Gates Paying Murdoch For System To Track U.S. Kids' School Progress

theodp writes "Discussing U.S. education in his 2012 Annual Letter, Bill Gates notes the importance of 'tools and services [that] have the added benefit of providing amazing visibility into how each individual student is progressing, and generating lots of useful data that teachers can use to improve their own effectiveness.' Well, Bill is certainly putting his millions where his mouth is. The Gates Foundation has ponied up $76.5 million for a controversial student data tracking initiative that's engaged Rupert Murdoch's Wireless Generation to 'build the open software that will allow states to access a shared, performance-driven marketplace of free and premium tools and content.' If you live in CO, IL, NC, NY, MA, LA, GA, or DE, it's coming soon to a public school near you."

Comments

We should already have this.

[tidepool]

Is it just me, or shouldn't we already have this by hiring competent, caring, understanding educators in the first place? Computer software to track an individuals 'performance' (Ie; a 'quantitative thing') is yet another step in the ass-backwardness of the modern educational system.

Why do we always forget that while test scores are important, they are FAR from the deterministic quality on which to judge an individuals intelligence or desire to learn?

We have not created successful AI; The human mind stuck inside a quality educator, no matter the level, cannot be boiled down to algorithms and pure statical data-sets.

But oh how we try. *sigh*.

Re:We should already have this.

[vlm]

Imagine $76 million dollars to fund MORE / 'Better' teachers? Willing to bet it does more to help the overall economy & education (current AND future, in the same price tag) than buying some silly software that's going to show us that we don't truly care anymore.

I don't think it would have much effect.

Half your budget goes to overhead and management right off the top. Darn near a 1:2 administrator / teacher ratio where I live, and administrators get paid more for doing basically nothing productive, and physical plant overhead is quite expensive (imagine what it would cost to rent an office building the size of a school per year). Then lets assume the average teacher pulls down $50K. Yes I'm well aware that their salary model is different than, say, private sector IT, so a newbie teacher starts out at $20K and gets a 5K raise every year for the rest of their career, whereas a IT dude gets $50K the first year and then gets a pay raise a little smaller than inflation for the rest of his career. Back to topic. It does nothing to hire one teacher for one year if they just get downsized next year, so lets pay them for 20 years to have a real, generational effect.

Thats 76M / 2 (half to overhead) / 50 (thousand bucks per teacher per year) / 20 years = no calculator necessary about 38 teachers for twenty years. So across a dozen states you just hired about one (big) elementary school, or perhaps an average sized middle school. Eh.

Re:We should already have this.

[TheLink]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/education/from-finland-an-intriguing-school-reform-model.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

"The fact that we have more race, ethnicity and economic heterogeneity, and we have this huge problem of poverty, should not mean we don't want qualified teachers - the strategies become even more important," Dr. Darling-Hammond said. "Thirty years ago, Finland's education system was a mess. It was quite mediocre, very inequitable. It had a lot of features our system has: very top-down testing, extensive tracking, highly variable teachers, and they managed to reboot the whole system."

Singapore and South Korea do about as well as Finland but with a different approach - the students do a lot more work, have more pressure and I think they have a higher student to teacher ratio (more expensive directly for the State). FWIW I think I'd prefer to be a Finnish student than a Singaporean student. The former apparently enjoy the process of being educated more.

Re:We should already have this.

[Registered Coward v2]

Is it just me, or shouldn't we already have this by hiring competent, caring, understanding educators in the first place?

I know one of those - a special ed teacher. She truly loves her kids and and does whatever she can to help them; but she is caught in system that says she *must* teach the same curriculum as for regular ed kids. Never mind that her kids, after a week of teaching them the color red, forget what it is as soon as they learn blue; she must teach a specified curriculum. The kids do not have to learn it, she must however prove she exposed them to each part of it. So, instead of being taught skills they can use in life they sit through lessons that they'll never remember. She tries hard to make them interesting and appropriate, but it is frustrating. I would not be surprised when she qualifies for retirement she decides to quit and do something else; not because she doesn't like teaching or isn't good at it but the system seems to be designed to make it a miserable experience. Add in pay cuts despite signing a contract at the start of the year and parents who expect 24 by 7 availability (she gets emails on Christmas and New Years Day) and it's no wonder teachers leave the profession or simply give up and coast to retirement.

We truly do not value education; and in the end get what we deserve.

Murdoch Political Agenda

[Anonymous Coward]

What really worries me is Murdoch's general push into the field of education. The man has already succeeded in indoctrinating an entire generation of adult Republicans into his own twisted version -- a version that has neither served conservatism nor America well. Is he going to start with the children now?

Re:Murdoch Political Agenda

[RazorSharp]

You're wrong on every point. Am I surprised? No.

Your wiki quote is cute. You left out this part:

Hearst was a supporter of Adolf Hitler from 1934 until 1938

Regarding Duranty: No, I don't think anything could have been done about the famine. Diplomacy would do nothing to sway the Soviets. Why would it? And how would it do anything? A famine means there's not enough food. When there's not enough food there's just not enough food. The Soviets just didn't want their dirty laundry aired. It was 1933. No one was going to help the Soviets. It would just have been bad press - "look how bad communism is!"

Regardless, Hearst is still a much more appropriate analog to Murdoch.

Concerning Iraq: Saddam Hussein complied with every single U.S. request leading up to the war. When he submitted an inventory of his arsenal, Bush claimed that it was inaccurate because WMDs weren't on the list. Upon invasion that inventory looked to be pretty damn accurate.

What failed to sell peace was FUD. It was a textbook example. People were scared and uncertain and Fox News fueled that FUD as much as they could. Other media outlets failed by not standing up to all the nonsense, afraid they'd look unpatriotic, but at least they didn't actively pursue war.

The "serious thoughts" coming from the anti-war movement were drowned out by jingoism, racism, and fear. Right after 9/11 Bill Maher said, "we've been the cowards, launching cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away, that's cowardly." Not long after he show was canceled. The Bush administration, Murdoch, and others on the far right successful used a national hysteria to stifle individual liberties, empower their oligarchy, and effectively wag the dog. The fact that Americans were willing to put up with blatant censorship post-9/11 (banning songs on the radio!) shows just how irrational the general populace was between September 2001 up to around 2005. In your case, the irrationality seems to be a permanent state.

Nothing Good can come out of a Murdoch Venture

[dryriver]

This man and his sprawling NewsCorp media empire have almost single-handedly ruined/corrupted objective journalism, and done so across multiple countries where NewsCorp is active. Nothing good can come from allowing Rupert Murdoch anywhere near schools and educational institutions. His signature reckless profiteering and lack of a conscience/values will likely corrupt the education process, too, not enhance it. I can't believe that Bill Gates is teaming up with Murdoch... I was under the impression that Bill had gone all "good guy philanthropist". Maybe I was wrong about that... But seriously, no venture owned by Rupert Murdoch should be allowed within a mile or so of a school, or of any other institution frequented by kids. This man will just try to spread his twisted, f^cked up neocon-ultra-jingo-conservative values to school children, given the chance. Don't do it, Bill. Whatever you are trying to accomplish, its not worth collaborating with this news-bully/snakeoil salesman/jingoist warmonger. Simply... don't... do it!

This is dangerous

[gweihir]

Learning is an individual process. Strong focus on "metrics" hinders progress and produces educated morons that can score high on tests but cannot do anything else well and do not have any real understanding on how things work. One reason is that the metrics typically used strongly promote learning facts without understanding them. The only place such people can perform well is on bureaucracies, i.e. in jobs where their main task is to decrease the performance of others. This technology allows even better implementation of that fallacy.

The only way to improve education is by improving the teachers. And, yes, that means firing bad and mediocre teachers and hiring good ones. Of course they will be more expensive and will need significant freedom to teach as they see fit, i.e. no parent influence. (A single moron parent can ruin a whole course if they are given influence....) Nothing of that sort seems likely to happen in a country so backwards that evolution is actually a disputed subject.

It will morph into Conformity Monitoring

[Anonymous Coward]

Marks will not be awarded for raw intelligence in math, chem and the hard sciences. It will turn into a sheeple score. How well you fit in as a corporate cog. Shut up, don't rock the boat, kiss the whip that beats you. How compliant you are. How much abuse and corruption you can endure, without blowing the whistle. How well can you turn your head away from the deaths at Foxconn. How well can you spin death, corruption, pollution in the media.

All you shit disturbers here on slashdot would have been marked and seperated out long before you every reached the second grade.

Jobs and Wozniak would never be hired by the Modern Apple HR department.

The kids that instintively say Hell No to the brutal psyops that marks industrial schooling, the Einstiens, the gentle geniuses, the shy creative types, everyone who was marked, scarred and terrorize by the years of indoctrination called education.

Public school is an awful place. To do well in it, 'WELL' being defined by Murdoch and Gates, that to me is some kind of new and awfull hell. Evil of a brand new kind. Evil worthy of a new word.

To everyone out there still in school, you have my deepest sympathy and greatest support. I cannot even imagine how awful and soul destroying it is now.