Therefore, the Common Core project itself is also an exercise in fear-mongering about the future of our children, and has its own version of Professor Hill in its chief promoter, Bill Gates.
My experience this week helps explain why I believe we must take more time to celebrate our victories. If we can win in Oklahoma, victory is achievable anywhere and everywhere.
When Lyndsey Layton interviewed Bill Gates a few months ago, she violated one of the major taboos of the education reform discourse.
I am trying to make sense of the education reform project, which seems a mass of contradictions. On the one hand, we have a seemingly utopian project with bold pronouncements about the boundless capacity of all students
If the pass rates on Common Core tests and the new Common Core-aligned GED plummet, it is because they were designed to do so. If there is an outcome that has been engineered, there must be a reason that outcome is desirable.
Bill Gates has it exactly upside down. The innovators are the classroom teachers. The innovators are the students. The innovators are the people working in the schools creating new things every day.
This summer educators around the country will congregate in the political workings of our unions at the AFT and NEA conventions. This is no small business.
As a thought experiment, what would it look like if the Gates Foundation truly was attending to the research and evidence that is showing how damaging the new Common Core tests and high stakes accountability systems are?
I believe we must fight competition-driven, test-driven reform with all our power, but we must also be willing to offer and/or accept an olive branch.
Someone in the mainstream media finally asked Bill Gates straight out what his role was regarding Common Core. What a concept!
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