Evaluating Gates via His Microsoft Failure
Billionaire Bill Gates has been buying his version of American public education for years now. His first major *reform* effort began in 2000 and involved chopping large urban high schools into smaller schools. It was his solution of choice for several years. He abandoned the idea in 2006 after it had been found “less successful than hoped” according to the Seattle Times. (Documented in chapter 23 of A Chronicle of Echoes and also discussed in this post.)
For Gates, the small schools failure was an inconvenience and a disappointment. (He wanted to “scale” the results.) For the school districts left holding the bag, it was incredibly disruptive.
Gates actively advances a spectrum of so-called reforms that interest him, including grading teachers using student test scores (in order to dump the “ineffective” teachers), merit pay, increased class sizes, longer school day and year, data systems to “track progress,” charter school fondness, and, of course, “fewer, clearer, higher standards”–an idea Gates publicly advanced in November 2008, in the months following his decision to bankroll the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) because Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) President Gene Wilhoit and CCSS “lead architect” David Coleman asked Gates to pay for it.
Interestingly, Gates notes the “need” for CCSS as a “standard” for grading teachers:
The first step in identifying effective teaching has to be setting fewer, clearer, higher standards that are aligned with the goal of graduating students from high school college-ready. You can’t compare teachers if they’re not pursuing a common standard.[Emphasis added.]
Must I write how stupid this idea is?
Teachers do pursue “common standards” in teaching students. It’s just that such “common standards” are often of a higher order that tends to defy quantification. Included among them are teaching and learning for the sheer joy of it and equipping students to make choices that might lead to a self-fulfillment that leads, in turn, to students becoming productive, engaged members of society.
Profit-grabbers like Pearson cannot test such lofty goals.
Nevertheless, billionaire boy Bill is only interested in that which might be quantified– but only as such lends support for his own preferences. Consider this statement from the same November 2008 speech linked above:
A good education means completing a postsecondary degree.
Gates did not complete a postsecondary degree. However, he has determined that this narrow view of “a good education” must apply to all others.
Gates continues in his speech by stating, “we are determined to follow the evidence.” Evaluating Gates via His Microsoft Failure | deutsch29:
