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Bill Gates on Improving Schools
It seems Mr. Gates has realized it’s not how much money gets spent on schools, it’s HOW you spend it. In this interview Gates notes that his foundation will shift their focus from spending on small schools and classes to measuring teacher effectiveness:
“This understanding of just how little influence seemingly large donations can have has led the foundation to rethink its focus in recent years. Instead of trying to buy systemic reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent.
“I bring a bias to this,” says Mr. Gates. “I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.” Compared with R&D spending in the pharmaceutical or information-technology sectors, he says, next to nothing is spent on education research. “That’s partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don’t think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research.”
The Gates Foundation is a big supporter of charters, but not so for vouchers, which he sees as having hot political issues not operational ones.
“On the fraught issue of school choice, his foundation has been a strong advocate of charter schools, and Mr. Gates is particularly fond of the KIPP charter network and its focus on serving inner-city neighborhoods. “Whenever you get depressed about giving money in this area,” he volunteers, “you can spend a day in a KIPP school and know that they are spending less money than the dropout factory down the road.”
“He praises the private school model for its efficiency vis-à-vis traditional public schools, noting that the “parochial school system, per dollar spent, is an excellent school system.” But the politics, he says, are just too tough right now. “We haven’t chosen to get behind [vouchers] in a big way, as we have with personnel systems or charters, because the negativity about them is very, very high.”
This Is Very, Very Significant —Gate’s Wasted $5billion on Ed Reform—WSJ July 23’11
Do you see how very significant this interview is? I have yet to read the over 650 comments on this Wall Street Story, but this is my take so far:
1. Gates, a rather establishment member of the world’s elite — someone to whom the power structures pay attention — is actually using the words of the harshest critics. He actually calls the public school, the “dropout factory down the road.”
2, Even Gates, an optimist and loaded with money and power, dares not touch the subject of vouchers — probably the one best method to quickly and massively reform education —BECAUSE he is afraid about the negativity which is very, very high. BECAUSE even he is AFRAID of the POWER of the teacher unions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkLGvDQsvmY
3. My strong opinion on where the problem lies is this: It is government failure —for retaining a monopoly system, for letting unions call the shots, for usurping parent rights and duties in education, for letting teacher training be hotbeds for progressive indoctrination, etc., etc.
4. Education reformers need to keep “educating” themselves and the public about the issues. The one best piece of literature that I feel gives the arguments for saving education from both the BLOB* and “schooling” is this FREE downloadable tribute to EGWest who clearly describes how, why, when education was captured by usurpers and suggests logical solutions — Government Failure: E G West on Education http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/upldbook223pdf.pdf
Essays include:
- The spread of education before compulsion
- Public education and imperfect democracy
- Education vouchers in principle and practice
- Education without the state
* BLOB — Big Learning Organized Bureaucracy
(PS: Does anyone know how to send this FREE book to Bill Gates?)