Archives / 2015 / November
Charter schools—What we know
More than a quarter of a century (and a million articles) later, charter schools show about the same performance level as traditional public schools. Certainly, there are a number of advocacy groups generating testimonials about charter school miracles, when the very best research is examined, the pattern is clear – there’s not much difference when the two sectors are compared. »
Gates intrusion into Florida
And that’s when I saw the influence of the Gates Foundation. They have the one thing non-profit, educational, civic, and parent groups are in desperate need of – funding. »
Gates and the effort to weaken student data privacy
by Leonie Haimson NYC parent activist and Executive Director of Class Size Matters Bill Gates has had an enduring fixation on the need to expand the collection and disclosure of personal student data. In 2005, the Gates Foundation organized a “data summit” among its grantees, at which launched the Data Quality Campaign, “to Improve the collection, availability and use of high-quality educat... »
Denver’s Gates funded teacher evaluation system
by Aaron Lowenkron Denver teacher Regarding Denver’s teacher evaluation system, this was my former colleague, science teacher Amy Hanson: Yet, somehow, her LEAP observation scores (our effective teaching rubric) were always “effective,” never “distinguished”. She has since left the classroom and moved to the University of Colorado, Boulder. My colleagues in the math d... »
Bill Gates on class size
While small classes and individualized attention will be reserved for his own children and those of the business and political elite; he has continued to maintain that everyone else’s children should be subjected to increasing class sizes and get their education instead through large scale experiments in online education and data-mining.»
When Gates came to Chicago
by Mike Klonsky Chicago Educator and Community Activist Gates supported small schools like a rope supports a hanging man. When Gates came, uninvited, to Chicago in 2001, an initial $50 million investment soon led to the transformation of a vibrant, teacher-led small-schools movement, into a top-down corporate-style reform initiative imposed on schools and on the school district. Schools and... »
The Gates teacher evaluation system in action—a costly and ineffective adventure in Hillsborough, Florida
by Carol Burris Executive Director, Network for Public Education and former New York principal (Part of this report first appeared in Valerie Strauss’ The Answersheet as a guest blog by Burris) In 2008, Florida’s Hillsborough School District received a $10,000,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The initiatives in the grant included: the establishment of an evaluation syst... »
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