We’re Not Getting Paid
Over here at the COOP, we’re not getting paid to “influence” the reform discourse in education.
Are we ever missing the gravy train.
Returning from a weekend practicing mindfulness for educators (so wrong side of the tracks), I blithely take some deep breaths, settle onto my ergonomic knee chair, and catch up on my emails from the last two days. Only to discover, to the detriment of our personal bank accounts, that none of us here at the COOP, have been receiving half a million dollars a year from the Gates Foundation, to personally influence public opinion to promote favored educational reform initiatives.
In an straightforward, just-the-facts-ma’am expose in the Sunday New York Times, Sam Dillon takes the reader through the rise of “The Big Three” educational foundation’s increasing focus on not just funding projects strategically designed to affect the shape of educational reform, but to influence the formation of opinion about those projects themselves. “We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes,” the Times article quotes the president of the Gates Foundation’s United States program saying. “The
