|Gates is not saying, "Find people who are doing good work in education and fund them...."
That the Gates foundation does not do this has always amazed me. They are backing Charter Schools, which I know is not popular around here. But if you go back to the original idea of Albert Shankar of empowering successful classroom educators by getting the bureaucracy off their backs so they could run better schools (which others could then learn from), you would think all the Gates Foundation has to do is identify and then back the most successful educator-led schools in a given city. (I would use three criteria for "successful": (1) math and reading scores that beat demographic expectations; (2) high teacher satisfaction = low teacher turnover; (3) high student satisfaction = long waiting lists/low suspension rates etc--in our city, for example, there are @115 Charter Schools: fewer than ten of them meet this definition of "successful")... but Gates does not do that. Instead they farm out the grant process --give money to unsuccessful educators who give it to their cronies and end up funding more failing Charter Schools --year after year of low scores, constant teacher & leadership churn, constant student unhappiness/churn--- reinforcing failure and changing nothing. But maybe this time!
Anti-democratic influence purchasing
|Gates is not saying, "Find people who are doing good work in education and fund them...."
That the Gates foundation does not do this has always amazed me. They are backing Charter Schools, which I know is not popular around here. But if you go back to the original idea of Albert Shankar of empowering successful classroom educators by getting the bureaucracy off their backs so they could run better schools (which others could then learn from), you would think all the Gates Foundation has to do is identify and then back the most successful educator-led schools in a given city. (I would use three criteria for "successful": (1) math and reading scores that beat demographic expectations; (2) high teacher satisfaction = low teacher turnover; (3) high student satisfaction = long waiting lists/low suspension rates etc--in our city, for example, there are @115 Charter Schools: fewer than ten of them meet this definition of "successful")... but Gates does not do that. Instead they farm out the grant process --give money to unsuccessful educators who give it to their cronies and end up funding more failing Charter Schools --year after year of low scores, constant teacher & leadership churn, constant student unhappiness/churn--- reinforcing failure and changing nothing. But maybe this time!
I call it a tax write off.