Bill Gates didn’t know the price of groceries why did we expect he would know something about education reform?

Is Bill Gates a smart man? I don’t know. I know he is a rich man and all to often in America we confuse wealth with intelligence and we do so to our detriment. If Gates doesn’t understand how grocery stores work, why should we expect him to know how education works?

The answer is we shouldn’t have but for years we let him experiment on our children and teachers like they were lab rats. How many good teachers lost their jobs or left in disgust? How many children didn’t receive the education they deserved because he decided to dabble in education. Gates isn’t a hero for trying to help, he is a villain because his hubris not facts dictated what he spent his millions on.

From Chalkbeat:

Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address reflected the heady moment in education. “We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000,” he said. “A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance.”

Bad teachers were the problem; good teachers were the solution. It was a simplified binary, but the idea and the research it drew on had spurred policy changes across the country, including a spate of laws establishing new evaluation systems designed to reward top teachers and help weed out low performers.

Behind that effort was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which backed research and advocacy that ultimately shaped these changes.

It also funded the efforts themselves, specifically in several large school districts and charter networks open to changing how teachers were hired, trained, evaluated, and paid. Now, new research commissioned by the Gates Foundation finds scant evidence that those changes accomplished what they were meant to: improve teacher quality or boost student learning.

The 500-plus page report by the Rand Corporation, released Thursday, details the political and technical challenges of putting complex new systems in place and the steep cost — $575 million — of doing so.

The post-mortem will likely serve as validation to the foundation’s critics, who have long complained about Gates’ heavy influence on education policy and what they call its top-down approach.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/06/21/the-gates-foundation-bet-big-on-teacher-evaluation-the-report-it-commissioned-explains-how-those-efforts-fell-short/

575 million dollars wasted. What would have happened had he invested that money in smaller classes, mental health counselors and social workers and wrap around services for children, or you know things teachers have been begging for.

Maybe this could be excused if this was his only failed education initiative but the thing is he has failed over and over again and our school system has paid the price for people letting him try his mad scientistesque experiments. He is a lot closer to Victor Frankenstein than Horace Mann.

Bill Gates, is a teacher blaming union busting, charter loving, voucher promoting hobbyist and it is truly stunning that this really rich and supposedly smart guy is on the wrong side of every education issue.

http://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/search?q=bill+gates+.

When made aware of the results, the Gates foundation had the following to say, also from Chalkbeat

“We have taken these lessons to heart, and they are reflected in the work that we’re doing moving forward,” the Gates Foundation’s Allan Golston said in a statement.

Well $#@% you Allan Golston and $#@% the foundation too. Unless you are going to listen to teachers and parents your assistance is not wanted.

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