Is Gates Money Going to Influence the National Board?
A billionaire by the name of Tom Perkins recently made headlines with his suggestion that since people like him pay more taxes, they ought to have more political power. His idea to make things more fair? "You don't get to vote unless you pay $1 in taxes... If you pay $1 million in taxes, you get a million votes."
Of course other billionaires figured out long ago that there are other ways to gain political control over democratic processes. You do not need direct control over votes if you can access other levers of power. Our education system is in the process of being transformed, and the biggest billionaire in the nation has led the charge for the past decade. But Bill Gates' project has run into a few bumps in the road recently, so once again he and his wife Melinda have been on the hustings, doing their best to convince us that all is well.
Bill Gates' latest effort is a column in USA Today commending the Common Core. In the name of debunking myths, Gates promotes falsehoods, such as the assertion that teachers, parents and students participated in the creation of the standards. Creation refers to the origin, the genesis of something. In that regard, we can enter the wayback machine to discover that no, teachers were not involved in the drafting of the standards.
But he really goes into the realm of myth-making when he states this:
These are standards, just like the ones schools have always had; they are not a curriculum. They are a blueprint of what students need to know, but they have nothing to say about how