American higher education is generally acknowledged to be the best in the world.
It offers elite colleges and universities where great thinkers and researchers have freedom to teach and study and where young people can learn from them and even work with them.
It offers great state universities where students can learn what they need or want to know about almost anything.
It offers community college where students of any age can learn almost any trade or occupation or fill in the gaps of their education.
It has a large online sector that gets poor results but offers a fast track to a degree in a degree-conscious world.
And it offers many options that don’t fit into any of the categories above.
Now Bill Gates has turned his mighty gaze onto this cornucopia of choices, and he does not like what he sees.
Although he did not stay at Harvard to earn his own degree, his vast wealth makes him an expert on every subject where his gaze falls.
In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, he shared some of his thoughts about what higher education needs.
And, to this reader, the real jolt comes at the end of the interview, when he refers to NCLB and the SAT as the “gold standard.”
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I was going to analyze what Gates had to say but realized it would take way too much space, time and effort. He had a couple of good things to say, such as “just giving a student technology isn’t the answer” but the majority of what he says about technology, efficiency, etc. . . has been said many times before. (See Callahan’s “Education and the Cult of Efficiency”).
“And they [the universities] don’t have very good metrics of what is their value-added” or “It’s only been recently with some things we and others have gotten behind that there have been standard metrics” or “Well at the end of the day you’ve got to have something that employers really believe in.” Statements that point to the language of business-standards, value added, metrics (something measurable-I almost typed miserable-caught that Freudian slip), “what the employers really believe in”. Yep, we’re here strictly to produce worker bees so that the “queen” (and I almost wrote queer-old fashioned sense) bee-the Gates don’t have to shell out any of their hard stolen, oops I mean earned, money to train them. This song has been heard for the last century-see above mentioned work.
Now, I don’t doubt (actually I do but what is not allowed to be said is sometimes more important than what is allowed to be said) that Gates would like to see “improvements” in education and is solely motivated by that sentiment. Who wouldn’t? But just because one is a successful businessman/woman doesn’t mean that they “know” anything about the teaching and learning process especially when s/he believes that NCLB and the SAT are the “gold standards”.
I transcribed this from the first video segment. In response to the question of what makes business people like him qualified to weigh in on the operation of universities, Gates answers,
“I don’t think there’s any business people who are just walking out of their office door over to a university and saying, hey, reorganize your university this way. I’ve never heard of that.”
Well that was exactly what was happening at the University of Virginia, as he spoke.
And people did hear about it, and they didn’t put up with it.
“Facing a torrent of criticism, the University of Virginia trustees made a stunning turnabout on Tuesday, voting unanimously to reinstate the president they had forced to resign over concerns that the university was not adapting fast enough to financial and technological pressures.”
The story highlights exactly who demanded (and got) the firing of distinguished
and highly regarded University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan:
“In particular, some members of the Board of Visitors, most of whom are business executives, appear to have been shaken by the way prestigious institutions like M.I.T., Stanford and Harvard have dived into the online realm, and wondered if the University of Virginia was being left behind.”
Stealth attacks on honest academic leaders like President Sullivan are happening at universities all over the country. Corporate providers of untried for-profit delivery systems are forcing restructured consumption of their services, in the name of cost cutting and efficiency. They use Gates’ own model, to leverage the small portion of public university resources they contribute, and thereby hope to harvest the public money allocated to education for themselves and their cronies.
“Paul Tudor Jones, a hedge fund manager and major donor to the university, wrote an article for the local newspaper, The Daily Progress, praising the removal of Ms. Sullivan, fueling speculation that he and perhaps other wealthy contributors had orchestrated it, an assertion that Ms. Dragas flatly denied.”
Do open the link, everybody. There are pictures of integrity, decency, and concerted academic community action emerging triumphant.
I;m sure that everyone who has felt the sting of the Gates approach to k12 education will really love his cavalier, innovate, make mistakes and learn approach. How nice for him to treat not just one school or state but the whole nation as his guinea pigs.
What was chilling was his terrier like tenaciousness that his focus on education will be there 15-20 years from now until his job is done.
Someone out there please give this man a real job to do. His so called philanthropy is killing education, is warping parts of the planet ecologically and is suffocating any real innovation.
If Bill Gates had had more eye opening classes, maybe one in the classics or philosophy or literature or art, he might have more ‘reverence’ for the opening up of the mind. I had to fight tooth and nail to take liberal arts electives as an engineering undergrad and I to this day my favorite class was a medieval literature class taught at UC Berkeley. Didn’t pursue that, had no job skills attached to it but it completely changed the value I placed on things I knew nothing about it. Learning as a means to open the mind.
The B school model is really decimating that.
I would really love it if Bill Gates took on college sports teams and THEIR graduation rates- I would pay money to watch those arguments flying.
How does one get the message to Gates that he has too much time on his hands and too much money and he has no idea what he is talking about? It must be fun to experiment on everybody else’s children. By the way, anybody know where his kids go to school?
Just being extremely wealthy does not make you an expert on everything. This advice to a billionaire is coming to you free from a thousandaire.
I dream of a Twilight Zone episode where Bill, Melinda, Bloomberg, Rhee, etc are trapped in a residential special education facility where they have to teach the most disabled and they can’t get out until all make AYP year after year until graduation. Each student must alao be “career and college ready”. Let’s meet up and talk about school reform ideas after that experience.
Typo..sorry…also
Maybe Gates should go finish his degree. Perhaps if he’d taken calligraphy at Reed or similar classes at Harvard he would be even better at what he does.
He’d wouldn’t want to do that unless there were some way of copyrighting proprietary script.
I think the phrase “Gold Standard” tells us everything we need to know about Gates’ Heaven.
And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.
“And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. What does this have to do with the topic at hand????
The way I read it, it’s about what happens when the Gold Standard comes to supplant all other values in a society.
► http://www.studylight.org/enc/isb/view.cgi?number=T5938
You are losing me now. Sorry but I am not interested in biblical quotes here.
Wisdom is where you find it.
(Kinda like gold in that one respect.)
NCLB is the gold standard of Education Policies That Make One Question the Intelligence of Policy Makers. It narrowly edged out RTTT.
I love Linda’s idea- have them put them their money where their mouth is Apprentice style or even Survivor. ( Not a tv watcher so don’t know if these are even still relevant).
I would one up that- take emotional and behavioral iep students with previous high test scores and see if they can add value. VAM be damned.
I would also throw in Bloomberg into the mix.
I am truly sorry that Bill & Melinda, Inc. have delusions of knowing anything about education.
But there are remedies for that.
In my city, for some odd reason, they have to arrest some person with delusions of being a plastic surgeon every other year or so.
That’s a good one!
Posted on another thread…want to post here. I have had it!
So many of these posts remind me of Animal Farm and what can we actually do. I don’t want to be Boxer and chant “I will work harder” knowing they will just be rid of you when you are not longer useful to them. I don’t want to be Mollie and run off to another farm and I don’t want to be Benjamin and complain cynically and do nothing (although that is who I am these days).
What would happen if we said NO! I am NOT following CCSS so I can train worker bees. I am not dedicating my days to test prep. I will not be bullied by non-educators. I will not be demeaned by incompetent bureaucratic administrators.
Are they going to fire all of us?
Apparently, yes. They can. We would become pariahs in our communities for “letting the public down,” and worse, any person looking for a job would be hired to fill the spots. Public education would be set back 200 years.
I lost you. We would be pariahs if we refused to spend our time on drill and kill and actually advocated for what is best for kids? I don’t think so. Most parents would support that, I believe.
Uh, no. More & more parents are becoming agitated RE: “standardized” testing; principals, administrators & college/university profs are signing petitions. A retired teachers group in Rockford, IL helped to–through their due diligence–get rid of their Broad superintendent. LOOK at the GOOD stuff going on, people, & join up! Check out the Parents Across America website. Find out what’s going on in your town, city, state. Talk your retired friends into helping
your school, your district.
They’re working on it …
Rutgers University, the State University, is not so public as it used to be. Due to a huge cut in state aid, Rutgers is now only 30% publicly funded. That means that 70% of what professors say or assign in representative readings is censored by the corporate “sponsors” that provide funding to keep it afloat. (Not really…well, not yet.)
Are American Universities the last bastion of learning? When free speech becomes completely squelched at the post-secondary level, where is the corporate “education” machine going next?
The mere fact that many colleges are private institutions with budget concerns allows for these “private industry in university” trends to be more and more commonplace.
Apparently the first thing higher ed needs is metrics (mentioned 4 times in the interview). Of course the second thing it needs is standardization to make the metrics work. And by the way, all this can be achieved through computer screens. Because there are limited funds these days, and we need to think of ways to deliver higher education for lower prices.
And you must purchase products produced
by Microsoft or your galvanized biometric
bracelet will shock you into submission.
Do you wants sensor rings with that?
All colleges, whether public or private, need to look very carefully at how Gates’ demands have been bought and adopted by Duncan and DoE in K-12, because this has meant that, in a relatively short period of time, state laws were changed to reduce the rights of teachers, including collective bargaining and tenure, in order to ensure that students’ standardized test scores could be linked to teacher evaluations and terminations.
Then look down the road to see that, if the Gates agenda is instituted in higher education, compliance with those demands will determine which schools get Title IV, federal financial aid, and which schools will not, as the carrot and stick approach, to determine who gets federal funding, is how Duncan managed to get states to comply in K-12. I’m sure Diane could explain the details a lot better than I.
The “metrics” and “gold standard” of NCLB and SAT that Gates referred to in the Chronicle interview are some of the biggest clues indicating that he wants to see the same things instituted in higher ed that are now requirements in K-12. Linking DoE compliance to eligibility for reciept of federal funds (Title IV), is likely to be a primary method of attack.
At a minimum, the demands for compliance are sure to include standardized tests to determine “outputs”, as Gates mentioned, which are then used to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers; busting unions, so students’ test scores can be linked to teachers and the results used to determine promotions and terminations of teachers; loss of academic freedom; creating a national curriculum, to be tied to standardized tests, etc.
College drop-out Gates has now pitted himself against the smartest and most talented people in our country, our professoriate. I would hope that those of us who still have tenure and academic freedom will step forward and rise to the occasion, since, as of 2009, 75.5% of us do not have those rights and our numbers have been rapidly growing over the decades: http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_release_06_19.pdf
Prof W
17 years experience teaching in higher ed and member of the Working Poor: http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-vice-president-biden-dont-blame-faculty-for-the-high-cost-of-college-most-are-working-poor
I regret that I must remain anonymous or risk losing my jobs, which pay slave wages for my hard work, as this is what happens when teachers have no union protections, including no tenure and no academic freedom and, for those of us hired by colleges as “Independent Contractors”, lack of labor law protections, too, including no minimum wage –the profiteer’s greatest delight, most commonly seen in online schoos which, of course, Gates would like to see expand
Bill Gates has evidently learned how to parrot back a high percentage of the right things to say.
Not too coincidentally, that seems to sum up his philosophy of education.