2013 in Review Part 3: Gatesian Reforms Rejected
In the year 2013, what was wrong with corporate reform became even clearer, and we also made a strong case for an alternative vision for public schools. In 2012, I spent considerable time working on a dialogue with representatives of the Gates Foundation, because I had become deeply disturbed by the path down which their spending was pushing our schools.
I began the year 2013 with a hotly debated post about what I termed the Education Reform Dichotomy. Building on work by Paul Thomas, I shared a table that contrasted the solutions offered by "no excuses reformers" by those offered by "social context reformers." The "no excuses" solutions tended to ignore or even worsen the conditions experienced by children in poverty, whereas "social context" solutions recognize and address these conditions. For example, "no excuses" reformers favor the closing of schools with low test scores, whereas "social context" reformers advocate support for such schools, enhancing the resources and stability for the students attending these schools.
In February, I responded to Bill Gates' Annual Letter with an open letter of my own. Gates had suggested that measuring things provided us with useful feedback to inform social change. I pointed out that the test scores that his education reforms were built around provide us data of very limited usefulness, and suggested that some other data might be far more instructive. My list of indicators included unplanned pregnancies, the availability of prenatal care, levels of school funding, access to college, childhood poverty, neighborhood violence, incarceration and segregation. I asked:
If the Gates Foundation is unwilling to tackle the scourge of poverty directly, could it at least
