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.

Re:This is really easy to fix-parents

[Dusanyu]

It's not just parents the students have to want to learn as well. When i was in High school there were many students who were just there because they had to be by law and treated the classroom as party time. End result was Teachers who could not teach because they were handling problem students. and problem students who made the Classroom impossible to study in. One of the big problems we have is youth who think its cool to ignore Rules and authority

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:Emerging middle class

[tomhath]

Polio vaccine for millions of children saved many, many lives. At least give him credit for that.

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.
 

It is not profitable to cure cancer

[nehumanuscrede]

It will never happen by anyone who lives in a country like the US. Besides the decline in education, the mindset is wrong.

Capitalism ensures that an ongoing treatment of a disease is far more profitable than curing one.

As a result, the Nobel for curing something like Cancer will never have an American name attached to it.

Re:All students aren't equal

[Ogive17]

So your solution is to give up on 80-90% of the students because they require more help to learn?

I believe Bill Gates is correct, the root of the problem isn't necessarily funding but changing our societal norms. There are large subsets of Americans that do not value education and they pass those values on to their kids.

In Japan they have different types of high schools. Some are college prep and some are vocational prep. I do agree that we cannot treat all kids like they are the same but they should all be given the same chance to succeed.

Re: Common Core

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, every top 10 education country in the world has a significant testing regime. Using Germany as an example, know what's different from the US? In Germany, the scores matter in a big way from an early age, and they steer the non-book-learners to a trade skills path by 8th grade.

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.

Re:Problem isn't funding

[voss]

Average elementary teacher salary is $59,000 , the average starting salary is $38k. Heritage numbers are suspect at best. NY teachers make 75k but thats the highest average salary in the nation. http://www.businessinsider.com...

Re:Problem isn't funding

[swb]

Around here at least, the excess administrative cost seems closely tied to the extent that the "achievement gap", the so called difference in educational outcomes between African American students and white students. This has lead to two things.

One, the increasing expansion of the educational bureaucracy to provide not only education but social welfare as well, providing things like meals, social workers and an increasing the number of special education teachers to deal with the learning deficiencies of the mostly black underclass. All of these services lie mostly outside of the traditional management hierarchy of schools and thus have their own parallel management bureaucracy within the district. It has also increased the number of district employees who "manage" the education gap issue but do not provide any direct involvement in general education.

The other byproduct of the achievement gap is political. Partly because African Americans are seen as the major stakeholders due to their poor educational outcomes, the African American community has come to see the school district administration as "their" institution. Patronage and political considerations have greatly increased the number of African American district administrative employees.

A few years ago after another forced resignation of the latest "hero" Superintendent, a temporary Superintendent with a long and well-regarded career in state government administration (there are actually some) was hired. He combed through the budget and discussed significant cuts in administrative overhead which would increase school funding. There were proposals to promote him to permanent Superintendent status but his plans for administrative cuts outraged the African American community because "their" people bore the brunt of the cuts. It was seen as a direct challenge to their political base and the school board quickly suppressed any talk of promoting the temporary Supervisor -- they and the Democrats (since all the board are Democrats), got the message that there would be problems obtaining African American political support.

The TL;DR edition: schools spend too much money on social welfare. It's not that social welfare isn't necessary, but that the school funding mechanism in the district is too shallow to provide an education and social welfare services for a significant plurality of the entire state's poor kids. Promoting the idea that the educational system is at fault for African American students has created a political base for African Americans who have used it to promote patronage and creating a bureaucratic base to support it, bloating the district's administrative staff with African American employees. The excess administrative staff is essentially immune from downsizing due to political considerations.

There's no real fix for it, either. Increasing social welfare support for poor kids would help, but it has to come from and be paid for by the state -- poverty concentration is too great for the local political entities to provide sufficient funding -- and the social welfare has to be delivered and managed by the state, not by local school districts. The district administration needs to be thinned accordingly, but what also has to happen is an acknowledgement that whatever they've been doing for the last 20 of 30 years hasn't solved the achievement gap and that it is principally a problem of family support and the social problems of the African American community, not a failure of pedagogy. None of this is likely, especially the admission that it's the African American community failing its own children, not the school district.

Re: Common Core

[Hognoxious]

she admitted the curricula was total shit

Did she admit that "curricula" is plural and should go with a verb in the appropriate number?

Why is it that any story about education attracts so many people who've never had any?

Re:This is really easy to fix

[brianerst]

That's not really the problem. The per-pupil spending in Chicago, for instance, is 33% higher than the state average, even though it is one of the worst performing systems in the state.

The real drivers of educational underachievement are social norms and immigration status. The children of low-skill recent immigrants make up the largest single percentage of children in the bottom two quintiles of achievement. Parental education level is the second best proxy of student achievement. This is not the fault of the children involved - second generation immigrant children (the children of the original students) have near-average achievement levels. Attempting to overcome learning a second language, poverty and lack of parental education is hard.

The US lags in worldwide educational achievement largely because it has imported a large cohort of poor and poorly-educated people who don't speak the language. It is to be expected that it will take time to pull them up to the national averages.