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Renee Kelly retired at 55 from her job teaching law at Riverview High School. Leaving early lowered her pension, she said. But she couldn't stomach changes under the new Gates-funded system of teacher evaluations. "We've been made out to be good guys against the bad guys," she said. Kelly is posting her views on websites and Facebook pages, and she isn't alone. In recent weeks, questions and complaints about the multimillion-dollar, seven-year Empowering Effective Teachers effort have grown more visible.

This week, the Wall St Journal reported that the NY Board of Regents approved the state's sharing of student and teacher information with a new national data base, to be funded by the Gates  Foundation, and designed by News Corp's Wireless Generation. All this confidential student and teacher data will be held by a private limited corporation, called the Shared Learning Collaborative LLC, with even less accountability,  which in July was awarded $76.5 million   by the Gates Foundation, to be spent over 7 months.  According to an earlier NYT story,  $44 million of this funding will go straight into the pockets of Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch's News Corp and run by Joel Klein.

It's always news when Bill Gates opines about education. After all, giving some $5 billion for education grants and scholarships since 2000 warrants attention. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I was a bit surprised to read what Gates said in an interview published in The Wall Street Journal on Jul. 23 ("Was the $5 Billion Worth It?").

In practising what should really be called "humanitarian privatisation", Winfrey and other philanthropists like Bill Gates have targeted public education with missionary zeal, speaking authoritatively on a subject they know little about. Having decided not to donate to inner-city public schools after criticising them and deeming their students unwilling to learn, Winfrey has publicly backed those advocating "charter schools", the US equivalent of free schools - including Gates and the makers of a controversial film, Waiting for "Superman", which attacks teachers and unions. In a parallel move, Rupert Murdoch is going ahead with plans to sponsor an academy in east London over the objections of the local council.

Last week at a school board meeting, Kansas City, MO School District superintendent John Covington told the school board that there is no research that supports reduced class size linked to increased student achievement. During the meeting, Covington  cited the views of Bill Gates, who has minimized the importance of class size and suggested that teachers be paid more for teaching larger classes.

These Charter Schools, and Bill Gate's own words,  like the words of propaganda used in Orwell's Animal Farm - are often preaching to us from on high, using the language of 'choice', 'freedom', and 'civil rights' as outlined in my own blog "The White Shadow:  Bill Gates, Charter Schools, and the Evil Twins". This re-segregation is repeated more and more across our country, harming the lives of so many of our children, our families, our teachers, and our public schools.

A school district that is a finalist for the soon-to-be announced $1 million 2011 Broad Prize for Urban Education is embarking on a public relations effort - funded with U.S. government and Gates Foundation money - to end public opposition to its school reform program, which includes a slew of new standardized tests. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina is using Race to the Top money - which wasn't intended to fund public relations efforts - and $200,000 in Gates Foundation money for the campaign.

"Everyone agrees that American schools need help. But as Diane Ravitch argues, the fixes proposed by billionaire savior Bill Gates will only makes things worse."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation today became the latest backer to withdraw financial support for the American Legislative Exchange Council. A foundation spokesman told Roll Call that it does not plan to make future grants to the conservative nonprofit, which has come under fire from progressive activists for its support of voter identification laws and other contentious measures.

Teachers are skeptical about several of the major reform ideas the Obama administration and education activists are pushing to turn around the nation's struggling schools, a new survey commissioned by Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has found. (Disclosure: the Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

Charter schools in Chicago would get easier access to facilities and a likely increase in per-pupil funding under a proposed district-charter compact that would also make charters subject to some of the same testing and accountability standards as traditional schools. The draft agreement between CPS and its charters was handed out at a Tuesday conference for participants in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative called "District-Charter Collaboration Compacts." Chicago Public Schools and Spring Branch Independent School District, outside of Houston, are joining the 12 districts across the country that already signed on.

Yesterday was a big day for big new studies on teacher evaluation. First, there was the New York Times report on the new study by Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff. Second, there was the release of the second part of the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project. There's still much to digest. But here's my first shot, based on first impressions of these two studies (with very little attention to the Gates study)

Once-a-year evaluations aren't enough to help teachers improve, says a report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And school districts using infrequent classroom observations to decide who are their best - and their worst - teachers could be making some big mistakes, according to the second part of a multi-year study from the foundation.

Like Henry Ford, Bill Gates has ushered in a new era in U.S. public education, shifting the already robust accountability era that began in the early 1980s and accelerated in 2001 with the passing of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) from focusing on student accountability for standards and test scores to demanding that teachers be held accountable for student test scores addressing those standards. Gates has been assisted by Michelle Rhee and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as the "No Excuses" Reformers have perpetuated narratives conjuring the myth of the "bad" teacher, which Adam Bessie has confronted by suggesting we hire hologram teachers in order to remove the greatest problem facing education: Humans. Just as the assembly line rendered all workers interchangeable, and thus, easy to hire, and easy to fire, the current education reforms focusing on teacher accountability, value-added methods (VAM) of evaluating teachers, and the growing fascination with Teach for America (TFA) are seeking the same fact for teachers: A de-professionalized workforce of teaching as a service industry, easy to hire, and easy to fire.

Three of Washington's most prominent education advocacy groups share more than a desire to change the state's public-school landscape. All three - the League of Education Voters, the Partnership for Learning, and Stand for Children - also receive significant financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates says that his $5 billion experiment in education has not failed. Gates also claims that he trusts in science. That prompted me to reread the National Academy of Sciences' analysis of the failure of test-driven accountability.

Just 2 days before the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action took place at the Ellipse on the US Capitol Grounds, Bill Gates was speaking in front of the National Urban League's annual conference on July 28, 2011.  His topic was "Education As a Civil Right".  In his speech he promoted the brave new world's philosophy of  CHOICE through the privatization of public schools.  

Jim Taylor has entered the poverty and education debate by asking U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and billionaire/education entrepreneur Bill Gates a direct question: "I really don't understand you two, the U.S. Secretary of Education and the world's second richest man and noted philanthropist. How can you possibly say that public education can be reformed without eliminating poverty?" Taylor's discussion comes to an important element in the debate when he addresses Gates: "Because without understanding the causes of problems, we can't find solutions," explains Taylor, adding. "You're obviously trying to solve public education's version of the classic 'chicken or egg' conundrum."

Covington is a product of the Broad Superintendents Academy. Bill Gates wrote a commentary last March in which he argued: What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. This appears to be the inspiration for Superintendent Covington's experiment.

Since 1968, the black middle class in America has quadrupled, Henry Louis (Skip) Gates told a packed house at the Edgartown Whaling Church on Thursday evening. But that was the only positive news in an otherwise bleak survey of the state of black education by a panel of experts convened by Professor Gates and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.