Gates spends millions to promote his view of school change

Gates spends millions to sway public ( and you) on ed reform

By Valerie Strauss - Washington Post 

The Bill and  Melinda Gates Foundation is spending at least $3.5 million to create a new organization whose aim is to win over the public and the media to its market-driven approach to school reform, according to the closely held grant proposal.

The organization is tentatively called “Teaching First,” and already has a chief executive officer: Yolie Flores, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, who has championed such issues as public school choice and teacher effectiveness. Flores did not immediately return phone calls for comment. A Gates foundation spokesman said she would take over the job fulltime when her board term is up in June.

The Gates proposal lays out a strategy to win public approval for the foundation’s investment of more than $335 million in teacher effectiveness programs in four school districts that involve controversial initiatives including linking teacher pay to student standardized test scores. Critics say this “value-added” model-based test scores is unfair measure of how well a teacher is doing because there are many factors that go into how well a student does on a test.

The plan includes campaigns to reach out to parents, teachers, students, business and civic and religious leaders, and to build “strong ties to local journalists, opinion elites, and local/state policymakers and their staffs.” The plan explains how the organization will ensure “frequent placement ... in local media coverage of issues related to teacher effectiveness and equitable distribution of effective teachers” in accordance with the Gates approach. 

Read the entire piece at  http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/gates-spends-millions-to-sway.html   See posts below. 

Does this sound like what Mayor Kevin Johnson and Michele Rhee are doing in Sacramento?

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Mayor Johnson active in school criticism

Feb.28,2011.

SACRAMENTO, CA – Today Mayor Kevin Johnson and STAND UP held the first ‘State of Schools’ meeting in Sacramento at the Guild Theater. Mayor Johnson was joined by Russlynn Ali, Assistant Secretary for Civil
Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, in a conversation on the urgent need for reform in Sacramento’s
public schools.

Today’s meeting focused on the condition of public schools in Sacramento and issued a call to action. The
meeting was sponsored by the Black Parallel School Board, Greater Sacramento Urban League, Sacramento
Chapter for 100 Black Women, Sacramento NAACP, and the Sacramento Observer in honor of Black History
Month.

Currently, less than half of Sacramento schools are meeting academic targets. While Sacramento’s public schools have shown slight increases in academic achievement over recent years, Mayor Johnson believes that the gap is not closing quickly enough.

Johnson stated, “Over the last seven years, city school third graders have improved by an average of two percent per year. This may sound positive, but think about it from this perspective: at the current rate, it will take 20 years before close to 80 percent of our third graders are on grade level. That’s an entire generation.”

Nominated by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Department of Education in 2009, Russlynn Ali has dedicated efforts to underscoring the urgent need to prepare all students for academic success in this global economy.

By Melody Gutierrez

Mayor Kevin Johnson is in Washington, D.C., today with education reformer Michelle Rhee for the launch of a national campaign aimed at eliminating “last in, first out” policies that base teacher layoffs on seniority.

The announcement came at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Johnson is the founding chair of the group’s Public School Task Force.

“We have to eliminate old policies that satisfy adult needs, but have absolutely no bearing on student achievement,” Johnson said in a press release. “(Last in, first out) policies represent everything that’s wrong with our current education system. I urge every mayor and state leader to stand up for children by eliminating policies that deprive them of great teachers.”

The campaign is being called Save Great Teachers and is being organized through the political advocacy group StudentsFirst, which is run by Johnson’s fiancé Rhee. Over the next seven months leading up to the new school year, StudentsFirst plans to aggressively advocate for the end of seniority based layoff decisions.

Source: The Sacramento Bee
Feb.23,2011.

From. www.standup.org

Searching for leaders of school reform

I was fortunate tonight to catch Bill Moyer’s Journal on PBS. Among his guests were Dr. Jim Young Kim. Born in the U.S. and raised in Iowa. He has spent the last twenty-five years delivering health care to some the world’s poorest people including those of Haiti, Africa, and Asia. He will now take a position as President of Dartmouth University.
His discussion pointed out that improving health care delivery required the participation of the doctors, nurses, and medical workers, and community members in their communities- it does not come from the hospital/health care industry. His talk reminded me of the argument made here before about school reform.
Democratic school reform will come when we can engage teachers, students and families. We need to engage the teachers in the classroom. It will not come from consultant class nor from universities not working closely with teachers. My 35 + years of experience in working with schools convinces me that the consultants and the researchers may receive the research funds, but the solutions will come from dialogues with the teachers and community activists.

As has been argued here before, the most essential problem with the politicians approaches to school reform is that they listen to promoters and not to teachers.
Arne Duncan, Kevin Johnson , Michelle Rhee, Joe Klein and others well represent the promoters view of school reform Both Duncan and Johnson, along with Sarah Palin, like to use basketball metaphors. So, lets try one out.
Arne Duncan and Kevin Johnson are cheerleaders for an ideology of how school reform should work. They chant and cheer and show a little flash. But, they are cheerleaders.
The players who make school reform work are teachers and students. If you want to win the game, you need to practice and improve the fundamentals – not watch the cheerleaders. Lets look at some fundamentals. Some schools have 17 students per class, some have 34 students per class, and some have as many as 42 per class- particularly in California. Then, all the students are measured on the same test. That would be like having one team field 12 players while another could only field 5 players.
The most basic decisions on class size in schools are made by the Governor, the legislature, and the voters. In last year’s budget deal, the legislature and the Governor cut some $6 billion from the k-12 schools forcing lay offs of teachers and increasing class sizes. California now has the largest class sizes in the nation. Our Senators and our Assemblypersons voted for this. They argue that they had no choice.
The legislature, enjoys a 16% approval rating from voters. They listened to Arne Duncan, the coach of the cheerleaders. In particular Senator Gloria Romero has introduced legislation to change the way California uses student test scores to comply with the demands of the Obama/Duncan administration. This particular coach has $10 Billion dollars to distribute. But, the federal competition is a distraction from the more basic issues. Until the schools are adequately funded, and class sizes reduced to at least the national average- no amount of cheerleading will improve test scores. You can’t win the game by only putting half of the team of teachers on the floor. Senators Romero and Steinberg, and the Assemblypersons know this.
At his recent Town Hall meeting in Sacramento Duncan was asked a couple of strong questions, polite, but firm, about the lack of resources for schools due to the California economic crisis. He cited the additional aid provided by the stimulus bill and the $10 billion available through the Race to the Top and other competitive grants. This is, of course, a very limited response. The economic crisis of school funding in California is beyond any investment provided by federal funds.