Subscribe to our Blog
More cents than sense
You may have heard of Bill Gates? Well, Bill caught the edreform bug a while back and, since he has billions of spare dollars at his disposal, he joined the cause in a big way. However, being a big success in one field doesn’t automatically mean you will succeed in a different field….
The first main thrust of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was to spend $1.6 billion dollars over a ten-year period on an initiative to foster small schools. This didn’t pan out, as the Gates freely admit. Now they have a new idea, to wit identifying and quantifying aspects of effective teaching. Their foundation is orchestrating a 335 million dollar Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) project designed to identify best practices in teaching, but the results of the first year of this study, which were promised for spring of this year, have not yet been released - suggesting that MET is not having much luck either. I will go out on a limb and predict that the Gates’ second big idea will fail as well.
From SQE’s perspective, all this expensive experimentation is very frustrating. Imagine what we could do with more than two billion dollars! (There’s a DONATE button in the left-hand column.)