What are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet talking about?
Here’s one depressing conversation.
Three of the most successful men in the history of men — Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger — were on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”this week to talk about public education. (You can watch it above or here.)
Why does it matter what they say about public education? Gates in recent years has had an outsized role in public education policy as the world’s largest philanthropist, having put billions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation into controversial and questionable school reform efforts. He funded the development of the Common Core State Standards and has poured millions of dollars into efforts to promote them across the country. Buffett has given billions of dollars from his fortune to the Gates foundation.
So what exactly did they say, and why is it so depressing?
Here’s what Gates said in part:
“One piece of good news is that the charter schools are doing a very good job of educating kids in the inner city where typically the dropout rates are very very high and very few kids go to college. The good charters have overcome that, so by using long school days, a long school year, a different way of working with the teachers, amazing results have taken place. … We haven’t moved the needle for most students. Charters are only a few percent, so we have to spread those best practices in order to get real change….“It’s not easy [ to change the public education system]. School boards have a lot of power, so they have to be convinced. Unions have a lot of power…. We need more pilot programs, more dialogue to get all the entities — government, school boards, unions — moving towards more intensive educational process..“Of all the foundation areas we work in, I’d say this has proven to be the most difficult… There are some entrenched practices. It’s a very big system. Its over $600 billion a year being spent and it’s a system very resistance to change. The best results have come in cities where the mayor is in charge of school systems. So you have one executive and the school board isn’t as powerful. So New York city made real progress. In Chicago, they are making real progress. But those area really the only cities where the mayor has a strong role.”
What?
Good schools of any kind have had success in helping students achieve — not just good charters. Gates seems to be perpetuating the myth that only charter schools have had success in cities. Charters didn’t pioneer the use of long school days, or a longer school year. Meanwhile, his reference to “amazing results” suggests stories about charter “miracle” schools that have been debunked over and over. As for mayoral control, it is hardly a panacea. New York and Chicago are not the “only cities where the mayor has [had] a strong role.” Former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, who won total control over the school system and hired Michelle Rhee to run it in 2007, would probably take issue would that, as would other mayors who had control of their systems (Seattle, Baltimore, Philadelphia, etc).
As for “real progress” in Chicago and New York City under mayoral control, it’s hard to understand what he is talking about. Perhaps Gates doesn’t know that when Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York City and hired Joel Klein as chancellor, the improvements that Bloomberg/Klein touted were illusory; the achievement gap was not narrowed and standardized test scoreimprovements that the two men touted for years were found to be inflated.
In the CNBC conversation, Buffett complained that public schools would be better if the “wealthy in many many cities” had not “opted out” of the system and sent their own kids to private schools. He recalled how his own father had served the “thankless” job of being a member of a local school board, and he said that city schools would improve if the rich cared more about them.
“We are spending the money. It isn’t like there is any lack of resources going into it…. If the only choice available were public schools, we’d have better public schools, but the wealthy in many many cities have opted out of the public schools system. They might vote for the bond issues out of conscience, and some of them may engage philanthropically, but with their own kids they send them to private schools, and by having this division essentially between the rich and poor…. In the end the people who don’t have their kids in public schools and know their kids are not going to go to public schools or their grandkids… .. are not going to have the intensity of interest across the board.”
We do spend a mountain of money on public education, but that doesn’t What are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet talking about? - The Washington Post:
