As reported to me by ProPublica: Bill Gates Offers Stimulus Advice by Christopher Flavelle: Bill Gates waded into the stimulus debate Tuesday, calling for states to be more ambitious in the way they spend stimulus money earmarked for public education. Speaking to the National Conference of State Legislatures in Philadelphia, Gates urged states to increase online learning, better assess both pupils and teachers, and create more schools modeled on charter schools, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. “Our schools need to get better, or our economic positioning relative to others will get worse,” said Gates.
Here we go again. "I'm rich so listen to what I say about [insert issue here]."
The last I heard Mr. Gates had NO educational background and was a college drop-out. He has seemed to become a regular purveyor of advice to the nation's schools. As a 25-year-teacher, I'd like to say that he is invariably wrong. Without going into the long, extremely complex problems with this particular speech, let me say that I know of few schools without access online --almost always high speed--and few teachers (especially new teachers) who lack the knowledge to get public students using the Internet, he misses a lot of necessary background learning required for students to effectively use said Internet.
Kids are whizzes at texting, less so at Emailing (most text now and rarely use Email accounts). Their writing skills are awful (but getting better), as are their reasoning skills. I often ask students to doonline research. They cannot 1) distinguish legitimate websites from those that are not; 2) put words together to make a cogent search string, often trying one search and telling me "they can't find anything." Other computer-use skills seem to pass by many. The computer/keyboarding teacher who taught next door to me would often get papers handed in where students hadn't bothered to spell-check, for instance, in spite of her REPEATED efforts trying them to get them to do so. (I graduated from high school in 1967 and took touch-typing in either 1965 or 1966. What I would not have given, back then, to have a "spell checker" on my manual typewriter.)
I also, disappointingly, hear lots of talk about "charter schools," which are nothing more than private schools by a different name. I hear president Obama talking about them, for God's sake. The great leveler of America is its access of education to all. Charter schools will, in time, guarantee that regular public schools will become dumping grounds for those students charter schools will not accept.
Mr. Gates clearly needs to have some knowledge of public education before he comments on it. The possession of vast fortunes means, often, that a person was in the right place at the right time, not necessarily that he or she has/had some sort of special knowledge about a particular field of study, especially one which is unrelated to the fortune he or she has accumulated.
This speech, like so many others of his, is full of platitudes which lack any sort of meaningful specificity, and prove beyond reasonable doubt that he simply doesn't know what he is talking about, at least not when it comes to education.
Maybe, just maybe, instead of these harangues, Mr. Gates ought to work on developing a piece of system or office software that isn't inherently inferior to a previous version of his own work. And maybe, for once, evaluations of our educational system might be left to those who actually teach. That would be a pleasant change.
Here we go again. "I'm rich so listen to what I say about [insert issue here]."
The last I heard Mr. Gates had NO educational background and was a college drop-out. He has seemed to become a regular purveyor of advice to the nation's schools. As a 25-year-teacher, I'd like to say that he is invariably wrong. Without going into the long, extremely complex problems with this particular speech, let me say that I know of few schools without access online --almost always high speed--and few teachers (especially new teachers) who lack the knowledge to get public students using the Internet, he misses a lot of necessary background learning required for students to effectively use said Internet.
Kids are whizzes at texting, less so at Emailing (most text now and rarely use Email accounts). Their writing skills are awful (but getting better), as are their reasoning skills. I often ask students to doonline research. They cannot 1) distinguish legitimate websites from those that are not; 2) put words together to make a cogent search string, often trying one search and telling me "they can't find anything." Other computer-use skills seem to pass by many. The computer/keyboarding teacher who taught next door to me would often get papers handed in where students hadn't bothered to spell-check, for instance, in spite of her REPEATED efforts trying them to get them to do so. (I graduated from high school in 1967 and took touch-typing in either 1965 or 1966. What I would not have given, back then, to have a "spell checker" on my manual typewriter.)
I also, disappointingly, hear lots of talk about "charter schools," which are nothing more than private schools by a different name. I hear president Obama talking about them, for God's sake. The great leveler of America is its access of education to all. Charter schools will, in time, guarantee that regular public schools will become dumping grounds for those students charter schools will not accept.
Mr. Gates clearly needs to have some knowledge of public education before he comments on it. The possession of vast fortunes means, often, that a person was in the right place at the right time, not necessarily that he or she has/had some sort of special knowledge about a particular field of study, especially one which is unrelated to the fortune he or she has accumulated.
This speech, like so many others of his, is full of platitudes which lack any sort of meaningful specificity, and prove beyond reasonable doubt that he simply doesn't know what he is talking about, at least not when it comes to education.
Maybe, just maybe, instead of these harangues, Mr. Gates ought to work on developing a piece of system or office software that isn't inherently inferior to a previous version of his own work. And maybe, for once, evaluations of our educational system might be left to those who actually teach. That would be a pleasant change.
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