Teachers’ letters to Bill Gates
Bill Gates (By Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
Bill Gates is a central figure in the modern school reform movement, thanks to his willingness to spend billions of his own dollars for projects he likes. He, for example, spent $2 billion in an effort to break up large high schools and create a network of small schools, but he abandoned that when he decided it hadn’t worked. He and his foundation injected hundreds of millions of dollars into experiments to develop controversial teacher assessment systems, is pushing a project to videotape every teacher in the country to help them see how they do their job, spent at least $150 million to help the Common Core State Standards initiative, provided $100 million to build a controversial student database, and, well you get the idea. His money has deeply affected the course of school reform.
There are, naturally, school reformers who are thrilled with Gates’ support, and, naturally, there are critics who wonder why a private citizen who happens to be rich should have so much influence on education policy, especially when his projects are not based on any research about what works.
In that last regard, a new website called Teachers’ Letters to Bill Gates is publishing messages from teachers to the Microsoft founder about what they do and his effect on their classrooms. The site published this letter to Gates and his wife, Melinda, whose name is also on the Gates Foundation as a way of explaining itself:
Dear Bill and Melinda ~
We would like to invite you to engage in dialogue with school teachers from the US and around the world about the very broad topic of public education.
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