When Money and Social Engineering Together Becomes The Goal Behind Education--The Dangerous Alignment of Bill Gates and Obama
Friday, February 15, 2013 at 08:16AM 2.12.13 – The Washington Examiner
Private funding influenced public education policy
February 12, 2013 | 5:43 pm | Modified: February 12, 2013 at 5:50 pm
Michal Conger
Staff Writer
The Washington Examiner
[2.13.13 – Comments from Donna Garner: Yes, Bill Gates is to blame for using his $173 Million to market the Common Core Standards/Race to the Top federal takeover of the public schools; but we must not forget that Gates was doing it to further the Obama administration’s social justice agenda.
Obama, Arne Duncan, Linda Darling-Hammond, Bill Ayers, and the U. S. Department of Education are the originators of the plan; and they used Bill Gates’ millions to accomplish their goals. He, of course, was only too glad to join them in their unscrupulous and unconstitutional efforts because he supports the social justice agenda himself.
More importantly, Bill Gates and Microsoft stand to make billions from his investment because of the technological infrastructure required to implement the CCS standards, curriculum, assessments, and personally intrusive national database that states’ taxpayers will be required to fund.
The disturbing aspect is that the Republican majority in the U. S. House that controls the appropriations could have shut down the CCS/RTTT federal grants any time they had wanted to do so over these last four years as the initiative was going forward. All they had to do was to stop the flow of federal dollars to CCS/RTTT, and the entire initiative would have come crumbling down. Where were the Republicans in the House who were supposed to stand for fiscal responsibility? They were AWOL. Is it too late for them to stop the appropriations for the national assessments? Without the national assessments, the Common Core Standards would be dumped. -- Donna Garner]
Education watchdogs are raising concerns over the Gates Foundation’s involvement in shaping public education policy, saying the private foundation’s influence in public education policy interferes with the democratic process and local input.
The foundation, owned by Bill and Melinda Gates, is the world’s largest philanthropy and has been heavily involved in funding states’ new Common Core curriculum, the Heartland Institute reported on Monday.
Gates has spent $173 million in grants to develop Common Core standards and win support for the curriculum, according to a Heartland analysis of the Foundation’s grant database.
The Foundation’s funding amounts to a marketing campaign for Common Core, Jane Robbins, a senior fellow with American Principles Project, told The Washington Examiner.
The Gates Foundation “has determined what it thinks education policy should be” and funded efforts to put that policy into effect, Robbins said.
“It’s the way [Gates is] doing it that we think is curious,” said Scott Thomas, dean of Claremont Graduate University’s education school, according to Heartland. “It’s an intrusion into the public sphere more directly that has not been seen before. They’re jumping into the policy process itself. That’s an interesting position, for a nonprofit to be involved in things that look a lot like lobbying.”
The problem with this expensive marketing campaign is that the policies Gates helped fund were created “under the radar,” without input from stakeholders or legislators, said Robbins. Now the curriculum is taught to students across the country.
The grants were made to nonprofit organizations whose policy-making meetings were conducted behind closed doors, including the the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, according to Heartland.
“Nobody really knew what was going on,” said Robbins.
The timeline of states’ Race to the Top applications, which included a requirement for a standard core curriculum that essentially excluded programs other than Common Core, was also problematic, she said.
Applications for Race to the Top funding were released by the U.S. Department of Education in November 2009 and were due in January 2010, even though most state legislatures aren’t in session during that time. Common Core standards were not released until June 2010, when states were given two months to sign off on them, again at a time when most state legislatures are not in session.
Instead, states’ boards of education signed off on the standards, and the majority of legislatures did not give their stamp of approval to Common Core at all, Robbins said.
“There was no chance to look at these standards, or to sign off on them,” she said.
The lack of transparency and local input is the primary problem APP and other education watchdogs have with Common Core and the Gates Foundation’s funding of it.
“There’s no accountability there,” Robbins said. “That’s the threat to the democratic process.”
The Gates Foundation told The Washington Examiner it did not fund Race to the Top, but did not speak on the record for this story.
Donna Garner
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