They have the power of the media, the big money. Ravitch has a blog and her book, unfair advantage. Teachers have limited access to get their ideas across.
Jonathan Alter recently interviewed Bill Gates in a piece of puffery, and it gave Gates an opportunity to paint Diane Ravitch as the enemy. He's a billionaire who's being allowed way too much access to public education "reform". She's the former assistant superintendent under Bush I...who has seen those so-called reforms as inadequate and harmful to public education.
Here's what Gates and Alter had to say.
A Case of SenioritisHe's against tenure, seniority based pay, and pay for advanced degrees. He considers class size unimportant.
Seniority is the two-headed monster of education—it’s expensive and harmful. Like master’s degrees for teachers and smaller class sizes, seniority pay, Gates says, has “little correlation to student achievement.” After exhaustive study, the Gates Foundation and other experts have learned that the only in-school factor that fully correlates is quality teaching, which seniority hardly guarantees. It’s a moral issue. Who can defend a system where top teachers are laid off in a budget crunch for no other reason than that they’re young?
When asked about Diane Ravitch who has been defending public education against the education "reformers", he had this to say.
When I asked Gates about Ravitch, you could see the Micro-hard hombre who once steamrolled software competitors: “Does she like the status quo? Is she sticking up for decline? Does she really like 400-page (union) contracts? Does she think all those ‘dropout factories’ are lonely? If there’s some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we’re all ears.” Gates understands that charters aren’t a silver bullet, and that many don’t perform. But he doesn’t have patience for critics who spend their days tearing down KIPP schools and other models that produce results.
And Alter goes on to end his article to defend the wealthy who are taking on this reform and to get a dig in at teachers and liberals.
There’s a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. Like the rest of us, they know that if we don’t fix education, we can kiss our future goodbye.
Another non-educator speaking on a topic he knows nothing about.
Diane Ravitch in the
Bridging Differences blog noticed that Bill Gates and Arne Duncan were reading from the same script, and she wondered who was writing it.
The struggle for control of American education continues to evolve at a dizzying pace. I read that Bill Gates advised the Council of Chief State School Officers to eliminate seniority and tenure and recommended that schools stop spending to reduce class size and stop giving teachers extra money for master's degrees. He wants teachers to get paid based on "performance" (i.e., their test scores). I guess we are now seeing a full-court effort to impose the corporate model of school reform, and Gates is the leading spokesman.
No, wait, I take that back, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said something very similar in a speech a day or two earlier, where he seemed almost happy to say that the days of wine and roses are over and schools must learn to do more with less. They seem to be sharing scripts. I don't know who is the leading spokesman.
Yesterday in the Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog, Ravitch responded to Gates' words about her.
Ravitch answers GatesIn the Newsweek piece, Gates poses some questions aimed at Ravitch. I asked her to answer them. Below are the questions Gates asked, in bold, and the answers, in italics, that Ravitch provided in an email.
Gates: “Does she like the status quo?"
Ravitch: "No, I certainly don't like the status quo. I don't like the attacks on teachers, I don't like the attacks on the educators who work in our schools day in and day out, I don't like the phony solutions that are now put forward that won't improve our schools at all."
Gates: "Is she sticking up for decline?"
Ravitch: "Of course not! If we follow Bill Gates' demand to judge teachers by test scores, we will see stagnation, and he will blame it on teachers. We will see stagnation because a relentless focus on test scores in reading and math will inevitably narrow the curriculum only to what is tested. This is not good education.
Those two questions by Gates are not even smart questions. They are nothing but words chosen by some propaganda-prone think tank.
The last one is just ignorant.
Gates: "Does she think all those ‘dropout factories’ are lonely?"
Ravitch: "This may come as a surprise to Bill Gates, but the schools he refers to as "dropout factories" enroll large numbers of high-need students. Many of them don't speak or read English; many of them enter high school three and four grade levels behind. He assumes the schools created the problems the students have; but in many cases, the schools he calls "dropout factories" are filled with heroic teachers and administrators trying their best to help kids who have massive learning problems.
And yes, Arne Duncan is spouting the same kind of nonsense. Here is a little about what Arne said in his New Normal speech.
Arne still following Gates' school agendaThe New Normal: Doing More with Less -- Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks at the American Enterprise Institute
"So, what do I mean when I talk about transformational productivity reforms that can also boost student outcomes? Our K-12 system largely still adheres to the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education. A century ago, maybe it made sense to adopt seat-time requirements for graduation and pay teachers based on their educational credentials and seniority. Educators were right to fear the large class sizes that prevailed in many schools....Today, our schools must prepare all students for college and careers--and do far more to personalize instruction and employ the smart use of technology. Teachers cannot be interchangeable widgets. Yet the legacy of the factory model of schooling is that tens of billions of dollars are tied up in unproductive use of time and technology, in underused school buildings, in antiquated compensation systems, and in inefficient school finance systems."
What follows is simply propaganda meant to prepare us for the privatization of schools...the New Normal.
Rethinking policies around seat-time requirements, class size, compensating teachers based on their educational credentials, the use of technology in the classroom, inequitable school financing, the over placement of students in special education—almost all of these potentially transformative productivity gains are primarily state and local issues that have to be grappled with.
Did you notice his reference to the "over placement of students in special education"? Another way to save money...to go into denial about special needs students.
Doing more with less will likely require reshaping teacher compensation to do more to develop, support, and reward excellence and effectiveness, and less to pay people based on paper credentials.
Districts currently pay about $8 billion each year to teachers because they have masters' degrees, even though there is little evidence teachers with masters degrees improve student achievement more than other teachers--with the possible exception of teachers who earn masters in math and science.
Bill Gates was simply insulting by his choice of words against Diane Ravitch. They showed his ignorance about his new undertaking...education.
Unfortunately for us, no one in power seems too concerned about this billionaire power play.
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