Smart Guy (Gates) makes my list of “Dumbest Stuff I’ve Ever Read!”
Bill Gates (clearly a very smart guy) has just topped my list of Dumbest Stuff I’ve Ever Read for the first few months of 2011. He did it with this post in the Huffington Post and with his talk to State Governors (in which he also naively handed out copies of the book Stretching the School Dollar, which is complete junk):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-gates/bill-gates-school-performance_b_829771.html
Let’s dissect two bold premises of Gates’ argument about US spending and student outcomes – how we’ve spent ourselves crazy for decades and how we’ve gotten nothing for it – how we spend so much more than other countries, but they kick our butts – his reasons for arguing that now is the time to flip the curve.
Gates opines:
Compared to other countries, America has spent more and achieved less.
To be able to make such a comparison, one would have to be able to accurately and precisely measure