What are Bill and Melinda Gates talking about?
Bill Gates is the leader of education philanthropy in the United States, pouring a few billion dollars over more than a decade to promote school reforms that he has championed. They include the Common Core State Standards, a small-schools initiative in New York City that he abandoned after deciding it wasn’t working, and controversial new teacher evaluation systems that use student standardized test scores to determine the “effectiveness” of educators. Such philanthropy has sparked a debate about whether American democracy is well-served by wealthy people who pour part of their fortunes into their pet projects — regardless of whether they are grounded in research — to such a degree that public policy and funding follow.
Bill and his wife Melinda Gates recently sat down with PBS journalist Gwen Ifill at the U.S. Education Learning Forum to discuss the reforms they support. This post, by Carol Burris, the executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education Fund, looks at what they said and explains what it actually means. Burris retired in June as an award-winning principal at a New York high school, and she is the author of numerous articles, books and blog posts (including on The Answer Sheet) about the botched school reform efforts in her state.
By Carol Burris
In 2012, Rick Hess, the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a brutally honest account of the how the true believers of the Common Core think. Hess called the piece “The Common Core Kool-Aid” and it ran in his Ed Week blog, Straight Up.
The blog post recounted Hess’ experience at the 2012 education summit sponsored by Jeb Bush. At that summit, Rick spoke with those pushing Common Core reforms and they bluntly explained their strategy to him. He summed up what they said:
First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes. Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace reform.
Hess continued:
Common Core advocates evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the “reform” agenda. And this conviction has become the happy Kool-Aid that allows would-What are Bill and Melinda Gates talking about? - The Washington Post:
