LA Times Criticizes Gates and Deasy, but Forgets Their Own Role
By Anthony Cody.
This week the Los Angeles Times published an editorial chastising the Gates Foundation for their role in education reform. The editors wrote:
…the Gates Foundation has spent so much money — more than $3 billion since 1999 — that it took on an unhealthy amount of power in the setting of education policy. Former foundation staff members ended up in high positions in the U.S. Department of Education — and, in the case of John Deasy, at the head of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The foundation’s teacher-evaluation push led to an overemphasis on counting student test scores as a major portion of teachers’ performance ratings — even though Gates himself eventually warned against moving too hastily or carelessly in that direction. Now several of the states that quickly embraced that method of evaluating teachers are backing away from it.Philanthropists are not generally education experts, and even if they hire scholars and experts, public officials shouldn’t be allowing them to set the policy agenda for the nation’s public schools. The Gates experience teaches once again that educational silver bullets are in short supply and that some educational trends live only a little longer than mayflies.
These are some valuable lessons – especially in Los Angeles, where philanthropists like Eli Broad continue to wield great influence.
But wait just a gol-durned minute.
While the Los Angeles Times takes care to trace the Gates Foundation’s role in education back to 1999, they say not a word about their own foray into education reform in 2010. Then, at the same time the Gates Foundation was gearing up for the release of Waiting for Superman and NBC’s Education Nation, the LA Times published a series of articles on “teacher effectiveness,” and commissioned an economist to create LA Times Criticizes Gates and Deasy, but Forgets Their Own Role - Living in Dialogue:
Big Education Ape: What The Gates Foundation’s Learned About Funding Education Journalism | The Grade | The Washington Monthly - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-gates-foundations-learned-about.html