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Code.org Documentary Serving Multiple Agendas?
theodp writes "'Someday, and that day may never come,' Don Corleone says famously in The Godfather, 'I'll call upon you to do a service for me.' Back in 2010, filmmaker Lesley Chilcott produced Waiting for 'Superman', a controversial documentary that analyzed the failures of the American public education system, and presented charter schools as a glimmer of hope, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed KIPP Los Angeles Prep. Gates himself was a 'Superman' cast member, lamenting how U.S. public schools are producing 'American Idiots' of no use to high tech firms like Microsoft, forcing them to 'go half-way around the world to recruit the engineers and programmers they needed.' So some found it strange that when Chilcott teamed up with Gates again three years later to make Code.org's documentary short What Most Schools Don't Teach, kids from KIPP Empower Academy were called upon to demonstrate that U.S. schoolchildren are still clueless about what computer programmers do. In a nice coincidence, the film went viral just as leaders of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook pressed President Obama and Congress on immigration reform, citing a dearth of U.S. programming talent. And speaking of coincidences, the lone teacher in the Code.org film (James, Teacher@Mount View Elementary), whose classroom was tapped by Code.org as a model for the nation's schools, is Seattle teacher Jamie Ewing, who took top honors in Microsoft's Partners in Learning (PiL) U.S. Forum last summer, earning him a spot on PiL's 'Team USA' and the chance to showcase his project at the Microsoft PiL Global Forum in Prague in November (82-page Conference Guide). Ironically, had Ewing stuck to teaching the kids Scratch programming, as he's shown doing in the Code.org documentary, Microsoft wouldn't have seen fit to send him to its blowout at 'absolutely amazingly beautiful' Prague Castle. Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft's rules, 'must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.' Fortunately, Ewing's project — described in his MSDN guest blog post — called for using PowerPoint and Skype. For the curious, here's Microsoft PiL's vision of what a classroom should be."
He's saying that a lot of this "U.S. schools are awful, just awful" stuff is propaganda, funded by U.S. tech firms in an effort to import more H1B-visa indentured servants to save money.
Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
You are aware Gates was a dropout right?
He made his business based on family connections at IBM.
He dropped out of college, but because he decided to found Microsoft. He did not get kicked out, and he didn't get to Harvard by being an idiot.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
WTF? I'm gonna assume this was intended to be funny, but it's sitting at +3 Interesting
1) Code.org is not run by microsoft. It's a non-profit founded by Hadi Partovi
2) Code.org doesn't promote microsoft coding habits. I can't actually find any microsoft languages on their site.
3) I'm not cetain who "they" refers to in the 3rd sentence, but Code.org doesn't have anything to say about outsourcing tech jobs. If it's referring to Microsoft, then Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Intel also signed the letter requesting an overhaul of the tech visa system
4) westerners who...think independently. Yep, that's some pretty "independent" thinking thinking you've got going there. It's so independent, it may form it's own little country with a flag and national anthem.
5) This is all helped by a whole host of corporate artists, celebrities, and other proffesional astro-turfers. Huh?
Sadly, as bat-sh-t crazy as your description was...it still made more sense than the article.