded 20 years ago “to promote progressive reforms in education and in teacher unions.” To all who are engaged in the debate about the future of public education – whether practitioners or policymakers — this document lays out precisely what we aspire to.

We begin with our idea of what education, schools and classrooms could and should look like, then turn to the policies needed to bring about that vision.

What's not to love, right?  Sounds like something we can all get in bed on board with.

What Ravitch does not post or even mention are the "Policy and Practice" objectives that TURN provides in the document, all of which reflect long-standing priorities of corporate reformers:

1) linking collective bargaining to accountability testing gains,

2) weakening seniority rights (particularly related to administrative transfers),

3) eliminating of teacher salary schedules in favor of merit pay schemes, and

4) dismantling system-wide collective bargaining agreements for the kinds of school-based preferences that made Green Dot's hostile takeover of Locke High School possible.

These are the policies, then, that TURN will continue to pursue, now with the added support from Diane Ravitch's NPE:

We back “quality bargaining” that puts student learning at the center of collective bargaining (and other collaborative) agreements and requires that all proposals be buttressed by evidence of how they contribute to the advancement of student learning.

➤➤We support the highest standards for teachers and reject the allegation that due process rights provide a lifetime job guarantee. Accordingly, we support the widespread adoption of peer assistance and review procedures that support struggling teachers and in some instances remove teachers from the profession.

➤➤We call for the possibility of flexible, site-specific negotiated agreements, where a super­majority of teachers in a school can override the corresponding district-wide contract to allow for tailoring terms and conditions to improve teaching and learning.

➤➤We propose modifying consideration of seniority in school transfer decisions in cases where fair teacher-led hiring practices are put in place.

➤➤We call for modifying the traditional single salary schedule and instead adopting differ­entiated pay that recognizes that teaching is broad in its scope of responsibilities. . . .

➤➤We advocate meaningful consultation with parents and community members as part of the process of collective bargaining (or other agreements) with management.

Oh yes, and if you are wondering if TURN has forgotten the latest corporate tech fixation on de-personalized learning and the elimination of brick and mortar schools, TURN has not forgotten.  Here's the way TURN couches the new "competency-based" screen-based learning as "learner-centered schools:"

In learner-centered schools, students are rarely lectured to. Instead, learning is collaborative, and students do most of the work themselves. The paradigm of students who sit still and absorb material is replaced by well-crafted, active learning opportunities that promote cooperation, analysis, and synthesis. 

And in learner-centered schools, learning is connected to the real world. Lessons often take place in real life settings, not just in classrooms. 

In the past, Diane Ravitch struggled to downplay her connections to TURN by attacking and disparaging motives of anyone who noticed as much.  In 2013, for instance, when lawyer and whistle blower, Kathleen Carroll, pointed to Ravitch's speech at one of TURN's meetings (and another speech to psychologists funded by Pearson), Ravitch lashed out, as did Diane's venomous protege, Mercedes Schneider.

Now quite suddenly, Diane Ravitch has openly endorsed TURN's latest statement of its agenda.  And she has done so with the typically deceptive and dissembling techniques that Ravitch perfected during her many years as a loyal lieutenant to Chester Finn and Lamar Alexander.

Some more links to TURN's activities:

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2013/12/is-turn-trying-to-take-over-your-union.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/06/attention-all-teachers-your-union.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/06/organize-to-oust-toner-neville.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/07/paul-toner-and-turncoats.html

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/12/paul-toner-from-turncoat-to-collaborator.html

0. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

Perhaps Bill and Melinda Gates need their folly expressed in a more familiar format to understand it?

“Philanthropy is not progressive and never has been.” — Tiffany Lethabo King and Ewuare Osayande

Seems Bill and Melinda Gates have great difficulty learning from their myriad mistakes. Our Professor Stephen Krashen is frequently reminding them and their fellow neoliberal corporate education reformers of what the real problem is. While the convicted predatory monopolist has no degree, Melinda Gates actually attended and graduated college, so one would think the two of them could sort these issues out. Despite this, the Gates Foundation duo are demanding yet more data, as if that doubling down on their poorly-thought-out ideas will work.

Since they're both computer science types, the problem may just be that they need to see their folly expressed in code. To that end, I've written a short program illustrating what the two Gates Foundation plutocrats do.

If I were more cynical, given their behavior in the face of overwhelming evidence discrediting their ideas and ideology, I think that their constant calls for more data are an attempt to rationalize their conduct, rather than actually trying to help anyone.

THE MIND TRUST SPIN-OFF IN CINCY AND BEYOND

By Doug Martin 

 

In my book Hoosier School Heist, I expose the Mind Trust, formed by once Democratic mayor of Indianapolis Bart Peterson and his charter school director David Harris.  I have also written on the Mind Trust spin-off formerly known as CEE-Trust (and its ties to Bill Gates, George Bush, and Joe Klein), which now goes by the name Education Cities and is operating in at least 24 cities. 

Before doing a recent NAACP Indy panel on ALEC, the Mind Trust, and school privatization a few days ago, I decided to peek into what Education Cities has been up to. Here are just a few things I found. 

Besides having the Mind Trust’s David Harris and Earl Martin Phalen and corporate school grandfather Howard Fuller (a BAEO/Edison connected operative who played a role in school privatization in Indiana and Philly) as board members, the Mind Trust spin-off Education Cities is being funded by well-known school privatization billionaire organizations like the Walton Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, and the foundation started by Eli Broad, the Broad Foundation. 

 

The Broad Foundation is noteworthy because of recent events. 

Started by Obama supporter Eli Broad, the Broad Foundation placed its members in Arne Duncan’s Dept. of Education.  Broad, as my book mentions, gave former Indiana supt. of public ed. Tony Bennett a $50,000 campaign gift back in the day.   

Broad is also funding Hillary Clinton’s campaign. As Nancy Bailey a short time ago wrote: 

Education Week recently compared the education platforms of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  Under “choice,” they mention that Hillary Clinton upset some charter advocates last fall when she stated that they didn’t serve all students.

The Wall Street Journal reported that one education reformer troubled by her comments was Eli Broad. Broad is currently on the move to make all Los Angeles public schools charters. And it is stated that he threatened to withdraw campaign funding if Hillary Clinton didn’t retract her claim—which she did.

In fact, Eli Broad's cozy relationship with the Clintons goes way back, as Ken Derstine highly details is his excellent piece, "Eli Broad and the Clintons: Update of the Update." 

Education Cities is in Massachusetts, too.  The Center for Collaborative Education, which is now carrying the corporate agenda’s water, announced a while back that it had “been designated as an ‘Emerging Harbormaster’ by the Next Generation Learning Challenge and Education Cities to launch a new Personalized Learning Network in Massachusetts.”

Next Gen.’s ultimate goal, which the Mind Trust with Bill Gates’ help has been pushing for years, is to turn schools into complete online learning hubs with a few teachers babysitting students. 

Along with the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation—another online-school promoting group--funneled $31.5 million into Ohio in 2002.  

In Cincinnati, Education Cities is represented by Accelerate Great Schools, a private-public set-up which includes the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Regional Business Committee,  the Cincinnati Public Schools, the Farmer Family Foundation, and the Haile U.S. Bank Foundation. 

The Cincinnati Regional Business Committee, in 2013, handed Teach for America, the temporary corporate-led teacher group, $300,000, with the Haile U.S. Bank Foundation adding another $20,000 in 2014 and $25,000 to TFA in 2015.

In 2014, Haile also gave the hedge fund-led DFER and Education Cities-affiliated Bellwether Education Partners (a group highlighted in my book Hoosier School Heist) $21,600 for its Cincinnati High Performing Schools Accelerator, which follows the corporate school model to a tee where, as my book shows, the fake progressives, Big Business, and the Catholics and often the Christian Right join hands to put a big dent in public education. 

Corporate school reformers like to swoop into poor cities, promise a moonshot, and set the neoliberal disaster capitalism dominos in place for complete privatization.   Cincinnati is a waiting victim, where 50% of the children live in poverty.

Who is heading the Cincinnati show?  Patrick Herrel, a former Teach for America recruiter and past vice president of recruitment for The Mind Trust, was picked by the corporate powers-that-be in 2015 to lead the Accelerate Great Schools.  (To see how Herrel supports Gates’ public money heist for online learning charter schools, see page 38 in my book.)  

One board member of the Accelerate Great Schools is Cintas’ Scott Farmer (the son of one of George Bush’s 15^th largest fundraisers in 2000) , whose Cintas, according to Forbes, was being investigated by the U.S. Inspector General for violating in 2006 “the federal False Claims Act when it tacked millions of dollars in ‘environmental fees’ on uniforms, mops, mats and towels it cleaned for the [U.S.] postal service as part of a ten-year, $200 million contract.”  

The U.S. postal service “dropped its pursuit of recovering $816,733 in October” 2007 because the Justice Dept. decided not to file criminal charges.  

Forbes also notes that in 2001 an Alabama Circuit Court lawsuit claimed “similar charges on customer invoices were bogus. That suit, originally seeking $175 million, was settled for $14 million. Cintas has stopped imposing such fees.” 

Hoosier School Heist is filled with similar stories, the private-public nightmares you hardly ever read about in newspapers.  The kind the Mind Trust/Education Cities crowd hope you never catch wind of.

As the author of  Hoosier School Heist,  Doug Martin’s research has been used by or referenced in Salon, Alternet, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, PBS, and newspapers and radio shows across Indiana and America.  His newest book project deals with Big Pharma, Big Medicine, the Cancer Industry, hospital fraud, and nursing home and health care corruption in Indiana.

More research further discrediting Corporate [Common] Core State Standards (CCSS)

http://ucresearch.tumblr.com/post/112788248272/whats-the-best-way-to-teach-math-to-struggling

TNTP and Indiana SBOE’s Crony Corporate Teacher Evaluation Agenda

by Doug Martin

Funded by Bill Gates and started by corporate school darling Michelle Rhee, The New Teachers Project  has a big role in my  book Hoosier School Heist.  And this corporate consulting/temporary teacher group is at it again, this time with help from the Indiana State Board of Education.

On Wednesday, February 4, the state board will meet to determine whether or not it will take TNTP’s recommendations from the group's report done over the last two months on Indiana teacher evaluations for the state board, and there’s a very good chance it will, since TNTP has been a part of the school privatization movement in Indiana for years now.  

Since TNTP has partnered with SBOE board member Dan Elsener’s Marian University, so we know he's onboard with the agenda.  And just a few days ago, Eli Lilly agreed to hand out $3.4 million to the Mind Trust to expand TNTP and Teach for America in Indiana.

TNTP’s CEO, Ariela Rozman, is a Mind-Trust board member.  In 2013, Rozman made over $300,000 in total compensation (page 7).  That same year, TNTP made almost $4.8 million in government grants (page 9).  TNTP, then, was active in 30 cities and created 1652 teachers  for its organization (page 30). 

As noted in TNTP report to the Indiana SBOE, The New Teacher Project doesn't like local control and finds it a problem that 90 percent of the teachers in Indiana have been rated good, which makes firing them and hiring temporary recruits from TNTP and Teach for America more difficult and slows down school privatization.

Reporter Megan Trent summarizes TNTP’s recommendations, one of them being test scores:

The New Teacher Project recommendations include setting a range for teacher evaluations. For teachers specializing in an area covered on ISTEP tests, 33% to 55% of the teachers’ evaluations would be based on student test scores. Educators that teach subjects not covered on ISTEP would have a range of 25% to 40% of their evaluations based on test scores.

Praising the evaluation system set up four years ago and criticizing the “obstacles” (like Glenda Ritz?) to implementation that have occurred (see page 8-9), TNTP, of course, wants the SBOE (minus Glenda Ritz as its chairperson, no doubt) to have a major role in the new plan, and this may require new laws (see page 26).  If adopted, TNTP's teacher evaluation plan for Indiana will begin in 2016.

Filled full of corporate language like “stakeholders,” the plan, no doubt, seeks to further dismantle teachers in Indiana.  Hoosiers need to find out how much TNTP was paid to do the SBOE report and if any taxpayer money was used and how much.

For TNTP’s recent and secret school privatization teacher preparation goals at the University of Memphis (which was hidden from department of education professors), read Jim Horn’s piece here.

Gates Civ 101: The Antiseptic History MOOC Comes to High School

Some reporters for the New York Times pretend to be stupid enough to believe Bill Gates is out to simply make his favorite history course available to every high school student in America.  The bigger assumption by the New York Times is that the American people are as stupid as their "reporter" pretends to be.

Actually, the Times didn't choose a real reporter but, rather, a CNBC Wall Street cheerleader who makes his living telling television viewers what hedge fund CEOs want them to hear about investing.

A TV financial analyst couldn't be a better pick for this 5,000 word story that introduces the world to the Gates undercover operation to devise a simple solution to the biggest disagreement to have not yet emerged about the Common Core: the proper content for Social Studies.

The Gates solution is technocratic, autocratic, and self-serving, which are the three characteristics that all of his solutions must have to be approved by Bill.  Big History will be the first big MOOC made for high school, and it will have the bigger advantage of eliminating the need for all that overly-democratic exercise of deciding the content for American history or World History courses.  It was that disagreement during the 90s that made it obvious that there is no One Inclusive Version of American history, thus killing the national curriculum efforts during the Clinton days.

Gates wants to sidestep all that Core-killing controversy by making his course the one that all the new Pearson tests will be built around for every high school in America.  No doubt Gates drones have other social studies courses in the works, all of which will be cleaner, no doubt, than a Microsoft chip lab.  None of that unsanitary disagreement about divisive issues, and nothing to stand in the way of eliminating whole departments of teaching along the way.

Along with Big Antiseptic History for Dummies, we get some Science for Dummies, too, that carefully keeps the First Cause argument alive, as you can see in the clip below.

The State Board of Ed, the Uneducated Educated, and the Unelected

By Doug Martin

Despite letter after letter and a strong physical presence in support of our democratically elected supt. of public instruction, the Pence/state board/CECI trio today set the ball in motion to steal more power from Glenda Ritz to carry on the billionaires' corporate-theocratic agenda I detail in my book Hoosier School Heist.

The whole attack against Glenda Ritz is, in essence,  an attack against women who make up the majority of the teaching workforce.  It is the same "Father-Knows Best" mentality that was at play with Mitch Daniels, which I wrote about a few years ago and cognitive linguist and political scientist George Lakoff has described extensively.  Although I do not often see eye to eye with state board member Andrea Neal--who works for the Koch Brothers-associated Indiana Policy Review Foundation--I am glad she stood up and voted against the attack today on Ritz.  Today's male attack against Glenda is very similar to the attack by Tony Bennett (who just received a mere $5,000 slap on the wrist for breaking the law) when he said in an email that his IDOE cronies needed to find ways to call out our supt. of public schools' "stupidity."

Let us talk about "stupidity."   

I spent 6,000 hours, at least, studying this assault on public schools in Indiana and probably another 2.000 on what is going on across the nation.  Even though smart people make the blueprint, those carrying out the orders, even though they are power hungry, greedy, and lapdogs of billionaires, are not very bright.  Ironically, we have unelected members on the state board of education who are highly uneducated.  In other words, "stupid." Stupid to country, stupid to democracy, and stupid to all things sacred.

Has Dan Elsener ever read the Upanishads and does he understand the Bible?  My guess is probably not.  He believes it is God's work he is doing, dragging Jesus from the cross and flipping the Savior on his head to propagate a free-market Christianity beginning in the early part of the 20th century and culminating in the type of Kerns Family propaganda which finds its way into think tanks, universities, the media, and rightwing evangelical borderline fascist TV shows.   

Has Mike Pence read the real research on global warming, where the only debate is when (not if) the human race is going to die?  No, he hasn't.  The progress he promotes is leading us straight to the grave; the so-called jobs he promises by using taxpayer money to train future workers in our public schools have all been shipped overseas.  For the jobs left, the billionaire plan Pence wants to utilize will merely flood the market so that  these over-trained workers can be paid less. 

Does Brad Oliver read Walt Whitman to his wife at night, that compassionate and spiritual poetic line stating that "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you?"  Don't bet on it.

It is time to tell it like it is.  It is a world with dumb and corrupt people in charge.  Our country's US DOE is run by Bill Gates even though he never graduated from college, doesn't read neuroscience, and lacks creativity, spirituality, and compassion. 

You can't measure creativity, spiritual wellbeing, or the ability to live peacefully with bugs, flowers, and animals by a standardized test score, even though Evan Bayh, now working for the Apollo Global Management private equity firm that owns McGraw-Hill Financial, isn't going to say otherwise.

I have been saying this all along, in every city I visit and on every radio show I do.  There is no sitting at the table with these people.  They are carrying the table out of the backdoor with your head on a platter and setting you house on fire. 

Let us kick the billionaires and politicians to the curb and let us build libraries and labor unions.  Let us put a psychologist in every school and a public worker on every bridge.  Let us create living-wage jobs for parents so that can find time to read books to their sons and daughters at night and give them a good healthy meal in the morning.  Let us support kid and teachers.

Let us support Glenda Ritz and rebel against Pence, the state board, and the unelected CECI.  Sign the petition to have the state board of ed. in Indiana be elected public officials now.

The Gates Effect in Schools: Divisiveness, Inequity, and the Proliferation of Supercilious Know-Nothings

When Bill Gates left his $90 million calling card in Memphis in 2009, it was plenty to buy the fawning  politicians who lined up for a handout in exchange for pushing the Gates Plan to Memphis schools.

Now five years later, the effect has been that of a massive institutional fragmentation grenade. A failed consolidation scheme has left at least seven school systems to replace the two that operated when Gates came to town, with the urban poor handed over in increasing numbers to corporate charter chain gang overseers with their No Excuses and Zero Tolerance apartheid penal systems of schooling.

Thousands of teachers have lost their jobs as public relations firms haul in more and more unsuspecting white privileged college grads to learn to teach for awhile at the expense of children who need caring and mature adults who know what care is.

Meanwhile, public services are increasingly privatized, with bus school drivers and cafeteria workers fired to benefit private firms with their under-30 hour a week employees for which no benefits or health care is required.  Even substitute teaching is being contracted to Kelly Services, so now Kelly girls (working under 30 hours) will fill classrooms for increasingly frequent illnesses of a demoralized and stressed out remaining teacher corps.

Between three and four thousand teachers found out this spring they will not be returning to work this fall, and they learned just this week they will not receive the teacher bonus that is being paid out based on last year's test scores.  My advice: sue the bastards.

Corporate Stooge, Supt. Dorsey Hopson

Those "fortunate" enough to have a teaching job must face an uncertain future, with no pay raise but, rather, a bonus based on test results.  With 60 percent of Memphis teachers being paid based on scores that belong to the forty percent who teach tested subjects, this unethical, invalid, and unreliable scheme represents the culmination of the Gates Plan.  Ironically, since Gates has pulled out now, the Board this week decided to forego the student surveys that would have cost several hundred thousand dollars that the board does not have, since every spare dollar has been taken up to pay for the $212 million dollar donut hole left in the budget to pay for the corporate charter schools that are run by corporate socialists from TFA's home office.

Meanwhile, the City fathers plan new austerity measures, cutting firefighter and other public employee pensions and long term health benefits.  If it were not for the certain death of the innocent, it would be a good time for the New Madrid fault to really shake things up one more time.

Reaction from MSCEA President, Keith Williams:

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."

Nevada Dad Asked to Pay $10,194 to See Common Core Data on His Children

Bill Gates is a master at using his calculated generosity to make the world dependent upon the technologies that his drones are engineering and his worker bees are mass producing.  Common Core’s move to online testing and the federal extortion efforts to require massive data collection systems on students and teachers are but two small examples.  

If the oligarchs get their way, by the time your kindergartner gets ready for a career, he will not need a resume—our corporate government will have a full dossier on every child in America that ever went to school, with full profiles on personality, academics, "character," behavior, learning patterns, strengths, and weaknesses.

If Bill Gates decided to give all his money away today, he would have to dish $10 million a day for the next 33 years to accomplish the feat.  Or if he was asked to pay the $10,194 that John Eppolito was asked to pay to see what data is being kept on his children in some corporate cloud in Utah, Gates could earn that pittance in less than 10 minutes, based on nothing but interest that is accumulating on his billions. 

By the way, Bill Gates ranks 37^th among nations of the world in total wealth.

Story below the video:

. . . . John Eppolito has four children in the Washoe County School District where a pilot program for Common Core is being tested this school year. "I just want to see any information that the state of Nevada is tracking on my children and any information that could be shared with others," said Eppolito.

The father contacted the Washoe County School District to see this information. The district directed him to the Nevada Department of Education, where he was given a price tag of $10,194.

Public Information Officer Judy Osgood responded to Eppolito’s request via email:

"The Department’s Director of Information Technology, Glenn Myer, has reviewed your request to receive reports of data for each of your four children that is contained in the SLDS. He has estimated that the cost will be approximately $10,194, which represents at least three solid weeks (120 hours) of dedicated staff time (billed at $84.95/hour) to build, test and validate a new application that will be able to display individual student data in a readable format. Payment of this fee must be made in full before work can begin."

Eppolito said he was shocked when he found out how much he needed to pay.

In a statement released to News 4, Osgood says the Department of Education needs a special computer system to accommodate Eppolito’s request:

"The data system is secure and private, but has not been built with an application to create confidential education records for individual students. The system is a warehouse of literally millions of pieces of data, but not the education records of students as that term is defined by law. Mr. Eppolito demanded to know how much it would cost for the Department to build a brand-new search engine to compile individual student records for his children, and that estimate was provided as a courtesy."

Eppolito has not paid the $10,000 bill, and is instead forming the group "Stop Common Core Nevada."

"This data will follow these kids the rest of their lives, so what if the data is not correct," asked Eppolito. "What if it is wrong information?"