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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Please Post Your Responses on Gates’ Blog « Diane Ravitch's blog

Please Post Your Responses on Gates’ Blog « Diane Ravitch's blog:


Please Post Your Responses on Gates’ Blog

Earlier today I posted Anthony Cody’s searing critique of the Gates Foundation’s support for profiteering and privatization. (“When Profits Drive Reform”)
Cody pulled no punches. He went right into the house of the Emperor to tell him that he has no clothes.
His post is now posted on the Gates Foundation’s own blog. They call it “Impatient Optimists.”
Please leave your comments on the Gates’ blog so that the foundation staff is sure to read them.
They need to hear what teachers and principals and school board members think of their efforts to transfer control of public education to private hands and to measure teachers by test scores. They need to hear what you think of handing children over to profit-seeking entrepreneurs.


Deborah Meier Explains Why Gates Failed

In a comment on Anthony Cody’s brilliant post, Deborah Meier explains why the Gates Foundation failed in New York City. She may be responding to the name of its blog “Impatient Optimists.” The foundation’s lack of patience caused it to crush the very practices and policies it should have nurtured. It wanted results–fast. It wanted measurements–quickly. Its impatience doomed its efforts:
Among other problems with Gates, it was their impatience for results that led them and others to abandon the arduous, time-consuming process of trying to expand the innovative networks that existed before they entered the field.  Rather than learn from them, they absorbed only the shallowest of the lessons they could have been taught.  I know, I remember, I was there at the time.  Our shared central “dogma” was and is: democracy isn’t