Book Review: The Educator and the Oligarch

“The power of human imagination and desire for autonomy will always survive, and when the time is ripe, the mighty will fall.” ~ Anthony Cody

By Catherine Austin Fitts

Ever since a radio show host asked me about Common Core and I confessed ignorance, I have been trying to understand the effort to centralize control – and in the process destroy -our public educational system.

Last week I received a copy of The Educator and the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation by Anthony Cody in the mail, sent by a gifted Solari Report subscriber who shares a similar quest.

Cody spent 24 years teaching in the Oakland, California school system with a remarkable record of supporting best practices both locally and nationally. This is a teacher who clearly knows his stuff. He launched his blog Living In Dialogue where he has tried to talk some sense into the Gates Foundation, and in the process dug deeply into the facts of what is being engineered in K-12 education in the United States.

Arguably the most respected voice in public education, Diane Ravitch wrote the book’s preface. Cody joined with Ravitch in 2013 to found the Network for Public Education.

Cody’s intellectual integrity and persistence in assessing the needs of education and the current and potential impact of centralized curriculum is so chilling that I will not try to describe it here. Rather, here are several quotes from the book to underscore the value in reading this book.

Let’s start with Jose Ferreira, CEO of educational technology company Knewton. Cody quotes from the following presentation which is very much worth ten minutes of your time.

Let me emphasize one of Ferreira’s comments:

“We literally know everything about you and how you learn best. Everything. Because we have five orders of magnitude more data about than Google has. We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else, about anything else, about anything, and it’s not even close.”

It makes you wonder what deals they have with marketing research and consumer companies. If getting a taste of Knewton’s respect for personal privacy and individual sovereignty is not chilling enough, try this:

“Recent changes in the GED are having some drastic effects on students. The GED is used in lieu of a high school diploma, as a gateway to a college education. The new GED test has been taken over by Pearson (Gates Foundation partner) and is now aligned with the Common Core. The result is a test that is so difficult that there has been an 80% drop in the number of students passing it.

If we accept that the low pass rates we are seeing on Common Core-aligned tests are not an accident, but are the result of their design, this indicates that there is an attempt to use ever more difficult Common Core aligned tests to certify as many as two thirds of our students as unworthy of the opportunity to have a career or attend college.

This raises the possibility of a dystopian future where an underclass of Common Core test rejects is allowed to subsist with the bare minimum payments required to keep starvation at bay, while a shrinking cadre of insecure workers maintain the machinery that keeps the lights on and the crops harvested.”

This is the best description of the policy issues involved in the implementation of the Common Core that I have found so far. Even if you don’t have children or grandchildren in the US public school system, this issue is of great importance to you.

Do you want the children in our society to be something more than a profit center to support the privatization of education? What about guinea pigs to teach Silicon Valley how humans learn (imagine how useful that data will be for building artificial intelligence programs for robots)? How do you feel about the NSA having access to their every keystroke from kindergarten through high school?

What can you do? Seems to me that supporting Anthony Cody is one step. Buy his book. Support his organization.

I am naming him Solari Hero of the week.