By Anthony Cody | Published April 4, 2013 by Education Week’s Living in Dialogue blog
No one in America has done more to promote the raising of stakes for test scores in education than Bill Gates.
Yesterday, Mr. Gates published a column that dances around the disaster his advocacy has created in the schools of our nation.
You can read his words there, but his actions have spoken so much more loudly, that I cannot even make sense out of what he is attempting to say now. So let’s focus first on what Bill Gates has wrought.
No Child Left Behind was headed towards bankruptcy about seven years ago. The practice of labeling schools as failures and closing them, on the basis of test scores, was clearly causing a narrowing of the curriculum. Low income schools in Oakland eliminated art, history and even science in order to focus almost exclusively on math and reading. The arrival of Arne Duncan and his top level of advisors borrowed from the Gates Foundation created the opportunity for a re-visioning of the project.
Montreal Teachers 4 Change.org 
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