Accountability for teachers! But free reign for corporate school reformers!? Anthony Cody (interview) via Valerie Strauss, An Educator Challenges the Gates Foundation, Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2014 washingtonpost/…/an-educator-challenges-the…/ One of the problems with the Gates Foundation is that they have had an almost unlimited source of funding over the past decade. And they are conducting a large-scale experiment with the children of the nation. Nobody voted for them to do this. They use the power of their money to pay for research, to pay organizations to support their agenda, and this undermines democratic decision-making, especially in communities that, due to poverty, lack effective political power. Through their strategic investments in research, journalism and advocacy, the Gates Foundation has purchased a sort of consensus among the powerful in terms of what must be done to improve schools. Their agenda has become the agenda of the Department of Education, and many large school systems have embraced the direction they have set. Take a look at the major trends in education reform. We have the Common Core, paid for by the Gates Foundation. We have charter schools rapidly expanding, with very little regulation, actively promoted by the Gates Foundation. We have a dramatic rise in the number of tests and the consequences for those tests, for both students and teachers, again, a high priority for the Gates Foundation. We have billions being spent on educational devices, which is being called personalization. Gates and his foundation are not the only ones promoting these trends, but the Gates Foundation has been particularly strategic and systematic with its investments and placement of key leaders. I have found it remarkable that an education reform project built around the concept of accountability has no mechanism, no means by which we, the public, can hold its sponsors accountable. We have bad teachers who must be held accountable. Schools and students that must be held accountable. But Bill Gates himself? Who holds him and his employees accountable for the devastating effects their reforms have had? ...(M)arket-driven reform has failed to deliver any results, in spite of the full embrace of the Gateses’ vision. In scientific research, if one is conducting an experiment and clear negative effects are observed, the experiment is discontinued. I think this experiment has run its course and should be ended before more damage is done to our schools and children who attend them.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 01:42:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015