It’s begun.  The School Board of Cobb County, Georgia, where I live, just voted (5-1-1) to purchase math books (print and digital) aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).  McGraw-Hill books will be purchased for K-8, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for high school.  The cost for these CCSS math books: $7 million.  This translates into about $64 per student for the 109,760 students in the district.  The estimated cost of supplying all students in Georgia with new math books would be about $102 million.

American education is poised to embody a one-size fits all model of curriculum.  We know that Arne Duncan claims that the Common Core Standards is not a curriculum.  The curriculum is what is taught in classrooms, and because most states have agreed to a single set of math and English/Language Arts standards, the curriculum in classrooms will be immensely affected by the CCSS.  Coupled with standardized tests that are being rolled out this year by two U.S. Department of Education funded groups, teachers will have little say in what the real curriculum will be because the same standardized test scores will be used to check their teaching effectiveness, and decide their employment.

In this post, I am going to report on those organizations that were funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to make the Common Core State Standards a reality.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made at least 164 grants to at least 125 organizations to support CCSS development and implementation.  I should also point out that the U.S. Department of Education is just as responsible for these standards, as Gates and the groups mentioned in this post.  You see when the Duncan department of education rolled out the Race to the Top, it insisted that states would stand a better chance of being funded is they signed on to the Common Core State Standards, and mandated the use of student test scores as a measure of teacher performance.

Figure 1. Top 20 Winners of Common Core Grants from the Gates Foundation. Data Source: The Gates Foundation

Then, to put the last nail on the coffin, the Gates Foundation provided consulting and writing help to states submitting proposals to the Race to the Top fund, especially during the second round of funding.  Georgia was a winner.  It got about $400 million, and it received help from the Gates Foundation.

These events made it possible for Achieve Inc., the developer of the CCSS to manage the development of the standards, and to work with many organizations, especially with the financial support of the Gates Foundation, to get the ball rolling.

The Top 20

The top 20 recipients give a window into the way the Gates Foundation is influencing K-12 education in American schools.  The movement to set up one set of learning objectives for all students is the essence of the Common Core.  These organizations are a Who’s Who of the corporate reform effort in which “big money” is being used to change the public landscape of education, into a market-place.

In America’s “race to common standards,” Figure 1 shows the top 20 organizations that have collaborated with the Gates Foundation to make sure that every child in the U.S. learns the same stuff in math, reading, and language arts.  The Common Core State Standards provide a common set of performances from which tests, texts, and online programming will be developed by private firms to be sold to public schools.

Top 20 Winners of Gates Common Core Grants

Here is the listing of the top 20 award winners in the Gates Foundation common core competition.  The links take you inside the Gates Foundation directly to one of the funded grants of these organizations.  You will find a link to the organization at that webpage.  As you read through and explore the top 20, note the emphasis on charter schools and teacher assessment in the context of the common core.

Figure 2. Pie Chart of Gates Funding of the Common Core, 2009 – 2014

In this report, 126 organizations received funding from the Gates Foundation to support various aspects of the common core.  However, a good deal of the funding went directly to charter management companies, and organizations that support the development of charter schools.  There is also funding to use student assessments (of the common core) to evaluate teacher performance.  Organizations received on average more than $4.4 million.

Figure 2 is a Pie Chart summary of the funding noting emphasizing the top five Common Core organizations.

What do you think about the Common Core?