The Well-Funded Echo Chamber That Wants to Destroy Public Education

The Well-Funded Echo Chamber That Wants to Destroy Public Education:

The Well-Funded Echo Chamber That’s Attacking Public Education

The term “corporate education reform” usually conjures up names like Michelle Rhee, ALEC and, of course, the Koch Brothers. While Rhee’s influence – or at least her starpower – has receded somewhat, the reach of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) and Charles and David Koch continues to extend far and wide across the education spectrum. Name the “reform” – vouchers, cyber-schools, rapid charter school expansion, or ending teacher ‘tenure’ – and it won’t take long to trace it back to their advocacy and deep pockets.

The focus on a couple of well-known players, however, masks the vastness of the network that is sharply focused on privatizating public education. Over the past few years, this network has widened, making it difficult to string together the many overlapping interests, funding networks and operations.

This week, Media Matters for America, a media watchdog group based in Washington D.C., released a report – a guide essentially – outlining the numerous connections in what it calls the “echo chamber” of advocacy front groups, think tanks, and media outlets that are behind the privatization agenda.

Source: MediaMatters.org

It’s a network that is “increasingly funded by a handful of conservative billionaires and for-profit education companies – often without proper disclosure,” the report states. “These groups are driving the education privatization movement forward by co-opting the education reform mantle.”

The Media Matters guide breaks down roughly 50 organizations into five categories: advocacy, media, philanthropy, corporations, and think tanks. The expanse of the network is staggering. No one is operating in a vacuum. Philanthropic groups – the Charles Koch Foundation, the Coors Foundation, the DeVos Family Foundation, to name just a few – fund the think tanks and advocacy groups profiled in the report (see graphic above). But funding sources aren’t the only thing they have in common. The connections run deep, from sharing board members and staff to building strategic partnerships to lobby for legislation at the state and local level.

Sometimes two groups will become one. In March 2016, Students First, the anti-teacher union group founded by Michelle Rhee, announced it was merging with the 50 State Campaign for Achievement Now (50CAN) a network of state-based organizations pushing for expansion of voucher programs and charter schools. The new larger group will operate under the 50CAN moniker (some state affiliates of StudentsFirst will keep the name, however) and will soon be running campaigns in at least 11 states.

A nexus of a lot of corporate reform activity and collaboration is National School Choice Week (NSCW).  Held every January, NSCW bills itself as a nonpartisan and nonpolitical opportunity to, according to its web site, “shine a positive spotlight on effective education options for every child.” Although public schools are included as one of those “options,” NSCW is clearly a well-funded PR offensive to champion vouchers and charter schools. NSCW was created in 2011 by the Gleason Family Foundation, which as the Media Matters report notes, also gives to a number of education privatization and Koch-affiliated anti-union groups and a number of right-wing think thanks. On the NSCW web site, the Foundation is listed merely as a philanthropic “partner.” Other such partners include ALEC and various Tea Party groups.  And yet the “nonpartisan and nonpolitical” label somehow seems to stick.

“Nonpartisan” is also how former CNN anchor and anti-teacher union activist Campbell Brown describes “The Seventy Four,” the education “news” site she launched in 2015. But Campbell’s ties to privatization groups are extensive and she is also the sponsor of high-profile lawsuits targeting teacher due process rights. Brown sits on the board of the American Federation for Children, a powerful school choice organization that has The Well-Funded Echo Chamber That Wants to Destroy Public Education:

 MUST Read “Here Are the Corporations and Right-Wing Funders Backing the Education Reform Movement”

Charter schools suspending black students at high rates | Crosscut

Charter schools suspending black students at high rates | Crosscut:
Charter schools suspending black students at high rates

Charter schools, which are new to Washington state, appear to be suspending African American students nationally at even higher rates than the traditional public schools whose educational practices the charter operations want to reform.

That’s one of the key findings of a study recently done for theCivil Rights Project at UCLA, which also found particularly high rates of suspensions for students with disabilities attending charter schools.

While the report found that some charter schools do a very good job of holding down suspension rates for all students, it also raised concerns about the effects of disparate rates of suspensions in many of the charter schools. It faulted many charters for contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline with high out-of-school suspension rates — running at least 25 percent of students — at the elementary and secondary levels. In some cases, the practices may amount to civil rights violations, the report suggested.

Under a 2012 ballot measure, Washington launched a modest program for establishing charter schools, with fewer than a dozen operating currently. And, despite a new state authorization by the Legislature in response to a court decision overturning the 2012 measure, questions continue about whether charter schools can be funded with state money.

The discipline report fits with concerns of charter opponents in Washington state about whether they will operate as equitably as regular public schools.

Some supporters of charter schools questioned the research methodology and the value of the report, saying many of the schools are leaders in new approaches to discipline. And the National Association of Charter School Authorizers told the media that parents need to be able to select the type of school they want, including ones with strict disciplinary policies.

The report, done by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, compared close to 5,000 national charter schools to 90,000 non-charter public schools, based on 2011-2012 discipline data of all schools obtained from the U.S Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The report says that the 2011-12 data was used because it provided the first full year of data under a new reporting requirement for charter schools.

The researchers found charters’ suspension rates were higher than that of non-charters for all students by 16 percent.In 2011-2012, for all students at the secondary level, the average suspension rate was 13.2 percent for charters versus 10.5 percent at regular public schools.  A disparity was found between black and white students, and this occurred at both elementary and secondary levels but was particularly a factor with older students, according to the Civil Rights Project report.

“Specifically, the 6.6-point racial gap at the elementary level more than doubles to 16.4 points at the secondary level,” the report said. “This means that charter secondary schools suspend more than 16 more black students than white students per every 100 students enrolled.”

The rate differences for students with and without disabilities also rise with older students. At the secondary level, the suspension rate was 23.3 percent, a couple of percentage points above the regular public schools’ rates.

Emphasizing the sweep of the longstanding problem in public schools, however, the charters’ 13.1 percent suspension rate for American Indians came in 3 percentage points under that of the traditional schools. Latino students had slightly higher suspension rates at traditional public schools; charters suspended Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students at slightly higher rates at the Charter schools suspending black students at high rates | Crosscut:

Peter Greene: John King Is Concerned

John King Is Concerned:
John King Is Concerned

If you’re on the USED mailing list, this weekend you received a “Friend” e-mail from John King, the latest in a series best entitled Let’s Keep Throwing PR Spaghetti At The Wall Until Something Sticks.

The theme, as with his Vegas speech a few weeks ago, is that gosh, we just have to get the focus back on a well-rounded education because somehow, some way, we’ve just gotten all twisted up with this testing stuff.

The most powerful thing about John King is his story, so he pulls that out again and seriously, there is nothing that anyone can mock about King’s story. His mother died, and he was raised for a few years by a very sick father who then also died, and King was an orphan at age 12. He credits his teachers in general and one, Mr. Osterweil, in particular, for saving his life. And in this letter’s retelling of the story, he also credits how involvement in and exposure to the arts also made a huge difference. That’s a new feature; the moral of King’s story is usually that great teachers and an orderly school can turn a student’s life around. Now they also need exposure to the arts to open up the world.

The most intriguing thing about King’s story has always been that he fails to draw any of the obvious lessons from it, like that fact that Alan Osterweil saved King’s life without the benefit of Common Core Standards or a Big Standardized Test. King has never publicly considered whether the reforms he has championed would have helped or hindered Osterweil, or if Osterweil would have approved of theaggressive, excessive suspension policy at King’s Roxbury charter.

But King plows on, with more thin-sliced baloney:

I hear frequently and passionately from educators and families who believe that the elements of a great well-rounded education are being neglected because of a too tight focus on reading and math.

Well, yes. I’m sure you do. But do you have any idea how such a thing happened?

Sometimes, that’s because of constraints on resources, time, and money. Often, teachers and administrators describe how No Child Left Behind and its intense focus on English and math performance left other subjects under-attended to or even ignored.

The mystery here is whether King is incredibly dense, or he thinks the rest of us are. First, the constraints of resources, time and money would not necessarily affect the arts except the federal government mandated that reading and math must be the focus of all education. And that didn’t just happen under NCLB— it continued and was intensified under the Obama-Duncan administration and Race to the Top along with Waiverpallooza, which required states to tie math and reading scores to teacher and school evaluations.

And King has to know that. Arne Duncan can claim ignorance from being safely ensconced in the beltway bubble, but King was out there trying to sell this mess to the people of New York in meetings so contentious that King canceled them and had to be forced back out there to meet with people.

The narrowing of the America’s curriculum did not just mysteriously happen. It was the direct and completely predictable result of the policies pursued by the last two administrations.

I’ve been clear, as has the President and my predecessor, Arne Duncan, that in John King Is Concerned:

The latest on those Kevin Johnson emails - Sacramento News & Review

Sacramento News & Review - The latest on those Kevin Johnson emails - News - Local Stories - April 28, 2016:
The latest on those Kevin Johnson emails
SN&R’s legal fight for the mayor’s “secret” messages and other documents still awaits its day in court.

After more than a year, SN&R’s legal battle with Mayor Kevin Johnson—over whether the city should make public his secret National Conference of Black Mayors emails—is nearing an end.

This past Thursday, April 21, a Sacramento Superior Court judge issued an analysis of both this paper’s and Team K.J.’s legal arguments. The take-home: Johnson’s pro bono attorneys at Ballard Spahr failed to prove that the remaining 158 records in question are privileged conversations between the mayor and his legal team—but SN&R also has yet to prove that they should be made public as well.

Judge Christopher Krueger directed SN&R, the mayor and the city of Sacramento attorneys to meet again “in good faith to attempt to resolve (or at least narrow) their dispute informally,” he wrote.

If this is not possible, the judge ordered that SN&R and the mayor file a joint statement, “no longer than five pages,” detailing areas of disagreement. This statement would be due in approximately three weeks, or sooner, and a hearing will be scheduled for a later date.

This legal tussle dates back to March of last year, when SN&R reporter Cosmo Garvin filed a California Public Records Act request for all emails on the city server sent to or from the mayor’s secret omkj@gmail.com accounts. In response, Johnson sued SN&R and the city last July in hopes to block hundreds of emails from release by the city attorney. This paper stood up to the mayor and, after a hearing last summer, Ballard Spahr released more than 400 emails and records to SN&R.

But 158 emails and documents remain unreleased. SN&R argued that all of them should be made public, Sacramento News & Review - The latest on those Kevin Johnson emails - News - Local Stories - April 28, 2016:

Related stories: 
Why Mayor Kevin Johnson sued SN&R, what we've learned—and what happens next
Mayor’s spokesman to SN&R: “It is what it is.” SN&R, 07.09.15. 

How Kevin Johnson’s lawsuit against SN&R set in motion events that led to his political destruction
K.J. vs. SN&R returns to Sacramento County Superior Court on April 22. SN&R, 04.14.16. 

14 National Conference of Black Mayors members threaten Kevin Johnson and city with lawsuit
The mayors and the group’s executive director claim defamation and lost income. SN&R, 03.31.16. 

PPIC Statewide Survey: Californians and Education (PPIC Publication)

PPIC Statewide Survey: Californians and Education (PPIC Publication):

PPIC Statewide Survey: Californians and Education

Mark Baldassare, Dean Bonner, David Kordus, and Lunna Lopes

Full Report[PDF, 1518K] Press Release[HTML]  Read in Spanish

Some findings of the current survey:

• Most Californians say that state funding for local schools is inadequate; solid majorities favor a Proposition 30 income tax increase extension and state and local school bonds.
• Democrats and Republicans are divided on the Common Core standards. Still, a majority of Californians are confident that Common Core will help prepare students for college and careers.
• While few Californians have heard of the Local Control Funding Formula, a solid majority are supportive after being read a short description of the policy.
• Californians are concerned about preschool affordability; most favor using some of the state budget surplus to fund early childhood education programs.

 Crosstabs:
All Adults [PDF]
Likely Voters [PDF]

 Time Trends:
All Adults [PDF]
Likely Voters [PDF]

The survey was supported with funding from the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, The Dirk and Charlene Kabcenell Foundation, the LA Partnership for Early Childhood Investment, the Silver Giving Foundation, and the Stuart Foundation.

PPIC Statewide Survey: Californians and Education (PPIC Publication):

Special Education teacher on leave after controversial letter about tests | WCBD News 2

Upstate teacher on leave after controversial letter about tests | WCBD News 2:
Upstate teacher on leave after controversial letter about tests
Special Education teacher requested students be exempt from federally mandated testing

An Upstate special education teacher says she was pulled from her classroom this week and put on leave after requesting in a letter that her students be exempt from federally mandated standardized testing.

“There’s a difference between testing and standardized testing,” Tracie Happel explained, Wednesday.

Happel says she’s learned this first hand in her 25 years in the classroom. She says testing holds students and teachers accountable, but standardized testing is purely a federal mandate.

In her first year teaching for White Oak Middle in Oconee County, she says the “SC PASS” and “SC READY” tests will force her special education students to meet unreachable standards, based on federal guidelines.

She wrote he concerns in a 3 page letter to the Oconee County School District the day before testing was set to start.

“I expressed my concerns about my students having to take a test where everything was a grade level, when I was working with the kids because they were not at grade level in their academics,” said Happel.

She asked they’d be exempt. She said the district told her it was impossible, but didn’t stop there.

“A few hours after I submitted my letter of objection, I was called to our district office and I was put on administrative leave,” said Happel.

She says the district told her she used derogatory names referencing her students.

“In my letter, I referred to my students and they relayed to me that they feel stupid, and like idiots and like retards,” explained Happel.

She says she works every day to inspire her kids, but they shouldn’t be subjected to fail. She believes it gets down to money with schools earning federal dollars for matching federal standards.

“Children are not exchangeable for money,” said Happel.

Wednesday, the district told 7 News that this was a personnel matter and they could not comment.

In the meantime, Happel just wants to encourage her students faced with taking the tests while she’s away.

“You guys, you can do this. I know you can do this. We talk about this every day how awesome you are. Just do what you’re supposed to do, listen to your mom and dad and I know you can do this,” said Happel, speaking to her students.

Our sister station, 7 News looked into state law. Currently, there is no mandate Upstate teacher on leave after controversial letter about tests | WCBD News 2:

What Frustrates This Educator about Rick Hess – Cloaking Inequity

What Frustrates This Educator about Rick Hess – Cloaking Inequity:

What Frustrates This Educator about Rick Hess

 As a former high school English teacher in two large, urban school districts, I completely understand how educators, parents and policymakers who are wrestling each day with the most pressing issues facing public education — standardized testing, the effects of poverty on learning, opportunity gaps — might be a bit impatient with educational theory and research. Is this new theory about the intersection of culture, politics, and digital media going to give me the answers about how to help my most struggling students today? If not, it can wait. My students need me right now.

So, I can chuckle for a moment along with Dr. Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, when hepokes fun at some of the paper titles that were presented earlier this month at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the largest professional organization of education researchers in North America. The titles he singles out are often extremely lengthy, contain more than their fair share of colons and million-dollar vocabulary words, and generally seem far away from classroom life.

I am now an educational researcher and freely admit that I have been guilty of these crimes against clarity and precision in my writing. Too often, academic writing that hopes to offer information to address the most pressing problems facing practitioners uses language that serves to alienate the very people researchers are trying to help — an issue that Dr. Mike Rose of UCLA just implored researchers to address at the AERA conference. The community of academia, like many other specialized communities, can get wrapped up in its own jargon to the detriment of its larger mission.

I can even give Dr. Hess a pass when he declares during a session on public scholarship at the AERA conference that Twitter is a social media site that does not lend itself to substantive public conversations. Perhaps he has seen too many snarky tweets and missed out on the amazing dialogues created by #FergusonSyllabus or #SlaverywithaSmile.

Yet, shortcomings in the communication of research, whether online or at conferences, do not mean that educational research is not crucial to informing and improving educational practice. In my courses for pre-service and in-service teachers, I remind my students that theory and research are inextricably linked to practice — that all decisions made in public education, from how we organize our lessons and assess student learning to how we structure school financing and school choice, flow from theories we have about the purpose of public education, the abilities of our students, and the kind of society we want to create. Naming these theories produces productive debate about the future directions of What Frustrates This Educator about Rick Hess – Cloaking Inequity:

Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates, Washington State and the Nuisance of Democracy | Alternet

Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates, Washington State and the Nuisance of Democracy | Alternet:

Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates, Washington State and the Nuisance of Democracy

Today’s multi-billionaires are a different species of philanthropist; they keep tight control over their foundations while also operating as major political funders.

This article was first published in the Nonprofit Quarterly (spring 2016; vol. 23, no. 1).

Once upon a time, the super-wealthy endowed their tax-exempt charitable foundations and then turned them over to boards of trustees to run. The trustees would spend the earnings of the endowment to pursue a typically grand but wide-open mission written into the foundation’s charter—like The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1913 mission “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Today’s multi-billionaires are a different species of philanthropist; they keep tight control over their foundations while also operating as major political funders—think Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, or Walmart heiress Alice Walton. They aim to do good in the world, but each defines “good” idiosyncratically in terms of specific public policies and political goals. They translate their wealth, the work of their foundations, and their celebrity as doers-of-good into influence in the public sphere—much more influence than most citizens have.

Call it charitable plutocracy—a peculiarly American phenomenon, increasingly problematic and in need of greater scrutiny. Like all forms of plutocracy, this one conflicts with democracy, and exactly how these philanthropists coordinate tax-exempt grantmaking with political funding for maximum effect remains largely obscure. What follows is a case study of the way charitable plutocracy operates on the ground. It’s a textbook example of the tug-of-war between government by the people and uber-philanthropists as social engineers.

The Case of Bill Gates and Washington State

This story begins in 1995, when the Washington State House of Representatives first considered legislation that would enable private individuals and organizations to obtain charters to create their own K–12 schools. These were to be taxpayer-funded schools, but privately run and exempt from many of the regulations governing district (regular) public schools. The funding would come from the resources of regular public schools: each student would “carry” his or her per-child funding out of the district system to a charter school.

The bill died in the state senate, so supporters went directly to voters with a ballot initiative to enable charter schools. The campaign attracted little money on either side, but turnout was high because the vote took place on the same day as the 1996 presidential election. Washingtonians rejected charter schools decisively: 64.4 percent against, 35.6 percent in favor.1

State representatives kept trying. They proposed new bills in 1997, 1998, and 1999, but got the same results: success in the lower chamber, failure in the Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates, Washington State and the Nuisance of Democracy | Alternet:

 

Troy LaRaviere Learns about Free Speech in Rahmistan

Lakeview - Troy LaRaviere Accused By CPS Of Misusing Equipment, Accounting Missteps - Neighborhood News - DNAinfo Chicago:
Troy LaRaviere Learns about Free Speech in Rahmistan

 LAKEVIEW — Ousted Blaine Elementary Principal Troy LaRaviere faces a dozen charges — ranging from mishandling school equipment to insubordination — that could lead to the dismissal of the outspoken critic of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, officials said Monday night in addressing the reasons for his removal.

The contentious news was met with boos from a crowd gathered at the school Monday night, as Blaine parents demanded to know specifics behind the sudden removal of a popular and seemingly successful principal.

"I think you can be high-performing and still break the rules," said Janice Jackson, chief education officer of Chicago Public Schools. "Over the past month, there have been so many acts that made it clear we were not able to redirect [LaRaviere's] behavior."

Although the district legally cannot discuss specific charges against personnel, Jackson said LaRaviere is free to share the list of charges with the community.

Jackson spoke broadly about the dozen allegations of misconduct, accusing LaRaviere of "dereliction of duty, violations of state and CPS ethical policies and insubordination."

Among violations were charges that LaRaviere disregarded teacher assessment guidelines, misused district equipment and broke rules governing how schools manage internal accounting.

Such infractions, however, can be for minor issues like mistakes in submitting cash receipts and purchasing information or failing to file a financial report.

While the local school council appoints principals, disciplining school administrators is left to CPS, Jackson said.

The insubordination charges are largely tied to a warning resolution the Chicago Board of Education issued to LaRaviere in August, lambasting him for insubordination and defying district directives related to Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, better known as PARC testing.

A written reprimand in December warned that ignoring CPS directives and continuing to speak out against the school district "could result in dismissal," Jackson said.

"As an administrator, you do have loyalties to the district that are expected," Lakeview - Troy LaRaviere Accused By CPS Of Misusing Equipment, Accounting Missteps - Neighborhood News - DNAinfo Chicago:

Most high school seniors aren't college or career ready, says 'Nation's Report Card' | 89.3 KPCC

Most high school seniors aren't college or career ready, says 'Nation's Report Card' | 89.3 KPCC:

Most high school seniors aren't college or career ready, says 'Nation's Report Card'

U.S. college readiness scores are down according to the standardized test known as the Nation's Report Card. LA JOHNSON/NPR

 The latest results of the test known as the Nation's Report Card are in. They cover high school seniors, who took the test in math and reading last year. The numbers are unlikely to give fodder either to educational cheerleaders or alarmists: The average score in both subjects was just one point lower in 2015 compared with the last time the test was given, in 2013. This tiny downtick was statistically significant in mathematics, but not for the reading test.

But even though the changes are small, chances are you're going to be hearing about them in a lot of places.

Why is this test so widely reported on, widely cited and widely debated? And how does it line up with common-sense yardsticks of how students are doing? Let's take a closer look.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, has become a standardized test that even some critics of standardized tests rely upon. One big reason: It's a research project conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, not a state accountability test.

Unlike state tests, which have been shifting year by year with the adoption of the Common Core, NAEP scores are comparable across decades — back to 2005 for math and all the way back to 1993 for reading.

"In our era of incredibly volatile state and local testing practices, it is our North Star," says Andrew Ho, a measurement expert at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who sits on NAEP's bipartisan governing board.

A large sample of high school seniors nationwide, in both public and private schools, took the tests last year — 18,700 students in reading and 13,200 in mathematics. This allows direct comparisons across states and cities.

And the absence of consequences for schools or teachers means students are not typically prepped or drilled to take the test, which potentially makes it a more useful measurement of student achievement than some state tests.

But what do NAEP scores mean? On the 12th-grade test in particular, Ho says, research shows that NAEP maps well with estimates of college and career readiness from Common Core-aligned tests, the SAT and the ACT.

According to research by Ho and others, just under 40 percent of students score at college and career ready levels on NAEP.

"College and career ready" means these scores strongly predict that students will be able to succeed doing college-level academics, or with on-the-job training in a position requiring only a high school diploma.

That seems clear enough.

Except when you realize a couple of things.

One is that in 2015 the nationwide high school graduation rate was 82 percent, not 40 percent. That leaves a potentially large group of kids who got diplomas but who weren't ready to succeed in college.

Who is right: their high schools or NAEP?

"I think the charitable view is that graduation is not just reading and math," says Ho, meaning that high school diplomas also include things like "social studies, Most high school seniors aren't college or career ready, says 'Nation's Report Card' | 89.3 KPCC:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas. Learn more ...

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Can AI fix education? We asked Bill Gates | The Verge

Can AI fix education? We asked Bill Gates | The Verge:
Can AI fix education? We asked Bill Gates
How personalized learning is changing schools

The rise of smartphones has transformed the way students communicate and entertain themselves. But the classrooms they spend so much of their time in remain stubbornly resistant to transformation. On one hand, technology has long had a home in classrooms — I learned to type on an Apple IIe in the late 1980s. But for most schools, the approach to teaching remains stubbornly one-size-fits-all: a single teacher delivering the same message to a group of about 30 students, regardless of their individual progress.

Bill Gates is working to change all that. Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman has invested more than $240 million to date in a developing field known as "personalized learning." It’s a diffuse set of initiatives, led mostly by private companies, to develop software that creates individual lesson plans for students based on their performance, coaching them through trouble spots until they have mastered the subject at hand. Teachers still play a central role in the classroom, but they do less lecturing and more one-on-one coaching.

The effort is led by a dizzying array of startups with terrible names — think "Learnosity" — but big companies are starting to pay attention. In 2014 Google launched Classroom, which lets teachers post class announcements, assign work to students, and collect and grade their assignments. And last year Facebook announced a partnership with Summit Public Schools, in which the Gates Foundation is an investor, to create personalized learning software and make it freely available.

This week Gates spoke at the ASU GSV Summit, an education technology conference in San Diego. In a standing-room-only speech, he laid out the foundation’s vision for accelerating the adoption of personalized learning around the world. Gates asked investors to take a longer view in education than other fields, because of epic school district purchasing cycles. He asked school districts to speed up those cycles by using more pilot programs, and by supporting data standards that make it easy to compare the efficacy of different products. And Gates told entrepreneurs to invest in research around the efficacy of their products, producing data that will encourage other schools to adopt personalized approaches.

Last year I wrote about Facebook’s efforts around personalized learning, and afterward Gates’ people invited me to speak with him about his evolving thinking about education. A few hours after his speech, Gates bounded into a hotel room on the 38th floor of the Manchester Grand Hyatt and sat in a chair by the window. We were joined by a Gates Foundation spokeswoman and, on the other side of the window, a lone seagull who observed our interview with great interest.

"It’s still early stages," Gates said about personalized learning. "In five years, 10 years from now, will it be highly penetrated? That’s not absolutely clear."

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Casey Newton: I think it’s fair to say that even people who love tech don’t always pay close attention to the ways it’s transforming education. So at a high level, what is personalized learning doing for students at the schools where it’s being tried? And what opportunities do you see it creating over time?

Bill Gates: Well the term "personalized learning" doesn’t have an exact definition. In general, the idea is that people progress at a different rate. If you’re ahead of what’s being taught in the class, that’s not good, you get bored. If you’re behind, then they’re using terms and concepts that create a general impression of "Hey, I’m not good at this." And science and math in particular — if they’re talking about something you haven’t had the explanation on, you just really give up in that area. And there is no way that you are brought back into it.

For me, one of the most interesting areas you’re focusing on is remedial education in community colleges. Kids are asked to spend lots of money on these classes, which don’t earn them any credit, and so they never get their degrees as a result. In your speech, you say institutions that use personalized learning software for remedial education see their completion rates double. How does this work? Why is this a problem that software has been better at solving than traditional methods?

There’s a boundary between high school and college where the all-access colleges make you take an exam as you come in. And depending on what your math score or your reading or writing score is, if it’s low enough, then you get placed in the remedial class, and they re-teach you everything. They don’t tweak the results you got and say, "OK, you’re missing this part or this part." It’s just a binary "You’re OK, go ahead" or "You have to get in the class." And so that’s one of the reasons we have such high dropout rates in higher ed. If you use a personalized tool, you’d sit down and it would sort of figure out, Can AI fix education? We asked Bill Gates | The Verge:

The toxic environment of standardized testing

The toxic environment of standardized testing:
The toxic environment of standardized testing

High-quality tests that accurately assess student learning and help teachers understand how to improve instruction are an essential part of an excellent education. But in some states and districts today, large-scale standardized testing has gotten out of hand, with students taking as many as 20 standardized tests per year.

This was the situation in Michigan not too long ago. Teachers, parents, and students felt powerless when it came to government-mandated standardized tests such as the Michigan Student Test for Educational Progress (M-STEP).

It was difficult for us to understand if the amount of time spent on standardized testing was actually beneficial to students. Hours were taken away from teaching and learning time last school year in order to administer the M-STEP. This was a problem.

Many teachers thought standardized tests were an unreliable and inaccurate measure of student growth. Educators argued standardized tests should not be on the cutting edge of education because it promotes teaching to the test, which can impede, rather than promote, learning. Frustrated teachers and parents of Michigan finally came together and demanded less time for standardized testing and more time for learning. They had enough.

After listening to public opinions, complaints, and feedback, the Michigan Department of Education shortened the length of the M-STEP. This change shows the importance of teachers’ voices in education policy.

Teachers need to be as respected as other professionals. They need to have a say in education reform efforts. Michigan lawmakers seem to have accepted the importance of teacher input when developing education policies.

But one thing our state’s elected leaders can’t continue to do is place such an emphasis on standardized testing. Instead, we must focus our energy on The toxic environment of standardized testing:

Stop saying it’s “best for the kids” when it’s really about ignoring the black community - The Hechinger Report

Stop saying it’s “best for the kids” when it’s really about ignoring the black community - The Hechinger Report:

Stop saying it’s “best for the kids” when it’s really about ignoring the black community 

Communities shouldn’t accept the flagrantly negative tradeoffs that come with school reform.

Reform can only be sustained by the very communities that use them. That’s the bottom line for New Orleanians involved in the current effort to bring charter schools in the Recovery School District back into the New Orleans Public School District. The public has the rights to good schools and good governance. And if it isn’t the bottom line and for the rest of the country, it should be.

The charter movement was supposed to be about greater autonomy for schools. It doesn’t require tearing apart school districts, dividing educators and removing basic voting rights of citizens. But all of these things happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. So what if we have higher test scores. The goal isn’t to myopically improve schools; the goal is to improve community.

Elected officials seem to agree. Louisiana State Senator Karen Carter Peterson, in consultation with district and school leaders introduced senate bill 432, which sees to the return of RSD schools back to the Orleans Parish School Board by 2018. The bill is receiving little to no opposition.

Join the conversation later on Andre Perry’s radio show, “Free College,” hosted Tuesdays on WBOK1230 in New Orleans at 3pm Central/4pm Eastern 504.260.9265.

The meat of the bill is that that “the local school board shall not impede the operational autonomy of a charter school under its jurisdiction.”

Many prominent educators are on board as well.

“The most important factor is the unification of our school system for our city,” said Jamar McKneely, CEO of Inspire NOLA Charter Schools. “I believe that our citizens deserve the right to democracy, to actually be in control of our current school system, and as a city we have to move there as early as possible.” McKneely, who was part of a panel hosted by 100 Black Men of New Orleans, also points to inequities that are created by having two systems. He has charter schools in both Orleans Parish and the RSD.

In a statement announcing the 100 Black Men’s The Time is Now! initiative, chapter president Jonathan Wilson stated, “The time is now for us to bring the conversation to the public and seek unified action by our school board and other local elected officials to bring the schools back to our community’s control.”

Even stalwarts of the New Orleans charter movement don’t see the Stop saying it’s “best for the kids” when it’s really about ignoring the black community - The Hechinger Report: