Bill Gates has adopted education as a billionaire's hobby for many years—once supporting small schools projects, but more recently focusing on teacher quality.
Little attention, however, has been paid to Gates's struggles in business (Microsoft) or his complete lack of expertise, experience, or success as an educational entrepreneur.
Until now, in this expose by Vanity Fair addressing the key practices at the foundation of Microsoft's failures ("Today, a single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined").
Gates has argued for a need to identify the best (and worst) teachers in order to control who teachers teach and how:
"What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. (In a 2008 survey funded by the Gates Foundation, 83 percent of teachers said they would be happy to teach more students for more pay.) The rest of the savings
