RAVITCH: Bill Gates: "We Won’t Know for a Decade Whether Our Ideas {for public education} Work"

[yurbud]

It's hard to think of a better example that our education policy has been as corrupted by big campaign donors as our economic, trade, and foreign policy.

Bill Gates has money to spend, so politicians will force whatever idea he pulls out of his ass on public school teachers and kids.

If he really thinks he knows how to run schools, he should open up some entirely private ones, and see how many paying customers he'll get.

The federal government, fully on board with the Gates idea, now has almost every state following agates' plan. As Valerie Strauss points out on her blog, Gates now says that it will take about a decade to determine whether his latest hunch actually works.

So far, it has failed to produce a reliable metric or results anywhere. So far, it has failed wherever it was tried, and billions of dollars have been wasted.

In the meanwhile, real teachers are being fired and losing their livelihood based on Gates' latest bigidea. Strauss writes: "Hmmm. Teachers around the country aresaddled every single year with teacher evaluation systems that his foundation has funded, based on no record of success and highly questionable “research.”

And now Gates says he won’t know if the reforms he is funding will work for another decade. But teachers can lose their jobs right now because of reforms he is funding.

http://wp.me/p2odLa-61u

[bemildred]

1. Gates expertise is marketing. nt

[yurbud]

2. as someone forced to deal with Windows OS at work, I agree. It sure ain't user interfaces

[bemildred]

3. Windows is tremendously wasteful of time and resources, and most of it's crappy design ...

driven by marketing considerations, with a certain quantity of ego-driven development thrown in, you gotta make your mark if you want to be a big shot, and that means new "features" or at least re-writing the old ones from scratch.

[yurbud]

4. there was a great article about how that played into Blackberries demise: they thought they knew

better than their customers what they needed.

[bemildred]

5. I've seen it many times.

I used to make a good living fixing broken programs written by software "geniuses".

[caraher]

6. It may take *him* a decade to figure out it doesn't work...

Meanwhile the professionals in education already know the answer.

[antigop]

7. +100 nt