Posted on 04/18/2013 4:40:06 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
A few years ago, Bill Gates, with his business success, super brain, and billion-dollar checkbook, jumped into education. We expected spectacular results. In fact, Gates had the same effect on our public education system that everyone else has had. Not much.
Gates announced that small schools were the key. He spent millions persuading school districts to divide their big schools. Didn’t help. Next he seemed all over the board: new assessments; better teachers; more tracking of data, Common Core Curriculum. Maybe I’m missing something but I’m pretty sure that Bill Gates did not have any spectacular success in education. I puzzled over this for a year. How could it be?
Finally I realized there is only one possible answer here. He made exactly the same mistake everyone else makes. He foolishly supposed that the Education Establishment was his partner, his friend, his ally, in a sincere campaign to improve public schools.
With all due respect, Bill Gates, how could you be so naive??
These people have spent the last hundred years trying to transform public schools their way. Joan Dunn, in her wonderful book “Retreat From Learning,” perfectly described, all the way back in 1954, what the progressive educators were about: “They want very much to get everybody into school, and when they succeed in doing just that, they are at a loss to know what to do with the students. The evidence of their own senses tells them that it does not work. So they call for bigger schools, better teachers, more desks, and more vitamins in the lunches. They blame everything but their formula.” Alas, these clueless commissars show no signs of correcting course now.
I’m worried that Bill was fooled by the advanced degrees, the self-importance, the tweed jackets, the endlessly mutating jargon, the academic grandeur....
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Bill Gates is too LIBERAL~
Billionaires set up foundations to control education, not to improve it.
Can he afford to be so trusting?
He’s a limousine liberal. One of our would-be masters in the coming global order.
Bill Gates is a weirdo with too much money. First he wanted to spend a chunk for a new toilet bowl design, now he wants he new type of condom. Of course, it’s his money to spend as he likes. Just wondering what is next on his list.
Bill Gates was a real sucker to accept Warren Buffets deal to use the worthless Berkshire Hathaway preferred stock as equal value and allowed Buffet into his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...
Bill Gates is a weasel who’s screwed more people to get to where he is than he could count.
Bill Gates is a connected POS.
I am wondering how smart Bill really is to have the politics he has and the priorities of the NWO so prominent is his philanthropy. Perhaps he is a frontman just like our PINO is to help advance the Globalist goals. When you are on the right team, your career/business just seems to rise like magic.
The key to the failure (both of Gates initiatives and of American public education) lies in the fact the rot comes not from the schools, not from the district administration, not even from the teachers unions, but from the colleges of education that most of the several states have granted monopolies on producing certified (or qualified or licensed or whatever regulatory adjective the legislature picked) teachers.
Unless and until the monopoly granted colleges of education is broken, or the colleges of education are fixed (which would take at least a generation and require some way of forcing them to hire professors who are willing to fail students and actually base the techniques they teach on empirical evidence rather than be baleful theories of Vygotsky and Dewey), no amount of money thrown at American public education will help, genuinely good ideas that work in pilot projects will inevitably be abandoned once the researchers or philanthropists pushing the pilot project stop the study or the special funding, and the only changes will be yet more cycles of back-to-basics reforms followed by reforms purporting to teach independent thought, followed by another round of back-to-basics reforms, and so on until the Republic fails and there is no longer such a thing as American public education.
Who’s software will be in those computers that each school child will have access to?
Bill Gates is too stupid and evil. Oh yeah, and majorly UGLY.
Best wishes,
Veto
(a girl)
"Joan Dunn, in her wonderful book Retreat From Learning, perfectly described, all the way back in 1954, what the progressive educators were about:"They want very much to get everybody into school, and when they succeed in doing just that, they are at a loss to know what to do with the students. The evidence of their own senses tells them that it does not work. So they call for bigger schools, better teachers, more desks, and more vitamins in the lunches. They blame everything but their formula.”. . . Point is, Bill Gates, you can't expect the Education Establishment to budge an inch. They are an ideological cult and won't willingly change.
Simply team up with the most innovative people and show Khan Academy how it's done.With all due respect, Sal Khan has been showing everyone else how it’s done. It would be a lot less speculative to simply throw your money into his operation.
Gates announced that small schools were the key.Hey, I have an idea! Let’s push the "small schools” and “parental involvement" ideas to the limit - give the parents free curricular materials funded by churches and other charities . . . and make every child's home a school!
And make Dr. Benjamin Carson Secretary of Education.
ping
nothing can improve the government schools ,no amount of $ , brains , business skills nothing. Gates is the best business mind but even that and his billions cannot make socialism/government work. government/socialism can never work that is why the government schools are so bad
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