CURMUDGUCATION: Gates & Feedback

CURMUDGUCATION: Gates & Feedback:

Gates & Feedback

When Bill Gates says, "Give Teachers What They Deserve," I think many of us can be forgiven for flinching. But over at his blog, His Royal Gateness has done just that. It might seem redundant for me to respond, because the piece is a bit of a teaser for Gates' Big Talk about education, which I've already responded to. But I find this sort of piece instructive, because when somebody has to edit down his own work, he tells you what he thinks the crucial, important parts were.

The crucial important part here is that after all this time monkeying around with education, Gates still doesn't know what he's taking about.

He opens with a wide-eyed tale of how a teacher he talked to begins the year by drawing a line on a piece of paper that aims up and to the right. The bottom-most point is labeled "birth" and then  "Fourth Grade" further up the line and still further up the line the teacher puts himself. This is called the learning line, and I can see its value as a construct for fourth graders. But Gates-- a grown man-- apparently found this image inspirational when working on his big education speech, and not for the first time I'm wondering how much real thought Gates has actually put into this education stuff. If I walked into a corporate board meeting and unveiled my chart with a line spearing up from the bottom left corner, and I marked the origin point "birth" and a little way up put "guy working at McDonalds" and a little further up put "Microsoft" and announced proudly that this I called this the Revenue Line, would board members be thinking about that for months? Or CURMUDGUCATION: Gates & Feedback: