Bill Gates Is Not The Devil.
His massive, unregulated, opaque, and technocratically-dominated influence on public education may be very troublesome……but honestly, some of the vicious (or do I mean viscous) mud-slinging I’ve been seeing around these parts make it a little hard for me to sing my Billy Bragg Labor Day tunes. We all need evidence, people. Where’s your Common Core?
(OK, maybe that wasn’t the right question.)
Put less flippantly: it seems to me that one can ask critical, hard and necessary questions about Gates funding without assuming that accepting money from them makes your organization a cheap front for corporate school takeover.
We need people who do that– and here’s one of them. I introduce to you today Ken Libby, a doctoral student and blogger at the University of Colorado Boulder.
While skating around looking for non-polemicist texts on Gates, I stumbled across this post of Ken’s at the Shanker Blog, which I highly recommend reading. I sent him an email, as I tend to do, and now I gleefully follow him on Twitter (@kenlibby) where amongst erudite and interesting links, he also he posts some of the more hilarious examples of Extreme Edu-Makeover under the hash tag #CORESPIRACY.