Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy The Gates Foundation won't permit acceleration?

I emailed several people at the Gates Foundation Thursday, but I only had names and had to guess at the email addresses. I think only 2 or 3 went though. Nobody has gotten back to me.

The permission slip contained the name of someone at the Gates Foundation and it looks like he is the academic in charge of the project. I sent him an email saying that either the school principal is misinformed (in which case, could he please clear this up) or that his study is not obtaining informed consent. I would imagine that this accusation loosens the bowels of any reputable researcher.

I just hope he checks his email. I sent it to his university because I am not sure what the email convention is at the Gates Foundation. I also stole your point about Bill Gates being the beneficiary of exceptional educational opportunities and suggested he would not have intentionally funded a study that would prevent a bright child from appropriate placement.

So I threatened his reputation and his funding. To bad I can't follow through!

The school has not been helpful. They are either lying or confused. The school district is huge and has a bad reputation for bureaucratic nonsense. I think it would be a lot of effort with little return, but I'll probably do a email tomorrow with a lot of cc's.

I did NOT use the syphilis reference, but I enjoyed reading that!

If you don't get anything useful out of the guy in charge of the project, I think the next step would be to email this to Anderson Cooper 360 at CNN, for his "Keeping them Honest" segment. He might be interested in getting some answers!

Someone asked me about this and I realized I should provide a summary of how eveything ended up:

In the end I gave up. Nobody from the Gates Foundation responded to any of my emails and the school principal changed her story several times. At our final meeting she said they would NEVER allow an outside organization to dictate placement.

She also said they gave my son a test on the fourth grade material and his score did not qualify him to be accelerated (I think he got an 80 or 85%). We were not informed that he was being tested for placement prior to being told he had not qualified.

The catch is that the test was administered by the Gates study! The principal didn't even seem capable of grasping that this WAS allowing an outside organization to dictate placement. She even admited she had never seen the test and didn't know what was on it. She also couldn't tell me what the range of scores in my son's class was.

My son is taking an EPGY course online.

I don't think our difficulties were caused by the Gates study, but the school definitely used the study an an excuse to not deal with us and nobody at the Gates Foundation stepped up to prevent it. And they certainly did not do an adequate job of communicating the study parameters to school personnel or parents. Very disturbing situation.

As I mentioned previously, the academic in charge of the study DID respond to an email I sent to him at the university he is affiliated with. But after our final conversation with the principal I didn't think it was worth anyone's time to pursue it further.