Thoughts on Gates-funded publicity
By Pamela Grundy
The first clue came when the phone rang at the house of my friend Carol Sawyer. At the other end was a pleasant woman who said she was conducting a survey on education in our school district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Carol doesn’t much care for phone surveys, but she’s interested in anything that has to do with CMS. She said yes.
A few minutes in, she realized that this was no ordinary survey. Question after question sought her opinions on key aspects of CMS policy: strategic staffing, weighted student funding, pay for performance and more. She could give free responses, which the surveyor typed up. Someone had spent a lot of money.
When she asked who had commissioned the survey, the woman wouldn’t say, beyond a
