You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Bill Gates non-profit…

…Or a former NC Department of Public Instruction (DPI) employee working for a Bill Gates  backed non-profit.

Case in point, Tabitha Grossman of Hope Street Group.

Who is Hope Street Group?

In case you missed my previous articles on Hope Street Group, they are, in a nutshell, a Bill Gates backed non-profit using a ‘Teacher Voice Network’ to continue pushing Common core. They are a resident of what I call the Common Core Potemkin Village.

North Carolina’s Superintendent is quite cozy with Hope Street and has entered NC into a partnership with them in March of this year.

More on that partnership in a separate article. Back to Tabitha Grossman.

Ms. Grossman has been the “National Director for Education Policy and Partnerships” for Hope Street Group since June of 2013. Here is where she was and what she did prior to that, via her LinkedIn resume:

Program Director National Governors Association June 2011 – November 2012 (1 year 6 months)

Senior Policy Analyst National Governors Association September 2008 – June 2011 (2 years 10 months)

Director, Learn and Earn Early College High Schools North Carolina Department of Public Instruction September 2007 – September 2008 (1 year 1 month)Raleigh, NC

Gee, a former NC DPI employee. Grossman’s next step was the National Governor’s Association (NGA) right at about the time Common Core was being created.

According to her NGA bio, she was in the thick of it with Common Core and ‘human capital’:

“she is currently working with governors and their key policy staff to help them assess and address the impact of the Common Core State Standards on human capital policy.”

While at the NGA, Grossman was tasked with training informing Governors about Common Core by providing them talking points, action plans in a report that “was made possible by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.”

Fun footnote: If you read page 24 of that NGA report Grossman was a part of, you’ll see it also mentions the ‘Shared Learning Collaborative. That collaborative was renamed inBloom and went out of business over data privacy concerns not long after it started up and Bill Gates had dumped over $18 million into it.

Oddly enough, the “Director” for Hope Street Group in North Carolina is not a former DPI employee.  Katharine Correll isn’t a teacher and never has been.

From her Hope Street Group  bio:

With a background in educational and social service nonprofit management, Katharine brings expertise in partnership development, stakeholder mobilization, and community organizing to Hope Street Group.

So, basically Correll is a community organizer.  Great!

More about ‘Learn and Earn’
Gee, “Learn and Earn Early College High Schools” is yet another Gates Foundation experiment.  Color me shocked.

The idea was to redesign high schools to line up with postsecondary institutions with the product being more prepared workers. Sound familiar? Ideas like this have floated for decades, but this particular one started back in 2003.

It’s worth noting the US Dept. of Ed is still trying to push this idea as of 2013.

In 2003, Gates gave Easley $11 million for high school ‘redesigning’ that appears to have developed into ‘Learn and Earn’. Check the bottom of the press release and you’ll see a similar cast of characters supporting it as are now supporting Common Core.

We see the ‘Learn and Earn’ branding in the 2009 report about “learn and earn” produced by the Council of Chief State School Officers:

The Gates Foundation invested $1.2 million in early college programs in North Carolina, according to Habit. Legislators also provided $25 million from the state’s general fund. Those funds are used for one year of planning and the first five years of implementation for each school.

Easley named the state’s early college program “Learn and Earn.” Its objective is for at least 95 percent of students enrolled in early college high schools to be academically at-risk, first generation college attendees or economically disadvantaged. (See p.15)

Yes, that’s former Governor Easley mentioned above and “Habit” is Tony Habit of NC New Schools, who is also a Common Core backer and Bill Gates grant recipient.

The current ‘Senior VP of Talent Development” at NC New Schools is Angela Quick. Ms. Quick, like Tabitha Grossman, is also a former DPI employee. Quick was apparently a high-ranking one with the title, ‘Deputy Chief Academic Officer‘.

Quick’s name is all over the multiple boxes of documents I requested from DPI on Common Core.    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Related

• An Update On #CommonCore Potemkin Village Resident: Hope Street Group
• Another House In the Common Core Potemkin Village: Hope Street Group
• Common Core Potemkin Village: Hope Street Group – Money and History