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Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Schools Matter: Gates Moves to Take Over Teacher Education, Part 1

Schools Matter: Gates Moves to Take Over Teacher Education, Part 1:

Gates Moves to Take Over Teacher Education, Part 1

The 2011 video below tells much of the story about the insignificance attached to research and scholarship by the corporate foundations that are trying to buy up university teacher preparation programs.  The woman on the left (in more ways than one) is respected scholar, Deborah Ball, whose scholarship and leadership as Dean of Education at University of Michigan adds the policymaker patina and research-vetted veneer to get the required respectability that the Gates Foundation is seeking to institute nationwide.

Watch the five minute clip below, and you will see Ball providing a rational, detailed overview of the work to be done on teacher improvement, and watch as she gets shut down when the Education Sector questioner steps over her to hear from the corruptKate Walsh, who, on cue, is there to promote the solution from the three states that were already in 2011 using value-added test scores to evaluate teachers.

You might say, Walsh was focused on the pre-determined outcome, even though Ball was pretending that the process that she was trying to initiate would somehow have an effect on that outcome.


Now four years later, Ball has completed her lengthy research, even though those same models used in Tennessee, Louisiana, and North Carolina remain the systems that CorpEd in Michigan seeks to emulate.  Even so, the elaborate plan was hijacked by a state senator last summer, who had the audacity to insist that teacher evaluation remain a local issue, rather than a state or federal one.

Undeterred, however, corporate foundation money continues to pour into Dr. Ball's operation at U of M.  This time, however, the focus is on revamping teacher preparation.  That will be the focus of Part 2.
Schools Matter: Gates Moves to Take Over Teacher Education, Part 1: