The Ambitions of Bill and Melinda Gates: Controlling Population and Public Education
by Anne Hendershott
Continuing their commitment to controlling global population growth
through artificial contraception, sterilization, and abortion
initiatives, Microsoft founder and philanthropist, Bill Gates and his
wife, Melinda, a self-described “practicing” Catholic, are now
attempting to control the curriculum of the nation’s public schools.
Subsidizing the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and
mathematics, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more
than $76 million to support teachers in implementing the Common Core—a
standardized national curriculum. This, on top of the tens of millions
they have already awarded to the National Governor’s Association and
the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop the Common Core in
the first place.
Working collaboratively with the Obama administration, the Gates
Foundation subsidized the creation of a national curriculum for English
and mathematics that has now been adopted by 46 states, and the District
of Columbia—despite the fact that the General Education Provisions Act,
the Department of Education Organization Act, and the Elementary and
Secondary Education Act all protect states against such an intrusion by
the United States Department of Education.
The Common Core Standards were developed by an organization called
Achieve, and the National Governors Association—both of which were
funded by the Gates Foundation. The standards have been imposed on the
states without any field testing, and little or no input from those
involved in implementing the standards. In a post entitled “Why I
Cannot Support the Common Core Standards,” educational policy analyst
and New York University Research Professor, Diane Ravitch, wrote that
the standards “are being imposed on the children of this nation despite
the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students,
teachers or schools…Their creation was neither grassroots nor did it
emanate from the states.”
Ravitch is especially concerned about the content of the
curriculum—what she called the “flap over fiction vs. informational
text.” Rather than giving English teachers the freedom to teach
literature, the Common Core mandates that a far greater percentage of
classroom time be spent on “fact-based” learning. Ravitch’s concerns
are shared by others. For example, one teacher claimed that she had to
give up having her students read Shakespeare in favor of Malcolm
Gladwell’s Tipping Point because it was “fact-based” and Shakespeare was not. Of course, Tipping Point
has a political agenda. Parents may be concerned if they were to learn
that Gladwell suggests such “facts” as the belief that parents should
stop worrying about their children’s “experimentation with drugs,”
including cocaine because “it seldom leads to hardcore use.”
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