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Bill Gates Still Trying To Buy Some Common Core Testing Love
theodp writes: "Bill Gates famously spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, implement and promote the now controversial Common Core State Standards," reports the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss. "He hasn't stopped giving." In the last seven months, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has poured more than $10 million into implementation and parent support for the Core. Strauss adds: "Gates is the leader of education philanthropy in the United States, spending a few billion dollars over more than a decade to promote school reforms that he championed, including the Common Core, a small-schools initiative in New York City that he abandoned after deciding it wasn't working, and efforts to create new teacher evaluation systems that in part use a controversial method of assessment that uses student standardized test scores to determine the 'effectiveness' of educators. Such philanthropy has sparked a debate about whether American democracy is well-served by wealthy people who pour part of their fortunes into their pet projects — regardless of whether they are grounded in research — to such a degree that public policy and funding follow." If you're still on the fence about Common Core after viewing it, the Onion just came out with a nice list of the pros and cons of standardized testing that may help you decide.
Common Core appears to have become controversial primarily because the conservative media told us it is. Apparently they were hoping that the new standard would also find a way to further reduce teachers' salaries and career opportunities, and as it did not do that it needed to be destroyed at all cost.
Granted Common Core has some faults, for sure, but at least it is an attempt by someone to do something. So far we have seen lots of lip service on the education system in this country and very little action. I'd be more impressed with the arguments of those calling it "controversial" if they actually proposed a meaningful fix instead of just attacking the fix that we have.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Let me be the first to point out... the Onion?
Mr. Gates is still trying to buy his way into history remembering him in a good light.
Thinking about standardized testing reminds me of the Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.". Standardized testing has its problems but these are no where near as significant as the problems with everything else which has been tried.
This monopolist has contributed absolutely nothing of value to the world.
You're linking to The Onion now?
Shame on you, /.!
how is democracy and equality compatible with a few super rich?
Common Core is the MS Windows of education. No wonder everyone hates it.
The Common Core Standards Initiative method has been copyrighted.
The presence of a BillG look-alike kid in the pro-Common Core ad made by recent $3.7M Gates Foundation awardee the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation is a nice touch!
I can say that at the high school level, what I teach has not changed dramatically (Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2). I cannot speak for the younger grades, but it has been suggested that it is pretty different.
The order of things has moved around quite a bit, but mostly in order to accommodate the testing window. This is where the real problem lies: the testing. The PARCC tests are an absolute logistic nightmare. I work in an affluent district with a 1:3 computer:student ratio (3500 students) and we have basically shut down the building to test. WIth 6 days of testing, another week of make-ups, and then another round of testing, we have been in test mode since the end of Februrary. This means that as the year winds down, it is impossible for teachers to use any sort of tech.
Let them take the ACT, get a "remedial" composite of like 18 and use that as their test credit. That sounds like a low score (it is), but it is about all they have to have to currently pass a state graduation test, and the PARCC tests will have similar benchmarks despite the ridiculous amount of stress they cause on the students.
The only advantage of common core is that when your government throws money at a school, there is no way to determine whether the money was completely wasted or not so completely wasted. When you compare different schools in different districts with the same test you at least have some, however flawed and pointless, benchmark for comparison, so when you as a taxpayer and parent deal with the politicians you have something to complain about (if you care).
My state (New York) which had semi-decent education standards to begin with, recently switched to the Common Core curriculum and it's really stirring up a mess. Partially, it's the mandatory testing that parents are opting their children out of, but it's also being tied to a bunch of other things. For example, teachers now have to deal with the same BS performance evaluations that corporate employees do, and a huge chunk of their rating is based on these test scores. They were evaluated in the past, but it was understood that there was no objective way to evaluate teacher performance with variable student performance. Now, new teachers will lose their jobs if their classes don't do well on these tests, with no regard for whether the teacher has a bunch of losers or geniuses in their class. I'm not a teacher, but I'm definitely on the teachers' side in this case. I would hate to spend the time to get a teacher certification (not impossible, but harder in NY than many states) and have my job be at risk due to factors I can't control. For example, most new teachers can't get jobs in the nice affluent school districts because there are tons more qualified applicants who want to work there, so they usually have to start off teaching in a crappy school district. Crappy districts tend to have kids who have crappy parents. (And yes, affluent districts have helicopter parents that make teachers' lives miserable, but that's another story.) If you have a class full of students who have bad home lives, parents who don't care, or have been socially promoted for years, they're going to do badly on these standardized tests and your performance rate will suffer through no fault of your own.
The other thing I've seen is that the material used to teach the common core curriculum is really different from stuff we saw in earlier times. I think that's another big thing -- parents feel they can't help their kids with homework. However, it's the material, not the curriculum itself. Blame the educational publishers for that, not the standards.
One thing I definitely don't agree with Bill Gates on is his love of charter schools. These just suck more money away from the public system and funnel it into corporate interests' pockets, making the public system weaker. What Gates or anyone doesn't understand is that education won't improve until it's valued by everyone. The reason China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc. are ahead of us in test performance isn't the curriculum -- they push their students like crazy from both directions (teachers and parents.) Kids in these countries spend many more hours in school than US kids, and have information drilled into their heads. That's what needs to happen if we want to compete with these countries in the future. In the case of India and China, school performance is basically some kids' only ticket to a better life given the population and structure of society. Things might be a little different if students in the US who didn't excel in school were permanently doomed to a life of poverty...I think the parents might care a little more.
The SOLs in Virginia, a collection of facts believed necessary to be known for one to be considered "educated", has failed in Virginia. The resultant standardized tests and overloaded, politicized curriculum have led to pervasive faculty cheating, wasted resources and dumber kids.
Countless valid studies over the years have shown how to better run our schools, but the system is broken and only supports Skinnerian, top-down, continuously failing approaches. We never learn. And our children suffer for it.
The problem is, the Gates foundation is not altruistic. Gates repeatedly demonstrates he still has vested profit-making interests that at least influence his projects if not obviously come first.
You don't want anyone who's motive even includes corporate gain, let alone is the main one, deciding how to educate our kids.
Common Core is actually most likely a long-play intended to benefit Gates the most. When Gates was at the helm of Microsoft he started them into strongly marketing to schools, the intent being direct influence over the mental processes of the entire next decision-making/product-buying generation. Common Core is just a better disguised approach to exactly the same goal.
The main problems with common core aren't the standardized testing, though that is a problem.
Put on your developer hats and think about it like a software project:
The problem with common core is the requirements were written by people who have no idea about requirements development. Not only didn't they know how to write the requirements that had no input from any stakeholders, or users.
These fatally flawed requirements were then implemented by publishers of curriculum that do not know how to do a requirements traceability, nor how to fulfill requirements.
These massively fatally flawed curriculums are being implemented on the students by teachers who cannot follow the badly written code that is the curriculum.
Everyone who was involved in this massive failure to develop a working product should be fired and barred from working on anything similar ever again.
If you don't believe me go and read the math requirements for the what is to be taught. The guys who developed the requirements were complaining to a journalist a while back that it wasn't their fault, and that the publishers just didn't correctly meet the requirements. But upon reading the requirements anyone who's done requirement based development will see that they were a soup sandwich.
The vast and bloated public education system is built upon behavioral psychology and the need for society to mass produce compliant workers.
To that there are billions of dollars floating around millions of bureaucrats where each stakeholder is more invested in having a job, mission and money before a young student is "educated."
If anyone was serious about human education as a form of goodwill in society - to create a newer generation of free critical thinkers to actively challenge the rich and status quo then two simple issues would be instituted over night.
1) Textbooks (like all information) would be effectively free. Has basic mathematics and language changed in 300 years? Nope. Why is that textbook still $100+ (even in electronic format)?
2) In terms of "standardize testing" an apolitical solution is clear. Just have every instructor in every grade in every state submit three questions that are thought to represent core concepts at the end of any subject. Have the questions put in a randomized pool and all students are tested on the questions at the same time. Statistically, for every "hard" questions there will be some "soft" ones. Teachers also take the same examination. Results for everyone are made public. That way students are tested against their peers and teachers are measured by their inherent skills and knowledge.
Both of these solutions would have profound impact on all education and be cheaper, more transparent and ultimately "fairer." The idea that billions of dollars needs to be shoehorned into secret, complex and nonsensical systems run by borderline incompetent wonks really shows nobody cares about public education - except as a system of control and compliance.
One thing I definitely don't agree with Bill Gates on is his love of charter schools. These just suck more money away from the public system and funnel it into corporate interests' pockets, making the public system weaker.
Supply and demand. We would probably be better making the public schools open to all certified teachers to teach their subject--more of a community learning center. But charter schools are another market-based solution that makes more sense than the current system. Subsidizing a supplier is just a bad idea from an economics perspective and prevents *choice* from shaping better education. The public schools are so terrified of lawsuits anyway that they really don't bring a lot more to the table, it's just that the teacher's union has very effectively made any threat to them seem like it's hate or an attack on family values or the like rather than what it is--a concern that the single most important role in our society is being terribly mismanaged.
Not his. Mine.
Of course he's generous with it: he's so damn rich that apart from a few people he can easily avoid, he's wealthier therefore more powerful than anyone on the planet. What he can't do with that money is get people to forget the past. Unless he spends it.
If he spends it on making schools have to buy Microsoft products, then he's making it MORE of my money he's spending.
charitable pursuits of providing accessible healthcare, education and reducing poverty for millions!
Prove any one of these to actually have been first successful and then validate that it was charitable.
With great respect for the place of civil debate and mutual respect in our society, I ask, "What the flying fuck is wrong with you?"
I mean, maybe you just rolled out of bed, but the next time someone drops tens of billions trying to fix some of the biggest and most complicated problems in the world, please don't act like they're a first-year coder who forgot to run a test suite on strcmp().
Because the problems are all to do with marriage. When you die, who gets first dibs? The wife. What if there are several? Ooops.
What if you're in intensive care,who can decide that you should be left to go or made to stay with you non-compos-mentis? The wife. What if there are several? Oops.
Tax break? Divorce? Custody? Alimony? What about your kids, when you die? What about your kids when one of your wives die, then you die. Do they get the divvied up stuff first, whilst the others have to wait until their mums die?
What about if there's many men and many women? Who is the husband? Who is the wife? There aren't spaces for multiple choice answers.
When kids need a parent present, does it have to be the biological one, or can one of the other mums or dads turn up? What if the kid is delinquent? What if there's abuse of the child? Since the parents are responsible, all of them are?
What about inheritance taxes? Tax free allowances? Do you only get one married couple or will it be between each pair, therefore combinatorial and so a tax dodge?
How about religion? Which one can refuse and why? If you marry an RCC man, will that be fine as long as at least one of the married couplets is of the opposite gender? So you and Dave marry, and this is fine because you married Betsy in another (Jewish, say) ceremony? Since churches have to let congregationists get married there, they ALSO don't allow polygamy, so which takes precedence? And if your marriage wishes take precedence, then should not gay and lesbian marriage take precedence over their religious dogma too? If not, then are they now open to a case of breech of their charter?
What if there are two dads and two mums and one mum and one dad dies, does that count as the parents have died, or as they are still there, therefore it's not taxably allowed?
What same-sex marriage doesn't have is the problem above: if you're adopted into a pairing, then it doesn't matter what sex either of the adoptive parents are, the situation is legally very clear. And doing so doesn't harm anyone, even the kids.
My son in 6th grade is doing the math work and it's just atrocious how badly basic multiplication has been mangled. For decades American kids learned math fundamentals by rote and we came out of those classes knowing exactly how to do it. Now the math problems are infrequently used such that there is no "drilling and killing" of any fundamental concepts. The whole thing sucks.
I have two young kids and I'm looking forward to get Common Core implemented in my district. I like it as it makes me confident that my kids will not get a bad teacher since those will be weeded out rather quickly (or they adapt and learn).
My Kids have been doing CC worksheets that are available online and I find them not difficult to explain. I can already see one big advantage of standardization which is identifying knowledge gaps in kids education.
I'm not a big fan of tests, have never been good test taker and I anticipate the same for my kids. However what else one can do to evaluate someone's knowledge? Instead of arguing for or against people should be coming up with ideas how to evaluate fairly and efficiently because it's needed no matter if Common Core is in or out.
"The rich and poor alike get exactly one vote each." BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAA!!!! Really? Do you think I'd get as much face time with the senate as Bill Gates would?
And if my voting only results in choices from ones Bill likes, what is the "equality" of our unitary count of vote worth?
Common core might not be so bad it does add some uniformity to public education. But just like how government throws money at education its not going to solve the continued decline of test scores and the ridiculous per student costs for little gain. My wife a teacher for 25 years was all for common core and even was directly involved in implementing it in her district. But after a year she has seen very little in positive gains and has lost her positive opinions about its effects. This again was a one size fits all solution that only fits in certain ways and needs some needed tailoring to make it work.
View: Common Core – and Cuomo – are failing NY
Common Core 101: What is it and how does it affect our children?
Umm, sorry to disturb your "conservatives are evil" rant, but then how do you explain the epically failing schools of many american inner cities? Cities that have been run top to bottom, city council to school district by liberals.
In no particular order: corrupt school boards, lack of funding, poor teacher quality (hard to get good teachers in areas perceived as high crime), disinterested parents, cultural aversion to education, externalities like drugs and crime, and the list goes on.
"Conservatives" are also for school choice, charter schools, school vouchers, all of which are designed to empower parents in those failing inner city districts some hope.
Bullshit. First off none of those positions supported by republicans are genuine efforts to improve those school districts. They are efforts to cause them to fail and close and oh by the way de-power teacher's unions which are a big part of the support for the Democrats. If you are going to try to convince me that Republicans give a damn about municipalities that pretty much never vote for them then you'll need some iron clad evidence.
Charter schools are nothing but cash grabs which weaken traditional public schools. I work in a school district (part time) with teachers who have taught in charter schools. They have NOTHING to do with improving school outcomes and everything to do with profit. Charter schools frequently are for-profit and I assure you that they only care about student outcomes insofar as it keeps the funding going. School choice merely results in a exodus from struggling school districts causing them to fail even faster, often without a credible backup plan in place. School funding is typically based on attendance and reducing attendance just causes financially struggling schools to struggle even more. School choice isn't a choice when you don't have the money to get to a different district which many families do not so you end up with students who have the means to leave going and those without means being stuck in an ever worsening school district.
A friend worked briefly for a company that runs an educational website targeted at preschool children, backed by the Gates Foundation. It is advertised heavily on cable television. The technical operation was run like a factory - get the programmers and designers to work as hard as possible, with fixed work hours and scheduled breaks, tasks assigned every morning, and an hourly report of tasks submitted at the end of each day and a summary each week. They did not follow best practices, and did not use source control. Because of the work conditions, the company was constantly recruiting to keep positions filled. For a company owned by a foundation trying to boost STEM education, it is certainly a poor example of the kind of job that awaits the next generation of scientists and engineers. Bill always had vision, but doesn't have much eye for details.
A few years back, Bill Gates partnered with Tony Blair's no.1 planetary PROPAGANDIST, Rupert Murdoch, to create a national database on every aspect of every child's life in the USA. The project was named INBLOOM after the common code phrase Victorian pedophiles used to describe potential child victims, as in the "blooming of a flower, ripe for the plucking".
Betas, like those of you here reading this latest Dice puff piece for Gates, had been told again and again that Gates and Murdoch were on the very OPPOSITE ends of the political and social engineering scale. For a Beta, the 'truth' isn't the TRUTH, but the most successful propaganda message disseminated by mass media outlets. You Betas ARE Betas because the 'loudest' voice programs your perception of the world, and Dice knows this.
inBloom even captured intimate details about every aspect of a child's sexual development, and Gates offered bounties to teachers if they used their own time to enter into the database information they had OVERHEARD while processing a child or their parents. Anyone familiar with the scandals over establishment pedophiles like Jimmy Savile or Greville Janner in the UK will comprehend the 'service' Bill Gates was intending to offer powerful individuals with a taste for child abuse.
Despite Dice's best efforts on Slashdot, public disquiet over inBloom led to the project being moved fully to the NSA, and away from the public eye. The NSA is now responsible for covertly mining computer resources to fill out the inBloom dataset, and as a result its purpose is now somewhat different from that intended by Gates and Murdoch.
Common Core is part of the inBloom CONTINUUM, but in a somewhat different direction. Common Core is 1984 NEWSPEAK brought to life, where you use 'politically correct' versions of 'knowledge' to limit and control what the common sheeple know and think.
For example, Common Core famously COLLAPSED maths confidence and ability in children of MIDDLING maths skills (the vast majority), while leaving the progress of the upper ability group untouched. American society NEEDS a small number of good mathematicians, but Gates wants the average American to have the least amount of technical skills possible, so state propaganda programs will be more effective.
Common Core maths teaching shows the pure evil nature of Gates' approach. The very fact that the 'new' methods leave pupils of superior natural skill unaffected allows VICTIM BLAMING when children (and their parents) of average ability cry 'FOUL'. It is as if ALL children are FORCED to perceive maths through the eyes of a Martin Gardener 'Mathematical Recreation' book. At 14 I read such books FOR FUN. But had such content been forced on kids of average ability, it would have turned them off maths for life.
University intake departments all reported a CATASTROPHIC collapse in maths skills in most students who had been forced to take Common Core maths teaching methods (which were actually rolled out in many states before Common Core as embryo programs). Gates simply paid for sites like this to be flooded with propaganda trolling blaming the parents for 'resistance'.
Bluntly, then they shouldn't have kids -- but I don't think that's the issue.
Whether they should or should not have children is irrelevant. The fact is that they do and that child needs to be educated.
It's very difficult for a diligent single parent to 'assist their kids in succeeding', never mind one who's more apathetic.
The difficulty or lack thereof is again irrelevant. The child needs to be educated and simply dismissing the problem because of some apathetic parents is dodging the issue. Yes parental involvement matters but sometimes it doesn't happen so what do we do about that? It takes a pretty cold person to just dismiss the problem as unsolvable and blame the parents for everything.
Schools have become "food" programs where kids get 2 of their meals a day. Many are open over the summer just to provide food.
Did it occur to you that there is a good reason for that? Children need to be fed and schools for better or worse are well positioned to be a part of the solution for that. A lot of people struggle financially and getting food on the table isn't a trivial thing sometimes. Schools sometimes need to be more than just a place to learn about math and reading.
Maybe we need discuss taking kids away from parents who cant or wont provide for their kids vs. the alternative of raising an ever increasing population of people who cannot or will not take care of themselves and bring in to the world children whom they are not equipped to provide adequate care.
Sigh... Taking a child away from a parent merely because they are struggling financially is about the most heartless and brutal thing I can think of. My parents were poor at one point in their lives and you think I should have been taken away from them for that? Wow... If you think putting tens of thousands of children in foster care because they have poor parent is any kind of a sane solution then you are an imbecile.
Bill is an executive/programmer who fancies himself to be a futurist as well. To the degree he's been successful developing his own culture inside and outside Microsoft, I imagine he must feel qualified to standardize education and promote his agenda for the world. In so doing he can't possibly be seen to care a whit for those who fall behind, including the teachers caught in the crossfire between administrators and free marketers bent on turning public school budgets into profit centers without care or concern for the outcome in human terms.
Common core standards may even be suitable as goals for exposure, but holding teachers responsible for studentse' uptake and on command regurgitation is a systemic problem which undermines the public utility of the educational system already overburdened with parental a psychological responsibility for which instructors are held accountable and scoolz are ill equipped.
C Core isn't really the issue. It's just another attempt to treat education as if children don't matter by ignoring those outside an artificially crafted norm and penalizing teachers for failing to achieve the irrational and unattainable.
Want to improve education? Its pretty simple if the resources are allocated.
Devise multiple educational models, hundreds if necessary.
Encourage their adoption at multiple schools covering as many demographics as possible.
Track the data over X number of years. Where improvements are seen, encourage further adoption of those models. Where problems are seen, scrap that model and devise a new one.
Continue this cycle over again. I doubt one "ultimate model," which a common-core type strategy tries to convey, will ever reveal itself. The models will continually change based on population dynamics, technology advancement, and the natural flow of cultural growth.
By allowing hundreds or thousands of models to compete and grow we will converge on improved systems.
The US is the country with the widest education gap. A few (usually rich) people are very well educated, most of the masses are below the lowest of standards of any other developed country.
Everyone in the world is using standardized tests and degrees. It's a rite a passage and a guarantee that people that have passed them have at least a basic level.
Sure, it's a got a lot of limitations and it is a rigid mold, but that's what you expect of basic core stuff. It is not useful in evaluating truly smart people, but it is really useful to have a better education on average and in particular for the disadvantaged, as it levels the playing field.
Why do we have [expensive] textbooks and not go the Japanese route and have thin, printed-on-demand booklets good for 6 weeks of material that includes not just the subject but also the exercises?
Would save the riduculous requirement for the student to bind a book in their personal cover every year. Would save the students from breaking their backs carrying all the unused bullshit.... I have almost never used more than half a textbook in any single subject in any single year. So why carry all that excess all the time?
No one can't tell me that an entire nation or even state of teachers can't collaborate and come up with booklets for all the typical k-12 subjects within a relatively short time, like a year or so. Have the teachers working on it get rewarded, and then have it be public domain. Most subjects in k-12 don't change much.
And how many Billions will he make if he convinces the government to go with his set of proprietary products (aka common core)? It is a $632 billion dollar per year industry. If it only costs him a few billion it will be well worth it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"American society NEEDS a small number of good mathematicians"
regards,
Marketing and Sales
Common Core will fail because there's not enough time to plug knowledge gaps of each child that is behind in some area. To fix this students would have to be grouped by level of proficiency however doing so may feel like discrimination.
Such philanthropy has sparked a debate about whether American democracy is well-served by wealthy people who pour part of their fortunes into their pet projects — regardless of whether they are grounded in research — to such a degree that public policy and funding follow.
BIll Gates: pours billions of his money directly to a cause to get something done (even if that something is against current research/ common good)
Others: pour billions into paying politicians so that the politicians will then pour billions of taxpayer dollars into a cause to get something done (even if that something is against the common good).
This is just standard US "democracy" at work. He is just removing the middleman.
"tens of thousands of children in foster care"
Well no, it wouldn't be foster homes, would it? We're talking orphanages at that point.
You made me wonder, how bad would that be? It's got a gym and a basketball court and nobody can pick on me and there's no guns here and I can be a part of something...
When we had those, we didn't have these problems. Correlation or causation?
You sort of brought it up, and it's supposed to be a thinking website...
How is it possible that Bill Gates, (the guy we turned into a Borg icon), gets a free pass on Slashdot?
Bill Gates, at some point in his career, decided that the way forward was to reduce our numbers, dumb us down through poison food and drugs, and prepare for the apocalypse with seed banks.
He's not a dummy. He knew exactly what Common Core would do. It was designed from the get-go to create stupid, compliant people and to crush the opposition. (The "opposition" being every other system which might compete with an alternative system of social control including our own, ie., Free Will. He's always been about the meta-game, the subversion and control of reality through sneaky, system-wide hacks and manipulations.
So now he's graduated from the engineering of software to the engineering of social order.
Sorry, but I don't want Bill Gates thinking of me and my family and friends as part of some armchair theory he feels compelled to tinker with.
1. Make people stupid because CC makes easy concepts hard to learn.
2. People graduate with worthless pieces of paper called grade school and high school diplomas, but cannot do squat.
3. They go to college and flunk out.
4. Bill Gates can't find qualified talent.
5. He then lobbies for even more H1B and L1 visas saying American suck at what they do.
People, neither teachers nor pupils are not standardised components. This is blatantly ridiculous plan.
The real reason cons hate common core is because they can't inject religion into a curriculum that is controlled by a national, highly-educated body. They need the local BOE making decisions to get any traction with that goal.