For more than the past decade, Bill Gates has dabbled in education. He launches initiative after initiative, with slim or no research, and all of them flop. While he dabbles–whether it is the Common Core or evaluating teachers by test scores–he messes up other people’s lives with no accountability for his screw-ups. He just moves on to his Next Big Idea.
Mercedes Schneider points out that the Gates Foundation spends more money “reforming education” in the U.S., but has nothing to show for it.
Curiously, the Gates Foundation’s annual letter doesn’t even mention education! (Correction: Leonie Haimson pointed out that education was not mentioned in the Foundation’s annual letter; its annual report is not published yet. So maybe we will hear some Trump-style claims about the successes of VAM and charters, and other DeVos strategies for privatization.)
Will he butt out? Will he admit error?
I saw him on TV Saturday night warning about the dangers of bio-terrorism. A few weeks ago, he met with Donald Trump in his golden penthouse and came away expressing admiration, prophesying that Trump had the chance to be transformative, like John F. Kennedy, by driving education innovation with new technologies. What’s on his mind? Saving humanity or market share?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“expressing admiration, prophesying that Trump had the chance to be transformative”
That is sad. Even if you happened to like something Trump had to say, any clued-in person should be aware that Trump’s ability to follow through on any initiative is weak.
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OMG, Gates again. He needs to go slink under a rock.
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When will Gates just go away!
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When there is placed a 90% tax on the highest levels of investment income, the robber barons of today will be somewhat subdued. In other words, William Gates III is not going away any time soon. The question is whether or on which days David Coleman and William Gates III will have the ear of — I am so tired of reading and writing this name — Donald.
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…whether or not…, autocorrect
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Thank you, Diane. We have been seduced and hoodwinked from the days of the Clinton administration when computers were deemed necessary in every classroom; to the days when the ambitious dreamed of delivering a laptop for every student; and finally today when from the dream of complete classroom connectivity we have moved away from the ‘archaic’ classroom to celebrating asynchronous and ‘private’ learning from the comfort of our kitchen tables and recliners.
The techies and managers of Silicon Valley and Wall Street have assumed that the problems of educating a democratic citizenry have technocratic solutions or, better still, can be resolved by handing over the whole messy, labor intensive and expensive task to bottom line driven businessmen and women. Nobody but cynical snake oil salesmen or the truly ignorant (who have missed out on a real education themselves) can truly believe that this is what is needed.
Unless well meaning teachers, parents, communities and funding agencies wake up to the dangers of allowing the barely educated to determine the future of the yet to be educated, the election of a populist demagogue or crony capitalism will be the least of our troubles.
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The education policy, chronology, at the Aspen Institute, where David Koch serves on the board, spells out who is responsible for the Gates/Walton plot. Gates funds Aspen programs like Pahara Institute and the Senior Congressional Education Staff Network.
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“The rich silent type”
The silent type’s the one
You worry ’bout the most
Cuz what he has begun
Ain’t given up the ghost
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Good one. Wonderful to have you back.
The new interest, and market, is international in two forms. One is strictly on-line marketed as personalized. The other is place-based, happens in slightly modified and usually scavenged shipping containers, everyone on the same page at the same time, a scripted “basic education” curriculum in the three R’s uploaded/downloaded wherever people can connect. This is a perfected example of cost-effective production of test scores that will please investors and satisfy communities who still want place-based educational services. Bridge International is one version. It is hoping to beat the competition.
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Remember a snake gets quiet before it strikes!
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It’s a shame that people keep trying to put their names on things (thinking dogs and fire hydrants) as their bigger brains try to ‘reform’ something…educational reform always sounds good but in reality it’s not reforming, it’s deconstructing and remaking in their image. I’m all for excellence against a common goals–more effective engagement in a learning ecosystem, more fun, life-long learning, skills that meet community needs, whatever. But Gates, and others, seem to believe the existing systems is wrongheaded…of course part of that is that equate learning with data/information rather than knowledge and wisdom…let alone culture and beauty. “Information is not knowledge; knowledge is not wisdom.” But this too may change…I can only hope sooner rather than later.
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What’s on his mind? Profit. Pure and simple.
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No, not likely. He’s already a billionaire, for one, and nothing that he does from now on is likely to make a material increase in that amount of wealth.
Secondly, he’s spending hundreds of millions on charitable causes, so he’s really losing money, not earning it.
The most reasonable interpretation of his actions is that he is simply misguided.
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Greg,
I don’t think Bill Gates does anything just to make money. He is allegedly worth $60 billion, more than he could spend in many lifetimes.
He unfortunately thinks he is incredibly smart and knows how to solve all problems. The proof of his divine brilliance is his great wealth.
This encourages him to impose “solutions” that don’t work on sectors about which he is ignorant.
He was able to attend a well -resourced private school in Seattle, as have his own children.
Why doesn’t he lead a campaign to make all schools like Lakeside Academy, instead of promoting the free market ideology of Betsy DeVos?
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His primary motivation probably stems from his being a free market acolyte.
His religious fervor explains why he can not be convinced by facts that contradict his policies.
Like all true believers, he is immune to reason.
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Glory hound, Bill Gates, brags that he is giving away his fortune in his lifetime. Despite his claims of great largesse, note that he never falls, even one rung, on the richest men lists, just like his best bud, Warren Buffet.
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Linda,
That’s because the money they “donate” to their own (and their friends’) foundations is used as a tax write-off.
At least part of that money would simply be lost if it were not “donated”.
This way, Gates and others maintain control over how their money is spent, even the part that rightfully belongs to the American public.
Make no mistake: Gates is using OUR money to develop Common Core and paying his pals Coleman and Zimba hefty salaries to do so.
And of course, the money used to produce the standard is very small compared to the amount required to implement it and pay for the curriculum, testing and all the rest. Of course, Gates does not pay for the latter. The states and local school districts are saddled with that bill.
Gates is basically a shyster and the only reason anyone listens to him is because he basically bribes them to do so
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IMHO, here’s all you need to know: reform is a religion TT hat worships the free market
The details are immaterial: who it’s profit is, whether it includes a belief in the Father,Son and Holey Gates, whether women are allowed to serve in the priesthood and as secretaries, etc.
There are various sects, and though some may put vouchers before charters, they all have the same common core of beliefs
“The Reformation”
Reform is a religion
With Friedman* as its god
And Billy Gates** as profit
To follow and to laud
With charter as the chapel
Where people bow and prey
With hymnal pads from Apple
To rapture them away
The fundamental tenet
The key to Heaven’s Gates
Is righteousness of market
That’s sealing all our fates
*Milton Friedman, All mighty Father of the free market
**This would be the sect that believes in the Holey Trinity: the Father, Son (David Coleman) and Holey Gates
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Good poem! So glad you’re back to share your talent with us.
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Our income disparity gives people like Gates and Broad unfair access to “have their way” with our young people. There is little to no evidence supporting either reform or personalized learning so our young people get to be guinea pigs for the 1% and their vanity project or market share driven bad ideas. The representatives that should be working for the citizenry really work for these oligarchs, and democratic representation, which should have a sobering impact on decisions, is cut out of the equation. We keep getting further and further from the ideals that founded this nation.
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For sure, not saving humanity.
Who was the real JFK?
Like the malignant narcissist in the White House, JFK had help from his wealthy, bootlegging, gangsta daddy.
Like the malignant narcissist in the White House, JFK was a serial womanizer and may have been involved with the death of Marilyn Monroe, because she might have been pregnant with his child and he told her state secrets while they were in bed together.
JFK took the world to the brink of nuclear war in a showdown with Russia, and the malignant narcissist in the White House seems to like the idea of using nuclear weapons.
What did JFK really do as president other than look glamorous and sexy, something the malignant narcissist in the White House will never do is look glamours and sexy?
To be honest, I can’t remember anything JFK actually did except what I’ve listed in this comment.
Oh, and JFK was assassinated. Maybe Bill Gates thinks that the malignant narcissist in the White House will end up the same way.
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Like many tech entrepreneurs, Gates is looking for the silver bullet to solve educational problems. However, each few years, the nature of the silver bullet changes. Rather than engaging the complexity of educating the diversity of students, the efficient answer is always the best.
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Banal cost cutting, wrapped in opportunities for profit-taking, from data mining, wouldn’t be seen as a “silver bullet” to anyone. On the other hand, Gates’ investment in the largest seller of for-profit schools-in-a-box, speaks volumes.
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“I saw him on TV Saturday night warning about the dangers of biowarfare”
That’s right. I read that article last night. Did you notice Billy Brilliant Billy Gates has more money invested in Big Pharma than in Microsoft? Did you pick up on his comment about needed to deliver a vaccine that would introduce synthetic materials into the human body? Uh, that’s already been happening as if he didn’t know it. It’s called Morgellan’s Disease.A science faux pas like so many other genetically modified experiments that are killing people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons
Gates and the Men of Davos are at it again. How to make the rich richer and depopulate the planet with their BRILLIANT profit plans.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/davos-world-economic-forum-bill-gates-outsmart-global-epidemics-cepi-coalition-for-epidemic-preparedness/
His head is in the toilet.
He pays off the government to use kids as guinea pigs for machine learning/AI via Common Bore on the one hand and vax to synthesize human tissue on the other hand to create the robots that will steal the jobs away. ( As a villian, Lex Luther has nothing on this modern day criminal who scores far lower on the intel ladder. Afterall, he stole his way to greatness!)
Then, in an attempt to cover up his insanity, he claims that robots who steal jobs from humans should be taxed.http://fortune.com/2017/02/18/bill-gates-robot-taxes-automation/
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His head is in the toilet? He financed a toilet for third world countries that doesn’t need much water. Maybe none.
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Gates toilets cost @ a nickle per person per day in poor countries where average incomes might be $3.50/day WHOO Hoo to Bill! And the cost of the toilet? $1,000? Field testing hasn’t been done.
Modi gov’t installed millions but research shows many are not used.
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You reminded me of one of my favorite bits from anything anyone has written on education…
[start]
School reformers sometimes resemble the characters in Dr. Seuss’s I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, who are always searching for the mythical land “where they never have troubles, at least very few.” Or, like Dumbo, they are convinced they could fly if only they had a magic feather. In my writings, I have consistently warned that, in education, there are no shortcuts, no utopias, and no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers than enable elephants to fly.
[end]
Oops, almost forgot to add..
Diane Ravitch, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM: HOW TESTING AND CHOICE ARE UNDERMINING EDUCATION (2016, revised and expanded edition, p. 3).
Not far behind is the title Anthony Cody gave chapter 22 of his THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH (2014): “Bill Gates and the Cult of Measurement: Efficiency Without Excellence.”
😎
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This is is stealth move, to distract from his ongoing, staggering investment in a nationwide program to impose his digital learning algorithms on states by force of law, under the “flexibility” of ESSA.
Microsoft itself is also leading the charge for digitized control of his new paradigm, which he is still massively promoting through his “Next Generation Learning Challenge” grants, at the same time he attempts to extract more profit from it through his corporate partners. It’s dizzying, not quiet at all.
In my own state of Massachusetts, for instance, these “Industry Partners” are imposing their private profit mining on our public schools, without our consent or knowledge.
“INDUSTRY PARTNERS:
GIANCARLO BROTTO, Global Education Strategist, SMART Technologies
BYRON GARRETT, Director, US Education, Microsoft Corporation
BILL HAGEN, Director of Solution Sales – Cloud Productivity,
US Education, Microsoft Corporation
DUANE WHEELER, Senior Architect, Networking Practice, Insight
JULIE WILLIAMS, Account Executive, Edgenuity”
Click to access CDE16_WHITE_PAPER_CAO_V.PDF
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The corporations use ABDA’s to collect the data and crappy Privacy Statements that share with their “affiliates” and ZERO Informed Consent to Parents. All Data will be shared (think Whatsapp) under the “Mergers and Acquisitions” clause.
Billionaire Boys Club met in Davos and their NextGen is for a Gen where students are nothing but a composite of their data sets. No human qualities necessary.
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I would hope what’s going on is that Bill Gates has been chastened by his bull-in-china-shop forays into mega-funding top-down mandates to solve US ed issues. He admitted as much in some interview I read in the last couple of yrs– he clearly noticed the grass-roots pushback, & realized making changes to such a fundamental aspect of everyday life in a democratic society is messy.
Gates gets something of a bum rap from our crowd, I think. Peruse his “Bill Gates Notes” under “Improving Education”, & read his interviews w/ recent WA Teachers of the Year. He is evolving a bit. I note also that his recent CCSS ed grants (as reported by M Schneider) are local– could be he is simply trying to get more data on this effort into which he once invested so much on a national scale.
We excoriate Gates for his arrogant, pushy ’90’s-2000’s efforts to change natl ed policy overnight, in which he largely succeeded. And we are correct in noting that those policies were self-serving, inasmuch as their implementation relied on sw & hw solutions that would feather his nest. But our excoriation is misdirected: it goes to changes in our govt over 40 yrs which allow any corporate CEO to amass $80 billion, and simultaneously allow unlimited funding of political campaigns– & wink at lobbying laws, revolving-door conflicts of interest, etc. no individual would be influencing policy to this degree in a true democracy.
On a recent comment thread we have discussed Gates’ “box-thinking” & how it seems to allow him to compartmentalize (which ameliorates cognitive dissonance), causing him to on the one hand nostalgically glorify the best pedagogical methods/ resources (à la Lakeside) while simultaneously promoting cheap lo-qual ed for the commonfolk, all delivered in a sort of neutral ‘so what?’ that is clearly founded on free-market winner/loser principles, accompanied by a galling authoritarianism borne of the monopolistic tendencies that accompany power.
I am here to say this is not an unusual personality paradigm, I have witnessed it up close in my own family clan. It is quite typical of a mathematical mindset accompanied by high intellect and academic/ business success. These are, like Gates’ family, highly competitive folk whose family/ personal time is spent on chess, bridge, competitive athletic pursuits.
Such folk usually– eventually, in mid-life– get schooled by their own offspring. But that depends entirely on who you marry. I had an uncle who came this close to running a great American US intl corp. His wife was an artist. Their eldest was a brilliant scientist married to an Asian researcher, but oh the kids! The eldest a brilliant artist who sampled several fields & now tours the Orient as a cellist [super-competitive]– the other is a crunchy-granola entrepreneur in boutique farming. My cousin (the Dad) was a B Gates-type but has mellowed thro fathering & is now nonplused.
But Bill G didn’t marry an artist. He came from lawyers & bankers, & married a gal from bankers. We know only about his eldest who is a super-competetive horsewoman (& biology major). His path to being nonplused will be much longer. A man like this is tempered by fatherhood, but his eldest is barely 21…
I happened to catch today a Bloomberg-TV interview w/Melinda Gates, talking mostly about their African endeavors. I was pleasantly surprised by the nuanced methods they had developed in efforts to change village culture re: birth control, shared household duties, allowing the women to engage in entrepreneurial efforts. Perhaps in future attempts to affect US ed, Gates’ will bring home some of what they are learning about grass-roots communication.
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I don’t see any evidence that Gates learns — ever.
He implemented his stack ranking program at his own company with disastrous results and then proceeded to call for a very similar thing for teachers (VAM).
When the American Statistical Society basically said that using VAM to evaluate individual teachers was a bad idea not least of all because it was very unreliable, instead of calling for an end to the process, Gates merely called for a 2 year moratorium on high stakes use of VAM.
Gates plays games.
He believes he is right and that’s that.
You can’t reason with him because he has already made up his mind from the beginning.
If Gates was actually “data-driven” as he claims, he would not impose stuff like Common Core on millions of students without having any idea beforehand whether it would work.
Throwing stuff at the wall and waiting ten years to see if it sticks is not the approach of someone who is driven by data and science.
Gates doesn’t have any clue what the latter even mean.
If Gates took any science courses at Harvard while he was there, it certainly does not show because he is lacking in very basic problem solving skills.
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Gates dropped out of Harvard in his second year. He probably avoided any classes that would require him to actually study. He was one of those dudes that wanted to go from square 1 to 100 in one leap and in his case, he made it by being more convincing than the competition. He was a better salesman. He didn’t have the better product.
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Lloyd
You’re right that Gates was basically little
More than a glorified salesman for Microsoft.
The person who made the technical stuff happen was his colleague Paul Allen, who Gates actually tried to cheat out of his rightful share in the company at one point.
What kind of person tries to cheat their own business partner?
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I don’t believe Gates is data driven. That’s his schitck to collect the data… all of it. If anyone thinks those computer generated q & a’s and all the other behavioral and emotional learning data isn’t being fed into computers to generate algorithms to advance AI then you’re not thinking like Billy. He’s a user.
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SDP, LL, Clairty,
All no doubt true. & if Bill gets schooled by life, he will probably fail to apply lessons learned beyond his personal sphere. Tho his forune opens multiple paths for doing good on a grand scale, his global vision runs to algorithms. Perhaps I underestimate him, but his reading lists suggest he is uninterested/ uneducated in classics/ humanities/ philosophy et al deep thinking needed to guide such ventures. My point: he is just one man, his solutions lack depth & finesse, there is a strain of venality, even banality that colors his thinking which is unchecked by intellect & exacerbated by power.
The power is the problem. Our governmental structure allows a single individual to amass nation-size wealth, & then does not sufficiently check its wielder (via democratic means) from imposing his whims on govtl policy.
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If Bill Gates lived in the Eisenhower era, he would be paying a tax rate of 91%.
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And Eisenhower was a Republican.
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Seems to me that if anyone has Bill’s ear it is Warren Buffet, and that Buffet would likely listen to Diane.
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How sad that we the people are reduced to the role of courtiers hoping to influence the money-monarchs via behind-the-scenes manipulation.
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Buffet likes to pretend he supports the little guy, but he games the system the same way Gates does to avoid taxes.
If Buffet really wanted to, he could give ALL the money he”earns” back to the American people, but instead he plays games to avoid tAxes a d at the same time keep control over how the money is spent.
People like Buffet and Gates do not get to where they are without stepping on and ripping off a lot of people along the way.
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