Schools Matter: Gates Moves to Take Over Teacher Education, Part 2

Schools Matter: Gates Moves to Take Over Teacher Education, Part 2:

Gates Moves to Take Over Teacher Education, Part 2

Part 1 was posted in December 2015, just days after the U of Michigan announced a $7 million grant from the Gates Foundation to support a project called TeachingWorks.  The immodest goal (has Gates ever been modest?) was/is to remake teacher education in a corporate high tech image, one that can be turned into deep and fast-running revenue streams by the increasingly rapacious Silicon Valley data miners and dystopian isolationists who view democratic community as a threat to unbridled corporate greed.

There are a couple of major updates to the story.  First, Deborah Ball has resigned as Dean of Education at UMichigan to work full-time on the TeachingWorks project.  Did the University sense of conflict of interest in having a dean for a great public university working for an outfit that, if successful, will overthrow its own program's legitimacy? 

For whatever reason, Dr. Ball seems excited at the prospect of devoting all her energies to two immediate priorities: 1) serving as director of TeachingWorks, thus providing a patina of respectability to a bad sci-fi conception of teacher education and, 2) serving as President of the American Education Research Association (AERA), where Gates, once again, has used some more millions of dollars to blast a hole straight to the top an organization that once represented legitimacy in educational research. 

The second big development in the teacher ed story is the arrival of avatar-based teacher training, which will require prospective teachers, at least in part, to earn their credentials by successfully conducting Schools Matter: Gates Moves to Take Over Teacher Education, Part 2: