Billionaires Target Teachers—and Take the Gloves Off in Illinois

[proud2BlibKansan]

A billionaire gang headed by Bill Gates and Eli Broad wants to convert America’s public schools, with its $600 billion in annual public expenditures according to the Department of Education, into a corporate-owned test-score factory. Their plan faces teacher resistance, and nowhere more so than in Chicago, where a feisty new leadership is making the Chicago Teachers Union among the most effective in the country.

The billionaires have decided to go toe to toe with CTU and with Illinois’s 200,000 unionized teachers. The battleground is the state legislature and a draft bill called the Performance Counts Act. The bill would gut teachers unions, maximize the firing of teachers at will, and ensure that no organized voice remains to advocate for quality public schools. The repercussions for all public employees—and all of organized labor—are clear.

Last October, journalists noticed that candidates for Illinois legislative seats were receiving unusually large checks. “It’s not every day that a group almost nobody has ever heard of gives $175,000 to a single state legislative candidate,” remarked an Illinois Times contributor. Another reporter observed that “a national education reform group has quietly dumped more than $600,000 into key Illinois legislative races.” He added that “the source of much of that money is a mystery,” because of the unusual path it took to arrive in Illinois.

The mysterious political action group is called Stand for Children. Based in Portland, Oregon, and with affiliates in seven states, SFC is an enormously well-funded and sophisticated “grassroots” organization whose largest single funder is Bill Gates: he gave the group nearly $3.5 million in 2010.

more . . . http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2010/12/billionaires-target-teachers—and-take-gloves-illinois

[nyc 4 Biden]

1. link

http://labornotes.org/blogs/2010/12/billionaires-target-teachers%E2%80%94and-take-gloves-illinois

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. Thank you

Sorry my link is messed up.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg are dictating education policy now....

http://www.alternet.org/story/149232/where_does_billionaire_monopolist_bill_gates_get_off_saying_bigger_class_size_and_fewer_teachers_is_the_education_solution

Where Does Billionaire Monopolist Bill Gates Get Off Saying Bigger Class Size and Fewer Teachers Is the Education Solution?

Gates' suggested short-changing of the nation's education system is just another strain of the oligarchs trying to take over another sector of society.

Once dominant, now America is just average when it comes to education. Its public solution, recently communicated by Microsoft mogul Bill Gates? Increased class sizes, decreased teacher counts, fewer advanced degrees, and probably more mediocrity.

It's the type of technocratic cure-all one would expect Gates to champion, and it will doubtless perform as lamely as Microsoft, which currently hobbles at $30 a share while its more intuitive tech rivals like Apple and Google respectively hover around $200 to $600. But Gates' short-changing of the nation's education system is just another strain of neoconservative austerity going viral in our global village. And it's just as short-sighted as the disaster capitalism that destroyed America's economic integrity: Increasing America's class sizes and downsizing its teachers could cost us more than it could save us.

"Bringing the United States up to the average performance of Finland, the best-performing education system, could result in gains in the order of 103 trillion dollars," claimed the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's three-year Programme for International Student Assessment report released in December. Of course, those are just the numbers. The hypocrisy stings worse.

"The oligarchy making decisions for public-school kids -- like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates -- send their own children to private schools with comparatively tiny class sizes of 15 or less, while many of the kids in the schools they impose their policies on have classes of 25, 30 or more," Leonie Haimson, executive director for the nonprofit educational watchdog Class Size Matters, told AlterNet. "New York City children are now suffering from the largest class sizes in early grades since 1999, despite billions more spent on education. And class sizes are expected to increase again next year."

<snip>

[MedicalAdmin]

4. Public enemy #3

For the good of the republic ...

[immoderate]

9. Sure sign that Gates has more money than he knows what to do with.

He may mean well. Like most people, he thinks that any adult can control a class and manage the process of learning. And he sees the simple answer to all of the problems a teacher must solve.

I think he means well. Thomas Jefferson spoke of amassing wealth that "becomes a danger to the State." Bill has too much fucking money, and he's trying to find where he can do the most damage optimize its use. This is a classic Peter Principle fail.

--imm

[BrklynLiberal]

10. I guess many people with loads of money think that if you throw enough cash at something, you can

solve anything. Guess it is part of the nature of such people to think that money = power, since that has been their personal experience. They do not realize that money may make one powerful, but not omnipotent or omniscient.

[immoderate]

12. His thinking ends after "roll up sleeves."

--imm

[Hawkeye-X]

18. He needs to give up all of his wealth, and make his wealth a priority

for redistribution among the poor/middle class.

Let him lead the way - he can live modestly at $250,000 a year.

What the eff would he do with his billions? Besides trying to screw up public schools?

[Hannah Bell]

23. he doesn't mean well. that's why people are going to get rolled.

they keep attributing good motivations to psychopaths.

[immoderate]

28. I said he means well, that's not exactly good motivations.

Seriously, I think he believes he is doing great good here. He is arrogant but not pathological. There are too many for them all to be pathological. If he didn't have all that money, he'd be harmless.

--imm

[somone]

3. Just another batch of robber barons

converting taxpayer money into personal profit

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. They've met their match in Chicago

Karen Lewis doesn't play. Can't wait to see her handle these selfish jerks.

[BrklynLiberal]

7. It would be a joyous occasion to see the unions trounce these oligarchs.

[lunasun]

21. exactly

[Starry Messenger]

8. recommend.

[sudopod]

11. $600 billion? What?

not arguing with the premise of the article, but that number sounds off.

[proud2BlibKansan]

20. It does seem high

[Rex]

13. This is all about destroying unions and taking away a teachers

ability to teach in the classroom. Bill needs to go feed Africa with all his money, all he can do in America is help destroy public schools and I wish he would stop, now.

[BrklynLiberal]

14. +1000

[proud2BlibKansan]

15. + a million

[SoCalDem]

16. Schooling may have to go back to "the olden days" to actually recover

With more and more teachers becoming "redundant", I can see some of them banding together to start their own "academies" here and there..

With people of modest means finding money to send their kids to "Store-front Jesus Schools, Inc", I can also see others hiring teachers to teach kids in similar settings..

The sad thing is that these teachers will have no long-term security, but having been laid off, they have none as well, so....

We may have to go back-to-the-beginning to get to better schooling..

Many of the guys who sent men to the moon with pencils, slide-rules & computers less powerful than your cell-phone, and were in their 30's & 40's in the early sixties, probably attended schools far less sophisticated than we have now..

They had inspirational teachers (probably most of them), and learned how to learn..

[WinkyDink]

17. Gates ultimately wants NO brick-&-mortar schools. HE'S ABOUT COMPUTERS, PEOPLE.

Study on-line; take the test on-line. Essay questions? Fuhgeddaboutit.

[Hannah Bell]

24. and you'll pay microsap for the privilege.

[senseandsensibility]

19. k and r but no one's listening.

This is completely ignored by the corporate media.

[Brilliantrocket]

22. Hmmmm

What incentive could billionaires have in the privatization of schools? Probably for making an army of mindless lever pullers.

[Gabi Hayes]

25. sick of the 'grassroots' lie much?

Stand For Children may well have used to deserve that sobriquet, but now? not so much

one of the few links I've found that goes into their funding follows


it contains the names of the main funders of the "charitable" branch of this organization. the political arm is protected by the cloak of anonymous donations, of course, so we can only see where the money from 'disinterested' people/groups like Gates, the Bekensteins, Paul Allen, Mitt Romney, Bain Capital (Romney and Bekenstein), Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, and others.

http://www.bluemassgroup.com/diary/19352/stand-for-childrens-stands


also at the link, an interesting exchange between actual citizen participant/supporters from the Massachusetts site, and people who've seen through the original imprimatur of the group's founder, Marion Wright Edelman, and those who've taken over, basically. read the link to see where the money comes from, which is basically from the list mentioned above, NOT from individual donors, which amounts to about half a million of the $3.6 million raised in 2008

I'll post that separately

[lonestarnot]

26. Motherfucking snakes in the fucking grassroots!

[Gabi Hayes]

27. comment from bluemassgroup:

this comment is the very last one on the page, but the others are well worth a read, too

''Stand, Corporate money, and Astro-turf

Several Stand members have posted here, expressing the belief that they are in control of Stand's agenda. Stand members in my town once shared their belief, but no longer.
I'm a former Stand member from Gloucester, a city that a few years ago sent nearly 300 people to a Stand rally in Boston--the largest Stand contingent from any city in the Commonwealth. Today, Stand could hire a Volkswagon Beatle to drive Gloucester members willing to attend a Stand-sponsored event, and still have room to pick up a hitch-hiker.

The membership crash in our city followed the realization that Stand was intent on a state-wide agenda that was immediately and overwhelmingly harmful to the fiscal health of our schools, viz., Stand was intend on expansion of charter schools. Gloucester membership was told that we could either get with the program or we could dissolve. We choose the latter course, both because Stand's program imperiled our neighborhood schools, because the program appeared likely to harm the large majority of students in the public schools throughout the state, and because the agenda was clearly hammered together by staff without significant membership input.

We have since learned, as noted by Tracy Novick, that Stand's national board is rife with deep-pocket contributors who are committed to a corporate-style education reform agenda, including charters, choice, and merit pay for teachers. Their contributions to Stand, like any industry's contributions to legislators, has got to raise the suspicion that the organization's agenda is tainted. ''

http://www.bluemassgroup.com/diary/19352/stand-for-childrens-stands

more at link. the comments are worth reading, as mentioned above, to get a feel for what's happening there.

same thing is going on in Oregon and Colorado, about which I've read, and can be easily found

nothing surprising, but it's spreading, and now it's coming home HARD in Illinois this week, as they're trying to gut the Illinois teachers' unions in special legislative session.