Did you happen to see this post on Blogger King about Bill Gates? I first saw it here on change.org. Certainly, spending $200 million dollars per year and having foundation staff end up on Duncan’s staff results in having an influence on public education, but Duncan has far more than that to spend through Race to the Top in a short period of time. The foundation’s positions on education especially support for charters and improving teacher evaluation systems are resulting in a closer alignment with the department. This, together with their support of states’ efforts to secure federal stimulus funds may be moving them into a position to have significant influence on future education policy.
In an earlier post I shared the Gates Foundation’s original support of 15 states in positioning for stimulus funds. After complaints from other states and organizations the foundation recently made the decision to support the remaining 35 states in this effort. This doesn’t satisfy the critics concerned with what they see as a partnership between this private foundation and the federal education department. Gates sees it differently.
"It's no secret the U.S. education system is failing," Gates said. "We're doing all kinds of experiments that are different. The Race To The Top is going to do many different ones. There's no group-think."
To receive support from the foundation in the competitive proposal process the state must first sign off on the foundation's education reform platform. Does signing off mean agreement? If yes, than I would suggest that they are in position to have significant influence on public policy as states race to them for support in writing their proposals. In an e-mail from OSPI in October we were told that our state is in the process of developing a proposal for round 1 of these funds. That is interesting considering the governor’s comments in this July article when she shares that we would not be in consideration for round 1. I wonder if the foundation is involved in this change. I am told that soon we should be seeing updates on the proposal at this site.
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1 comment:
Mike, I was at the WEA Board meeting all weekend and this very topic was a big part of our conversations. On one hand we have always known that lobbying has been a form of “buying” your way into legislation and policy change but it appears that this has taken on a whole new form in regards to the Gates foundation. We had many conversations this weekend regarding how WEA should move forward as the face of education changes. Are we willing to make to make changes in our lobbying, policies, and strategy in an effort to support changes in the state to secure more funds? What is our bottom line? What are we not willing to give up? We spent nearly 6 hours discussing this strategy just this weekend and in the end we have created a new direction for what we will be doing to help our profession move forward. It was an interesting conversation as we discussed do we “teach to the test” and support change or do we stand firm on all of our beliefs and keep doing what we have always done, which did not work well on 2261. The face of education will change drastically over the next 10 years and I believe that WEA has made a choice to get involved in that change rather than continue to fight the inevitable. I know that we will still stick to many of our beliefs but we have identified strategic assumptions that will now help focus our efforts in Washington State. It will be interesting to see how WEA moves forward over the next 12 months.
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