Never Forget Rigoberto Ruelas

The Los Angeles Times has a lot of blood on its hands for having for years peddled the billionaire agenda of pilfering public schools for private gain. However, it was still shocking to read an editorial which nailed Bill Gates to the cross for his wrongheaded crusade to privatize public education when he didn't know or care what in the fuck he was doing.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration was all too willing to peddle the Gates-Broad bullshit to the detriment of public education.

For his education policies alone, I consider Obama a flop as president. His exit from public life can't come soon enough for me.

The editorial is still something, though:

Then the foundation set its sights on improving teaching, specifically through evaluating and rewarding good teaching. But it was not always successful. In 2009, it pledged a gift of up to $100 million to the Hillsborough County, Fla., schools to fund bonuses for high-performing teachers, to revamp teacher evaluations and to fire the lowest-performing 5%. In return, the school district promised to match the funds. But, according to reports in the Tampa Bay Times, the Gates Foundation changed its mind about the value of bonuses and stopped short of giving the last $20 million; costs ballooned beyond expectations, the schools were left with too big a tab and the least-experienced teachers still ended up at low-income schools. The program, evaluation system and all, was dumped.

The Gates Foundation strongly supported the proposed Common Core curriculum standards, helping to bankroll not just their development, but the political effort to have them quickly adopted and implemented by states. Here, Desmond-Hellmann wrote in her May letter, the foundation also stumbled. The too-quick introduction of Common Core, and attempts in many states to hold schools and teachers immediately accountable for a very different form of teaching, led to a public backlash.

That is putting it mildly. Obama administration directives were a serious overreach and in fact were and are impeachable offenses. Obama was simply lucky he had a GOP congress who believed just as he did about education.

Oh, and the billionaire foundations need to stay the fuck out of education. Charter schools, which the editorial seems to think are okay, are a colossal failure, a ripoff.


A few observers out there felt the need to remind readers of the paper's own culpability in promoting neoliberal bullshit education ideas.

An Article That is Long Overdue

Money talks and bullshit walks. That's how Bill Gates "did it" to public education in this country.

He doesn't give a shit about education or kids. This is a cash cow to make even more money.

The notion that public assets are there for billionaires and corporations to plunder is little more than justifying a wholesale bank heist from taxpayers.

The article should win the Pulitzer prize; it is that good. It is worthy of Woodward and Bernstein. Impeachment hearings of Obama and Duncan really should be on the table. Unfortunately, both political parties are so fucking corrupt with billionaire/corporate cash, the chances of those happening are virtually nil.

Snip:

While the Gates Foundation created the burst of momentum behind the Common Core, the Obama administration picked up the cause and helped push states to act quickly.

There was so much cross-pollination between the foundation and the administration, it is difficult to determine the degree to which one may have influenced the other.

Several top players in Obama’s Education Department who shaped the administration’s policies came either straight from the Gates Foundation in 2009 or from organizations that received heavy funding from the foundation.


Before becoming education secretary in 2009, Arne Duncan was chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, which received $20 million from Gates to break up several large high schools and create smaller versions, a move aimed at stemming the dropout rate.

As secretary, Duncan named as his chief of staff Margot Rogers, a top Gates official he got to know through that grant. He also hired James Shelton, a program officer at the foundation, to serve first as his head of innovation and most recently as the deputy secretary, responsible for a wide array of federal policy decisions.

Duncan and his team leveraged stimulus money to reward states that adopted common standards.

This is the stereotypical Chicago-style corruption writ large on a national level.


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I agree there should be congressional hearings on Gates' undue influence on national education policy, but fat chance it is ever going to happen.
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Oh, Man

Like many other school districts in the United States that have been co-opted by the "reform" movement, WCSD is going on a mission to try and "educate" people on Common Core.

There is NO way you can turn this sow's ear into a silk purse. It's worse than that--it's pure evil.

Fordham Institute--bad news. It is in favor of the destruction of public education in the United States and turn the whole thing over to billionaires and Wall Street types to make even more money, this time off the taxpayers, These people are literally parasitical. When will people wake up, and when will this insanity end? This is what happens when you have years of tax breaks and wealth distribution upward so that billionaires and their ilk start dictating how the country will be run. It also helps there was 30 years of propaganda that said our schools were no good beginning with the fraudulent and thoroughly debunked 1983 "A Nation at Risk" to help undermine trust in public institutions.

This is why I say pay attention to school board elections in your communities. This cancer is infecting every school district in the United States.

Remember, the whole idea of "common core" was started by the Gates Foundation. Gates has an ulterior motive in education "reform," and that is to ultimately force all public school students into online "academies" where software is by Microsoft and curriculum is by Pearson. No teachers needed at all (why need them when all of the curriculum is standardized all over the US), just low-paid aides to keep the kids under control, and no questioning of authority allowed. That's not the world I want to live in.

Bill Gates Is One Dangerous S.O.B.

People always take a look at the Koch brothers as examples of dangerous rich people at work to undermine our democracy, but I argue people like Bill Gates and Peter J. Peterson are vastly more dangerous because they both have the attention and support of a so-called “Democratic” administration.

I always knew Gates was the mastermind behind this Common Core nonsense, but now the proof is there for all to see.

This is the opening salvo in the attempt to turn ALL public school systems into online academies and abolishing teaching as a profession–indeed, abolition of needing teachers at all for the masses.

Common Core is the Gates Foundation's Baby

It's not because the states wanted it. It's not that teachers want it. It's not that parents want it. It's that Bill and Melinda Gates, both of whom have way too much money and too much time on their hands, want to dictate education policy which is something they have NO knowledge of whatsoever.

Common Core is ultimately about creating an educational and thus economical caste system in the United States. Bill Gates has yapped in the past he'd like to see education done like is done in some European countries, where kids are cut off higher education and forced to go into apprenticeships at a young age if they haven't decided on college. Well, the United States, unlike most of the rest of the world, has traditionally been about equality of opportunity, and that includes the right to access higher education. That includes going to college in midlife just as much as at age 18.

Neolibs and bastards like Gates don't think like this. They want to cut off ALL education access, and what almost all students would be stuck with aren't with apprenticeships anyway, but with shitty-paid jobs to "compete" with third world countries.

With Gates it is much more than that. Force Common Core down people's throats by buying off politicians and dipshits like Arne Duncan, and that way once all kids in all parts of the country are forced to have the same curriculum, why bother with teachers at all? Just collude with Pearson and force all kids except for the rich to sit in front of computers all day long, "supervised" by poorly-paid teacher aides, and get rid of teachers altogether.

That's where this Common Core shit is headed if it isn't stopped dead in its tracks.

However, it is very important for the Gates Foundation and the other usual suspects to lie to the public:

The truth is that the National Governor's Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers were simply front groups for the cravings of the Gates Foundation. Using the power and influence that comes with controlling huge amounts of money, Bill and Melinda Gates, educational dilettantes at best, bought their way into the hierarchy of American public education. In doing so, they became public education's most influential voices.

By giving the NGA $30,679,116 and the CCSSO $71,302,833, they set in motion their callow vision of what American public schoolteachers should be teaching and what American public school students should be learning. They also managed to get the support of United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who threatened to withhold federal funds from individual states if they did not adopt the Common Core. The Gates team also bought themselves the support of a cadre of second-stringers, such as the American Federation of Teachers for $11,343,925; the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction for $823,637; the Center for American Progress for $2,998,809; the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for $5,711,462; the PTA for $2,005,000; the Teaching Channel for $11,076,761; and the National Writing Project for $2,643,593, to mention only a few. A colleague of mine, Susan Ohanian, wrote about these giveaways, saying, "He who pays the piper calls the tune, and with money in their pockets, many are eager to sing the Common Core song and eat the funeral meats."

The Gateses are totally corrupt.

If this isn't a case for increasing the tax burden on the superrich, I don't know what is.

Those Not-So-Pearly Gates

If Bill and Melinda Gates and their "foundation" aren't evil, I don't know who or what is.

Their cancer is infiltrating higher education.

All they see is education is for job training, not for making people well-rounded, informed citizens.

It is a recipe for disaster.

The goal really is to limit higher education access.

The roots of the Gates foundation's higher-education reform effort go back to 2006, when a $31-billion pledge from Warren Buffett doubled the size of the foundation and allowed it to expand its programs. The foundation hired Hilary Pennington, who had co-founded Jobs for the Future, to identify the most effective lever for increasing social mobility. She was struck by research that showed two things: (1) the upward mobility of children is affected by their parents' level of education; and (2) if a poor person fails to get a college degree by his mid-20s, his chance of ever getting one plummets.

Gates came up with a strategy to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty by doubling the number of low-income students who earn degrees or credentials with labor-market value by the age of 26. Ms. Pennington would lead it. Success would require an annual increase of some 250,000 graduates.

Anthony P. Carnevale, a Georgetown University scholar whose research on the work force has informed the foundation, says education posed one major advantage over other ways to fight poverty, such as strengthening the social safety net: Increasing college completion was politically feasible.

The son of a bitch should be forced to channel that money back into the U.S. Treasury to help get this country back on track economically.

I want billionaires to stay the FUCK OUT of policy making.

You CANNOT Reason With a Software Billionaire

ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS question anything Bill Gates does in the name of education. He doesn't care at all about kids, about learning, about anything other than finding another way to make even more obscene money through software and "virtual schools." He is a nightmare for democracy, for public education.

And fuck that bastard Arne Duncan. He is on right now in a film at the convention about education "reform."

He is the single worst cabinet appointee in the history of the United States. Bill Gates and his ilk OWN him lock, stock, and barrel.

Really Dumb Idea Allowing Gates and His Foundation

to even have a "dialogue" with those who care about public education. Gates is only for Gates and doesn't give a SHIT about teachers, teaching, or the well-being of children.

This is all about converting all public schools into online "academies" regardless of how ineffective and harmful they are to K-12 children as those who peddle them haven't a clue about child development. This is all about making even more obscene money with software.

Why is Gates even allowed to have these "non-profit" foundations that are presumably tax-exempt when in fact they are POLITICAL outfits first and foremost?

The Education Wars

The Gates Foundation is once again up to no good.

Not one word about "effective" administrators, too many of whom are sociopaths but are perfect foot soldiers in the war against public education.