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High Tech High 2.0
theodp writes "A week ago, in his How to Keep America Competitive Op-Ed, Bill Gates touted the Gates Foundation-backed High Tech High as the future of American education. One small problem. Two days earlier, tearful Bay Area High Tech High students — recruited by a Bill Gates video — were told that their school of the future has no future. So would Bill be too embarrassed to lay out his education plan before the Senate Wednesday? Nah. Not too surprisingly though, mentions of High Tech High were MIA in Bill's prepared remarks (PDF), which touted Philly's imaginatively named $65M School of the Future, built under the guidance of Microsoft, as the new school of the future. Committee politicians reportedly embraced virtually all of the suggestions made by Gates."
I thought the reasoning of politicians had gone a little beyond the "let's suck up to whatever Bill Gates says for he always knows better than us". It seems we're still a long way from that...
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Duuuuuuuuude!
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Committee politicians reportedly embraced virtually all of the suggestions made by Gates.
Of course they embraced his ideas. Hes the richest man in the world. Every politician want s to be him.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I really wish Gates would stop touting the H-1B program as the solution to a lack of American scientists and engineers. All it does is allow companies to pay scientists and engineers low wages by pumping up the labor supply. This is a clear case where the interests of the companies are in stark opposition to the interests of America.
If America wants to stay competitive, force these companies to start paying real salaries for scientists and engineers. People will seek these career fields if the salaries are right, and the supply problem will go away.
in a Microsoft-based school:
Kid 1: What do you have next period?
Kid 2: Obeying the man 101, what about you?
Kid 1: I have to sit through Advanced Legal Manipulation.
Kid 2: Damn that sucks!
Kid 1: At least I have a full ride to the new Torvald's College when I'm done here!
The original generic sig.
So, um, exactly how far does that $65 million go after subtracting out the computers for every student... and all those Vista licenses? =)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
While it is very nice of His Billness to donate a bunch of money, I think most of his flap is just that. He is obviously trying to salvage MS's public image with his personal charm.
The government can't save you.
Bill Gates shown to be giant hypocrite in favor of his own solutions! News at eleven!
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Let him lobby for 100,000 more Visas or whatever... Do you want to work for Microsoft ? Why aren't Larry and Sergey complaining ? They are hiring the brightest kids out of college. The real problem is, Microsoft is no more the destination for smart American kids :-)
That's all, he's just a douche.
I read the article and don't think I remembered hearing about parents at all.
That may be intentional or not & might be true or not in the actual school experience, that parents are ignored, but without parent involvement, encouragement & support, there will not be the achievement that everyone wants.
... and learn how to speak English?
realkiwi
I like the whole concept of HTH, and the best part is all the homework is outsourced to India.
Teacher: Now class, what is the square root of 4?
UAC man in black coat (MIBC): Teacher, you have queried the students. Cancel/Allow? (allow)
Jimmy: Two
MIBC: Jimmy, you have answered the teacher's query. Cancel/Allow? (allow)
Teacher: Good job Jimmy! You get an extra point on the test
MIBC: Teacher, you have issued a grade to Jimmy. Cancel/Allow? (allow)
MIBC: (black one-way window drops in front of teacher)This is a restricted action. Please provide your password (gives wrong password)
MIBC: Please give your password again. Do not attempt to breach the window
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Bill Gates is a shining example of the kind of competitiveness we do not want. His empire was built on undercutting the right enemy at the right time and cramming technological mediocrity down consumers' throats. And this is not me being a frothy-mouthed anti-Microsoft zealot; anyone can compare, say, OS/2 with Windows 95 and agree with that statement, grudgingly or not.
And so, is this the man we want as an example of technological brilliance? He should be inspiring young kids in MBA school, not the future engineers and programmers. His business sense goes against the entire philosophy of having a high tech school - it seems that he made his money by preventing technological advancement.
http://zero-to-enterprise.blogspot.com/
Bill Gates was known as a master Poker player in college. Many think this is the skill that allowed him manipulate his way past competitors and cripple giants like IBM. Offshoring and visa workers are making tech skill a cheap commodity. Perhaps we should teach our kids Poker. As W shows, we are the land of con artists. We might as well embrace our comparative advantage and welcome our sneaky overlords.
Table-ized A.I.
That seems like the usual Microsoft strategy, when the new version comes out, the old one is ignored and shut down! (probably a coincidence in this case, but it's still funny).
stuff |
However stupid "High Tech High" sounds,
it is not grounds to dismiss Gates' points.
America needs smarter citizens.
(who respect intelligence, and don't vote for certifiably stupid leaders)
America needs to be attractive to the best and brightest from around the world.
This requires focusing on education and immigration policy reform.
Please lets not get sidetracked on the MS bashing stuff when bigger issues abound.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
1. Is directly in contradiction to 5.
4. Not a bad idea.
6. Why non-Hindus? Is there a less qualified ratio of Muslims, Sihks & Christians in India?
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
with other countries adopting foss at a faster rate than the usa, business cost will be lower for outside countries faster than the usa which has a slower rate of foss adoption, making running proprietary software a competitive disadvantage for the usa. if the usa made gpl companies, tax exempt, it would help spure adoption of foss, making the usa more competitive.
Infuriating, but not at all surprising. Outside the geek world-- and very few geeks seem to realise this-- people think Bill Gates is a role model to be followed. He's the richest guy in the world, so people in our highly capitalist, money-obsessed society are prone to hang on his every word. Much like Christian apologists, they note the good ("Bill Gates gives billions to charity") whilst ignoring the bad (e.g. "he made those billions via anticompetitive, illegal means" / "his Foundation is a huge tax break and PR boost for himself, and has been used as a tool to push Windows on developing nations who can't afford it"). They believe that simply because he is obscenely wealthy, he is necessarily a good guy. Everyone likes to root for the biggest fish in the pond. Everyone likes to root for the winner, and Bill Gates is undoubtedly a winner. It's sad, but true-- most of the world thinks Gates is a great guy.
History doesn't look upon, say, Andrew Carnegie as a good guy simply because he gave away obscene amounts of money, but the average American today is lot more greedy, selfish and short-sighted than their counterpart of Carnegie's time, evidently...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
They didn't. If you checked the post and the user's history you'd realize he's got low karma to begin with.
Twit.
The LA Time recently ran a story about the possibly troubling investment strategies of the Gates Foundation. You can see more of their coverage here.
There was also, more to the point, this story via the Register: Gates demands better schools as Gates-backed school closes and this much more detailed story.
If this is an example of how the deals are made and how things are managed, it points to another classic example of 'the microsoft touch' screwing things up. It quickly reads as a tremendous gift of technology squandered by poor management, the same management which had delivered on providing poor schools in the first place. Of course, Bill protected his development.
(Pardon me for being cynical)
I recall another story along this line from someplace (done in the human interest vein), but I can't place it just yet.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Your solution only works if paying 'real salaries' is profitable(leaving aside the discussion of whether they are or not, job creation depends on it being profitable to pay someone to do work).
More importantly, we have to ensure that it's profitable. America can't compete with the Third World on wages; it's just not going to happen. The cost of living here is just too high, and unless we want to reduce our standard of living in order to reduce the costs, we have to figure out a way to shield American companies from direct foreign competition. That's the long and short of it, and it's what nobody really wants to say. We have a standard of living that's only achieved by very high costs; companies in other areas don't have these problems. But unless we want to reduce our standards to that of Calcutta's, trying to compete isn't an option.
At least for the moment, America is by far the largest goods-market in the world. We need to use this to our advantage, by ensuring that American companies, and other companies from areas that pay workers well, receive preferential access.
There's quite simply no other way to ensure that workers here are paid enough to maintain our expected standard of living. If we allow immigration and bring in low-cost workers from abroad, wages plummet. If we don't allow immigration but allow cheap imports, than domestic companies go bankrupt (or offshore everything) because they're no longer profitable. Either way, you end up with us collapsing our own economy.
We need to take a far more aggressive stance towards ensuring that our way of life is economically sustainable into the future, and right now I think we're on a collision course with disaster. Nothing less than our way of life is at stake.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It must be bad. Nuff said.
The failure of HTH clearly shows the lack of high school students we face in this country. There simply aren't enough American teenagers available! If HTH had been able to recruit teenagers from India, they'd be thriving. But no, anti-free-market immigration laws have put the school out of business.
Would *you* ever want to be described as a "committee politician"?
This is all because politicians, much like gorillas, do love getting pubic lice from Bill Gates, if you know what I mean.. wait... or is that the other way around?
That HTH went to blue screen of death?
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
Right from DOS days, Gates and Microsoft never got anything right before version 3. Maybe we just have to wait this one out for the next iteration.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
http://www.nclr.org/funding The "Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" funds La Raza.
4 825
and just a couple of articles down from this one on the slashdot's main page:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/07/23
Bill gates speaks out against immigration policies - he wants to make it
even easier
Driving down wages and salaries by taking in foreigners who will work for
cents to the dollar is not about making America competitive... unless of
course we're competing with third world sweat shops that is.
click on these
You can't build a house of cards from the top down. Our way of life is a result of how much we produce, not how much we consume. If we closed our borders perfectly today, some of us would be better off, but as a whole we would be worse off(by definition, trade is beneficial to the parties engaging in it; a third party often loses, but that is their problem). To the extent that we are currently unable to meet our resource demands internally, we need foreign trade, so it isn't really an option.
The other problem is that I lack the nationalistic zeal that says that my fifty pounds of steak is more important than other people, ya know, eating. I'm not a goddamn dirty longhaired hippy. I don't feel bad eating the steak that I earn, but I really don't give a shit about where in the world all the rest of the steak goes; I am just as happy with someone in China eating it as I am with someone in California. Sorry.
The upshot is that it is entirely possible to grow the world economy and pull other people up, rather than having them pull us down. You can watch it happening(China is growing incredibly fast, but our economy still got bigger the last few years, and the strength of the dollar is even becoming somewhat more certain). The size of the pie is not fixed yet.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Am I the only one who thought this article was going to be about some kind of new designer street drug?
A few weeks ago, an anonymous person emailed me this list. They said it fell out of Bill Gates' briefcase:
High Tech Education Concept - Windows Vista Ultimate High Class Descriptions
[Most of the world thinks Bill is a great guy.]
And that is the power of money and mindshare. My x-father-in-law and I had many debates about the merrits of Bill. He believed that in order to be one of the richest men in the world, he had to be really smart, innovative, have a great business savvy, work ethic, and could do no wrong.
I argued (from experience) that his business practices were shady (and driven from the top, so him and Balmer), that his success was from right time and connections, many successes were built upon the unrecognized work of others, and pointed out his philanthropy came very late in life. Everything Bill does has a catch. The school-of-the-future plans I first saw had the "microsoft only" stamp - as well as the strings attached to any Bill/Microsoft donation to education.
I still have a recruiting brochure Circa 1991 from Microsoft that touted Bill as a post secondary drop out. How can anyone consider Bill a champion of education?
Ah well, North American culture worships anti-heroes. I wonder how many slaves worshiped their masters like the wage slaves worship the well-to-do.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
New Wonder Drug Enables Users To Get Higher Than Hell
and not this:
Wonder Drug Inspires Deep, Unwavering Love Of Pharmaceutical Companies
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
To avoid offshoring, become a lawyer or doctor.
Why aren't companies getting H1B plumbers and electricians?
Get some H1B Accountants.
Leave my industry alone. Pay them a competitive wage? Go 2 years, have 200,000 open jobs
and I'll have an auction for my services. Then we will see what competitive wages are.
See:o n-technology-has-failed.htmlh nologyHasFailedSchools.html
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-educati
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTec
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change...
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
While I agree with most part of you post, I disagree with the subject. No matter how good a school is, it cannot make a person intelligent. It can only make him/her knowledgeable.
the criminalization of drugs has a very strong negative effect on the united states economy, not to mention subsidizing king pins profits by keeping drugs illegal, raises eyebrows on the citizenry on the politicians motives for their criminalization to begin with. besides freeing up the criminal justice system, small business stands to benifit the most from the decriminalization of drugs as ppl who use in a decriminalized market, stand to have more of their own money to spend.
...in San Diego. They have three high school campuses and one middle school that are up an running, and they just opened two more in the north part of the county for the coming school year. Their robotics team is one of the top in the country. I think the problem with the San Francisco campus was more of an administrative one (i.e. the administrators were not in line with the institution's philosophy or something along those lines)
It seems this agenda follows a common Microsoft theme of attracting/buying qualified outside resources rather than making them in-house. That may work for capitalist strategies, but not societal change. All we have is "our house".
I agree that education needs a boost, but outsourcing jobs only scares kids away from industry. With a decrease in technology/science majors, US foreign resource dependency increases. Like leeches, we won't remain very high on the political food chain if our host weakens. Leverage comes from self-sufficiency. Throwing ourselves at the mercy of other countries seems a naive strategy to me.
Why not increase funding for the arts in our schools? Oh wait, that's a useless subject. I forgot, it only influences youth creativity, independent thinking, and fresh approaches to managing life. New thought patterns couldn't possibly fuel US business.
This is just wonderful. Politicians will listen to Bill Gates, but not to actual teachers.
No wonder education in America is fucked.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Stop mainstreaming, empower teachers and re-establish respect for educators. It is that simple, no technology required.
I know quite a few Christian apologists. They all, without fail, try to work negatives into positives, simply ignore them, or shrug and say "Man cannot always understand God". Religion is like that, and in America, capitalism is the state religion as much as fundamentalist Christianity is.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Next week I'll be attending a conference bringing all the state technical educators together. (I'll leave the actual state name out.) One of the themes is how to remove Microsoft from the class room. Instead of teaching MS Office, seems folks are starting to think teaching OpenOffice and/or Google Docs/Spreadsheets will do just as good of job of teaching the student's basic skills.
A few years ago the idea of a Google OS seemed crazy--now I only hope Google or someone else has a bare bones operating system in the works that could replace Windows on all classroom machines. Much of the learning has shifted to web based technologies, not much of OS would be needed.
Certain does seem as if the glory days of Microsoft are fading fast.
Is that the only reason Gates/Microsoft are behind this is to getting Microsoft products (only) and Microsoft brainwashing into the up-coming generation of engineers and managers, just to further strengthen the Microsoft monopoly.
Can anyone who actually goes to these MS-funded schools tell me how Linux or opensource software are viewed (or ignored) there and if they are even allowed to use it on campus?
Would America benefit from a better educated workforce? Yes. Is a better educated American workforce something Bill Gates supports? No. It was simply window dressing to distract America from the fact that Bill Gates would prefer to import lower wage workers from foreign nations than provide Americans with competitively paying jobs. While I will not claim that Americans are smarter or better educated than their foreign counterparts, I will make the argument that Microsoft has benefited substantially from being based within America. I would go as far as to state that this nation created the environment within which Microsoft was able to grow and develop and succeed, and to reap the benefits of what this nation has provided you while attempting to give back to her citizens as little as possible is shameful. Any American CEO who feels they owe the citizens of this nation nothing should feel free to relocate their entire business elsewhere. I am sure they will be successful, despite the regional instability, corruption, or outright resistance to capitalism they will find in many other nations.
Do you really think that the beuracratic school systems can teach something as abstract as "the arts"?
I live in Wichita, KS and I can tell you that this most recent move (seemingly) to a (possibly the?) $65M school of the future is a bit behind the times. Great concept, but "dude, that's a lot of cash." Some of you might already know that Wichita, KS is the "air capital of the world." Regardless of whether or not any of us is willing to go quite that far with that particular description of Wichita, everyone must know that the Wichita economy is driven by what I call "affective hit points." That basically means that Boeing, Cessna, Ratheon(Beechcraft), Learjet and Bombardier all rolled up are a big giant, living machine that requires a lot of resources and even more labor to utilize those resources and ultimately produce aircraft and related computer-intensive technologies ordered by players in the transcontinental to conduct yet greater still sizable resource and labor gobbling big giant, living machines. But I digress ...
What I'm really getting at is that a partnership was recently entered into by the city of Wichita and the aircraft companies as a committee, whereby a "school of the future" will be setup (and is near or already has reached, completion) that, hopefully, outputs enough qualified/skilled labor to meet the demands of industry here in town. Everyone got together and said, 'look, we gotta do something here -- the labor pool won't sustain our collective requirements' and since the companies are collectively so huge, that loosely translates into 'we need more cats here in town who know what they're doing with airplanes and computers and electronics and interior aircraft design, oh -- and a bunch of cats who know how to paint real good) me.' And up to this point, there has not been enough qualified help to run da bidnesses.
Maybe Bill Gates came to Wichita in a secret midnight rendezvous after realizing he had the exact same problem in his industry ... most of which, undenialby, he has had a huge influence on to begin with ...
Just some random thoughts ... I really believe we've honestly gotten to the point that specialized education is a necessity, not a wish-list item.
Your father would argue that 45 is not "very late in life." Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (est. 2000)
Warren Buffett was 76.
Hardball capitalism is the American national game, with Poker a close second.
You know, since everything is soon to be switching anyways, why not re-evaluate such operating systems as BeOS and Amiga 4 desktop or whatever it's called now ...
I'm pretty sure those companies would be much more willing to play co-op and against microsoft than microsoft would co-op play with anybody else.
hope, rainbows, and pots of gold, and lephrechans named "little bastard"
Wow, it's interesting to see this show up on /. -- stories haven't been about things happening to me personally since the coverage of Be Inc. dying. Anyway, my son was one of the first students at High Tech High Bayshore. The first year, 2003-2004, they were actually just "San Carlos High School", because the deal with the HTH franchise came later. Originally, the idea was to have the school be run on the HTH model, not be an actual member school.
Anyway, here's what the articles aren't saying: the school sucked. The articles are making a big deal about the money issue, and yes, they are closing because of the money, but the reason they don't have funds is that they're incredibly under enrolled, and they're under enrolled because they've had so many students leave.
Initially, we had really high hopes for the school, and the first year wasn't that bad -- some good teachers, some mediocre teachers. The next year they had a new principal, and there were more mediocre teachers. As an example, that year all 10th graders (like my son) were in Chemistry. They had no lab equipment, and the instructor frequently taught them just *wrong things*. Wrong as in, the wrong value for Avogadro's number. Since the class was supposed to be a lab science, they were told they had to be doing lab work weekly. To meet that requirement, they did a "learning to measure" lab. And the next week, they did it again. For weeks on end, they essentially repeated the same basic labwork, so that the school could say they were participating in a lab component. At the end of the year, the administration apologized and admitted that they hadn't actually learned any Chemistry. Oh, and at the end of that year, many of the remaining *good* teachers left.
So, by this year, they had something like 30 seniors, and were losing those fast. They've had attrition at two ends of the spectrum. They lost students dropping out or failing out, but they have also continued to lose students at the high end of the academic spectrum. My son, for example, studied two years of math in one year in his first year there, because he was allowed to have a more independent study approach. His sophomore year he was studying Calculus with two other students, but the teacher they had assigned to oversee them -- the "10th grade math" teacher -- couldn't actually *understand* math at the pre-Calc or Calc level, so he didn't give them any tests, couldn't grade their homework, etc. For the second semester, the school agreed to have the students take community college math classes instead. That would have been fine, except the next year, they decided the students should rejoin their grade level math classes -- now 2 years behind -- and just do that.
I have tons of stories like this -- my son being taught flat out wrong things, having some classes where they learned a lot about one "project-based" subject, but had huge gaps in other areas. While some of the instructors were incredible people and really engaged my son, increasingly that wasn't true.
But what made him leave in the end was the paucity of college assistance. My son's aiming pretty high for schools, but the school was pretty much set to tell students "Pick a University of California school you want to apply to, and a Cal State school, and you're done!" Son has watched some very gifted students fall through the cracks because there wasn't enough coaching in place to help kids find and apply for schools other than that. So we reached a point where it began to appear that staying at HTHB was going to negatively impact his ability to be accepted at the schools he really wanted to attend. He ended up transfering to another small charter school, where he's doing his senior year now.
It sort of frustrates me as a parent to see all the focus be on the money situation at the school. If the school hadn't had ongoing problems with the quality of education, if it hadn't driven away high-achieving students by saying things like "academic quiz teams are not in keeping with the school's
By the way, we're Linux people in our household, so one of the questions we asked about the school during the High Tech High changeover and funding is "Will this mean the students are stuck using Microsoft products?" No, they weren't. The school was Gates-money funded, but the computers were all Macs and the network was Linux-based. I think the only Microsoft there was the Office suite on the Macs.
become a lawyer or doctor.
Lawyers dealing with contracts, wills, etc are already off shore. If you don't have to show up in court, just stop by to pass the bar and go back home. As for doctors, "medical tourism" is still on the rise.
Accountants just push numbers around in Excel, there's no reason for them to be in the country at all.
Why aren't companies getting H1B plumbers and electricians?
Because plumbers and electricians have their profession sewed up tight thanks to their guild. Want to be a plumber? First, you have to apprentice to one, assuming you can find one taking future competitors on as apprentices.
I don't understand how people can possibly believe that technology make for better schools. Sure, it's nice and all, but things like involved (but not sociopathic) parents, competent teachers, accountability for failure, the ability to punish misbehaving kids, etc., are what makes schools better. None of those things require fancy buildings and the like. I guess it comes down to throwing $$$ at silver bullets instead of actually fixing things.
Join the military. :)
That's a sure way of having a job.
Of course, the "physical attributes" of most Slashdotters might be a tad problematic in that regard, but hey.
Fact: Relative to wages, America has quite a low cost of living. Think about it - how long do you have to work at an average job to afford a car in America? How long in Calcutta? Even goods that are more locally priced (e.g., food) are almost always relatively cheaper in America, particularly when quality and safety are taken into account.
What you're advocating is protectionist trade policy, and this almost always hurts us at least as much as it hurts our importers.
Furthermore, your facts are wrong - if American companies were actually going bankrupt, or if everything were being offshored, then our balance of trade wouldn't be negative. Macroeconomics teaches us that balance of trade is the opposite of the balance of investment (plus some adjustments for currency, but these are usually small enough to ignore). Thus we have a large positive balance of investment - countries like China are investing more heavily in the US than we are in them. Also, they are doing this despite strong domestic growth. This indicates that investments in the US are pretty profitable.
So I'm not too worried about us spiraling to our doom just yet. Both the theory and the facts are lacking.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
I guess I see the fundamental need of exactly what you're saying; even the teachers and administrators needed to go to school to learn how to be teachers and administrators. You could, in a sense, presume that the labor pool in that spot was bad for the academic "essense" and in the very same stroke giving breath to the doomed idea of thinking teachers could teach students when the teachers themselves were students. All in all, I'd blame it on the staffers. Who staffed those freakin' idiots anyhow? Where the accountability for that person? In my book, it would benefit all to seek independent evaluation of curriculum, budget and staff and fire all of the root administrators in the system, start over. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. I mean, jeez, the scenario you presented here was so pittiful and egregious that I haven't even heard of a public school being that bad in Arkansas or Kentucky.
In America, this is probably true, but not necessarily in the rest of the world. In Australia, for example, if you get too high and mighty, people are inclined to cut you down to size. It's called the "Tall Poppy Syndrome":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndromeWell, your understanding is not entirely correct. Having gone through two years of stupidity at HTH-Los Angeles, I can honestly say that the quality of education there is among the lowest of all the schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
They have a nice building, nice P.R., lots of money, lots of computers, etc., but the school did a horrible job on the actual learning process. I never took trigonometry, because the school didn't offer it. I was stuck with the rest of my grade, who were all one math level behind me. After some pushing by my parents, the math teacher gave me a 40-year-old trig book for me to work on for the last two weeks of school. Luckily for me, my Calc teacher at the school I transferred to for my senior year did a trig review, and I caught on quickly.
The same teacher also taught my Chem class, which was also a joke; I spent the majority of my time reading slashdot. Yeah, that's right, the school let kids basically loose on the computers during class, I guess because the idea was to integrate technology into the classroom. The problem is, nobody ended up learning everything - the teacher would be talking, and the students would be on the computers goofing off. Those two classes also ended up progressing at the pace of the slowest student, which turned out to be excruciatingly slow.
Oh, and another thing - I was missing a semester of P.E. coming into the school, having sprained my arm in a regular school. LAUSD requires four semesters of P.E. credit, and I was assured that the Tai-Chi exercises we did during homeroom would make up for the semester I missed. Oh, how wrong I was. I ended having to take P.E. as a senior the next year.
At the time I left, 3 teachers had been booted (Including one that actually did a pretty good job teaching Spanish), and about half the kids I had started with in my 10th grade year were now gone. I later found out that the school was bleeding students like crazy - of the 9th graders that had entered the school in my 11th grade year, only about 40% of them returned to the school next year. My class had a graduating size of oh, 25?
As I said before, I ended up transferring to a regular school for my senior year, and I couldn't have had a better year of high school. I mean, I was never that worked up about school (something I continue to regret) but taking 3 AP classes and actually learning stuff never felt so good.
I wouldn't be surprised if I read about HTH-LA's closing within the next few years.
Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand...
It's obvious where he's going to go.
Linux and OSS are making huge inroads into education.
So Gates decides to be the "philanthropist" again - by dreaming up a notion and tying it to US "patriotism" disguised as "competitiveness" - with the end goal of making sure everybody in education loads up on Microsoft software.
Total Gates bullshit, as usual.
For Gates, spending $65 million on a school is obviously much better than using FREE software since the latter directly threatens his entire market.
Anybody who can't see this asshole AS an asshole IS an asshole.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Let's just skip all these committees and laws chipping away at my livelihood. Each senator should just bust in my door and butt-rape me in my home. On the way out they can all take a few bucks from my wallet to help them score a new election or bag of coke, too.
Wow, that sound like HTHB, alright, especially the part about being stuck in a slower math class. I tell people that HTHB has had two kinds of teachers: good ones, and ones that get hired back each year. My son's transfered to another charter, and it's much better. While it still has every student taking the same class for each grade, the coursework is more traditional and much more rigorous. He's taking AP Lit, AP Stats, AP History and Gov, AP Environmental Science, and Spanish. And yes, he's happy to be actually learning stuff again.
I think what was upsetting is that HTHB has been unapologetic that they want to educate "the middle third" -- students that were C students in middle school. This is probably a terrible thing to say, but it appears they do that by basically offering classes that don't really challenge those kids, so they end up having good grades because not much is being expected of them. As I know you know, they do projects on particular aspects of a subject, but basically ignore anything else -- so my son had a lot of information about the peace process at the end of WWI, but not much else about any other aspect of early 20th century history. There's a *lot* of PR, and a lot of slickness and marketing, but as you said, not much emphasis on just having strong teaching.
Consider when Bill had billions and it puts it in perspective. Bill didn't start active philanthropy until a couple years after his mother died from cancer. And she was big UnitedWay board member. (So... '96, Bill became a Billionaire in '87.)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Doctors already are being outsourced. There are dozens of companies now where, for a few grand a month, you can have your X-rays, CT/MRI scans, ultrasounds, etc. read by some guy in India or China, and within whatever time frame you specify, the report will be sent back to you as a fax or a PDF. The same thing is rapidly happening with pathology and a few other primarily visual specialties - any field where you look at an image or listen to a soundtrack can and is being outsourced. Those services were started as a way to provide rapid access to specialty care in underserved regions, but as with just about everything, they're now being used to cut costs at big hospitals in major cities.
Meanwhile, on the home front, we're replacing internists, pediatricians and family practice doctors with nurse practitioners as fast as we possibly can, and replacing nurses with practice aides (most of whom are foreign imports, some illegal at that) and volunteers. Anything, ANYTHING not to have to pay someone to take care of sick people.
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
With money, yes... politicians listen when money talks. The only reason they listen to proposed high tech schools is because there was money involved. Redirect it to another subject area, you'll see the same response.
You always can tell when the IT/software labor market is getting tight: the first indication is Uncle Bill going to Washington asking for more cheap, imported tech labor. I guess he still hasn't made enough money.
... and rightly so.
... rather only to maximize their profit margins. Hey Uncle Bill, don't be such a tightwad ... feel free to spread some of that wealth to the rest of your countrymen.
If you pay them they will come (and not from overseas, either). There's a reason why more bright students end up being lawyers than engineers and scientists; it's the emm-oh-enn-ee-wye. So long as companies are allowed to import cheap H1B/L1 visa labor (sorry Uncle Bill, but that's what you really want) thereby usurping the salaries that have to be paid to attract native, intellectual talent to scientific fields (and making the job markets in those fields more unstable in the process), there will always be a diminished interest in those careers
Let the free market work, and it will. Cheap labor is not a necessity for U.S.-based companies like Microsoft to survive
It seems to me that offshoring and H1B wage-lowering strategies are not going unnoticed by those in school and choosing a career.
... the engineering enrollments are down, but if you look you'll see the business and law school applications are not. Not too many financiers or lawyers getting their salary structures usurped by H1B/L1 immigrants, now are there?
They never are