Why Sue Desmond-Hellmann leaving as the CEO of the Gates Foundation matters - Vox

Why Sue Desmond-Hellmann leaving as the CEO of the Gates Foundation matters - Vox

The Gates Foundation has enormous impact. Its CEO leaving could have an enormous impact, too.
Sue Desmond-Hellmann has helped Bill Gates spend $5 billion a year.

The leaders who call the shots at major philanthropies are some of the most powerful people in the world that you’ve never heard of.

And one at the tippy-top of that list is stepping down in a rare changing of the guard at the Gates Foundation.

Sue Desmond-Hellmann, the CEO of the $50 billion charity, said she would leave her post next year due to health and family issues, ushering in a new era at what has been viewed as the tech sector’s most successful giant charity. Desmond-Hellmann has served as Bill Gates’s senior-most aide for the last five years, overseeing the world’s largest foundation that dispenses about $5 billion a year in grants.

And so while Desmond-Hellmann has not been a household name, she held enormous influence across the globe, shaping everything from malaria programs in Africa to billionaires’ willingness to participate in the Gates-led Giving Pledge. The CEO of a megafoundation is the type of person who operates with little scrutiny or accountability but whose opinions can ricochet around the world and direct the flow of billions of dollars.

That’s especially true if you’re the head of the Gates Foundation, which has been called, correctly, the nerve center of Big Philanthropy. The Gates Foundation is a role model for many newly wealthy who dream of enormous influence after their business careers, as Gates has had. In the 20 years since they established their foundation, the Gateses and their other rich peer, Warren Buffett, have made it bigger in assets than the older, legacy philanthropies that are icons, those named after people like Ford, Rockefeller, or Carnegie.

That’s made Desmond-Hellmann herself a big deal. A doctor and former AIDS researcher who rose high in the leadership ranks at Genentech, she’s only the third CEO of the CONTINUE READING: Why Sue Desmond-Hellmann leaving as the CEO of the Gates Foundation matters - Vox

Poverty Won’t Be Solved By Committee: Education For Liberation, Less Data More Freire – Wrench in the Gears

Poverty Won’t Be Solved By Committee: Education For Liberation, Less Data More Freire – Wrench in the Gears

Poverty Won’t Be Solved By Committee: Education For Liberation, Less Data More Freire

The video below is public testimony I gave to the Jobs and Education Subcommittee of Philadelphia City Council’s Special Committee on Poverty Reduction and Prevention on Thursday December 5, 2019 at Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School in North Philadelphia. It is my belief that this committee was created to jump start pay for success initiatives in our city, a city of deep poverty. You can read about the predatory nature of pay for success finance here.

In 2016, the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia prepared a white paper lauding Philadelphia’s potential to become a center for the impact economy. Perhaps we could even aspire to be the Silicon Valley of “impact!” Yes, we have THAT MUCH poverty, and Main Line venture capital interests are falling all over themselves to package the data of misery management for a tidy profit. See my previous post on social impact investing and public education in Philadelphia.

Here is my testimony. It’s about ten minutes long.

*Correction. I misspoke at the beginning of my testimony. Mass school closures in Philadelphia took place in 2015 not 2013.

It was SUCH a long hearing with six official panels and over twenty CONTINUE READING: Poverty Won’t Be Solved By Committee: Education For Liberation, Less Data More Freire – Wrench in the Gears

Broad Center to move from L.A. to Yale along with $100-million gift - Los Angeles Times

Broad Center to move from L.A. to Yale along with $100-million gift - Los Angeles Times

Broad Center to move from L.A. to Yale along with $100-million gift

The Broad Center, which has attracted praise and suspicion for its training of school district leaders, will move from Los Angeles to Yale University, along with a $100-million gift provided by founder Eli Broad, the center announced Thursday.

The donation is the largest ever for the Yale School of Management and will help fund a master’s program for public education leaders and advanced leadership training for top school system executives — efforts that had been undertaken by the center in Los Angeles.

The current participants will finish their work at the center in Los Angeles before the operation shifts to the East Coast.

“I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished in the last 20 years and I can think of no better future for the Broad Center than Yale University,” Broad said in a statement.

Broad, an 86-year-old billionaire, has recently been planning for the future path of his endeavors in various fields, including medicine and art, for which he has funded research and advocacy.

The Broad Center has received praise for offering a fresh and evolving take on school district management outside traditional education.

As described by Broad and center leaders, the mission was twofold: to attract and train talented leaders from outside education — including business executives and senior military officers — and to provide needed skills to career educators who rose through the ranks, often starting as teachers.

“The job of leading a large urban school district or a district of any size is incredibly complex, difficult and important,” said Executive Director Becca Bracy Knight. “Instruction is at the core, but other pieces are needed to make that happen well: transportation, food services, safe facilities, hiring and development, external communication and communicating with the community, board governance, and labor relations.”

The center has two tracks: an academy for people in top leadership positions and a residency, which targets earlier career professionals and recently began offering a master’s degree.

Separate from the center, Broad has been a major funder of privately operated, CONTINUE READING: Broad Center to move from L.A. to Yale along with $100-million gift - Los Angeles Times

Teacher Platforms (Ben Williamson) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teacher Platforms (Ben Williamson) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teacher Platforms (Ben Williamson)

“Ben Williamson is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. His research traces the connections between educational policy, digital technologies, and practices in schools and universities. He is the author of Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice (Sage, 2017) and over 30 research articles and chapters.“

Amazon has launched a new service allowing teachers to sell and buy education resources through its platform.

The massive multinational platform company Amazon has announced a new service allowing teachers to sell lesson plans and classroom resources to other teachers. The service, Amazon Ignite, is moving into a space where Teachers Pay Teachers and TES Teaching Resources have already established markets for the selling and buying of teaching materials. These services have reimagined the teacher as an online content producer, and Amazon has previously dabbled in this area with its Amazon Inspire ‘open educational resources’ service for free resource-sharing. But Amazon Ignite much more fully captures the teaching profession as a commercial opportunity.

The operating model of Amazon Ignite is very simple. Teachers can produce content, such as lesson plans, worksheets, study guides, games, and classroom resources, and upload them as Word, Powerpoint or PDF files using the CONTINUE READING: Teacher Platforms (Ben Williamson) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

John Thompson: The New Wave of “ #MisNAEPery ” Heading Towards Oklahoma and Other States | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson: The New Wave of “MisNAEPery” Heading Towards Oklahoma and Other States | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson: The New Wave of “MisNAEPery” Heading Towards Oklahoma and Other States

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the use and misuse of NAEP scores to advance disruption in the schools.

A new wave of “misnaepery” is heading towards Oklahoma and other states. After most or all of the corporate reform agenda became law in about 90 percent of states, reading scores dropped so much that even a reform true believer dubbed NAEP as “National Assessment of Educational Stagnation and/or Decline.”

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/07/24/37naep.h32.html
https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cDovL2VkdWNhdGlvbmdhZGZseXNob3cubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M%3D&episode=NzEzNTA2MzJjMDI0NDA0YmJmMjM4NjVhNzAwODE4NzE%3D&hl=en

After test-driven, market-driven reform was implemented, from 2013 to 2019, the nation’s 8th grade math scores for African-Americans dropped by five points. But I would argue that 8th grade NAEP reading scores are the most important and reliable metric, and they dropped seven points in six years for African-American 8th graders.

Today, Oklahoma’s 4th grade NAEP reading scores have dropped to four points below the 1990s pre-HB1017 tax increase level. And since accountability-driven, CONTINUE READING: John Thompson: The New Wave of “MisNAEPery” Heading Towards Oklahoma and Other States | Diane Ravitch's blog

Massachusetts Addresses School Funding Inequity by Adding $1.5 Billion Per Year for Public Schools | janresseger

Massachusetts Addresses School Funding Inequity by Adding $1.5 Billion Per Year for Public Schools | janresseger

Massachusetts Addresses School Funding Inequity by Adding $1.5 Billion Per Year for Public Schools

The eternal question in state school funding is how much is enough. Two days before Thanksgiving, Massachusetts addressed this question directly when Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, signed the new school funding bill sent to him by the state’s Democratic-majority legislature.

State legislatures have to balance their investment of tax dollars across K-12 education, state colleges and universities, Medicaid, transportation, incarceration, and a range of other services and functions. And legislators have to build the public’s will to pay the taxes which make government possible. In the 2008 recession, tax revenues collapsed in many places, and political leaders across many states have been preaching tax cutting as some kind of solution to a lagging economy—even though it never seems to work.  Again and again, from state to state, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has described “a punishing decade for school funding.”  Striking RedforEd teachers have been demonstrating what all this means for our children: Staffing across America’s public schools has dropped below the barest minimum in too many school districts—no nurse, no librarian, no guidance counselor, no music or art, and class size hovering around forty students per teacher.

Massachusetts’ investment in public education did not drop as low as many states. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported that between 2008 and 2015, while (adjusted for inflation) Arizona’s state investment in K-12 public education fell by 36.6 percent and Florida’s state school funding dropped by 22 percent, Massachusetts managed to increase its funding for schools—barely—by .3 percent. But its citizens just demonstrated they expect far more for their children.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker went to The CONTINUE READING: Massachusetts Addresses School Funding Inequity by Adding $1.5 Billion Per Year for Public Schools | janresseger

Eli Broad Pays $100M to Move His Ed-Reform-Producing “Broad Center” from LA to Yale | deutsch29

Eli Broad Pays $100M to Move His Ed-Reform-Producing “Broad Center” from LA to Yale | deutsch29

Eli Broad Pays $100M to Move His Ed-Reform-Producing “Broad Center” from LA to Yale

Eli Broad is one of the chief billionaires pushing education reform.

In 2017, Broad “inserted himself” in the Los Angeles School Board race via the largest contribution to an individual candidate– $100K. Two years earlier, in 2015, Broad was caught planning an “initiative” to put half of LA’s students in charter schools over an eight-year period. (The plan was leaked to the New York Times.)

One year prior to that– 2014– Broad approached US ed sec Arne Duncan’s speech writer, Peter Cunningham, about creating a billionaire-funded, ed-reform blog to defend ed reformers against “being piled on” by non-funded, grass-roots-emergent, pro-traditional-public-ed bloggers. (Sad but true.)

And in 2011, Broad donated $25M to help make the teacher-temp org, Teach for America (TFA), a permanent training program for those temp teachers. (Ironic to work to make TFA permanent so that it could permanently churn out temporary teachers.)

If you want a sense of how far the Broad reach is in supporting ed-reform organizations, peruse the numerous grants Broad had paid in 2017 as listed on the 2017 Broad Foundation tax form. The list is replete with ed-reform organizations, particularly those related to charter schools.

Broad’s efforts have also included the Los Angeles-based “Broad Center,” which includes the “Broad Academy” and “Broad Residency,” has served as pseudo-credentialing mechanism for would-be leaders espousing market-based ed CONTINUE READING: Eli Broad Pays $100M to Move His Ed-Reform-Producing “Broad Center” from LA to Yale | deutsch29

CURMUDGUCATION: My Toddlers Can't Read

CURMUDGUCATION: My Toddlers Can't Read

My Toddlers Can't Read

Here at the Curmudgucation Institute, the Board of Directors has taken a great interest in the printed word.

We have, for instance, entered the Me Do It phase for one of our most beloved tomes (Little Excavator, by Anna Dewdney). I am no longer allowed to read that book to the Board, but must hold it open while a Board member recites the text. We can do then same thing for select portions of that other best-seller, Digger, Dozer, Dumper. The Board also enjoys just sitting and holding a book and flipping through the pages, one at a time, just like the Institute's CEO and his wife, the Executive Breadwinner.

A Board member considers the deeper themes
of Hank the Cowdog

The Board is currently 2.5 years old. In my professional opinion, they cannot actually read. They do a great job of picking up visual cues and hints from the illustrations and context of the books, but I'm not sure they even fully grok the connection between the A-B-Cs all over the page and the words that go with that page.

I have two older children, so I've seen this movie. At some point the letter-sound connection will click. At some point they will start to learn that particular letters make particular sounds, and they will start connecting the marks on the page to the words and stories that they already know.

When that day comes, there's one thing I know for sure-- the damn reading wars arguments will still CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: My Toddlers Can't Read

Governor Cuomo versus the Children, Parents and Teachers of the State of New York: Will the Funding Formula Inequities Be Addressed? | Ed In The Apple

Governor Cuomo versus the Children, Parents and Teachers of the State of New York: Will the Funding Formula Inequities Be Addressed? | Ed In The Apple

Governor Cuomo versus the Children, Parents and Teachers of the State of New York: Will the Funding Formula Inequities Be Addressed?

A couple of months ago I signed up to testify before the hearings on Foundation Aid, the New York State share of education funding; on Tuesday I trekked to 250 Broadway to listen and testify before the committee.

My testimony: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YUHhryzXza8-utRP8_FdeEuPK0Yne_u9Ovica3S1C6I/edit

The Senate Education Committee, under the leadership of Shelly Mayer, has held roundtables and hearings around the state; Tuesday’s hearing was the last of the series.

The legislature convenes in January and the governor gives his State of the State speech on January 8th and will probably lay out his budget priorities.

The state is facing a 5 billion dollar budget gap, the largest in a decade,  due to sharply increasing Medicaid costs, only California spends more on Medicaid.

Now we get into the weeds; the governor has wide discretion in setting the budget; if you’re interested, and I hope you, are check out Silver v Pataki, a NYS Court of Appeals decision that sustained the governor’s right to set state CONTINUE READING: Governor Cuomo versus the Children, Parents and Teachers of the State of New York: Will the Funding Formula Inequities Be Addressed? | Ed In The Apple

The National Assessment of Educational PARALYSIS (NAEP) | The Merrow Report

The National Assessment of Educational PARALYSIS (NAEP) | The Merrow Report

The National Assessment of Educational PARALYSIS (NAEP)

“U.S. 15-year-olds made no significant progress on the Program for International Student Assessment, the results of which were released Tuesday. On a 1,000-point scale, students in 2018 earned on average 505 in reading, 478 in math, and 502 in science in 2018, statistically unchanged from when the tests were last given in 2015.”  That’s how Sarah Sparks of Education Week reported the dismal findings from an important international test familiarly known as PISA, which measures reading, math, and science literacy among 15-year-olds, every three years.

This comes on the heels of even more disappointing results on our own national test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). When I wrote about this recently in this space, I solicited reactions from Aristotle, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey.

However, given the PISA results and the harsh truth that NAEP scores have been disappointing for many years, it’s time to rename NAEP. Let’s call it the National Assessment of Educational Paralysis, because paralysis accurately describes what has been going on for more than two decades of “School Reform” under the test-centric policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Unless and until we renounce these misguided “School Reform” policies developed under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, educational paralysis will continue, and millions of children will continue to be mis-educated and under-educated.

Right now, too many school districts over-test, which means their teachers under-teach. Too often their leaders impose curricula that restrict teachers’ ability to CONTINUE READING: The National Assessment of Educational PARALYSIS (NAEP) | The Merrow Report

Looking for a home? You’ve seen GreatSchools ratings. Here’s how they nudge families toward schools with fewer black and Hispanic students.

Looking for a home? You’ve seen GreatSchools ratings. Here’s how they nudge families toward schools with fewer black and Hispanic students.

Looking for a home? You’ve seen GreatSchools ratings. Here’s how they nudge families toward schools with fewer black and Hispanic students.

What’s the right way to judge a school?

Across the country, states and school districts have devised their own systems of letter grades and color-coded dashboards based on test scores and graduation rates. But arguably the most visible and influential school rating system in America comes from the nonprofit GreatSchools, whose 1-10 ratings appear in home listings on national real estate websites Zillow, Realtor.com, and Redfin. Forty-three million people visited GreatSchools’ site in 2018, the organization says; Zillow and its affiliated sites count more than 150 million unique visitors per month.

GreatSchools’ stated mission is to help all parents, especially those who are low-income, make more informed decisions about where to send their children to school.

But GreatSchools ratings effectively penalize schools that serve largely low-income students and those serving largely black and Hispanic students, generally giving them significantly lower ratings than schools serving more affluent and more white and Asian students, a Chalkbeat analysis found.

And yet, according to GreatSchools’ own data, many schools serving low-income, black, and Hispanic populations are doing a good job helping students learn math and English. But those schools still face long odds of getting an above-average rating on GreatSchools — likely because their students are arriving far behind.

The result is a ubiquitous, privately run school ratings system that is steering people toward whiter, more affluent schools. A recent preliminary study found that as the site rolled out an earlier version of its ratings, areas with highly rated schools saw increases in home prices and rises in the number of white, Asian, and better-educated families. After three years, the study found, property values in CONTINUE READING: Looking for a home? You’ve seen GreatSchools ratings. Here’s how they nudge families toward schools with fewer black and Hispanic students.

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Women and Power | Teacher in a strange land

Women and Power | Teacher in a strange land

Women and Power

At the very beginning of the 2020 Presidential primary, I sent $5, a one-time donation, to each of four candidates: Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand. I did this because I wanted to see all four of them on the debate stage, and the DNC was counting individual contributors.

What this yielded was a veritable flood of emails asking for donations. I was already getting them from the Sanders campaign (because I donated to him in 2016, also a small-potatoes amount), so this was a lot of email, but it was worth it to see four qualified women debating. We haven’t had that before, and I saw it as one step on the path to equity in electoral politics.

And, although I think it’s unlikely, unless I live to be 100, that I will someday see equity in electoral politics (among dozens of other institutions in the Home of the Free), there are few things I think are more worth pursuing.

When I say ‘equity’ I don’t mean just gender equity—I mean representative equity, being governed by a mix of men, women and people who characterize the entire LGBTQ spectrum, people of color and people of diverse ethnic origin, people who are rich and people who worked as bartenders after gaining a university degree. Young people. Old people. Rural and urban citizens.

Until Congress and State Houses and County Commissions—and, for that matter, CONTINUE READING: Women and Power | Teacher in a strange land

‘Flat-out corruption’: DeVos accused of scheming to stop next president from canceling student loan debt – Raw Story

‘Flat-out corruption’: DeVos accused of scheming to stop next president from canceling student loan debt – Raw Story

‘Flat-out corruption’: DeVos accused of scheming to stop next president from canceling student loan debt

“Normally the rich are moderately more subtle about rigging the system in their favor. They’re scared.”

Billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week proposed handing over the federal government’s $1.5 trillion student loan portfolio to a “stand-alone government corporation,” a move observers condemned as a corrupt ploy to strip the next president of the ability to cancel student loan debt.

“This very much appears to be a Betsy DeVos scheme to block the next president from unilaterally forgiving federal student debt, which she is well aware a president could do without Congress,” The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim wrote in a series of tweets late Wednesday. “The DeVos family is heavily invested in the student loan industry and this is just flat-out corruption.”

DeVos’ plan, first introduced on Tuesday, would spin off the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office into a new and supposedly independent federal agency.

“One has to wonder: why isn’t Federal Student Aid a stand-alone government corporation, run by a professional, expert, and apolitical Board of Governors?” DeVos tweeted Tuesday. “A separate Federal Student Aid would be better positioned to deliver world-class service to students and their families as they finance higher education.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who has proposed wiping out all student loan debt, dismissed the CONTINUE READING: ‘Flat-out corruption’: DeVos accused of scheming to stop next president from canceling student loan debt – Raw Story

Why Do Black Parents Have to File Lawsuits to Achieve Educational Justice?! - Philly's 7th Ward

Why Do Black Parents Have to File Lawsuits to Achieve Educational Justice?! - Philly's 7th Ward

WHY DO BLACK PARENTS HAVE TO FILE LAWSUITS TO ACHIEVE EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE?!

Upper Dublin, a district outside of Philadelphia, recently settled a discrimination case that was filed with the U.S. Department of Education by Black families and the Public Interest Law Center four years ago. One more reason why Secretary DeVos’s moves to dismantle the Civil Rights Office at the U.S. Department of Education must be challenged and thwarted.  

I previously wrote about Upper Dublin High School, a school in a very wealthy district with brazen, in-your-face racist practices. While Black students made up less than 8% of the student population, they were disproportionately suspended – almost 50% of all suspended students were Black.  

But, the discrimination didn’t stop there (when does it?). Students were routinely tracked to less rigorous courses. Even if a Black student received high grades in middle school, they were not rostered to high school Honors courses. Now, why would that be?

Senator Hughes, who has worked to highlight the racist school funding that CONTINUE READING: Why Do Black Parents Have to File Lawsuits to Achieve Educational Justice?! - Philly's 7th Ward