All students should have the high school experience that Bill Gates had.
A wonderful campus with a rich curriculum, experienced teachers (79% with advanced degrees), small classes, excellent arts programs, great sports activities, up-to-date science laboratories. Everything that makes for success.
So why does he say that, for other people’s children, class size doesn’t matter?
Why does he support TFA, which sends temps without advanced degrees to the schools of the neediest?
Why does he not fight for the right of every child to have the experience that he had, rather than the dime-store model?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They need to come clean and simply admit that they favor a modern form of feudalism.
I agree with you 100%.
Still morally repugnant, I see.
The same could be said of the President’s children. Take a look at Sidwell’s curriculum and then what race to the top is promoting. Presently, our educational policy is for others people’s children.
King Gates only cares about efficiency and rolling out a common operating system for the children of peons. Sociopaths aren’t concerned about anyone but themselves.
This is his experiment and we better follow along. The one with the most money calls the shots. And don’t forget to worship while being beaten.
Keep exposing the elite remedy for other people’s children but not their own who get luxe schools with small classes and experienced teachers, not TFA temps with ridiculous 5 wks of summer schl making them “highly-qualified” in the lying eyes of our moneyed govt. Bill and Melinda Gates should be ashamed of their hypocrisies.
AMEN, IRA. Bill and Melinda Gates live in a bubble and yes, Bill and Melinda should indeed be ashamed of their hyprocrises.
It’s sad that this is only discussed here. Nothing about this hypocrisy to be found any where in the mainstream media. I wonder why??? Oh yeah the mainstream media is owned by them. Cowards…those so called “reporters” who report nothing.
Diane Ravitch is on MSNBC’s Mellisa Harris Perry’s show Saturday morning October 26, and The Daily Show next week. It is good to see a wee bit of traction with a part of the MSM…and thank you to Diane Ravitch for your tireless efforts to educate the public!
Watch this video parodying New York State
Ed Commisioner’s pushing of excessive
testing and Common Core standards.
This is King behind the scenes:
There is a presumed mythic superiority of wealth and privilege, embodied in the entitlements taken by the billionaire class, as well as granted to those from elite schools, that is deeply deified by our society… THIS presumption must be conquered in conjunction with any push back against their class prerogatives, for accepting them as somehow ‘better’ is why they run roughshod over the rest of us…
The reality is that most sensitive and evolved thinkers about education, regardless of their academic pedigree, as well as most Americans who matriculate successfully through the public school system, through university, are every bit as competent to assess education process and outcomes and strategic intention of public education as the billionaire boys club and naively intended TFA temps from elite institutions…
The billionaire emperor’s presumptions have no clothes — and if we can all grasp this, we have a good chance of prevailing against the onslaught waged at public education in America….
How lucky for Bill Gates that his childhood education introduced him to something that enabled him to find HIS INDIVIDUAL PASSION and fly. But I have to wonder… what about all the other kids in his school before then and since? Was this a “one-size-fits-all” institution? Did this private school teach no social studies, science, arts, history, etc.? Was every student inspired by the computer? Did everyone who attended his school become a computer tycoon? Did this school produce no scientists, writers, artists, historians, sociologists, social workers, bankers, etc.? Check out the Lakeside School website. Peruse the whole thing. Me thinks there’s some MAJOR hypocrisy going on. (Try not to choke on their swollen list of academic departments.) http://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=144978&rc=0
Bill Gates has lost his mind. How could he promote the reform garbage and then tell us all how great his high school was with a full curriculum and small class sizes? Go look at urban charter high schools and look and the classes available. They are so narrow that the arts and other electives aren’t even offered. Gates needs to butt out of education. Charters are nothing more than gold mines for people looking to make money in the education business.
I can’t stand these private school graduates forcing their way into public schools, creating an experience completely different from their ideal childhoods. “Hey, rich people! If your education was so great, give it everybody!”
If Billy, Barack, and the King don’t actually believe in their own reforms, which is why their children go to the best private schools. This whole “pet project” is designed to let the elite decide what is best for the masses. It is no different than Obamacare…if it is really that great why aren’t the senators, house of reps, and the president jumping on board and signing up? And, if they are signing up for it, why do they receive a 70% subsidy for their plans? Do the rest of “us” get that perk?
Please include Arne. This man has no clue what is going on out here. If they all believe in a quality education for all children they would never promote the reform nonsense and charters.
The hypocrisy of Gates and similar “edu-reformers” is deplorable and the subsequent misery they inflict on hard-working educators, parents and students is incalculable.
Melinda Gates attended high school at Ursuline Academy in Dallas. It’s a private, all-girls school (9-12) and only about 50% of the girls who apply are accepted.
The school has multiple “lawns” for goodness sake! The girls have picnics on whichever lawn is set aside for their grade level. It has a gated entrance with a guard. Ursuline also prefers to hire teachers with master’s degrees.
Lawn picnics, laughter, deep learning for Melinda; hours of standardized testing for the poor attending nearby Dallas ISD schools, which are being run farther into the ground by Broadie superintendent Mike Miles.
Sounds to me as if Bill Gates realizes how lucky he is to have been taught by uncommon teachers using uncommon strategies to teach their uncommon students how to rise above anything resembling common. I hope to Heaven that my public school students feel as uncommonly fortunate.
The argument here is that no schooling is any good unless it’s perfect. Saying that charter schools are no good because they’re not as good as the schools the elite send their children to is like saying that McDonald’s should be shut down because Lobster Newburg is not on their menu or that no car should available for purchase unless it’s at least as good as a Roll Royce.
No Jim, that’s not the argument. The argument is about the hypocrisy of offering an educational philosophy for the masses that in many ways is diametrically opposed to the philosophy that guided their own education.
Yes 2old2tch that is exactly the argument. Thank you for stating it so clearly and succinctly!
When Bill Gates speaks, he inserts his foot/feet into his mouth. It happens when arrogance and money consumes a person’s sympathetic/empathetic being. When you watch and listen to the way he speaks, he excudes officiousness and narcissism. If elite schools produce those kinds of people, I wouldn’t want my children to attend. Our world needs people opposite of his agenda. Elitism is a cycle like poverty but should it be a necessary evil?
And if I remember from the book “The Outliers” Bill didn’t always attend classes. His teachers accepted his absences so he could spend a massive amount of time working in the computer lab.
Amazing that he was allowed to follow his passions while others are not.
There have been a number of good comments on this thread. Two brief additions.
First, the MSM doesn’t cover the hypocrisy of the edufrauds—“One school for thine, Another for mine”—for the same reasons that they are egregiously deficient in covering education in general. Those reasons include being studiously uninformed and misinformed, in large part because they often [and rightly] fear incurring the wrath of employers, many of whom consider the MSM as one giant infomercial that serves as a launchpad for eduproducts like charters, vouchers, high-stakes standardized tests and the like.
Second, the leading charterites/privatizers can mouth hypocrisies because they share a common assumption: the kind of education you get should depend on the type of person you are—hence, their love of the labeling, sorting and ranking integral to high-stakes standardized testing. In their eyes, appropriate or differentiated or ‘effective delivery of eduproducts & eduservices’ is meaningless if the wrong consumer, er, ‘scholar’ is the recipient. Hence, THEIR OWN CHILDREN get the kind of education they already merit—one that prepares them for the leadership roles they are [allegedly] destined to fill. OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN [the vast majority], given their lamentable but obvious deficiencies, need to be taught in such a way that brings out their meager talents and potentials as much as possible—but low expectations are in order, so docility, obedience and low-level skills are the order of the day here.
Hence when people point out the hypocrisy of Bill Gates and other edufrauds like State Commissioner John King, they see in it nothing but ad hominem arguments that beg the real question—
Why waste a perfectly good education on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s “uneducables”? No, no, efficiency and ROI demands that we cater to Michael J Petrilli’s “strivers.”
It is no surprise, then, that they consider John Dewey’s observation pure bunkum: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.”
Notwithstanding all the cage busting posturing on the part of the edubullies, there is a better than 98% “satisfactory” certainty [thank you, Bill Gates!], that John Dewey is still right.
🙂
From an old post at:
https://dianeravitch.net/?s=Danny+Weastneat
Here’s a devastating article that points up Bill Gates’ hypocrisy when it comes to the variation between what he demands for his own children, and what he subjects children from lower income communities:
http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2014437975_danny09.html
THE SEATTLE TIMES’ Danny Westneat takes Gates to task for promoting policy all over the country that jacks class size sky high, with Gates using the common-sense-defying logic that kids will fare better in larger classes.
Well, Westneat sends his own kids to public schools, and will eventually attend Garfield High School (in the news of late). These are the schools that—once Gates has his way—will have obscenely large class sizes… A bit fed up, Weastneat did what perhaps no other writer has yet dared to do:
he investigated the two rich kids’ private school where Gates sends his own children and—doncha know it? —these schools major selling point is that they have… wait for it… EXTREMELY SMALL CLASS SIZES:
WESTNEAT: “I bet (Gates) senses deep down as a parent that pushing more kids into classes isn’t what’s best for students. His kids’ private-sector grade school has 17 kids in each room. His daughter’s high school has 15. These intimate settings are the selling point, the chief reason tuition is $25,000 a year — more than double what Seattle schools spends per student.”
Calling out Gates’ hypocrisy, Weastneat ends the article with a knockout finish:
WEASTNEAT: “Bill, here’s an experiment. You and I both have an 8-year-old. Let’s take your school and double its class sizes, from 16 to 32. We’ll use the extra money generated by that — a whopping $400,000 more per year per classroom — to halve the class sizes, from 32 to 16, at my public high school, Garfield.
“In 2020, when our kids are graduating, we’ll compare what effect it all had. On student achievement. On teaching quality. On morale. Or that best thing of all, the “environment that promotes relationships between teachers and students.”
“Deal? Probably not. Nobody would take that trade. Which says more than all the studies ever will.”
Thanks for the flashbacks and memories this morning.
Bill Gates is one of those wealthy hypocrites who are so stupid they will never even realize what out of it hypocrites they are… This is a great example of that.
Take the “college and career ready” stuff and all that about stopping “dropouts”. In context, we shouldn’t be laughing at Billionaire Bill and Melinda — but what else can we do?
Whenever anyone talks about how Billionaire Bill dropped out of Harvard to do his “entrepreneurial” thingy, etc., etc. as if that was a good idea, I try to remind them, if I’m in a good mood, that Bill Gates already came from one of the wealthiest families in Seattle. He would have remained rich even if he had never completed eight grade, and those street kids who suffered in Seattle back in the days when he was in the wealthiest school in town were not part of his reality. Nor were those of us in the working class (except to exploit, and keep without unions…).
Bill Gates could surely do his version of adulthood without a college degree. In other words, he had a planeload of golden parachutes waiting in case his “entrepreneurship” failed along the way. His DNA was probably also how he knew that a good “intellectual property lawyer” was as important as the ability to code complexly in BASIC. Privilege has its privileges.
That’s not true for most of us.
I came from Linden, New Jersey, not the rich side of Seattle. My community was where every adult male on our block (the 500 block of Monmouth Ave., it’s still there) and one adult female (my Mom) were Army (or Seabee) veterans. Union jobs and the “G.I. Bill” were what created that little sliver of the “middle class” five blocks from the ESSO (now Standard Oil) refinery that Bruce Springsteen wrote about in “Born in the USA.”
When I was lucky enough to get to the University of Chicago on a scholarship while two of my many hometown friends suffered very much in Vietnam (one became a POW for eight years; the other KIA USMC outside Danang before he was 20), there were people among my “radical” peers (I began this stuff a long long time ago) who were preaching that all of us should drop out and do “movement work.”
What they were leaving out, I slowly learned, was that their trust funds, like Bill Gates’s DNA, would make sure that if American capitalism survived the challenges they were trying on like new boots, they would be wealthier in a generation than all the men and women on my block would ever be. It’s really easy to talk about this “leave college and do your thing” thing when you know there are a dozen available escape routes from anything you do thanks to the privileges of class. Gates was never just a guy like the rest of us, any more than the fringe blow ’em up to make the revolution crowd were back then. My brothers and sisters, my parents, and the men and women I chose to work with had seen the real violence of war and knew that step was not to be taken lightly — unless your family’s privileges were so enormous that you could get away with anything, including murder.
That’s one of the reasons why I was glad to cover the American Federation of Teachers convention in Seattle in 2010 and watch stunned while Randi Weingarten smiled on stage while chiding the delegates to be nice to Billionaire Bill. She and somebody had decided that since the AFT was meeting in Seattle, who better to talk about education reform to the 3,000 delegates than one of the biggest union busters and teacher bashers in the USA.
Of course, there were lots of people at the AFT convention in Seattle that July who knew the militant and courageous history of union struggles in the Pacific Northwest. And who were shut out of the main events by Randi’s craven version of reality.
Thanks for the memories…
I’d bet Bill Gates all of his $70 (?) billion that he couldn’t pass this test:
Click to access 2013.05.09_-_ela_regents_nti_document_final.pdf
Certified bank check please, Mr. Gates
This will soon be a graduation requirement in NYS
MUST READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
IT IS WELL WORTH THE DOWNLOAD TIME SO THAT YOU CAN FULLY GAUGE THE INSANITY OF THE COMMON CORE AT THE HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL>
Unbelievable.
Yes, Bill, you should take this test. See if it holds your interest.
These poor kids. My heart breaks knowing this is their life.
Thanks for taking the time WM, its more insane than one might imagine. Seeing is disbelieving.
And if you want a real challenge Bill, take this 3-hour test after being up all night because your drunken step father was beating the shit out of your mother while and your baby sister wouldn’t stop crying.
Thanks, NY teacher. When this was previewed at an Albany meeting, officials and “test designers” were positively gleeful about the test’s difficulty. When seasoned AP/honors teachers pointed out that this was more difficult than a certain AP English exam and would be difficult for even bright students to pass, state education folks were nonplussed. We gave the multiple choice section to graduating seniors, including one who scored 790 on the SAT II in literature, in order to see how students responded to these questions. The results were not pretty. One correct answer and 3 “plausible distractors” proved confusing for some deep thinkers and careful,readers. Those atrocious grades 3-8 test scores, which were aligned to NAEP, are the destiny of high school students in NY. What will we do with the 70 percent who don’t pass, and as a result, don’t graduate? Thanks for funding the destruction of public education, Bill.