The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is offering a mea culpa for the way it pushed the Common Core standards adopted by most states, including Georgia.
The standards, which started as an idea promoted by governors, including former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, became controversial, with opponents saying they amounted to a federal takeover of education and focused too much on testing.
"We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently engage educators – particularly teachers – but also parents and communities so that the benefits of the standards could take flight from the beginning," CEO Sue Desmond-Hellmann writes on the foundation's website.
Georgia kept the standards in math and English, with only minor tweaks, and, like many states, rebranded them when the opposition swelled, renaming them the Georgia Standards of Excellence.
The Gates organization, which has invested large sums into changing American education, learned a “challenging lesson” but isn’t giving up. The group is “in it for the long haul,” Desmond-Hellmann writes. “I’m optimistic that the lessons we learn from our partners – and, crucially, from educators – will help the American school system once again become the powerful engine of equity we all believe it should be.”
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