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Thursday, April 4, 2013

Bill Gates Dances Around the Teacher Evaluation Disaster He Sponsored - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher

Bill Gates Dances Around the Teacher Evaluation Disaster He Sponsored - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher:


Bill Gates Dances Around the Teacher Evaluation Disaster He Sponsored

No one in America has done more to promote the raising of stakes for test scores in education than Bill Gates.
Yesterday, Mr. Gates published a column that dances around the disaster his advocacy has created in the schools of our nation.
You can read his words there, but his actions have spoken so much more loudly, that I cannot even make sense out of what he is attempting to say now. So let's focus first on what Bill Gates has wrought.
No Child Left Behind was headed towards bankruptcy about seven years ago. The practice of labeling schools as failures and closing them, on the basis of test scores, was clearly causing a narrowing of the curriculum. Low income schools in Oakland eliminated art, history and even science in order to focus almost exclusively on math