The art of manipulation and fooling people has become an industry of deception.
For instance, Katie Couric interviews Melinda Gates about the Gates Foundation’s pledge to donate $1 million to DonorsChoose. Melinda Gates says that million will go to help teachers.
To discover the obvious, The Journal.com reports “Public school teachers spent $1.6 billion of their own money on classroom supplies and gear in the 2012-2013 school year.”
The Bill and Melinda Gates contribution represents only 0.625 percent of what public school teachers spend annually on classroom supplies and gear. But that $1 million from Bill and Melinda will buy good press and PR worth a lot more—another agenda that will destroy the public schools.
To discover the real agenda of Bill and Melinda Gates, let’s look at how much they spent to destroy the public schools through the rank and yank agenda of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that Bill Gates was promoting before there was a CCSS.
Bradley County News reports the Gates Foundation contributions during the time frame of consideration and development of the Common Core initiative.
Counsel of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO):
2009–$9,961,842
2009–$3,185,750
2010–$743,331
2011–$9,388,911
National Governor’s Association (NGA):
2008–$2,259,780,Mark Tucker’s NCEE:
2009–$1,500,000
Total: $27,000,000
Then Mercedes Schneider at deutsch29 reveals: “The Gates amounts are even higher than for NGA. Prior to June 2009, the Gates Foundation gave $47.1 million to CCSSO (from 2002 to 2007), with the largest amount focused on data “access” and “data driven decisions” … In total, the four organizations primarily responsible for CCSS–NGA, CCSSO, Achieve, and Student Achievement Partners – have taken $147.9 million from Bill Gates.
Next, The Washington Post reports that “The Common Core standards were developed in 2009 and released in 2010. Within a matter of months, they had been endorsed by 45 states and the District of Columbia. At present, publishers are aligning their materials with the Common Core, technology companies are creating software and curriculum aligned with the Common Core, and two federally-funded consortia have created online tests of the Common Core.”
The Washington Post also reported, “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.”
You may also want to know who the 24 people were who wrote the Common Core Standards: Altogether, 24 people wrote the Common Core standards. None identified himself or herself as a classroom teacher, although a few had taught in the past (not the recent past). The largest contingent on the work groups were representatives of the testing industry. Diane Ravitch.net
A brief timeline might help reveal what is really going on:
First—Bill Gates spends $47.1 million to promote the CCSSO before there was even a CCSSO. The goal of the CCSS is to use standardized tests to rank and then yank (fire) teachers in addition to closing democratically run public schools and turning our children over to private-sector, corporate run Charter schools.
Second—In 2009, 24 people, mostly non-educators who were representatives of the testing industry, wrote the Common Core Standards that Bill Gates spent more than $200 million promoting and supporting to develop this untested theory that has an agenda to fire teachers and replace public schools with corporate—mostly for profit—charter schools.
Third—There’s the Economic Policy Institute (EPI): The EPI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank created in 1986. EPI believes every working person deserves a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, and retirement security. To achieve this goal, EPI conducts research and analysis on the economic status of working America.
The EPI says, “There is broad agreement among statisticians, psychometricians, and economists that student test scores alone are not sufficiently reliable and valid indicators of teacher effectiveness to be used in high-stakes personnel decisions, even when the most sophisticated statistical applications such as value-added modeling are employed.”
Conclusion: There is no evidence that the results of the Bill Gates developed and promoted Common Core standardized tests will improve the schools or help children learn—none. But there is evidence that standardized tests do little to nothing to help children learn. In addition, during the years that Bill and Melinda Gates spent more than $200-million to punish teachers through his CCSS rank and yank agenda that will destroy the public schools, teachers spent more than $11 billion to help children learn—and Bill and Melinda Gates think they can dig themselves out of their $200-million+ dollar hole with a $1-million dollar bribe.
Who do you trust more to teach your children—Bill and Melinda Gates or public school teachers?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 