Microsoft’s lesson on what not to do with teachers
Bill Gates (By Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has been spending billions of dollars on education reform for years, first with a small-school initiative that he declared had failed after spending $2 billion, and in more recent years with expensive experiments on how to evaluate teachers with the purpose of improving teacher quality. In this 2011 op-ed, Bill and Melinda Gates wrote that Microsoft had some good lessons for schools about how to improve employee quality:
At Microsoft, we believed in giving our employees the best chance to succeed, and then we insisted on success. We measured excellence, rewarded those who achieved it and were candid with those who did not. Teachers don’t work in anything like this kind of environment, and they want a new bargain.
Well, it’s hard to imagine teachers wanting to work in the Microsoft environment.
Gates’ school reform philosophy is influenced by a Microsoft management practice that, according to this story on Slate.com by Will Oremus, has been cited by employees as “poisonous” to the company’s culture. The practice is called “stack racking” (and, it should be noted, wasn’t started at Microsoft). How does it work? Oremus quotes fromthis 2012 Vanity Fair magazine article by Kurt Eichenwald about Microsoft. See if this description sounds familiar in the context of school reform:
At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack
