Slashdot Mirror
Gates: Not Much To Show For $5B Spent On Education
theodp writes "Since 2000, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has poured some $5 billion into education grants and scholarships. Ten years into his record-breaking philanthropic push for school reform, the WSJ reports that Bill Gates is sober about the investment and willing to admit some missteps. 'I applaud people for coming into this space,' said Gates, 'but unfortunately it hasn't led to significant improvements.' This understanding of just how little influence seemingly large donations can have has led the foundation to rethink its focus in recent years. Instead of trying to buy systemic reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent. Despite the good intentions, some are expressing concerns about how billionaires and the Gates Foundation rule our schools, including the lack of transparency and spotty track record of the wealthy would-be reformers. Perhaps Gates should consider funding a skunkworks educational project for retired Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie, who was working on networked, self-paced computer assisted instruction in 1974 — 36 years before Bill and Google discovered Khan Academy!"
My understanding that much of Gates' donations have been spent on organizations trying to reform public education along "market-based" lines -- i.e., public schools run by private companies, which supposedly makes them more accountable. Maybe he's discovering this isn't the panacea that the reformers have sold?
Proves the point that we knew all along, throwing money at the educational system does not fix it! Just look at the govt track record. Time to dump the institutional model? I'm sure this article will spark the ever repeating slashdot argument about what's wrong with America's school system.
If I learned anything from my teacher wife*, it's that there are dozens of ways that children (and adults) learn, and you have to tailor the learning experience for each of them.
Some children may do very well with things like the Khan Academy. Others will not.
Anyone who tries to shoehorn all children into the same learning solution is likely to leave a large percentage of them behind.
* and my own experience in contrast to my brother, and my own two childrens' very different learning experiences in public schools.
The problem with our education system is simple; it's run by politicians. Education should not be run by people who a) don't have a solid grasp of the material they are mandating and b) are more interested in reelection.
The only way we'll get meaningful reform is by pushing control ( ie: money ) down to the county level and letting them figure it out.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I did a Master of Arts in Teaching in the early 90's. What I think I learned from my History of Eduction Reforms was this: 1) kids will learn given half a chance, 2) most (if not all) education reforms have had AT BEST marginal impacts, 3) so you can do something good or screw up and it doesn't matter all that much. Education and the drive to become educated starts at home.
here in california with 'charter schools' which have turned out to be little more than money laundering operations for major corporations, business elite, and a handful of food service vendors. Corporations are also granted another platform to showcase to the public a model of business sans union.
businesses are dismally suited toward the task of education. Their mandate, a legal one at that, is to maintain and grow shareholder earnings and profit.children are complex and perform differently. as such they are a poor if not dangerously unpredictable revenue generator for shareholders. So, instead of measuring childrens success in education by plausible means like college enrollment rates or hireability in the workplace, businesses running education tend to emphasize performance based on standardized testing batteries and total number of students enrolled; a sort of quantity over quality model
i surmise when bill says 'education reform' what hes tacitly implying is nothing less than what was implied when charter schools were created.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It's true. If $5B went into developing a full and open instructional curriculum online, we'd be done by now and the whole world would be a better place. I'm not saying that this would fix all of our problems in education, but at least it would give kids who are ready and able to learn the access to an education. Most money in our educational system goes to kids who are either not ready or not able to learn. It's no wonder that with them, progress will be hard to see. I'd much rather see more money spent on educating girls in the third world, or at least those who are motivated to learn. I think they are much more important to the future of our planet than the unmotivated children of US rednecks and methheads.
I had a friend who was an education Ed.D. candidate. She did a lot of studies of studies and for the most part found that any new education initiative could have a large positive impact, but it was all the Hawthorne Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect Young, idealistic, teachers could make any new program work, but once it was filtered down to regular schools, there was no difference in student achievement. Study, after study, and basically the kids do as well in school and after as their parents did.
Putting money to redirect "how public education dollars are spent", isn't going to help, if we don't know how to do better.
You'd probably do better to judge a school based on how happy the students and parents are. If the S&P's are unhappy, fire the principle and try a new one until the "customers" are happy. Frankly, if the students are happy with school, and actually going, then learning will happen. You have to actively beat down a human to keep it from learning, but that's exactly what many schools do.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I get suspicious when people like Gates "leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent." Like those who believe schools should operate how they want schools to operate instead of how they should operate. There was a time when someone completes high school they have reasonable education to be an adult, though trade school or college will help. Instead these "big donors" are trying to form school kids into what they want to function at their companies. Though not necessarily a bad thing if done for the right reasons. Yes, corporations need intelligent employees but people should have a right and ability to pursue a career they have a personal interest instead of having to work $9/hr in IT.
Everyone has all kinds of ideas for school reform, but what did schools do before they became so "bad?" What was their methods of teaching? I wonder if some of these old people forgot what methods were used to make them successful. Or did they simply grow up in neighborhoods that had good schools and not experienced growing up in neighborhoods with bad schools. There is a huge difference in Palo Alto, CA school district (where many parents have college degrees) when compared to east San Jose school districts (where many parents are poor working class). For you that say, "tango sierra, they'll just have to work harder!" Be careful because poor uneducated can easily be recruited into gang activity, and that can lead to bigger problems.
My big gripe is they increase spending on prisons, TSA, etc. and decrease spending on schools so it should not be a surprise we'll have more young people going to jails instead of schools.
mfwright@batnet.com
there is a need for more freedoms in the economy, freedoms from government intervention, government subsidies, taxes, regulations.
If this is the goal, education is starting at ground zero. One of the fundamental tenants of the public education in the U.S. is that it is provided free of charge, paid for by tax dollars. If you turn that on its head and make parents pay for their children's education, there will be a vast class of uneducated children - who are themselves much less likely to be any kind of asset to the country, unless you think we're heading for a Soylent Green future?
Perhaps Gates should consider funding a skunkworks educational project for retired Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie, who was working on networked, self-paced computer assisted instruction in 1974 â" 36 years before Bill and Google discovered Khan Academy!"
To paraphrase Heinlein, who was paraphrasing someone else, "when it's time to railroad, people will build railroads" and the corollary "you can't railroad until it's time to railroad."
Networked computer instruction was a great idea back in the 70's, but the infrastructure wasn't really there to support it. Right now it's entirely possible and it's only entrenched notions about education that are holding it back. A couple decades more and in retrospect it will seem both obvious and inevitable.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
This point seems the most salient. While I have huge admiration for Gates's philanthropy, it seems he doesn't quite have the hang of it. In fact his willingness to cede control over his wealth (throw it away, so to speak) instead of managing it wisely seems foolish and irresponsible. The proper way to administer a trust fund can't be beyond him. Or have I missed his point? The very fact that such a successful capitalist would support an antithetical method of socialism (or is it totalitarianism?) is mindless. His same investment applied to founding a college of programming and computer science would ensure his goals for the next century at least.
Money is like air. You need enough to survive, too much and and you're blown away. If you don't have enough air, throwing more air at the problem seems like the right solution.
The trick is figuring out where the actual problem is. If you don't have enough money to hire a great Principle or Teacher for your school, you might settle for Nth best. Then after the school is filled with dysfunctional admins and teachers, giving those people more money certainly won't fix the problem.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
You honestly believe that this recession was caused by *OVER* regulation? HAHAHAHAHA
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Bill Gates has been doing pretty good lately. If I owned MS stock I'd be pissed he wasn't still there putting this level of effort into my investment.
He's done some excellent work with vaccines and malaria. He started an initiative on sanitation that likely could be transformative in poverty struck areas, and now he may have the resources to turn the goliath that is public education towards a direction that helps students instead of the current path that aims at creating unthinking easily controlled sheep.
He is on the path to becoming the most influential philanthropist in a hundred years.
Or the kids that are the problem. It's the school boards and administration in most cities that is the problem. The administrations is full of failed middle-management idiots, that have transferred their complete lack of skills into D-level politics.
And the school board is usually nothing but lunatics just trying to draw a paycheck, and hoping to somehow jumpstart a political career.
And, of course, there are kickbacks and deals at every level.
Basically, every school district in the country is representative of the absolute WORST aspects of government corruption and incompetence. And it's not the system, it's the people.
VOTE IN YOUR SCHOOL BOARD ELECTIONS! Throw the idiots out. Run for the board yourself. That's the only way.
The problem with the United States is that people are deluded by the belief that throwing money at a problem will fix it. The thing is that the US already spends way more per student than any other developed nation. Teachers and school administrators are certainly part of the equation, but the true source of the problem are the parents and popular culture. American culture glorifies the celebrity and the athlete. It creates the expectation that a person can get rich overnight and that everyone will be fabulously wealthy. When isn't there some celebrity dipshit on television flaunting their wealth? There's no idolization of the hard working individual, of the person who studies hard in school. American parents care more about having a child who is popular than they are having one who's studious. The mindset that is endlessly perpetuated is that you should do something you love, because it's fun.
Look at Asian kids going through the same exact school system. They consistently excel. Not because they're innately smarter than anyone else. Live in Asia any length of time and you'll be cured of that misconception. Asians excel because from birth their parents are pushing them to work hard and do well in school. As a friend explained to me, your average American parent is happy with a child getting B's in school whereas an Asian parent will tolerate nothing less than straight A's. So from the start a child is learning that good enough is all they need to do to satisfy people.
Every single thing they do is aimed at ensuring their kids not only do well but can get into a good university. This means everything from no computers or televisions in the bedroom to no socializing during the school year. And the parents are always aware of what their kids are doing. Too many American parents are too concerned with giving their kids freedom, with being their buddies.
And this has nothing to do with the academic system in Asia because most of these Asians kids were born in the States and are growing up here. For a while I considered moving back to Asia and for a variety of reasons stayed here. One of those reasons was the school system here versus in Asia. The thing with the American system is that it's problems can be easily countered with parental involvement. In Asia, on the other hand, there is little that can be done to address the problems there. Asian schools still suffer the problem of focusing on rote memorization, parroting the teacher, and a fixation on taking tests. Study schools are still huge there. After school kids go to these cram schools in the evening with the purpose of studying to pass tests more effectively. School there is a lot more oppressive. I suppose the upside to all that is that at least they're still very focused on academics.
And of course, the final piece here is that when Asians choose careers they consistently choose those which will ensure the greatest success. They're much less likely to choose a career that merely feels good. So this means that they get into finance, technology or healthcare. But even those who don't go that route, when they've had such a strong work ethic instilled in them ultimately find another path to success, even if they've started off in construction. Where your average individual will remain stuck working for someone else indefinitely, they'll find a way to grow to the point that they've got their own thriving business, as is the case with a good friend of mine. And the funny thing is that I've known Asians who've been fully Americanized, and they pretty much end up in the same situation as the average American; they've lost the formula for success.
The thing here is that these techniques are especially important for a child growing up in lower to middle-class environments. These are the kids who are less likely to be exposed to successful role models. A kid growing up in an upper-class neighborhood has little to worry about. The success of everyone around them will rub off on them, and if it doesn't, well, they're connected enough that they wi
But if you think you can fix a problem with money (or just money), you are in for a rude awakening.
Tell that to the New Jersey State Legislature about Abbott Districts like the one you referred to.
I think, you can deduce from the nature of the story, that the second had much better standardized test scores and college acceptance.
But hey, if you needed it spelled out, that deduction is correct.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
School priorities are still screwed up. To put this in perspective: At my school, I was a member of the Quiz Bowl and Deabte teams both. And in terms of the attention we got from the school newspaper, announcements, and so forth, it was, quite literally, about 10% of the coverage that our sports teams got.
Education was clearly a second priority at times - teachers showing up baked, obsession with authority, and, of course, not much prize placed on student interaction with the lessons. School's a job for kids and it's always such a rare and special thing for a teacher who has kids that 'love to learn' - bloody hell! Maybe if we started treating the teachers well and clearly explaining their jobs, this would be [i]every[/i] class. They teach stuff that's interesting as hell! American History and Civics? You've got Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, FDR, JFK...Chemistry? Work more experiments in, kids like combining stuff, especially if it looks pretty, explosive, or shiny. English? Focus less on literary classics (You know, which let you not update your lesson plan for 20 years) and work in books that the kids will actually like to read and discuss them.
Teachers will half-ass it because their pay and direction are half-assed; they're treated more like bureaucrats then educators, so why are we surprised that throwing money at the problem without fixing the broken fundamentals has resulted in little improvement? The only reason that you see the H1-B discrepancy is the monumental difference in effort that comes from living in a harder life, having more pressure, but that's not the only way to succeed - good teachers can produce these results from all students. We just don't have, and don't encourage, good teaching.
His take on Rupurt Murdoch?
Is Murdoch an 'average businessman'? No, he is part of government system. An 'average' businessman is not part of the government system.
Anything and everything that is wrong with the world is the governments fault. If a business fails, it's the governments intervention. If a businessman does something illegal, it's the government's regulation that made him do it. Rober baron? Obviously he's secretly part of the "government system".
If a volcano explodes, he'd probably blame the government for not allowing the free market to appeal to pseduo-volconologist fear-mongers that would have warned us about this.
One of the things that's stunning about all the education reform right now is that there's a critical group not at the table right now: teachers! This top down reform isn't working because these are solutions coming from people who aren't in the trenches actually teaching kids. As a teacher (6–8 grade English, which means the No Child Left Behind target is squarely painted on my forehead) I'm stunned at the obtuseness of all these solutions.
Testing kids to death and then evaluating teachers based on their students' solutions is a terrible strategy. This automatically creates a conflict of interest. Teachers won't want to work with challenging students. Teachers will teach to the test instead of “teaching” in order to avoid negative reviews. Why would I as a teacher even want to teach challenging students if I could very likely get fired if they don't do well?
There are many good ideas out there for improving education, but please let's stop shoving “improvements” down teachers' throats. This won't work.
The solutions that work cost money (some): smaller classes, better pay for teachers, more teacher autonomy to help students in need and to make decisions that help education as a whole. Yes, this means you'll have to trust teachers to make those good decisions, but these *are* the experts. (Yes, I know teachers' unions can be a drag to work with. I'm in one, and even as a member I find it a drag sometimes.) People get involved with teaching to help young people, teach, and to share what they know, not to collect a huge paycheck. Let's let them come up with the solutions, not people who haven't spent thousands of hours in front of the classroom.
I don't begrudge Mr. Gates's involvement with education and his money is certainly welcomed. However, even though I am a former IT worker, I wouldn't humiliate myself by telling him how to program and build operating systems. That's his business and expertise. However, if he's going to involve himself and spend some money in my profession, perhaps he should talk to more experts. Hint: they're not behind desks or collecting consultant fees; they're standing in front of children every day, teaching.
-Ian
www.teachthefantastic.blogspot.com
... is nearly limitless. Honestly.
Here's a guy who is smart. He has a LOT of money because he knew how to use his brain at the right time and right place in history. Now, being older, he wants to do good with his money. Great. Or not so much... because given the cultural assumption that multi-billionaires understand something about the world that the rest of us don't, his quests are followed and worshiped as good steps. But lets look back at his severe missteps in his attempts to reform education:
1) Scholarships: The whole effort start with giving away hundreds of millions of dollars in competitive scholarships. That's really nice, but here's the thing about competitive scholarships-- they almost always go to the kids that are already destined for higher education funding. He was helping the easily helped. Of COURSE this wasn't going to change the state of education in the USA. He was/is just holding the status quo.
2) Building Super Schools: Bill funded/helped to fund tech super schools. As Bill knows from the planned obsolescence model, those schools aren't fiscally sustainable because all the high tech hardware needs upkeep, security, and replacement regularly. That means more cost for the schools. Bad move, Bill.
3) Charter Schools: Bill, despite his great intentions, has fallen into the latest fallacy trap: "Private business survives on lean budgets and thus public service has something to learn." But there's a problem... private/corporate businesses are "lean" in their budgets because their shareholders demand evermore short-term profits at the cost of service and employees. Turning public schools (where the shareholders are effectively the students) into genuine private businesses opens up schools to the profit motive and thus low-investment teachers and cherry-picked students. So what's the plan when stocks take a dive...?
Bill, here's a tip: Go through an MA in education program and get your California Teachers' Credentials. Experience the massive bureaucracy and cost associated with becoming a teacher and ask yourself, "Who in the world is willing to do this to themselves... and how do we make sure more are able to do it?" What do I mean? Well, here's a quick walkthrough of the path to becoming a well-prepared teacher:
***Take your SATs during high school = ~$75
***Apply to undergraduate programs at 4-year universities = ~$60 each
***Get accepted, go through college, graduate with B or better average = $125,000 (UC education)
***Prepare for and take the GRE, CBEST, and CSET (in your planned area of teaching) = $250
***Explore the completely non-standardized MA/PhD world, tons of websites, more phone calls and emails, and find the right MA Education program for you. Apply to many and prepare to move house. ~$80 each. Don't forget to save money for all that travel for interviews you'll have to do!
***Complete your MA and get your credentials over 2-3 years while also teaching for free = ~$50,000
***Congratulations, you're a mostly-prepared teacher with temporary credentials and have only spent $200,000.
***Additional fees: $55 per copy of your credential (you'll need multiple), the cost of fingerprinting in each county you apply as a teacher (non-transferable).
***Start your job search in a state that recently had MAJOR teacher downsizing. Hope for a 75+% appointment but take whatever you can. Prepare to move house.
***Start work making $30,000-$40,000. Don't settle in to your new apartment. There are still more cuts and teacher tenure is under attack. Oh, expect to pay $1,500 out-of-pocket for your class supplies because neither your students nor your school can afford to buy them.
***3 years pass, and you have to complete your credentialing. You take more classes, more tests, get evaluated. You've spent $4,500 on school supplies since starting.
And it goes on.
Bill, if you REALLY want to change education for the better, here are two ways to do so:
1) Affect the poorest and lowest performing children. Fund the fixing of thei
I would suggest the best way to help teachers is to make the wages competitive.
And before everyone jumps all over this on a "TEACHERS GET OVERPAID", stop and do the math:
For a pre-schooler, it's going to cost you around $600 a month for day care. That's about $30 a day to supervise and entertain a child.
A teacher is expected not only to do those two things, but also educate them. And they're doing this for a much larger group (your day care is required to have one staff for every ten kids here; your kid's classroom will be double or triply as large).
Do you think your kid's teacher is making $900 a day? (30 kids x $30/day)?
I completely disagree with your assessment. My parents have been teachers for 30+ years, and it is the parent's attitude not their wealth or free time that affects their success.
In fact, very often the children of poor parents are often the best ones because their parents actually discipline them. They want their kids to succeed and reinforce what needs to be done for this to happen.
Then there is another group of poor, the fatalistic, who don't believe it is possible to move up, and who don't want to do anything but stay drunk/drugged and skirt along. Their kids have the same attitude seeing school as a waste of time, and look down on students who do well.
There is no difference in time/money between the two groups above, just attitude.
Likewise, rich parents with plenty of time and money sometimes use that to enrich their kid's education, but just as many ignore their kids in favor of their career or defend everything they do wrong rather than discipline them. Again, time/money isn't the difference here. It is the quality of the parent.
You can not have computer illiterate educators and users and get educational improvements using computer technology. Your Foundation's donations not only lock them into Microsoft products but do nothing to educate the educators in even the basics of computer operating system usage. You've gone great though selling them on teaching "The Word", "The Excel" and "The Powerpoint" so you've locked another generation into only knowing products and not concepts of word processing, spreadsheets, or presentations. You've also done a great job at instilling fear of the computer by doing nothing to educate on the concepts of file systems, printing systems nor even general desktop metaphoric use. File - Open and File - Create New are perfect because they first must start "The Word", ie _your_ application. And the 3 or 4 other methods of getting new files created must be the right way to do it considering the 10s of millions you've spent in User Design Pattern research over the years.
And I just loved how you blasted the OLPC for its poor design and unfamiliar software yet turn around and claim that a standard Windows desktop is all they should have to know how to use.
So you can not have it both ways Bill. You either educate the educators and people learn concepts and standard usage patterns which expose them to the ability to use other platforms or you continue keeping them ignorant and spending your billions to keep them generating more money for you by locking them into Microsoft products.
Besides, it surprises me that you and your Foundation are even allowed to pedal Microsoft software being so financially tied at the hip. I had thought there were laws against such conflicts of interest.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Gates and Broad and whoever else controls education reform direction have an assumption in common. Namely that poverty doesn't matter. To prove this, they point to KIPP schools where great test scores are achieved. More on that in a minute. I don't know much about what else they accomplish at KIPP schools. I have a vague notion that they excel in performance arts as well, which is great. Anytime a child gets arts experience in school, it's a good thing.
I have a few major problems with this, mostly that students are selected to go to KIPP (self-selection counts) and that all they demonstrate with high test scores is success on tests. It could just be gaps in my knowledge about how much success kids have in KIPP. But the self-selection and ability of KIPP schools to dismiss students both undermine the idea's scalability.
Until we address America's 23%-and-climbing rate of child poverty, the scores posted by poor students are going to continue to drag the average down. I don't mean to be cruel here, but scores by non-poor students are generally fine. In some cases, better than many countries'. Poor kids need some basic needs met that are traditionally not the responsibility of schools. You're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs I hope. Throwing more money at the administrators or putting in bonus programs for schools (as in NYC) will not accomplish this. There was a guy in Harlem with a charter I think who put in a dental office in the next building over because his students were not getting dental care. That's a start.
School reform efforts that ignore or dismiss concerns about poverty will always fail.
Note that this is still better than the conservative vision of school reform, where the greatest resources are spent on the highest (student) achievers and everyone else gets enough education to serve as their working class.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."