Deep Pockets, Corporate Reform, and Teacher Education
A colleague whom I have never formally met, but with whom I’ve had some interesting email exchanges with over the past few months — James D. Kirylo, Professor of Teaching and Learning in Louisiana — recently sent me an email I read, and appreciated; hence, I asked him to turn it into a blog post. He responded with a guest post he has titled “Deep Pockets, Corporate Reform, and Teacher Education,” pasted below. Do give this a read, and a social media share, as this one is deserving of some legs.
Here is what he wrote:
Money is power. Money is influence. Money shapes direction. Notwithstanding the influential nature of it in the electoral process, one only needs to see how bags of dough from the mega-rich-one-percenters—largely led by Bill Gates—have bought their way in their attempt to corporatize K-12 education (see, for example, here).
This corporatization works to defund public education, grossly blames teachers for all that ails society, is obsessed with testing, and aims to privatize. And next on the corporatized docket: teacher education programs.
In a recent piece by Valerie Strauss, “Gates Foundation Puts Millions of Dollars into New Education Focus: Teacher Preparation,” she sketches how Gates is awarding $35 million to a three-year project called Teacher Preparation Transformation Centers funneled through five different projects, one of which is the Texas Tech based University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation (U.S. Prep) National Center.
A framework that will guide this “renewal” of educator preparation comes from the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET), along with the peddling of their programs, The Deep Pockets, Corporate Reform, and Teacher Education | VAMboozled!:
