July 22, 2010
IS THE GATES FOUNDATION INVOLVED IN BRIBERY?
Sam Smith, Undernews
LINK

An online legal dictionary defines bribery this way:

"The offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of something of value for the purpose of influencing the action of an official in the discharge of his or her public or legal duties."

When we think of bribery we usually envision a check or cash being passed on the sly to public officials. But what if it is right out in the open, concealed only by the fact that the briber is a foundation created by Bill Gates rather than some back street shyster?

Here is how a news story describes it: "Now the foundation is taking unprecedented steps to influence education policy, spending millions to influence how the federal government distributes $5 billion in grants to overhaul public schools. The federal dollars are unprecedented, too. President Barack Obama persuaded Congress to give him the money as part of the economic stimulus so he could try new ideas to fix an education system that most agree is failing. The foundation is offering $250,000 apiece to help states apply, so long as they agree with the foundation's approach."

If you or I did something like this, even at an infinitesimally smaller scale, we could likely be headed for prison. It is a criminal act to use money to influence official positions in such a manner.

And it gets worse, as the story related: "Duncan's inner circle includes two former Gates employees. His chief of staff is Margot Rogers, who was special assistant to Gates' education director. James Shelton, assistant deputy secretary, was a program director for Gates' education division. . .The administration has waived ethics rules to allow Rogers and Shelton to deal more freely with the foundation, but Rogers said she talks infrequently with her former colleagues."

This is even before one considers broadly understood restrictions on political lobbying by non-profits. But then who needs to bother with lobbying if you can just deliver the cash and get your way?

A particularly gross example of this upscale, and so far legal, bribery was revealed by Bill Turgue, in the Washington Post in April:

"The private foundations pledging to help finance raises and bonuses for D.C. teachers have placed themselves in the middle of the city's mayoral race with one of the conditions for their largesse: If Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee leaves, so could the money.

"The private donors have told the District that they reserve the right to reconsider their $64.5 million pledge if leadership of the school system changes. . .

"Should the foundations pull their funding after the agreement is finalized, the District could be liable for at least $21 million -- the amount of private money earmarked to pay teacher salaries. . .

The leadership condition (is) set out in letters to District officials from the Walton Family Foundation, the Robertson Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Broad Foundation."

On a national scale, we have the unprecedented and increasing control of national education by a foundation created by a single billionaire. The thing driving these standards is not wisdom or public choice but the money:

"I think the reality of it is the Gates Foundation has been the major funder of the national standards and the three major reports on which the Massachusetts recommendation is based are funded by Gates. It's a little like being judge and jury," said Jamie Gass, director of the Center for Education Reform at the Pioneer Institute.

Wrote Matt Murphy in the Lowell Sun:

The Gates Foundation since January 2008 has awarded more than $35 million to the Council of Chief School Officers and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, the two main organizations charged with drafting and promoting common standards.

In the run-up to his recommendation, Chester told the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that he would base his decision on analysis being done by his staff, as well as independent reports prepared by three state and national education research firms -- Achieve, Inc., The Fordham Institute, and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.

Achieve, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based education-reform organization, received $12.6 million from the Gates Foundation in February 2008, according to data provided to the Washington Post by the foundation.

The Fordham Institute has accepted more than $1.4 million from the Gates Foundation, including nearly $960,000 to conduct Common Core reviews.

If an individual were to influence governmental decisions with this sort of money, it would be clearly a criminal offense. Why should it be any different for a foundation?

Gates has opened the door to an manifestly corrupt approach to government where a handful of well funded groups and individuals override the democratic legislative process by the prospect of funding or the threat of losing it. If you can't go to jail now for doing this, there should be laws that make it clear that you do from here on out.

Exit Interview: Duncan's Outgoing Chief of StaffBy Michele McNeil
Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org.
LINK

Margot Rogers, chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is leaving her post on June 30 after 18 months in which she helped build the department’s leadership team and implement $100 billion worth of economic-stimulus programs.

Before joining Mr. Duncan’s staff at the start of the Obama administration, Ms. Rogers, an attorney, spent 15 years working for education-related nonprofit organizations and foundations, including the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Margot RogersMr. Duncan credits her with serving as a thoughtful sounding board, and for becoming a “one-man HR wrecking crew” as part of an effort to recruit education leaders to top posts in his department.

Taking her place in this key role at a time of broad transition for the department will be Joanne Weiss, who has been in charge of the Race to the Top Fund competitive grant program. Mr. Duncan described the department’s shift as one toward policy implementation and away from policy formation, since the department has already set policies around Race to the Top; the Investing in Innovation, or i3, Fund; and other grant programs.

What follows is an edited transcript of a 30-minute interview on June 14 with Ms. Rogers:

Q: Why are you leaving and where are you going?

A: I’m going to the beach with my children for the summer. I’m leaving because, as much as I love this job, and I love this job, I now have one teenager and one who’s squarely in the tween years and feel like they need more of me, and frankly, I need more of them than either they or I have gotten over the last 18 months. When I came, I told the secretary he could fire me any day of the week and I would leave and we’d be good friends, but that I would commit to him through summer of 2010. I had hoped we could make it work a little longer, but it’s time on the family front.

Q: This year and a half has been quite the whirlwind for the department. Looking back, what’s been the most challenging policy issue you faced?

A: ...When something like the (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) happens so early in your tenure, it’s such a galvanizing opportunity on so many levels. Obviously, it’s important for the country economically, important for the culture we’ve tried to build here, where career and political people work very hard together to make a set of decisions and execute. But embedded in all of those new programs were a set of decisions about how you change the way the education community in the country operates. ... (W)e spent a lot of time talking to people around the country and getting input and then trying to be as thoughtful as we possibly could about how you link a set of decisions and priorities that take people where they are and push them as fast and hard as you can without breaking them.

Q: You’ve gotten a lot of leverage out of these discretionary funds. You’ve taken Race to the Top and you’ve run with it. What happens if Congress doesn’t keep giving you those discretionary funds, what then (if) ... you’re left with formula funds and rule-making?

A: A few things. Obviously, we hope we don’t face that first and foremost. Secondly, I think what you see now, because the vast majority of states have participated in one or the other or both rounds of Race to the Top, is that states have had really hard conversations about how to make things happen... And whether or not they get Race to the Top money, they’ve got a solid plan, and we’ve heard from a lot of states that that’s their plan.

So, what you hope you have is continued discretionary money. If you don’t, then you have formula funds which you hope will come in behind and help support people’s thinking about things in new ways. And that’s obviously true with the (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) programs, and what you have on the other side of (the law’s) reauthorization remains to be seen. But you have those pots of funds that will support the same kinds of activities that states have designed under the Race to the Top applications. So, what I hope we have is not just pots of money ... but thoughtful plans about how we change practice in education so we can get where we need to for this country.

Q: Talking about your role a bit, chiefs of staff can take on many different roles depending on the personalities involved and the political context. (Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach) Peter Cunningham likened you to glue. How would you describe your role?

A: Glue—I think that’s fair. ... I spend a lot of time connecting dots and making sure we’re having the right sets of conversations and the right sets of people are involved in those conversations. ... I also have focused a fair amount of time on helping Arne build our team and helping try to build a team that represents the kind of culture that he wants in an organization he’s leading. Which is one where people come in because they care first and foremost about keeping students at the center of their decision-making, where they’re willing to roll up their sleeves and check their egos at the door and debate vigorously about what the right thing to do is, but also remember at the end of the day we’re part of a team, both from the political and the career staff. Chiefs of staff spend time making sure things are working. So you dive in where you think we need to have a better process. That’s all part of the job. Maybe that’s glue.

Q: Is crisis management part of the job?

A: Sure. Knock on wood, my mom always said growing up you’re going to make mistakes because everybody does, but just don’t make the big ones, which I thought was good advice. And by and large, you have 4,200 people in a big, complicated organization doing a whole lot of work fast, and so of course you make mistakes here and there, but by and large we haven’t made the big ones. So, crisis management hasn’t had to be at the center here.

Q: Of the little crises, which one was the trickiest?

A: Hmmm.

(Press Secretary Justin Hamilton interjects: “That one we don’t talk about.”)

Q: Of the ones you do talk about...

A: Let’s see. (Pause). Justin, what’s on your list?

(Hamilton says: “Who actually won the guacamole showdown on Friday?”)

Right. There was a lot of controversy about that. You know, none of them have been all that difficult.

Q: You came from the Gates Foundation. The department has gotten some criticism for being too close to the philanthropic community, and specifically to Gates. Do you think that’s a fair criticism?

A: So, I would say what Arne’s been so great at doing ever since I’ve known him, which has been about six or seven years, is saying everyone has to be in this game. Everybody. We need parents and students and teachers and administrators. We need nonprofits and philanthropy. We need the private sector. Everybody’s got to be in this game. Foundations are clearly part of that. He’s been quite explicit that we need them to help this all work and are grateful for their support.

On Gates specifically, it’s not surprising to me that if you could interview 15 people, all of whom have worked in education for 15 or 20 years, that they would come up with the same category of things that we need to be working on as a nation. That we need to attract the best people to teaching, we need to reward them effectively and keep them in education. We need to think about more rigorous standards. So, I think part of the characterization with Gates is that some of their priorities have been some of the department’s priorities. And I would sort of proffer that they’re the field’s priorities at this point. There is more agreement than disagreement around what needs to happen in this country, which gives me great optimism.

Q: Race to the Top has gotten a lot of public attention. Has anything gotten overlooked by the public that the department is doing that’s as important, or almost as important?

A: (O)bviously, Race to the Top becomes an umbrella for a lot of different things that the department is doing right now, which is part of what makes it powerful. It’s about teachers, it’s about data, it’s about so many things. I think in terms of priorities, the shift to direct lending [for college loans] and what that means, both in terms of how we have been able to reallocate savings to invest more in students in the country, is a big deal. It got a certain amount of play, but because it happened in the middle of health care (overhaul legislation), it didn’t get as much attention. And yet for us, it’s been a big deal both in terms of how we are able to continue to meet the needs of students in this country and how we operationalize that effort.

Obviously the "i3" fund is a big priority, and what I’ll be interested in seeing from the outside is what ends up getting funded and what that looks like with Race to the Top. It’s about how you think about different pots of money, and how communities are able to leverage multiple pots of money, whether it’s TIF (Teacher Incentive Fund), or SIG (School Improvement Grants), or i3, or Race to the Top, or local funding. And what does that mean for those communities and what they’re able to do for their students? So, sometimes we don’t talk as much about those smaller pots, but they’re actually quite big.

Q: Speaking of SIG grants, those four turnaround models (required under the program) have been debated a lot. Can you talk about the internal debate around those four particular models, and the decision to mandate them?

A: (W)ith all of these decisions we’ve had lots of people involved in them. We’ve gotten lots of input from people in the field both in the brainstorming phase, when you’re allowed to talk to everybody, and then in the formal comment process for all of these programs. So none of these decisions is easy, and I think you debate them internally and you get lots of people involved and you make the best decision that you make. And there will continue to be debate, I’m sure, about that one in the field.

I can’t personally wait to see what schools around the country do with this money. My own high school is on the SIG list. I grew up in southern Virginia. I went to Prince Edward County High School, and it is on the SIG list and the headline in the Farmville Herald, because I still read my hometown paper online when I can, the headline said something like “Federal Funds Coming to Prince Edward County.” This is a community where they’re really embracing the kinds of conversations that we hope people across the country are having: what’s working, what’s not, and what do we need to change. And those are hard conversations to have, but SIG creates an opportunity for people to sit down and engage, hopefully, in meaningful conversations that will yield great things for students.

Q: ESEA (reauthorization) provides a big opportunity for the department if it ever happens.
A: I know. It’s my big regret.

Q: A lot of signs are pointing to the fact that it’s stalling. Is the department going to have to change strategy?

A: Look, I’m not going to get a crystal ball out about when this thing is going to move because it’s obviously up to lots of people on (Capitol) Hill and not to me. I will personally say I have very mixed feelings about leaving this job period. It’s hard for me professionally balancing that ... Anybody who knows me knows it’s been the biggest challenge I’ve had my whole life, which is when to push the accelerator and when to take it off. Not being here for ESEA is a big deal for me personally. But I don’t think that any timing issues necessarily mean you have to change course. And we’re obviously involved in lots of conversations with the Hill about how to move forward, and we’ll see what transpires over the next few months as a result of those conversations.

Q: So you don’t have a crystal ball but you do have the benefit of hindsight. Is there anything the department could have done to make ESEA move faster?

A: It’s a great question, and I don’t know. It’s fascinating, right? Because it’s not like we came Jan. 21 (2009) and we said, “So, the next 18 months we’re going to focus on ESEA”. We came Jan. 21 and then weeks later the Recovery Act happened and we needed to get money to the field so they could spend it because we’re in the middle of an economic crisis. And then we had to map out all of these discretionary proposals. What we didn’t want to do was have an ESEA proposal that didn’t contemplate all of those [proposals], because this is about sequencing, and this is about helping people aspire and be inspired by Race to the Top and come up with a plan that you hope ESEA will come behind and support. I think the sequencing was right. But it’s hard to know whether we could have effectively accomplished more at once. I’ve got to say people here have been working very hard. It’s hard to imagine how we could have pushed the organization any harder.

Q: One of the biggest pots of money from the stimulus that doesn’t get talked about much is the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund. The message from the department was, spend this money quickly, but also do some reform. I don’t really think that happened. The jury’s out. It was mostly used to backfill budgets. Was it unrealistic to think states could do both?

A: Look, I think it’s important to both, and the [stabilization fund] obviously was important to get out quickly so that people could avoid massive layoffs. What we do know is that, had those layoffs occurred, we could have never gotten to reform. It’s very hard for people in the middle of completely restructuring their schools and their districts to deal with diminished staff, to think proactively about getting anything different and positive accomplished. So we know that. The tension and balance between those two is continuing to be debated as we’re looking at a new jobs bill. I think what you do is you get money out, and you tell people these are the things we want you to do, and then you follow it with a series of discretionary programs that push very hard in that direction. And hopefully the whole package gets you both in a very clear way.

Q: The decision to award Race to the Top to Delaware and Tennessee—why those two and not, say, just pick one winner? Or three? Was this a case where (Secretary Duncan) went in his office and thought it over for a half-an-hour and came out and said, "This is the decision"? Or was it the (executive committee) sitting around debating it?

A: In the final analysis, he’s the kind of leader that you know owns those kinds of decisions for this department, and he’s very good at it. This decision—the data drove this decision. There was a big gap between state two and state three, and that’s where you go. The next time, you won’t have that kind of decision to make. You have a pot of money left, and you’ll fund down until you run out.

Q: Do you fund each state at the maximum grant?

A: I don’t know. I won’t be here. It will be fascinating to see.

Q: What’s going to be your successor, Joanne Weiss’, toughest challenge?

A: Joanne is so capable, and she’s going to do a great job here. They’ll be a couple of things. One is, we’ve got to get ESEA over the finish line. That is an important next step in sequencing our efforts. She’s got a great team working hard on this every single day. But day-to-day operations at the department work pretty well, and she’ll inherit an organization that works pretty well, and she’ll dive in at the margins, too. And she and I are different people, and she’ll bring a set of expertise that will make it her own, and I look forward to watching her in that role.

From Education analyst Susan Ohanian:

Ohanian Comment: The smaller story here is another case of the enemy of our enemy. . . . The Pioneer Institute are supreme Standardistos as well as charter advocates Here's how Pioneer describes their education thrust: a leader in the charter public school movement and champion of greater academic rigor in Massachusetts' schools. Current initiatives promote choice and competition, school-based management, math and science education, and the broader use of data to increase transparency and help parents make informed decisions regarding their children’s education.

We may disagree on most things, but Pioneer is right in objecting to but they rightly object to the imposition of Bill Gates' standards.

The bigger story, and the real outrage here, is Gates. I've just read 700 articles about Race to the Top and The Common Core standards and only three include ANY MENTION of the Gates funding. As Daniel Golden pointed out recently, Duncan's spokesman Peter Cunningham acknowledges, "is very much aligned with the Obama Administration agenda. We partner with them on a whole host of things."

Officials come together to align K-12 standards, higher ed
LINK

The reporter notes:

The task of setting the standards — which involved more than two years' worth of work by the school officers' group, the National Governors Association, and many others — has been a big job, but it has been done largely without the involvement of higher education.

What he leaves out is the $35 million the Gates Foundation gave to CCSSO and National Governors Association, the $12.5 million to Achieve, plus assorted monies to organization that analyze the Common Core.

The reporter writes, "The establishment of common core standards for high school graduates is first and foremost a matter of concern for elementary and secondary school official," The truth of the matter is that this establishment of common core standards is a matter of concern for Bill Gates. But his name never appears in any of these so-called news items. Gates is the man behind the curtain. Read Daniel Goldman and Matt Murphy .

Note that they're talking about the assessments that will be tied to these standards. National test.

How much money will Gates have to offer for the college folk to drink the Kool-Aid?
By Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed, 2010-07-20
LINK

MINNEAPOLIS — For years, educators and policymakers have been talking about the need to better align K-12 and higher education so that students coming out of high school have the skills and knowledge they need to do college-level work, as well as reduce the need for remediation once students are in college.

But while many colleges are involved in various ways in their local school systems and virtually all states have created "P-16" or "K-20" councils aimed at, among other things, aligning high school graduation and college entrance standards, progress in creating a seamless education system for both students and states has generally been seen as limited.

Higher education and K-12 "have frequently operated as if they reside in different universes," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Friday at the first-ever joint meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO).

The relationship between elementary and secondary education too often continues to be marked by finger-pointing between the sectors, which the leaders of the two groups mimicked from the dais at last week's meeting.

"We have problems because you don't train the teachers well" is a complaint frequently heard from high school principals about colleges of education, said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of CCSSO.

The knee-jerk comeback from college professors and administrators, said SHEEO president Paul Lingenfelter, is "the students you send us aren't prepared, so we have to spend all our energies on remediation."

The two speakers are hopeful that the impetus for last week's meeting — the recent establishment of a set of common core standards for high school graduates — presents an opportunity to end what Wilhoit called the "repetitive cycle of non-productive activity" and take the collaboration between K-12 and higher education to a new level.

The establishment of common core standards for high school graduates is first and foremost a matter of concern for elementary and secondary school officials; the creation of the standards is barely on the radar screen of many college administrators and professors. And yet it is clear that the standards will be truly meaningful and useful only if they are fully embraced by higher education.

Only if colleges align their own admissions and placement policies with the common core standards (and agree to use the common assessments that are likely to be developed to gauge mastery of the standards) will high school students and their schools know what to shoot for, Lingenfelter and Wilhoit said. And only if colleges of education begin to reframe their curriculums and practices for training teachers and school administrators and their professional development programs for working teachers in response to the standards will schools have the future workforce to carry out the standards.

The discussions among the state superintendents and higher education chancellors and commissioners who met here offered some reason for optimism for those who believe that better alignment between high school and higher education is essential to the goal of raising the level of college attainment and completion in the USA. (So, too, did the fact that they took place at all: Much was made of the fact that the two groups had never met jointly before, with one state school officer holding up the morning newspaper and joking that if BP had figured out how to cap the Gulf Coast oil well, "then I know we can collaborate with SHEEO.")

"The fact that we've stepped up and said, 'We expect for every student exiting our system to be college- or career-ready,' drops on your doorstep an opportunity: to continue to engage with us in a process of discovery," Wilhoit said to the higher-ed leaders in the group. "I don't think the wisdom (to improve college readiness and completion) lies entirely in the schools or in colleges and universities. The wisdom resides in our collaboration — in getting the people who really understand the problems on the ground together with those who, from a little distance, can help them solve those problems."

But the discussions here made clear just how big a job remains to be done.

Setting standards, and beyond

The task of setting the standards — which involved more than two years' worth of work by the school officers' group, the National Governors Association, and many others — has been a big job, but it has been done largely without the involvement of higher education.

At Friday's meeting, Susan Pimentel, a senior consultant for the non-profit education reform group Achieve, who helped write the common core's English language-arts standards, described the surveys of postsecondary faculty members that helped frame the guidelines and the involvement of numerous college professors on the work groups that helped draft the standards.

And while some college leaders have balked that postsecondary educators were involved too late in the process, the American Council on Education helped convene panels of experts (based on advice from the Modern Language Association and the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences) to assess the standards.

If higher education's role in crafting the standards was minimal, it is likely to be much larger, on many fronts, in bringing the guidelines to life and making them meaningful. While the groups describe the standards as designed to "define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs," they do not set specific levels of proficiency that students are expected to have. That will come only with the development of assessments that are tied to the standards. Three coalitions of states and non-profit groups are reportedly planning to develop tests that would measure students' proficiency in achieving the core standards.

Higher education officials have a clear stake in how those assessments are developed, but the big job for college leaders will then be to decide whether and how to use those tests in admissions and placement into public colleges, said SHEEO's Lingenfelter. "For that to happen, the standards and assessments are going to have to be organizationally understood and accepted" by public college administrators and faculty members, he said.

Kevin Reilly, president of the University of Wisconsin system, noted that Wisconsin is among 31 states that has joined the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of three that has applied to the federal government's Race to the Top program for funds to build an assessment aligned to the common core.

The 15 campuses in the Wisconsin system "don't have common placement practices," Reilly said, but the system's eventual goal is to set a single, common level of proficiency that students would need to achieve to know that they could avoid developmental courses and begin college-level work at any of its campuses (from the highly selective flagship at Madison to more accessible institutions like Whitewater and Superior). "The goal would be to help drive more sensible messages about what you need to do to attend any of our campuses," Reilly said.

Those involved in shaping the common core standards acknowledge that those sorts of discussions could be vexing for many colleges, given the belief among many faculty members that their own colleges should demand more of students.

"When college faculty are asked to say what they think is important (for students in general to know and be able to do), they're good at listing 12 things," said Jason Zimba, co-founder of Student Achievement Partners and a member of the panel that drafted the common core math standards. But when asked about students should be required to know at their own institutions, Zimba said, "through admissions standards," they expect a lot more.

The second major task ahead for postsecondary institutions will fall to their education schools. "We're going to have to change the way we prepare teachers and school leaders," said Lingenfelter.

Wilhoit was more pointed. "Do we have a workforce in place, and a structure to support those teachers and school leaders, to get children to the levels we now say we're expecting of them? The answer right now is dramatically 'no,' " he said.

Changing that situation will require education schools and their professors to work with K-12 leaders in their states to rework their teacher training curriculums and their programs for teachers once they're embedded in schools. Much of the work, both on aligning the high school exit and college entry/placement requirements with the core standards and on better preparing teachers to carry them out, will take place between K-12 and higher education leaders within individual states, but the national organizations hope their own collaboration can point the way.

Jack Warner, executive director of the South Dakota Board of Regents and incoming SHEEO chairman, said it and the school officers' group expect to set up two work groups to discuss aligning common core assessments with admissions and placement requirements, and educational preparation of teachers and school administrators, to see if they can "model the way" for leaders in individual states.

"The core standards open the door to more and more effective joint discussion between K-12 and higher education, but it's a question of seizing that opportunity," Warner said.

It won't be easy, several state leaders said. Robert L. King, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, warned that if past practice is any guide, college and high school leaders should expect legislators in their states to try to "dumb down" the standards and lower cutoff scores if students start failing. "While everyone in this room is persuaded (about the wisdom of the common core standards and the need to raise educational attainment), we should be worried about parents coming back on our state legislatures," King said.

Said Reilly of the University of Wisconsin system: "We would be foolish when we leave this room to underestimate the resistance (in the public) to the idea that more and more of our students need to go on and get a degree."

— Doug Lederman
Inside Higher Ed
2010-07-20

Ohanian: Kudos to Matt Murphy. Why are so few people taking note of this?

Bias seen in push to new ed standards
By Matt Murphy
LINK

BOSTON -- The recommendation that Massachusetts adopt a set of national "Common Core" academic standards over the highly successful state standards already in place was based in part on outside analyses from research groups heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation, run by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, has also been heavily invested in the drafting of the Common Core standards themselves, raising questions about whether state officials were relying on the most unbiased information.

Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester, in a memo to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education on Friday, announced that he would recommend adoption of the national Common Core standards, calling them "at least as strong, if not stronger" than those in place today.

The new national standards would replace Massachusetts's current public-school curriculum, and could potentially lead the state to eliminate the MCAS exam in favor of a new test more aligned with what is being taught in the classroom.

The board is scheduled to vote on the commissioner's recommendation Wednesday.

"No. We really don't have those concerns," said Heidi Guarino, chief of staff to Chester. "The Common Core standards initiative was a state effort and whether or not these organization were funded by Gates, Gates does not control what they say."

Guarino said the independent reports were only a piece of the process. She said Chester also relied heavily on side-by-side comparisons done by the state's internal curriculum specialists.

Critics, however, have raised concerns about the partiality of those studies, which compare Common Core standards to those in Massachusetts, regarded along with California and Virginia as some of the strongest in the country.

The standards written after passage of Massachusetts's Education Reform Act of 1993 have resulted in students here topping the nation on standardized English and math exams.

"I think the reality of it is the Gates Foundation has been the major funder of the national standards and the three major reports on which the Massachusetts recommendation is based are funded by Gates. It's a little like being judge and jury," said Jamie Gass, director of the Center for Education Reform at the Pioneer Institute.

The Pioneer Institute has been a frequent critic of the Obama administration's effort to replace state education systems with a more uniform, national curriculum, as well as Gov. Deval Patrick's willingness to participate.

The Gates Foundation since January 2008 has awarded more than $35 million to the Council of Chief School Officers and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, the two main organizations charged with drafting and promoting common standards.

In the run-up to his recommendation, Chester told the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that he would base his decision on analysis being done by his staff, as well as independent reports prepared by three state and national education research firms -- Achieve, Inc., The Fordham Institute, and the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education.

Achieve, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based education-reform organization, received $12.6 million from the Gates Foundation in February 2008, according to data provided to the Washington Post by the foundation.

The Fordham Institute has accepted more than $1.4 million from the Gates Foundation, including nearly $960,000 to conduct Common Core reviews.

In the group's final report for Massachusetts, Achieve researchers wrote that the Common Core standards were "more rigorous and coherent" than Massachusetts standards.

"Policy makers can be assured that in adopting the Common Core State Standards, they will be setting learning expectations for students that improve upon those currently set by California and Massachusetts, and that the college and career-ready bar in the Common Core State Standards are set at a level that currently surpasses the level of the mathematics required for graduation in both states," the report stated.

The Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education contracted for a study to be produced by the San Francisco-based WestEd, which also operates Learning Innovations in Woburn.

WestEd's director of assessment and standards, Stanley Rabinowitz, served on the validation committee for the Common Core standards and has already signed off on them.

Linda Noonan, executive director of MBAE, said it is difficult to find any organization with the expertise to perform a comparison study that had not somehow been involved in the drafting of national standards.

"WestEd has so much at stake in their reputation that we felt they were above reproach because they have worked for so many different people," Noonan said. "I'm rejecting the notion that the source of funding effects the outcome."

Noonan also said that she requested a "firewall" between Rabinowitz and anyone else at WestEd involved in the Common Core initiative before signing the contract.

"Not only did he not work on it, he did not share any knowledge he had with the team," Noonan said.

MBAE also requested that outside researchers sign off on WestEd's methodology.

Chester did not wait for the findings of the MBAE study. The report is scheduled to be released tomorrow, giving members of the board another document to review before they vote.

— Matt Murphy, The Lowell Sun, 2010-07-18