Nancy Bailey reviews the latest failure of Bill Gates in his efforts to reinvent public education.
This is just the latest in a long series of failures for Gates.
She asks, what is he really aiming for?
It is not to make schools better, but to make them unnecessary. The goal: using technology to tailor education to each child.
“All of this will lead to:
-No more teachers.
-No more public schools.
-Students using technology anyplace, anytime.
-Technology in charter schools.
-Continuous online assessment.
-No more privacy rules.
-Connecting children with workforce needs.
His acumen is to put down the seed money and get you to pay for his next experiment.
No accountability for him as he wrecks your schools with his latest brainstorm.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I hate this thought. Have a baby. Then sign him up for a career. Absurd! There is journey here, people! A day to day journey of love and joy to spend with your child. The last thing on a new parent’s mind should be what job will you do ? A friend posted on FB yesterday, Retirement? What? I’ll be working till lunch on the day of my funeral! I am leaning more and more on Thoreau. We use too much. Simplify, simplify ! Everywhere!
This is exactly what a meant a few threads down about improving education has never been Gates’ intention. What we consider failures he considers necessary steps on a different road.
Do you ever feel like the ants in an ant farm or the animals in the zoo? Actually, in a top notch zoo, the animals get better treatment than Gates plans for students. Each animal is important in a zoo whereas Gates is ready to throw away students in his never ending experiments. His attitude is more like that typically demonstrated by those soon defunct ant farms many of us received as kids.
That’s pretty much it.
It’s all about serving the needs of capital – an active, engaged citizenry be damned!
The tech titans want a future like in the cartoon Wall-E, with everyone plugged in to virtual reality and unable to advocate for themselves in real life.
Good analogy.
This have been a reality for decades.
— Education.
— A TV in every room.
Charly, 1968
Never happened. 50 years went by so fast. Wake me up when Bill Gates gets a clue.
Gates, like many, keeps a fixed and anticipatory gaze on AI. But those who fundamentally misunderstand human intelligence will be unable to put AI to good use.
Gates sits on his perch on Mt.Olympus figuring out ways to fit the rest of us into his dystopian agenda. In a democracy no man should have such power. Gates uses our young people as his play things. He has repeatedly failed, and parents have good reason to be alarmed. Our children have a right to a free public education, and nobody voted for Bill Gates who buys compliance from others. Parents should challenge any state or school district that jumps on Gates’ personalized bandwagon as the research on virtual charters in charters is dismal. Parents should defend their children’s best interests free from the influence of Silicon Valley marketing and endless invasion of privacy. Gates has made too many mistakes to be trusted.
Nancy’s so prescient statement: “The Gates Foundation always fails, but their changes bring us closer to the end of public education and professional teaching.”
long. The MET study was a dud, but the American Educational Research Association has taken the Gates bait and is subsidizing research with the data from that disaster.
I became aware of the recycling of the bad data by reading studies in Educational Researcher. But here is the rest of the Gates infection. The following is lightly edited from the online website. http://www.aera.net/Professional-Opportunities-Funding/AERA-Funding-Opportunities/AERA-MET-Dissertation-Fellowship
The AERA-MET Dissertation Fellowship Program….
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) with funding support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pleased to announce a dissertation fellowship program to support graduate students in education research to conduct secondary data analysis using the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Longitudinal Database.
The AERA-MET Dissertation Fellowship Program provides funding and professional development and training to dissertation stage graduate students who use the MET data to address research questions and examine issues that will contribute to knowledge about teaching and learning.
About the MET Database
The MET Longitudinal Database consists of extensive quantitative and qualitative information about teachers and their teaching, students’ academic achievement, video-recorded lessons, and assessments of a teacher’s pedagogical and content knowledge, as well as surveys of students, teachers, principals, and schools.
Recognizing the importance and richness of the MET dataset, AERA supports and builds research capacity among graduate students who use these data in their dissertation projects. Through use of this dataset researchers are trained and encouraged to analyze the MET database systematically and rigorously (whether through quantitative or qualitative methodologies) to address education research questions that can ultimately enhance teaching and learning in our nation’s K-12 classrooms.
Funded dissertation studies that use the MET database are expected to contribute to new knowledge, advance analytic methods for using such data, raise the profile of the value of these data, and enhance the research findings produced by the next generation of secondary users of this resource.
The MET data is available through the University of Michigan’s Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). …All MET data are restricted and require that doctoral level students access the data through a faculty member. If awarded the AERA-MET Dissertation Fellowship, the Chair of the dissertation committee must have an approved Data Use Agreement application with ICPSR that lists the awardee among those with access to the MET data.
…..
Illustrative Topics
• Research that advances the measurement of teaching using existing MET data. ….
• Statistical, psychometric, and/or qualitative analyses that advance descriptive, correlational or causal research on teaching and teaching effectiveness using MET data. ….
• Use of the MET data to advance the practice of teacher evaluation in schools (including) personnel decision making in school systems (e.g., through analyses of measurement precision, error rates, or consequential validity).
…..
• Use of existing MET video to conduct qualitative and/or quantitative research on the rating process. Such analyses might involve new scoring of existing MET videos and be oriented to examining the cognitive processes of those who score videos and/or the effects of different conditions of scoring on either the cognitive processes of raters and/or the resulting scores.
…..
AERA-MET Fellows Awards: 1. Receive a $20,000 Stipend for research using the MET Longitudinal Database. AERA pays travel and lodging for the Fellows to attend a 3 day AERA Doctoral Research Conference in order to network and interact with senior scholars and researchers who are involved in developing and implementing the MET project and other graduate students who use large-scale datasets. 2. Fellows must use their stipend budget for travel and lodging expenses to attend the AERA Annual Meeting Research Institute and Early Career Transition Capstone Conference and participate in an …institute led by MET experts (among other activities). 3. “At the end of the Annual Meeting, fellows will participate in the Early Career Transition Capstone Conference” in order to receive guidance on searching for a faculty or research position, and publishing in journals.
The AERA-Virtual Research Learning Center (http://www.aera.net/VRLC) offers a course about the MET Project and how to access the data. For information about the MET instruments and data files visit: http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/METLDB/ and http://k12education.gatesfoundation.org/blog/measures-of-effective-teaching-project-faqs/
I think many readers of this blog are familiar with GIGO, Garbage In=Garbage Out. That seems to me a good way to describe the MET study. I am a member of AERA, so I sent some questions to the managers of the AERA-MET Fellows Awards
Will the AERA_Met Fellowships be continued on an annual basis?
If so, for how many years will the AERA_ Met Fellowships be offered?
Will the AERA have a formal response to the widely publicized evaluation of the MET study and criticisms of the entire effort?
In the light of the flaws in the MET project should AERA continue to support the use of that data and those measures (including VAM, the student surveys, the limited number of subjects, the use of videos selected by teachers, the unproven reliability and validity of the Danielson Framework, and more).
AERA received $250,000 in May 2013 “to fund the selection and support of nine doctoral scholars who will conduct research in the area of teaching effectiveness using the Measures of Effective Teaching longitudinal database for 62 months (about five years.)
The University of Michigan received $1,421,494 in August 2011 “to securely house and make available to qualified researchers the data collected by the Measures of Effective Teaching project (for 47 months)
The failures that Gates supports have a very long shelf life, aided and abetted by educators eager to please. Disgusting.
Gates, most charters, the deformers and VAMers really missed the mark, their own mark.
If one insists on using some sort of survival of the fittest strategy, one must understand the field of play and what would make sense in terms of productive development (evolution).
If there are specialized and very variegated populations and schools, it makes little sense to painstakingly select for individuals, teachers, who may be current matches or mismatches. What may yield gains is selecting for practices AND materials that work with specific populations (skill levels, age, culture, manifest attitude) under certain conditions (initiatives, theme, expectations, facilities).
The reason Gates and the other tech billionaires will always fail at reinventing education is that education doesn’t need reinventing. Simple.
They tried to reinvent baseball too with data analytics. They tried to reinvent moms (remember Tiger Moms). Moms, baseball, what’s next? Apple pie? Maybe they should try to reinvent pants. Or maybe, just maybe they should pay taxes and not be so runaway rich.
The end game of Gates, Broad, and the Waltons? This:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/12/walmart-surveillance-sound-sensors-employees
Too much conspiracy theorizing? Just keep in mind that surveillance cameras in classrooms was one of Bill Gates’ many ridiculous suggestions.
Mr. Gates and his fellow reformers want to run schools like a business… with high test scores the proxy for “learning” and/or “intelligence” but $$$ the most important outcome…
In an early biography of Gates, he’s quoted patronizing and disparaging a competitor for its “finite greed,” which leads to the reasonable inference that be believes in and operates on the principle of “infinite greed.” No surprise there, given his genius as a monopolist.
That’s always been my guiding assumption about Gates’ motives; he’s seeking an educational landscape where his infinite greed, and that of his fellow Lords of the Overclass, is “free” to devour everything: children, teachers, communities, public goods, democratic traditions… all prey to their insatiable maw.
Well said! Gates is a megalomaniac.