Sunday, May 22, 2011

How Bill Gates Bought Public Education (or Go Linux!)

How Bill Gates Bought Public Education (or Go Linux!)

How Bill Gates Bought Public Education (or Go Linux!)

It's pretty scary, the way a rich guy can influence an entire nation to succumb to his whim. It's scarier that the public let him.

...
Mr. Hess, a frequent blogger on education whose institute received $500,000 from the Gates foundation in 2009 “to influence the national education debates,” acknowledged that he and others sometimes felt constrained. “As researchers, we have a reasonable self-preservation instinct,” he said. “There can be an exquisite carefulness about how we’re going to say anything that could reflect badly on a foundation.”

“Everybody’s implicated,” he