Finding the Next Generation of Teachers With "Innovative Microsoft Ads"

theodp (442580) writes "Back in 2011, the U.S. Dept. of Education delegated teacher recruitment to Microsoft (RFP, pdf). 'The decision to turn over TEACH to [Microsoft] Partners in Learning serves to expand the already outsized influence Gates and his fortune have on public education,' wrote the Washington Post at the time. So, 'what happens when a public institution in a democracy — the US Department of Education — outsources its goal of recruiting good teachers to a private industry?' Well, in addition to Teach.org and redundant social media efforts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Linkedin, and YouTube, the U.S. is now relying on 'Innovative Microsoft Advertising to Recruit the next Generation of Teachers'. From the press release, 'The Ad Council and TEACH have formed a unique outreach campaign with Microsoft's Advertising team in an effort to recruit the next generation of teachers who will drive innovation and redefine teaching in K-12 classrooms. Microsoft donated over 125 million impressions across Xbox 360, Windows 8, and MSN in order to encourage consumers to rediscover teaching through interactive ad units. This media effort is an extension of the Ad Council and TEACH's public service advertising (PSA) campaign, Make More...Throughout March, consumers were able to engage with TEACH "NUads on Xbox", via gesture, voice or controller on their Xbox 360 consoles...Most recently, Microsoft leveraged their Windows 8 platform to provide a unique experience to consumers, enabling them to navigate through a series of questions to help "discover their true passion," along with the opportunity to play challenging mind and word games, such as a word scramble and tangrams.' Check out the demo of the Windows 8 platform experience [YouTube], in which a person is advised 'You'd Make a Great Science & Tech Teacher,' on the basis of a 'Personality Quiz' consisting of five dragged-and-dropped photos."

Comments

Gates wants your children

[globaljustin]

M$ shouldn't be allowed anywhere **near** children.

Gates is trying to end public education with his charter school fund.

This stupid, reductive, publicity-focued initiative is just another in an expensive line of turds M$ has dropped in the education punch bowl

Get these data-gathering, exploitative, anti-user businesses AWAY FROM OUR KIDS

As a former teacher, the problem is that people want to spend money on ***EVERYTHING*** other than what will help educate children: public schools with the highest-paid, best trained teachers in the world

Without the above, no ammount of tech, "social media" or "big data" will ever make even a dent in the problem

Re:Gates wants your children

[Anonymous Coward]

Check your math, 60K for a teacher for 9 months work, means no money for 3 months.

Re:Gates wants your children

[Anonymous Coward]

Most teachers spend the summer teaching summer school, or attending conferences or continuing education, a lot of summer related educational expenses are also unpaid. I know one or two teachers every year (our of the hundreds I deal with) that take a two+ month long holiday, but I'll be that those numbers are the same for most people in most industries, with the difference being that you can expense your educational conferences and continuing education in the non-public teaching realm.

60k is good but not great and if you're intelligent enough to be able to teach my child, you're intelligent enough to know you can make more for less work in a field that doesn't subject you to abuse a good portion of the time.

Re:Gates wants your children

[stms]

As a former teacher, the problem is that people want to spend money on ***EVERYTHING*** other than what will help educate children: public schools with the highest-paid, best trained teachers in the world

That's good for the few who can afford the best trained teachers in the world. Good teacher are unfortunately an inherently limited resource. You're right that in the short term big data will probably not help our children to learn much. In the long term however I think that it can help students by understanding their needs better than their teachers ever could. Check out what CGP Grey has to say about this.

Re:Gates wants your children

[Anonymous Coward]

You may want to watch the following video from an *actual* teacher...
    So You Want to be a Teacher? -- Time

It is only one of his "So You Want to be a Teacher" videos that give an insider's perspective on the teaching profession for those of you who think teaching is a normal 8a-4p job, I have never heard of another job that requires so much mandatory, unpaid, extra-curricular work in my life.

Just ask yourself if you would take this job for say... $60k/year.

Re:Gates wants your children

[Anonymous Coward]

Before I met my wife, a teacher, I might have assumed the same thing you did -- 9 months of pay, with 3 months vacation (actually it's only 2 plus a few extra days; school years usually start in late August here now). She works 3-4 hours, on average, extra each day -- getting up super-early to get supplies (she teaches TWO 'prep-heavy' classes -- horticulture and art, since no one wanted to teach hort and she had to revive the school's program single-handedly). It's like every class is a science lab. Then she stays late to do more prep that she won't be able to get to the next morning.. organizing field trips with reams of paperwork (at our school board the teachers have been getting more and more of the paperwork duties, admin used to do it but now the board is in full CYA-mode after some field trip incidents -- oh did I mention she had to get her school bus license since they cut all of the drivers?)

She pays for snacks out of her (our) own pockets a few days each week, so the kids have something before lunch as many of them don't get a good breakfast -- they are impossible to teach otherwise. None of this gets her any overtime or time-in-lieu or counts against her yearly class budget. Honestly with all the extra time she pulls she has legitimately banked up that 2-month vacation.

Teachers should indeed be paid well. Or, get many, many more teachers so the workload isn't a total burnout, and the teachers can work regular hours. Either way, more needs to be spent (in the RIGHT places, not administration or 'metrics' bullshit). If the paperwork, workload and class sizes were reduced, perhaps teachers could be you know, teachers.

In Canada BTW.. I can't imagine how it must be in the US.

Re:Gates wants your children

[Intrepid imaginaut]

You start running into the gold rush problem then. Pay too well for a job and you get people interested only in the pay, not doing the job well. This is especially true in jobs where it's difficult to measure performance.

In any case the best teachers in the world are usually the child's parents. There's a direct correlation between how well kids do at school and how much time and effort their parents put into helping them at home, not to mention the general happiness and security of the home.

If anything funding should go into making parents aware of this and giving them time off work for example to help their children succeed academically.

Re:Gates wants your children

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, some states pay well for teachers. However, the national average is $53k and the average for my home state (NC) has finally increased to a whopping $45k. The 2013-14 salary schedule (PDF link below) indicates that entry level teachers (0-2 years of experience) are paid only $30,800/year. In the same state, CS graduates with no experience can expect to be hired by Cisco, Fidelity, IBM, and other local big companies for no less than $60,000/year. You'll note on the same salary schedule that after 36 years of teaching experience, a NC teacher with a Bachelor's degree would still be paid only $53,180 at today's rate.

I absolutely agree that teachers are very well compensated in some states. However, it cannot be ignored that teachers are paid abysmal rates in some states. It irritates me to no end when I hear people in NC talk about how overpaid teachers are -- the same people are usually surprised to hear the reality of just how little NC teachers are actually paid.

I don't know what the solution is, and I don't think the USDoE is in a position to talk about federalizing a nation-wise education system as a solution in its current form, but what we have today is terrible broken. The differences between states is rather astounding, and to use one state's context as a justification for sweeping nation-wide policy comments is disingenuous at best.

As promised, the NC 2013-14 Salary Guide: http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/fbs/finance/salary/schedules/2013-14schedules.pdf

Re:Gates wants your children

[frisket]

I don't know what the fuck your teachers do during the "vacations" but in my country they do stuff like accompanying educational visits with their pupils, marking exams, preparing the next year's syllabus, getting up to date on their subject, doing all the paperwork they didn't have time to do in term-time, and — if they can afford it — actually having a vacation of their own.

Maybe I'm wrong; maybe US teachers just sit on the porch and drink beer all vacation long. I doubt it. The violent jealousy you show toward their "3 months of no work" perhaps shows how little you know about the educational system. If you want to fix it, get your politicians to change the school system so that classes go on all year, just like regular work does.

Re: Gates wants your children

[lymond01]

Salary is very dependent on where you are. $60K for an entry level CS job was the going rate in Boston in 1993. In California near the Bay Area, high school teachers are paid in the $70k-$80K range for 9 months.

Re:Gates wants your children

[sootman]

> The average teacher salary in Michigan, for example, is in the
> 60Ks, for nine months of work (and so really in the upper 80Ks
> adjusted for working nine months).

Where did you get that number from? This page says it's only $35k for Michigan. Feel free to point me to a better source.

And as for the old "summers off" bullshit, 1) teachers often go to conferences or work on their curriculum during the summer, or come in to do admin work (due to budgets always being cut) or move the library around etc., and 2) I've never met a teacher in my LIFE who worked just 8 hours per day. So yeah, multiply to account for 2 extra months off, and then divide to account for workdays that are typically 10-12 hours.

As for "how highly do you want them to be paid"? Well, given what CEOs and anyone in the financial sector earns for continually robbing the country and fucking everything up; and given what we pay actors, entertainers, and fucking ATHLETES; and given what we're actually asking teachers to DO, I can't think of any reason that teachers should earn less than doctors.

Re:Gates wants your children

[Uberbah]

Throwing money at the problem is not the solution!

Neither is repeating a talking point that was baseless 30 years ago.

And exactly how much do teacher salaries have to be in order for them to properly educate children?

How much would you want to be paid to have a teachers job? Tens of thousands in student loans to get a masters degree, 50+ hour work weeks, playing babysitter/parent/disciplinarian/counselor/doctor for a bunch of kids before even starting the teaching part, putting up with shitty parents and administrators, spend your summers continuing your education, and finally be judged on student performance when the #1 correlation for that is what kind of home the student goes home to at the end of the day. Something you have no control over whatsoever.

Not one of you snobby snots would take a teaching job for less than six figures.

what MS/Apple/etc want to teach, vs what we should

[Anonymous Coward]

MS, Apple, Facebook, etc: "Buy from our stores! Don't mind being locked in! Don't dare to want freedom and openness, it's scary and not good for you!"

They all want to teach kids to grow up to be good little consumers. Spending all their money at the locked-in store. Giving all their personal information to the company. Develop an app of your own? Too bad unless you want to give 30% to Apple and be under their control for whether you can even publish it or not.

Why can't we just teach openness, freedom, and having control over your own computing experience? A TRUE social internet, not the data-mined and controlled garden those companies all want us to have, so people get locked into their marketing and advertising engines, and their ecosystems.

Apparently Bill Gates wants to make money.

[Futurepower(R)]

Apparently Bill Gates is still doing things to make money. When you have $70 billion, you still need more?

How about

[rsilvergun]

finding the Next Generation of Teachers with more financial ad programs, better wages and an actual career path? Seriously, I know a lots of teachers and unless you're willing to drop what you're doing and hall ass to another state whenever the budget cuts come you're in for a pretty lousy time. Oh, and no, they don't take summers off. Most of them spend summers either tutoring for extra money or getting yet another degree (Masters, Doctorate) in a desperate attempt to earn a little more money :(.

Linux and Apple users need not apply

[RotateLeftByte]

Isn't that the obvious ploy of this move.

Embrace the education establishment
Extend the curriculuim so that ONLY MS tools can be used
Extinguish all non compliant teachers as being obsolete

order of magnitude more

[globaljustin]

How highly do you want them to be paid?

you're splitting pennies for one of the essential functions of human existence: teachers to our young...

however we just pass MILLIONS$$$ and BILLIONS$$$ around when discussing business executive pay or defense contracts

it's absolutely ridiculous, from a free market capitalist perspective, to expect to get the best people for a fraction of what they typically can earn in other fields

Want A Job? Buy an XBox

[Bob9113]

Microsoft donated over 125 million impressions across Xbox 360, Windows 8, and MSN in order to encourage consumers to rediscover teaching through interactive ad units. This media effort is an extension of the Ad Council and TEACH's public service advertising (PSA) campaign, Make More...Throughout March, consumers were able to engage with TEACH "NUads on Xbox", via gesture, voice or controller on their Xbox 360 consoles.

Masters in education, good experience in other districts, just moved to the area, you may be a good candidate. Now, if you really want the job, go out and buy some Microsoft products, and then we'll give you a shot. You should also probably make sure you have created a rich and carefully crafted demographic footprint on each of the incumbent cloud surveillance networks:

Well, in addition to Teach.org and redundant social media efforts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Linkedin, and YouTube,

Prostrate yourself before the oligarchy or be unemployed! Our nation cannot afford to have teachers who have any awareness of the value of attenuating corporate rule or pervasive surveillance! Young minds must be formed only by those who do not question the oligarchs!

Sounds like MS is trying to get government money

[Karmashock]

Who is going to pay for all this crap? Remember, LA Unified school district just shelled out something like a billion dollars for ipads. So there is big money to be made here.

The danger for the public is that it might not accomplish anything.

If all the promises of the technology pan out then its money well spent. If not, then its an unforgivable waste of finite public resources.

I think schools like this one should be nominated

[bobstreo]

http://www.linux.com/news/feat...

Donations linked to schemes to make money.

[Futurepower(R)]

You missed the point. Yes Mr. Gates gives money away, but he also links those donations to schemes to make more money, it seems obvious to me.