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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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"
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"?
If you want to create schools that teach people useful knowledge the best thing that could happen is a school voucher program where parents receive a set amount of funding from the various levels of government and are free to spend those dollars as they see fit. Thus music programs and technological education can compete in a fair manner.
That HTH went to blue screen of death?
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
Am I the only one who thought this article was going to be about some kind of new designer street drug?
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.
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.
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.
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.