Bill Gates Experiments on Millions of American Children...

...and he has no idea whether or not his ideas will work. He says he won't know for ten years, in fact. So meanwhile, too bad if you lose your job. Too bad if your kids spend all of their time prepping for tests that may or may not be valid. Too bad millions of kids hate to read because we feed them train schedules instead of inspiration. Bill Gates wanted to try his stuff out, and you can't expect him to try it on his own kids. They have needs.

Bill Gates' kids need the best. Like Obama's kids. Like Klein's kids and Bloomberg's kids. Like at least one of Michelle Rhee's kids and Reformy John King's kids. They need smaller class sizes and something other than constant testing. They need music and arts. They need fiction and poetry. They need to be part of a community, not simply one task to be executed. You can't expect their kids to be paraded around like tin soldiers in one of those charter schools Bill so adores.

Because this is an emergency. American children can't wait to find out whether or not the Gates way will work. He wants to try it, and he has billions of dollars, so every public school child in the country must do whatever they hell he says. And it doesn't matter that ideas like merit pay have been around for a hundred years and have never worked anywhere. Who's to say they won't work now?

Sure, excellent teachers may be fired based on VAM, which has also never been proven to work anywhere. But at least we can say we tried something. At least we can say we did something. Because, to Bill Gates, the important thing is to do something.

But it's like the old song:

Once the rockets are up, 
who cares where they come down?
That's not my department,
says Wehrner Von Braun.

And that makes about as much sense as Bill Gates performing his voodoo on our children. It's incredible that a President who promised hope and change would instead give us Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a veritable ventriloquist's monkey for Bill Gates.

If Bill Gates gave a golly gosh darn about our children, he'd demand for them the same thing he demands for his own kids.  And make no mistake, that's what Matt Damon, Leonie Haimson, and Diane Ravitch do. People who take his money vilify them for it. Yet they don't say word one about Gates, because that would jeopardize the gravy train.

Bill Gates has about as much integrity as Bela Lugosi turning people into zombies in some ancient B-movie. And his methods are hardly more sophisticated. Our children are not guinea pigs.

If Gates wants to throw children in the air and watch with intense curiosity to see where they fall down, it behooves him to start with his own. And no, I don't wish that on them. I only wish they had a father with a conscience instead of a program.