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The Gates Foundation Engages Its Critics
sam_handelman writes "The Gates Foundation responded to the critiques of its policies (previously discussed here) by inviting its critics at Education Week Teacher to a dialog on its own site. Edweek blogger Anthony Cody answered the challenge. The two sides negotiated a five-part series of post and counterpost, which can be viewed on both sites. Previous exchanges include Cody's question, Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It?, and an answer from the Gates Foundation's Global Press Secretary, Chris Williams, Poverty Does Matter — But It Is Not Destiny. The final round of the dialog has begun, and is available for comment on the Gates Foundation's own blog. Slashdot readers may not know about Gates' sponsorship of specific edutech industry partners, such as Rupert Murdoch's Wireless Generation, and Pearson Education. Cody poses tough questions, including, 'Can the Gates Foundation reconsider and reexamine its own underlying assumptions, and change its agenda in response to the consequences we are seeing?' According to the agreement, the Gates Foundation will answer in the coming week, concluding the series."
F-you. Comments like these are so, so easy from arm-chair quarterbacks who look at the world through a pin-hole lens. The Gates Foundation might not donate to causes that you believe in, and it might provide tax shelters for some individuals (based on current U.S. Tax Law I might add), but I'd rather see the kind of work that they do and the funds they provide than nothing at all.
OF COURSE their corporate investments are larger than their givings. this is how foundations without a steady stream of new income work.
they do their charitable work using their investment incomes.
Did I read that wrong or did you just day that you became a conservative because you were tired of liberals telling you you were smart? If so, you're still not doing any of your own thinking.
Economics scientifically proven!?! HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA that's a knee slapper!
Not say, a proven scientific theory with decades of incredibly complex research to back it up as a model of how wealth flows and is generated.
A theory on how wealth flows - interesting. It's an interesting theory - wealth flows up - the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The rich fuck the poor and middle class to get richer. The rich got rich by lieing and cheating. Hard work? Everyone works hard! To get rich you have to fuck thy neighbor - up the ass.
Is Capitalism evil? Yes. Is it the worst system on Earth? No.
It's the best economic system we bald apes have. Which is fucking pathetic. After all these centuries, Capitalism is the best we can come up with?
We humans are stupid.
Yeesh, what an IA mess. Duplicate blog posts and comment threads across multiple blogs, duplicate author names on blog posts... and if there's an index to the entire discussion, I couldn't find it. So I made my own.
Here are all the posts and responses thus far:
1:
Anthony Cody: How Do We Build the Teaching Profession?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/07/dialogue_with_the_gates_founda.html
July 23, 2012
Ivrin Scott responds for the Gates Foundation: How Do We Build the Teaching Profession?
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/07/A-Response-to--How-Do-We-Build-the-Teaching-Profession
July 30, 2012
2:
Vicki Phillips writes for the Gates Foundation: How Do We Consider Evidence of Student Learning in Teacher Evaluation?
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/How-Do-We-Consider-Evidence-of-Student-Learning-in-Teacher-Evaluation
August 7, 2012
Anthony Cody responds: How do we Consider Evidence of Learning in Teacher Evaluations?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/responding_to_the_gates_founda.html
August 8, 2012
3:
Anthony Cody posts: Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/can_schools_defeat.html
August 13, 2012
Chris Williams responds for the Gates Foundation: Poverty Does Matter--But It Is Not Destiny
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/Poverty-Does-MatterBut-It-Is-Not-Destiny
August 20, 2012
4
Irvin Scott for the Gates Foundation: K-12 Education: An Opportunity Catalyst
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/K12-Education-An-Opportunity-Catalyst
August 28, 2012
Anthony Cody responds: What is the Purpose of K-12 Education?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/Gates_Foundation_Dialogue.html
August 29, 2012
5:
Anthony Cody asks: What Happens When Profits Drive Reform?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/09/the_dialogue_with_the_gates_fo.html
September 03, 2012
Gates response to come.
The debt has increased approximately $5.4 trillion since President Obama took office on January 20, 2009.
And none of it was because of the wars, tax cuts, etc., starting before that date.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/06/07/238653/animation-tax-cuts-deficit-debt/ (watch animation)
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/cbppdebtchart.jpg (static display of same plot)
http://crooksandliars.com/files/vfs/2011/06/cbpp_deficit_factors_2011.jpg
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/govt-spending-per-capita.jpg
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/assets_c/2011/07/24editorial_graph2-popup-thumb-560x622-58477.gif
http://crooksandliars.com/files/vfs/2012/02/wsj_deficit_obama_2013.png
So, before you talk about how shockingly the debt has risen in the past four years, tell us about the prior four years, and the policies from 2001-2008 that are still costing us out the wazoo.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Did I read that wrong or did you just day that you became a conservative because you were tired of liberals telling you you were smart? If so, you're still not doing any of your own thinking.
Think what might have happened if they had told him he was dumb.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Stripped of the invective, AC is 100% correct - did you actually READ any of the articles above?
In either story?
The fact that the Gates Foundation can do more-or-less whatever it wants (Karl Rove is an even more egregious example) and deduct that from their taxes is a minor problem. The real problem is that they're using their combination of leveraged money and free P.R. from fools like you to take over vast quantities of [b]our tax dollars[/b] and redirect that money into their coffers and the coffers of their allies like Pearson Education, Murdoch, etc.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
A lot of the reforms the Gates Foundation has brought about in public education are actually bad. The "Criticism" section in that Wikipedia article doesn't begin to describe it. The best explanation you can easily get is by doing a Google or Wikipedia search for "Diane Ravitch" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Ravitch and her longest explanation I know of, outside of her books, is her New York Review of Books article.
She refers to Gates as a member of the "billionaire boys club" that is "reforming" education according to some fads that they picked up, which aren't supported by scientific evidence. Ravitch was an assistant secretary of education under GHW Bush and Bill Clinton. She started out believing in charter schools, free market incentives, high-stakes testing, and all the other neocon reforms. But she said that when the data came out, it didn't support those reforms.
The one factor that is most strongly associated with student achievement, according to Ravitch, is family income. So when you reward teachers for raising student test scores, you're mostly rewarding them for having high-income students, and when you fire them for missing the test targets, you're firing them for teaching in poverty schools.
The Gates education reforms depend heavily on high-stakes testing. But according to repeated analyses, the tests they use today to fire "underperforming" teachers are statistically invalid. There was a debate over that in Science magazine last year, in which the author who was defending the tests admitted that they weren't valid, and his argument was that we should continue to use them and try to improve them.
New York City gave all its math and English teachers rankings based on their students' scores in a standardized test (which wasn't scientifically validated), and education commissioner Joel Klein made the results for individual teachers public, despite the risk of unfairly shaming teachers. One fundamental problem is that they don't have enough statistical power to evaluate individual teachers. A science teacher did a standard statistical analysis, and he found out that they had an essentially random distribution. He made the point that every teacher knows that beginning teachers improve a lot from their first to second year (conversely, most teachers agree that they had a lot of trouble in their first year). But yet, when you compare the scores of the teachers in their first year to the same teachers in their second year, the correlation was random. According to these tests, teachers don't improve with experience. It doesn't make sense. And yet, NYC is firing teachers on the basis of these tests.
Financial incentives and bonuses for teachers have been tested in randomized, controlled studies -- and they don't work. Students don't perform any better when their teachers get bonuses for higher test scores. OTOH, it's hard to be a dedicated teacher if you don't know whether you'll have a job in 10 years, your pay is going down because NCLB has destroyed your union, and politicians like Joel Klein attack you, call you incompetent, and humiliate you.
If you needed proof that these reforms aren't working, look at Michelle Rhee's experience in the Washington DC schools system. Her followers were touting her as a genius who was tough on students, got rid of incompetent teachers and principals, and rewarded the master teachers and principals who raised the test scores with generous financial bonuses. They it turned out that the teachers and principles were raising their tests scores by cheating, which was picked up by the internal verification procedures in the tests -- and Rhee knew about it. There have been cheating scandals in high-stakes testing schools around the country. When you fire teachers who don't raise test scores, what do you expect them to do?
Bill Gates and the other "reformers" have turned teaching from a comfortable, respected job where people were paid well but not extravagantly, and motivated by
Teachers' ability is correlated with student results. The tests that they use to measure teachers' ability is not correlated with student results. The same teachers rank in the top 10% one year, and the bottom 10% the next year. Obviously the tests aren't measuring the teachers' ability.
The effect of student poverty is far greater than the effect of teachers' ability. The test scores are primarily measuring student poverty, according to Ravitch.
Teachers' ability is correlated with experience. Teachers who have been teaching for 20 years can get better results than charter-school teachers who are on the job for 3 years and quit, as many of them do. If you want teachers to stay on the job for 20 or 30 years, you have to pay them enough to raise a family and send their own kids to college.
This is Obama's economy, his policies, his executive orders, his parties control of the senate and house - for two years a supermajority.
You mean his supermajority for four months?
http://washingtonindependent.com/74033/the-four-month-supermajority
The Four-Month Supermajority
By David Weigel
Friday, January 15, 2010 at 9:03 am
In the final stretch of the Massachusetts special election for Senate, Republican candidate Scott Brown has focused on “restoring balance” to Washington. He’ll be the “41st vote” to filibuster legislation; the Democrats’ hold on 60 votes has let liberals run the country into the ground. “That’s not what the founders intended,” he said Monday during the final debate.
The irony is that if Democrats lose the seat, they will have had a working 60-seat majority for all of four months — much of which was spent with the Senate in recess. They opened the Congress in January with 58 votes, counting the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), not counting Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), whose razor-thin victory was held up by lawsuits from former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.). On April 28, 2009, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) switched to the Democratic Party, bringing the Democrats to 59 votes without Franken. When Franken was finally sworn in on into the Senate on July 7, 2009, the badly ailing Kennedy was unable to vote and break filibusters
Two flaws in your premise. The first is that NYC is firing teachers based of statistically irrelevant results. The truth is that they've finally got an excuse to finally fire misdemeanor level bad teachers. Felonies were, until this, the only way to get rid of a teacher, short of the completely unfair harass until they quit approach.
The second is that you have proposed no measurable way to determine if the students have learned anything. Standardized tests are bad, in the same way democracies are bad. There just hasn't been any better way demonstrated. I'd love to ditch the stress of standardized testing. However, I've got nothing else to measure, in any objective way, student learning. Essays? Standardized tests that measure vocabulary (parental income) and attention span. Orals? Not at all objective. Give me something to use.
You mean his supermajority for four months?
Shouldn't four months be long enough to fix eight years of fucking things up?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Cody claims teacher performance doesn't correlate with student achievement. I believe him. I don't agree with his assertions that schools are underfunded and couldn't educate poor students even with more funding.
There is even less correlation between cost per student and student performance than between teacher and student performance.http://www.npri.org/blog/does-more-spending-increase-student-performancehttp://www.reuters.com/article/2007/05/24/us-usa-education-spending-idUSN2438214220070524http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2012/03/02/opinion/doc4f51a55f28207547363660.txthttp://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Little-correlation-found-between-per-pupil-823833.php
It is common for urban poor school districts to cost much more per student than the surrounding suburbs. Look at Kansas City or Washington DC for stark examples.
Seriously, spending more than $10,000 per year per student is a travesty. A class with 30 students should not cost $300,000 and the money is not going to the teacher!
I agree, end the war on drugs and greatly reduce parent incarceration rates.
I agree, find employment for everybody that raises them above poverty.
I agree, support family planning, pre-natal care, nutrition, and free pre-school or head start.
But, it isn't poverty exactly or school financial resources that predict student performance. It's culture. There is an urban poor culture that doesn't exist among poor rural students, and the outcomes differ. How can we change the culture that devalues education? How can we change the violence and street power culture? How can we convince people not to have children that are later neglected and abused?
Sometimes central planning works, sometimes it doesn't.
In medicine, doctors use a lot of drugs, but don't know whether they work, or whether they're actually harmful. The best way to find out is with a randomized, controlled trial. For the most part, these trials are funded by government agencies. They collect the best experts in the country (or the world), figure out how to design and run the trial, and do it. In other words, they create a central authority to collect all the evidence and report their recommendations. They found out that a lot of drugs were actually killing more people than they were helping. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoetin_alfa
Then after they find out that the drug is killing people, there are still a lot of doctors who just want to continue using it, either out of habit, or because they make a lot of money out of it, or because they really believe in it. If you want to stop doctors from prescribing drugs that kill people, the first thing to do is to have a central authority, like a medical association or government agency, recommend against it. When you leave it to doctors to decide by themselves, you're more likely to die. When you leave it to patients to choose for themselves, they really don't know what they're doing. There have been good studies of this. Most patients can't make good medical decisions. Those who do know how to make decisions follow the recommendations of the central authority.
I'm using medicine as an example because I know more about medicine than education, and because in medicine, where peoples' lives are at stake and they have lots of money, they do very rigorous studies.
There are good central authorities and bad central authorities. If you have a central authority that makes their decisions on the basis of the scientific evidence, they can do a good job. If you have a central authority that ignores the scientific evidence and follows the politics, as the Obama and GWB administration did with Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, and firing teachers on the basis of test results, they're going to do a bad job (as they did).
There's no simple way to make policy. You can't just say, "Central authorities are good" or "Central authorities are bad." It depends on whether the central authority is independent enough from politics to collect the best-informed experts and follow their advice.
A lot of big science came from central authorities and probably wouldn't have been possible without a central authority. The Manhattan Project and NASA were highly centralized.
Like Communism, its an ideology that isn't practiced in reality anywhere. Mainly because the pure forms of both are unworkable and inhumane.
Let's take your drug idea. Here are a list of questions no central authority can answer:
Is the rigor that is applied today is too strict or not strict enough?
What is the optimal amount of rigor to benefit the most people?
What conditions can be permitted to try riskier drugs with possible benefits?
Is it more beneficial to have a long life or shorter more active one?
The problem is all of the answer to these questions depend on the individual.
If you read the New England Journal of Medicine (which you could call a central authority), you'd see lots of articles answering those very questions. Some of the authors that you can find with a Google search are Marcia Angell and Jeffrey Avorn. For many years, the FDA was under a lot of pressure to approve medical devices. Then they wound up with a few well-publicized disasters, like heart pacemakers where the electric leads got damaged and patients died. Now they're making specific changes in the standards they use for premarket testing. They approved drugs that produced improvements in secondary outcomes (like raising hemoglobin levels), but didn't improve primary outcomes (like death). They found out that more people died with the drug than without it, so the FDA went back to approving drugs based on primary outcomes like death.
Science can only find out how a treatment works on a population level, not on an individual level. If they randomize 100 people to a drug, and 30 of them die, and 100 people to a placebo, and 10 of them die, I wouldn't want to take that drug under those circumstances.
You may have a doctor who thinks he's smarter than everybody else in the world, and he believes that he can tell that the drug will work for you. You may have a gypsy fortune teller who believes that the drug will work for you. Go ahead and use it if you insist. The FDA won't stop you.
Most people would play by the numbers. And the only place to get those numbers is from a central authority.
Its hard to talk about this issue without talking about race, because quite frankly American urban poor are mostly minorities, and from that reduced group they are mostly African American.
With that in mind, my own feelings about this follow fairly closely with Bill Cosby. It is certainly a cultural problem more than an economic problem, and it wasn't always this way. There is a stark difference between black culture at the turn of the 20th century and the turn of the 21st century, and the difference has proven to be a great disadvantage. Some of it has institutional roots, but as both I and Bill Cosby believe, that is no excuse for what blacks are doing to themselves.
We cannot legislate this problem away, and there is good reason to believe that every time we try we just prolong the condition. The inner cities need strong inspirational leaders that accept no excuses. Things can't get better until people start being better.
"His name was James Damore."
So where is the magic land that actually has a capitalistic system?
Or is capitalism just impossible?
Capitalism isn't strictly impossible, any more than jumping off a building is impossible. However, like jumping, it is inherently self-contradictory; it can't be sustained infinitely, and the results when the system crashes aren't pretty.
Unfettered capitalism appears indistinguishable from feudalism: every initially free market rapidly devolves into one or two winners who become the equivalent of landlords. They own the land/property, everyone else becomes a serf who works and pays rent to the property-holder. This feudal situation with "late stage capitalism" of course ends up looking nothing like the early-stage "free market", but therein lies the self-contradiction. Then eventually the landlords overreach and you get a revolution or a disruptive technology, philosophy or outside invader, and this temporarily resets the game pieces. We see this happening in rapid acceleration in the intellectual property landscape in computing, but it looks much like the same forces that have been at work for thousands of years. Marx spotted this pattern but I think he was a bit off in his prescriptions on how to fix it; replacing capital with compulsion by force seems to do bad things for everyone involved.
It would be nice if there were more intellectual alternatives to the Austrian School than Marxism. I tend towards E F Schumacher, who isn't easy to pigeonhole as "left" or "right".
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Yes, it is what the "free market" leads to. The free market says the most efficient players will do the best and it is always more efficient to pay the government for regulations then to innovate and create a better product.
You just have to look at the amount of money being spent by "free enterprise" on the current American election with the most successful players spending money on both sides as whoever wins is a win for the capitalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
If you look at what Adam Smith wrote about a Free Market, his theoretical perfect form of "Free" included everybody having full knowledge of the situation when buying or selling. That's a condition that can only be met if someone (like a government) compels full disclosure. Trade Secrets are anti-free market by that definition, as are all sorts of other things like ultra high speed stock trading. As it stands today, most people who claim to be Capitalists think Smith meant 'Free' as in Government keeps out of their way and lets them take advantage of any disparity in knowledge as much as they possibly can, even though that's the exact opposite of what Smith described. So of course, Capitalism is impossible, in the same way as Democracy is impossible if most of the people claiming to want it think it means noble families rule by inherited right, or Anarchy is impossible if most of the people calling themselves Anarchists think it means the police have the right to detain people indefinitely without charges, or similar distortions of what people meant when they coined the words.
Beyond that, people very soon after Smith published 'The Wealth of nations' were pointing out that, if you can't get a quite perfect free market, but only get pretty close, Smith hadn't proved that that meant you got petty close to the 'Greatest Good for the Greatest Number' or any sort of 'best economic system' in any particular way. Smith's theories left the possibility that 'close to perfectly free' would make a really lousy society and make the vast majority of people miserable. (Sort of like 99% of a perfect vacation flight to Hawaii could mean in the end you had to jump out of the plane 12 miles out to sea and swim for shore with no life vest). So capitalism may be just impossible in another sense unless you can prove that the particular areas where the market is less than perfectly free, even if they seem trivial, don't have a vast negative impact.
Who is John Cabal?