Bill Gates: U.S. Education Harder to Improve Than Infant Mortality Rates (xconomy.com)

gthuang88 writes: In a Q&A with Harvard students, Bill Gates said his foundation's work on K-12 education in the U.S. has had little impact, at least compared to its success in reducing infant mortality in developing countries. The challenge with education, he said, is that it is "essentially a social construct" that depends on creating the right culture of accountability and interactions -- and funding, of course. Gates said if he had a magic wand for the U.S., he would fix education, and for the rest of the world, nutrition.

He also said if he were a college student now, he would study artificial intelligence -- and that he was jealous that someone in the room could solve the problem of creating an AI that can read a book and pass an AP exam.
Gates predicted this generation of graduates will "solve" cancer, as well as the pesky problem of infectious diseases.

And even though his foundation's 20-year effort has failed to improve educaion -- "we'll keep going."

Comments

This is really easy to fix-parents

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere in all that, parent participation is left out. Parents are the key to a successful education program. That's why some cultures do better than others.

challenge w/edu is "essentially social construct"

[JoeyRox]

No, the challenge is that it's much harder to define an objective methodology for measuring the success of education than it is for measuring an infant mortality rate.

Change culture

[thinkwaitfast]

if you want to change education. School has minimal impact if the desire is not there.

I logged onto yahoo yesterday when I'd heard about N Korea and it was buried under a bunch of celebrities that I'd never heard of doing something that I did not care about. I grew up in a poorer area of town and all of my Asian friends did well (very well in fact) in school, everyone else was a mixed bag, but tended to be on the lower side of educational attainment.

Re: Common Core

[TechyImmigrant]

As a parent of one of your "masses" I have to agree with the OP. Common core is just fucking awful. My kids suffered through that bullshit just because some bright boy thought it was "improving" education. Here's a hint:. It's not. Whole language was not an improvement. Singapore math was not an improvement. Just fucking teach the class without a stupid assed gimmick that changes every couple years.

Common core isn't awful.

The state and federally imposed testing regime is awful.

The common core curriculum is just a base list of stuff you should be learning. Try to separate that from all the strawman bollocks that web sites bring up, using badly written textbooks.
 

Problem isn't funding

[Solandri]

U.S.public spending on education is already the second-highest of any OECD country. The problem isn't funding. The problem is most of the increase in education funding over the last 50 years has gone to ballooning non-teaching administrative staff.

It's the administrators who control the school budget. Any time education funding is increased, they sop it up by raising their own pay and benefits and hiring more administrators, while passing a token amount down to teachers. Every time education funding is cut, they send it straight to the teachers, so they'll generate news stories about how they had to buy paper and pencils for their students out of their own wallet, to pressure legislators into increasing education funding even more. I even crunched some numbers from the Dept. of Education website a few years ago, and dividing the salary + benefits by the number of teachers yielded an overall average pay for teachers over $100,000/yr. There's no way that's possible. What probably happened is administrators shifted some of their pay and benefits into the teacher category, to try to hide how much of the school budget they were sopping up.

The problem isn't funding, it's how the funds are spent.