The Gates Foundation Funds ALEC

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been battling public schools for a while now (See HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE). Last month, the Foundation took another step towards privatizing public education by issuing a grant to ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council.

The Gates Foundation Grant is for more than $375,000 and will go to

...educate and engage its membership on more efficient state budget approaches to drive greater student outcomes, as well as educate them on beneficial ways to recruit, retain, evaluate and compensate effective teaching based upon merit and achievement.

That sounds suspiciously like developing state laws which require the "evaluation of schools and teachers using student test scores" as well as methods for cutting state education budgets.

What is ALEC?

The short answer is that ALEC is

a corporate-funded conservative advocacy group that specializes in lobbying state legislatures for enactment of favorable legislation.

The truth, though is much more complicated.

ALEC is a "corporate run organization which provides state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line." The web site, ALEC Exposed explains it this way...

Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law.

What corporations support ALEC?

The list of corporate supporters of ALEC reads like a Who's Who of the corporations against public education. Its supporters include the Koch family, Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Koch-managed Claude R. Lambe Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and the Walton Family Foundation.

(Click HERE for a complete list of non-profits affiliated with ALEC)

Why is Bill Gates giving money to ALEC?

While others have focused on union busting, one of the goals of ALEC legislation, Bill Gates has focused more on the privatization of public education. Profit is the primary goal of privatizers and Bill Gates, while claiming to support public education, is more likely interested in seeing public education become a profit making enterprise.

Bill Gates is in this for the money, not philanthropy. In a must-read article titled Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools in Dissent Magazine, Joanne Barkan wrote,

I’ve heard, “They do good work on health care in Africa. Leave them alone.” But the Gates Foundation has created much the same problem in health funding as in education reform. Take, for example, the Gates project to eradicate malaria.

On February 16, 2008, the New York Times reported on a memo that it had obtained, written by Dr. Arata Kochi, head of the World Health Organization’s malaria programs, to WHO’s director general. Because the Gates Foundation was funding almost everyone studying malaria, Dr. Arata complained, the cornerstone of scientific research—independent review—was falling apart.

Gates' most infamous case of screwing up public education was the funding of the Small Schools Initiative. Again, Barkan wrote...

In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn’t produced strong results. They didn’t mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power couple had a new plan: performance-based teacher pay, data collection, national standards and tests, and school “turnaround” (the term of art for firing the staff of a low-performing school and hiring a new one, replacing the school with a charter, or shutting down the school and sending the kids elsewhere).

Now, the Gates Foundation is sending its money to the place where state legislation is written. Supported by people like Charles and David Koch, Richard de Vos, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Indiana Superinttendent of Public Instruction, Tony Bennett and others, ALEC has even more money with which to achieve its goal of privatizing public education.

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You might also want to read this...

Gates Foundation Grants ALEC A Hefty Sum For 'Education Reform'

Excuses, excuses!

Our schools have been labeled as failing by people who have never stepped foot in them. The favorite weapon of these 'reformers' is test scores.

Michelle Newsum, Teacher at Coos Bay (Oregon) School District, continued,

* American kids in schools with less than 10% poverty far outscore all
other nations
* Kids in schools with up to 50% of students living in poverty score
well in comparison to the international average
* Only American students in schools with more than 75% poverty score
below the international average

This trend holds true for virtually all major standardized tests. On the TIMSS, PISA, SAT and NAEP low poverty schools do well and high poverty schools do not.

Stephen Krashen has made this point repeatedly, but as teachers know, it takes as many as twenty repetitions for students to learn something and some may need more. It takes even more repetitions to overcome misinformation such as these comments from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan from 2009 in Atlanta...

...[Education Secretary] Duncan noted while striding through Atlanta’s Grady High School...“You can have all the money in the world, but it won’t make a difference if teachers don’t believe their students can learn.”

...[Duncan] has no patience for teachers and schools that tick off all the reasons that their poor or minority students can’t achieve.

He doesn’t accept the excuses that their parents don’t care, their homes lack books and no one takes them to museums or plays.

Secretary Duncan, in misinforming the American people, doesn't seem to know the difference between understanding that all children can, indeed learn at their own rate, and the fact that the condition of poverty interrupts the education process.

In The Year They Began Calling Poverty and Homelessness an 'Excuse' Mike Klonsky wrote

Duncan has chosen to ignore poverty's downward effect on test scores and focus entirely on what he calls "bad teachers" and "failing schools." Recently confronted by educators teaching in some of the nation's highest-poverty areas about the need to do something about the living conditions of their students, Duncan cynically responded, "poverty is not destiny."

Yes, Secretary Duncan is correct, poverty is not destiny, but as Gerald Bracey said,

[Poverty is] like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty.

Duncan's assertion that poverty is not destiny, while true, minimizes the role the government has played in increasing poverty over the last 10 years, and the lack of progress in reducing it. He has essentially said that "bad teachers" and "bad schools" are at fault for not reducing poverty in the United States.

The last two years, especially, have see a surge in family poverty.

The poverty rate increased from 13.2% to 14.3% between 2008 and 2009, representing an additional 3.7 million people living in poverty for a total of 43.6 million in poverty in 2009. The poverty rate for children was 20.7% in 2009, representing 15.5 million kids living in poverty. In 2009, over one-third (35.5%) of all people living in poverty were children.

Unlike Secretary Duncan, most people understand that poverty has a deleterious effect on people, especially children.

In 2009, over one-third of black children (35.7%) and nearly one-third Hispanic children (33.1%) were living in poverty. Families (with children) headed by single mothers hit 38.5% in 2009. Of the 6.6 million families living in poverty, 3.8 million of them were headed by a single mom.

Schools can't provide everything needed to heal children from the effects of poverty. Families are the most important part of a child's life. If the family is not functioning properly due to a lack of food, heat, medical and dental care, or emotional support then schools will have difficulty doing their job...especially as money for education decreases and class sizes increase.

In Waiting for a School Miracle, Diane Ravitch wrote

Families are children's most important educators. Our society must invest in parental education, prenatal care and preschool. Of course, schools must improve; every one should have a stable, experienced staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum including the arts, foreign languages, history and science.

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.

The so-called "reformers" are trying to tell us that if we improved the education of children then poverty would disappear. However, it's the opposite which is, in fact, true. The education of the majority of poor children in the United States will improve once their poverty is reduced.

Blaming schools and teachers is the excuse used to cover up the failure of our society to deal with the growing poverty rate in our nation. When the billionaires (Gates, Broad, Walton), their foundations, their mouthpieces (Duncan, Obama, Klein, Bloomberg, et al), along with their state government lackeys (Walker, Scott, Kasich, Snyder, Daniels et al) direct the course of public education in the nation then something's wrong. None of them have ever taught in a public school...indeed, many of them, like Secretary Duncan, never even attended a public school. Their lack of experience in and knowledge of teaching and schools should disqualify them from affecting the direction of education in the United States.

What have any of these people done to reduce our nation's poverty? Susan Ohanian put it best:

When Congress passes No Child Left Unfed, No Child Without Health Care and No Child Left Homeless, then we can talk seriously about No Child Left Behind.

2011 Medley #14

Charters, Evaluations, Teacher Certification, Poverty's Influence on Education, Gifted Students, Economy

Should Schools Be Run for Profit?

Led by Patricia Levesque, an experienced lobbyist...the campaign has scored notable successes in the past year, promoting for-profit virtual charter schools...Levesque recommended that "reformers should 'spread' the unions thin 'by playing offense' with decoy legislation...allowing taxpayer dollars to go to religious schools by overturning the so-called Blaine Amendment, 'even if it doesn't pass ... to keep them busy on that front.' She also advised paycheck protection, a union-busting scheme, as well as a state-provided insurance program to encourage teachers to leave the union and a transparency law to force teachers unions to show additional information to the public. Needling the labor unions with all these bills, Levesque said, allows certain charter bills to fly 'under the radar.'"

Principals Protest Role of Testing in Evaluations

...President Obama and his signature education program, Race to the Top, along with John B. King Jr., the New York State commissioner of education, deserve credit for spurring what is believed to be the first principals’ revolt in history...658 principals around the state [NY] had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.

Degrading Teacher Certification

...there's a big difference between knowing a subject well and knowing how to teach it well. For example, before Evan Hunter became famous as author of "The Blackboard Jungle," he taught English in a vocational high school in New York City. When asked in an interview years later why he quit after a short stint, he replied: "I was trying, but they weren't buying." Clearly, Hunter knew how to write, but that was not enough.

‘Broader, bolder’ strategy to ending poverty’s influence on education

To ignore [the reality of poverty] and make bold assertions that all children can achieve while doing nothing to address the outside-of-school challenges they face is neither fair nor a sound basis for developing public policy

Is giftedness always a gift?

the challenge for families and individual children can be immense. “Some bright kids will do well regardless: they are resilient. But for many more the lack of stimulation in school will actually lead to underachievement. A percentage will fall in with the mainstream and never perform to their ability. Another percentage will become so frustrated that they will withdraw altogether. They think the system is just not designed for them. Then you hear the comment, ‘Well, maybe she wasn’t that bright to begin with.’ It’s a terrible waste of potential.”

Neuroscience & The Classroom: Making Connections.

Insights drawn from neuroscience not only provide educators with a scientific basis for understanding some of the best practices in teaching, but also offer a new lens through which to look at the problems teachers grapple with every day. By gaining insights into how the brain works—and how students actually learn—teachers will be able to create their own solutions to the classroom challenges they face and improve their practice.

For Business, Golden Days; For Workers, the *Dross

For companies, these are boom times. For workers, the opposite is true...effective tax rates, both corporate and personal, are well below where they were during most of the post-World War II era.

*Dross n.
1: the scum that forms on the surface of molten metal
2: waste or foreign matter : impurity
3: something that is base, trivial, or inferior


From Merriam Webster Online Dictionary.

It's not an excuse. It's a condition.

From SOS Million Teacher March on Facebook. Click the cartoon for the link.

In 2007 Gerald Bracey wrote,

When people have said "poverty is no excuse," my response has been, "Yes, you're right. Poverty is not an excuse. It's a condition. It's like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty."

"Corporate Reformers" like to call the labels on the backpacks of the children in the above cartoon 'excuses' but teachers know first hand how outside influences affect children's achievement.

In Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success (2009) author David Berliner wrote,

Because America’s schools are so highly segregated by income, race, and ethnicity, problems related to poverty occur simultaneously, with greater frequency, and act cumulatively in schools serving disadvantaged communities. These schools therefore face significantly greater challenges than schools serving wealthier children, and their limited resources are often overwhelmed. Efforts to improve educational outcomes in these schools, attempting to drive change through test-based accountability, are thus unlikely to succeed unless accompanied by policies to address the [Out-of-School-Factors] that negatively affect large numbers of our nations’ students. Poverty limits student potential; inputs to schools affect outputs from them.

Read about Berliner's report at Blame for School Achievement Gap Misplaced.

...and here are some links to information about the "excuses."

TV

• The Effects of Extracurricular Activities on the Academic Performance of Junior High Students
• University of Michigan: Television and Children
• The Read Aloud Handbook: CHAPTER 9: TV, Audio, & Technology — Hurting or Helping Literacy?

Violence

• American Psychological Association: Violence & Socioeconomic Status
• The association of community violence exposure with middle-school achievement: A prospective study

Drugs

• Substance Abuse, Violence, Mental Health, and Academic Success
• Deterioration of academic achievement and marijuana use onset among rural adolescents

Abuse

• Child Welfare Information Gateway: Academic Achievement
• Child Welfare Information Gateway: Long-Term Consequences of Child Abuse and Neglect
• Child Maltreatment: Effects on Development and Learning

Absent Parents

• Father Absence and the Welfare of Children
• The Importance of Fathers in the Healthy Development of Children

Poverty

• Teaching with Poverty in Mind: Chapter 2. How Poverty Affects Behavior and Academic Performance
• The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children
• Poverty has a Powerful Impact on Educational Attainment, or, Don't Trust Ed Trust

Lack of role models

• Strengthening Childrens Success in School
• Reflections on Four Days of Dialogue on the Educational Challenges of Minority Males