Bill Gates' School Crusade

[proud2BlibKansan]

The Microsoft founder's foundation is betting billions that a business approach can work wonders in the classroom

It's been two years since Bill Gates left his day-to-day role at Microsoft (MSFT) to concentrate on supervising the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—and his new enterprise is booming. Headquartered in a converted check-processing center in Seattle's Eastlake neighborhood, the 10-year-old foundation plans to move into a 900,000-square-foot campus and visitors' center near the city's Space Needle next spring. The Gates Foundation opened a London office this year; it also has offices in Washington, Delhi, and Beijing, and 830 employees around the world, up from about 500 in 2008. With assets of $33.9 billion as of Dec. 31, 2009, and America's two richest people—Gates and Warren Buffett—as trustees, the foundation plans to spend $3 billion in the next five to seven years on education. If there's such a thing as a charity behemoth, the Gates Foundation is it.

While its efforts in global health are widely applauded, its record in America's schools has been more controversial. Starting in 2000, the Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its first big project, trying to revitalize U.S. high schools by making them smaller, only to discover that student body size has little effect on achievement.

It has since shifted its considerable weight behind an emerging consensus—shared by U.S. Education Secretary and Gates ally Arne Duncan—that quality of teaching affects student performance and that increasing achievement is as simple as removing bad teachers, identifying good ones, and rewarding them with more money. On this theory, Gates is investing $290 million over seven years in the Tampa, Memphis, and Pittsburgh school districts as well as a charter school consortium in Los Angeles. The largest chunk of money, $100 million, will go to Tampa's Hillsborough County school district, the eighth-largest in the U.S., with 192,000 students and 15,000 teachers. These carefully selected programs, which will favor or penalize teachers depending on whether students make larger or smaller gains than their test scores in prior years would have predicted, are intended as models that, if proven successful, can be rolled out nationwide.

The Gates agenda is an intellectual cousin of the Bush Administration's 2002 No Child Left Behind law, which required all public schools—though not individual teachers—to make "adequate yearly progress" on student test scores. Some opponents of No Child Left Behind questioned its faith in data; are scores too narrow a gauge of how well kids are learning? Gates sees nothing wrong in relying on quantitative metrics. "Every profession has to have some form of measurement," he said in a late June interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. "Tuning that, making sure it's fair, getting the teachers so they're enthused about it" are the keys.

more ... http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_30/b4188058281758.htm

[SpiralHawk]

1. Gates is huge on pimping the mutant GMO food thingy, too

Can you spell m-a-t-e-r-i-a-l-i-s-t.

Twisted Dude (R) knows the price of everything, the value of nothing.

[mediaman007]

2. Great description of the Tea Party:

"The price of everything, the value of nothing!"

[Login]

3. Bill Gates: In Five Years

The Best Education Will Come From The Web

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/


Bill Gates thinks something is going to die too.

No, it’s not physical books like Nicholas Negroponte — instead, Gates thinks the idea of young adults having to go to universities in order to get an education is going to go away relatively soon. Well, provided they’re self-motivated learners.

“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued.

He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.

He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.

But college needs to be less “place-based,” according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.

But his overall point is that it’s just too expensive and too hard to get these upper-level educations. And soon place-based college educations will be five times less important than they are today.

One particular problem with the education system according to Gates is text books. Even in grade schools, they can be 300 pages for a book about math. “They’re giant, intimidating books,” he said. “I look at them and think: what on Earth is in there?“

According to Gates, our text books are three times longer than the equivalents in Asia. And yet they’re beating us in many ways with education. The problem is that these things are built by committee, and more things are simply added on top of what’s already in there.

Gates said that technology is the only way to bring education back under control and expand it.

[n2doc]

6. Spoken like a man who has never taught one day in his life

Giving lectures ain't teaching. I've done both "distance" and "in room" teaching, and the former is 10x as hard to do as the latter, and I am convinced that it is essentially impossible to provide an equivalent teaching experience using the two methods. A proportion of students will respond well to on line learning, but most will lack the self-dicipline to get much out of it.

[n2doc]

4. Ain't it so wonderful that the billionaires want to give away half of their $$$?

That was the meme last week. Left unsaid was just what they planned to do with the funds. Gates as both his and Warren Buffett's $$$ to play with :scared:

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. And Gates cured malaria!!

[End Of The Road]

7. I'm so sick of non-educators telling us how to improve education

I do not believe that a "business model" is relevant to education, and I'm tired of people like Gates telling us that it is.

[proud2BlibKansan]

8. The Blueberry Story

Google it.

[NashVegas]

9. Gates'Crusade Is To Turn Out Mindless Drones

Who will be good little consumers, or tech-developing helpers, as he and others continue to fuck over today's professional class, just like the Industrial Revolution did to 18th and 19th century artisans.