Read this and prepare to gag unless you are the president of your regional Bill Gates Fan Club.
Did you know that Bill is warm and cuddly when he talks about how he plans to make US education the very best in the world without spending more? Don’t doubt for a minute that he knows how to do it. He has been reforming education for years, and think of all he has done. Well, let’s see, there is…..
The article begins:
“After almost two decades of pursuing improvements in U.S. education through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates maintains a sweeping and grand ambition. His goal for the next 20 years, he says, is to graduate roughly twice as many kids from college, move the United States up in the international rankings, and do so without spending more money. It’s as if Gates wants to apply a version of Moore’s law (in which the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit double every two years) to education.”
Oh, and note his favorite Ed-tech start-ups: #1 is inBloom. In modesty, Gates does not mention that he put $100 million to underwrite a massive data warehouse designed by Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify. It will store the confidential information of millions of students and make it available for vendors without the permission of parents.
The writer received Gates’ funding in 2011.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is mind-boggling how he can do his “magic” by spending no more money, but he sure likes to rake in the money for himself.
More like a blowjob.
Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard! He found one of the most progressive, challenging institutions too restrictive! And yet he can’t wait to turn the public education system, which is already many times more rigid, into the factory model‽ How anyone takes him seriously on this is beyond me! (Oh, wait, he has a lot of money!)
In Gates we don’t trust:
The Gates plan is his usual delusion concerning anyone but his own personal financial interests. There he takes care of business. For the rest of us spin, spin, spin and smoke and mirrors. He dropped small schools after 10 years and a billion dollars and instantly went to ruining teachers without a seconds thought about what he was doing except that would give him and his buds control of the money and minds. After all even a billionaire needs a new profit center and power is what really drives them not money at that point. They have not spent one second on what is proper or necessary and we have to fight them.
If you really want to do that help us at LAUSD get Monica Ratliff elected to the board of education. Then we will have the four votes to change the entire dynamics of the LAUSD Board of Education. This influences the entire U.S. Her website is http://www.monicaratliff2013.com and her email is monicaratliff2013@gmail.com. The billionaires are supporting the corporate side with big money. She got through the primary with $14,000 against over $1.3 million. IMAGINE if she got some national support by individuals and organizations. CORE-CA is endorsing her. The founding King Family of L.A., not MLK, has over 114 years of continuous civil rights. I am the Director of Policy. We are totally independent as we do not take their money as all others do. Please help us stop this mess. Go to Monica’s website, see what she supports, if you agree and want to stop this corporate mess in the second largest school district in the U.S. with the most charter schools, now over 260, help Monica Ratliff who is also an attorney who worked civil rights for many years as a lawyer before becoming a teacher win this board seat. It is everyones obligation to stop the ruination of public education.
Sadly, we’ve been conducting these CEO worship sessions for the last twenty years. I agree that the fawning coverage is stomach-turning, but it’s taken a long time to get this bad. CEO’s are celebrities in this country. When’s the last time you saw a fawning article on the GREAT WORKFORCE at a large company? Bill Gates apparently ran Microsoft alone, out of his kitchen. No one else contributed, at all, to his megabuck-raking.
On a more positive note, I bought a t-shirt! Thanks to the person who did all the work to get them ordered and up for sale.
I know it’s not much but I’m happy to help the cause.
Just read Bill Gates ‘Mein Kampf’.
Since he owns America, I don’t know if education can be saved. His $$ will never end. Do we have to wait until the last group of kids are tortured and leaving the equivalent of a USSR Olympic gymnastic training school?
Because of his extreme wealth, he has numerous and endless people aligned with him, especially for the $$.
Where are the high profile people with $$ on the side of decency, kindness, appropr. teaching, teachers, students and families? We need equal footing! Talking education, research and humanity with Gates will no longer cut it. Open for suggestions.
“Where are the . . .” Sorry but it’s impossible to be on the side of decency when one has so much wealth that they couldn’t spend it in 5 lifetimes. Decency and obscene wealth in the same sentence produces an oxymoron.
Who invited him anyway? Arrogant gate crasher!
Gates mistakes being wealthy with being wise.
Gates has no clue. He is just a marketer of bad products.
What?
You don’t love windoze???
Me neither.
“Once you go Mac….”
😉
Lil wayne
Gates wishes to rule…his father was fond of Eugenics. The worship of Celebrities and the Rich in our society are ruining our country…who got everyone else to believe that worshipping these greedy, selfish, power hungry people is in the best interests of the rest of us who bust our backs everyday to make them Rich? When I watch Gates with his sniveling talk and his smug sneer, I want to vomit….he wants to destroy our kids and the public school system just as he also works hand in hand with Monsanto to control our food supply….he is portrayed as growing up as just a normal “middle-class” kid, don’t believe it …he attended a private school…the likes of which he has no desire to give to the majority of the kids attending public schools. He was accepted by our “ruling elite”, the “old money” because of his “genius, myth and celebrity and he grooves to their privitization of everything public beat. Increasing money and power, ruling you and your family’s ever move is Bill Gates creed.
This quote stands out:
People who are as curious as I am will be fine in any system.
…… Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.
Really?
Maybe they are curious about different things than what they are “taught” in school.
This man says the dumbest things and no one in the media nor in the political arena stands up to him. I’m really sick of it. Media people, please stop listening to this man. Politicians-please stop selling yourselves to Gates and other super wealthy people.
The Bill Gates “interview” was by Anya Kamenetz. She attended Benjamin Franklin High in New Orleans, which was created as a school for the “gifted.” It’s now a charter school that has “a selective admissions process.” She attended Yale. And she wrote that her boyfriend (and now husband) “”proposed to me on a tiny, idyllic island off the coast of Sweden.”
You can see some of her work at her blog:
http://diyubook.com/
Still, having said that, Kamenetz did actually ask Gates a couple of good questions.
FOr example, she asked this:
“The performance of independently run public charter schools has been mixed. Breaking up large schools into smaller ones has yielded few improvements. There is little robust data about the impact of laptops, tablets, and other technology on graduation rates or test scores. Do we know enough about what works and what doesn’t to undertake large-scale interventions?”
Gates’ response was that “These are complex questions,” and then he talked a bit about Western Governors University, never answering her question. And Kamenetz didn’t follow up.
On the issue of standardized testing Gates said that “we can make massive strides even with imperfect measurement systems. That doesn’t mean just test scores; it means observing in the classroom and asking questions.”
What Gates did NOT say is that the “measurement system” he proposes relies almost exclusively on test scores. It’s a valued-added model. Research funded by Gates (Measures of Effective Teaching) found this:
“MET project teachers’ classroom observation scores were bunched at the center of the distribution, where 50 percent of the teachers scored within 0.4 points of each other (on a four-point scale) using Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching. Teachers at the 25th and 75th percentiles scored less than one-quarter point different from the average. Only 7.5 percent of teachers scored below a two, and only 4.2 percent of teachers scored above a three. This would suggest a large middle category of effectiveness with two smaller ones at each end. Rather than trying to make fine distinctions among teachers in this vast middle, efforts would be better spent working to improve their practice.” Huh?
The Gates study also found that observations and student surveys (“asking questions”) added nothing to the equation.
But again, Kamenetz did not follow up.
Was this a fluff piece? No question about it.
Gates was part of the teacher survey mess. This week the students were surveyed. Afterward, they talked of how they were going to get certain teachers fired: 1. because they didn’t like the teacher’s accent and 2. another teacher didn’t like the teacher and they were going to curry favor with this teacher/coach so they could get a spot on varsity. I can only imagine this going on in more than one school- imagine at the middle school level what this could look like?
This is somehow suppose to be an indication of how professionals are evaluated? It is this and absurd tests– truly absurd tests at the beginning and end of the year- that are being used to hire and fire teachers. So glad that to know teacher have worked hard at honing their craft to then be treated to a popularity contest or a witch hunt coupled with tests that have no meaning what so ever.
–As for the tests: the calculus test meant to measure growth had NO calculus questions on them; science tests that had questions that were NOT part of any state standards; history exams that had questions that required 3x more time to respond than was granted to the test takers. This is what Gate’s hubris has wrought. At least no one vomited in stressed out misery but there are very few teachers who are prepping to bring their A game to this circus called teacher evaluations ( MET aka MESS)
Billy the Goates has mental constipation due to eating too many tin cans.
What I found most concerning is the statement:
“In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.”
In the current Citizens United era, I hope Mr. Gates is prepared to carry the heavy burden his influence is having not only on our children but also on the curricular opportunities available to them. Teachers will be fighting over dollars for the arts while he is able to peddle ill-gained student information to his cronies for profit.
I hope Mr. Gates is prepared to come to terms with the catastrophic outcomes of his influence that is currently happening to our students and ultimately to our society. This truly is unfettered capitalism run amok. Yes, privilege does come with responsibility.
While disturbing for what’s says about Gates’ mindset, this quote is useful, since he is acknowledging something the readers of this blog well know: these are matters of political economy, and have nothing whatsoever to do with pseudo-science, research or anything else.
In fact, in the minds of so-called reformers, education itself is secondary in these debates, of concern only to those charged with its social engineering aspects.
I wonder if Bill Gates realizes that Harold Varmus, the brilliant Nobel prize winning scientist, among many other brilliant math/science based people, graduated with an English literature degree from Amherst. I have heard many colleagues and esteemed members of the science community comment on how inspiring it is that Dr. Varmus is so well read. These people who dedicated their days and nights to science aspire to carving out more time to read literature, learn more about art and music. It is a basis of inspiration- so necessary for our very human brains. There needs to be eloquence and beauty in this world- are we not human? It is our unique ability to go beyond into those other creative realms that is part of what defines us as being Homo sapien. We should be celebrating and expanding our minds and thinking. It shouldn’t be just the limited offspring with access to the means to get that educational freedom. Shame on Bill Gates for his Kafkaesque plan for our future.
Months ago someone posted a link to the Bill Gates reading list. First I thought, who gives a crap what he’s reading, but then I took the bait and clicked on the link.
OMG! How boring! All non fiction, manuals, techie how to’s, topics that stroke his already preconceived notions. I don’t think I saw one fiction book. What a dud!
Actually, whenever Bill says anything related to education, the real teachers of America should do the exact opposite or wait, we already do.
Bill
Put your money where your mouth is…then put your body in one of the classrooms-Block-Schedule-.35 students-15,000 standards to C-O-V-E-R-.(.No such thing as TEACHING-Just Testing.)…Go ahead BILL….
You will walk out within a week if not sooner!!
Put your body in the classroom for 1 entire year..
Bill Gates and the Giant Publishing Company is destroying education..
ASSEMBLY-LINE -QUALITY-TEACHER-CONTROL VIA-TEST-SCORES ..
Yes, it’s “fawning” but there’s much more to understand. http://newpol.org/content/how-understand-fawning-interview-bill-gates-look-world-bank
Please watch, especially if you have children in grades k-12 and forward to other parents, very important to spread this to all:
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/04/video-occupy-doe-talking-about-class.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FEJcmuc+%28NYC+Public+School+Parents%29
Bill Gates couldn’t even get his own operating system to work correctly, and now he wants us to hand our children’s education over to him and the people who crashed our banking system?
“Instead of just being in isolation and getting no feedback, you can be videotaped, you can have a peer evaluator advise you on your performance.”
Uhh, we can do that without you , Mr. Gates. In fact, that is something that has been used for some time in my district.
He also mentioned that most students are not “highly curious.” Hmm, do you think it has anything to do with the fact that they are being taught how to fill in bubbles, and who would be curious about that? It has been my experience that most students are in fact highly curious when presented with a genuine learning situation, not just test prep.
Actually, I don’t find Bill highly curious.
Highly opinionated, highly self-absorbed and highly egotistical, but no, not curious.
Back to school Billy.