Gates Paying Murdoch For System To Track U.S. Kids' School Progress 182
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timothy
from the now-where-were-we? dept.
from the now-where-were-we? dept.
theodp writes "Discussing U.S. education in his 2012 Annual Letter, Bill Gates notes the importance of 'tools and services [that] have the added benefit of providing amazing visibility into how each individual student is progressing, and generating lots of useful data that teachers can use to improve their own effectiveness.' Well, Bill is certainly putting his millions where his mouth is. The Gates Foundation has ponied up $76.5 million for a controversial student data tracking initiative that's engaged Rupert Murdoch's Wireless Generation to 'build the open software that will allow states to access a shared, performance-driven marketplace of free and premium tools and content.' If you live in CO, IL, NC, NY, MA, LA, GA, or DE, it's coming soon to a public school near you."
We should already have this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it just me, or shouldn't we already have this by hiring competent, caring, understanding educators in the first place? Computer software to track an individuals 'performance' (Ie; a 'quantitative thing') is yet another step in the ass-backwardness of the modern educational system.
Why do we always forget that while test scores are important, they are FAR from the deterministic quality on which to judge an individuals intelligence or desire to learn?
We have not created successful AI; The human mind stuck inside a quality educator, no matter the level, cannot be boiled down to algorithms and pure statical data-sets.
But oh how we try. *sigh*.
Murdoch Political Agenda (Score:5, Insightful)
What really worries me is Murdoch's general push into the field of education. The man has already succeeded in indoctrinating an entire generation of adult Republicans into his own twisted version -- a version that has neither served conservatism nor America well. Is he going to start with the children now?
This looks like a good idea? (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I missing something? This sounds like a good idea except for that Newscorp is involved. Besides that, what is wrong with this? Heck, I'm even wondering if anonymous, averaged data per school would be publicly available to see how schools are doing.
It just seems like this is the sort of thing that should have a glaring hole in it.
Nothing Good can come out of a Murdoch Venture (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We should already have this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that all are bad; I've known some very good teachers, and we lobbied with the Principal to get our children into their classrooms. But they were the exception.
Honestly, and this is just a general assumption (although, I'm sure there is plenty of truth in it):
They are exceptions because the field pays so LITTLE and seems to be quite hard. (Not the teaching, mind you, but the 'beat down' one gets from Government, Parents, School boards, etc).
Imagine $76 million dollars to fund MORE / 'Better' teachers? Willing to bet it does more to help the overall economy & education (current AND future, in the same price tag) than buying some silly software that's going to show us that we don't truly care anymore.
Rupert Murdoch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, wait...isn't this the same guy who had another company that got into really deep hot water by hacking into people's phones and otherwise massively abusing their privacy? As in shut-the-company-down, pay-out-millions-to-the-victims, and some-just-got-arrested bad?
There IS a place for technology in schools, absolutely, and if you're at all familiar with schools the level of useless redundant work that goes on drives you nuts. Every year it ticks me off that I have to fill out 50 pages of nonsense information to tell the school what they already know. That said, you know who you don't give the job of modernizing it to? Someone with a track record of abusing the hell out of people's privacy.
Re:We should already have this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine $76 million dollars to fund MORE / 'Better' teachers? Willing to bet it does more to help the overall economy & education (current AND future, in the same price tag) than buying some silly software that's going to show us that we don't truly care anymore.
I don't think it would have much effect.
Half your budget goes to overhead and management right off the top. Darn near a 1:2 administrator / teacher ratio where I live, and administrators get paid more for doing basically nothing productive, and physical plant overhead is quite expensive (imagine what it would cost to rent an office building the size of a school per year). Then lets assume the average teacher pulls down $50K. Yes I'm well aware that their salary model is different than, say, private sector IT, so a newbie teacher starts out at $20K and gets a 5K raise every year for the rest of their career, whereas a IT dude gets $50K the first year and then gets a pay raise a little smaller than inflation for the rest of his career. Back to topic. It does nothing to hire one teacher for one year if they just get downsized next year, so lets pay them for 20 years to have a real, generational effect.
Thats 76M / 2 (half to overhead) / 50 (thousand bucks per teacher per year) / 20 years = no calculator necessary about 38 teachers for twenty years. So across a dozen states you just hired about one (big) elementary school, or perhaps an average sized middle school. Eh.
Re:Rupert Murdoch? (Score:3, Insightful)
well, somebody should (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We should already have this. (Score:4, Insightful)
You did the right thing though. The main problem here is that many parents cannot afford to bypass a broken educational system, which in the long run hurts everybody.
Re:Shitstorm inc. (Score:5, Insightful)
Through a bug it will track their physical location, everything they say, and what websites they visit. And their parents while at it.
That's what Facebook is for.
It will morph into Conformity Monitoring (Score:5, Insightful)
Marks will not be awarded for raw intelligence in math, chem and the hard sciences. It will turn into a sheeple score. How well you fit in as a corporate cog. Shut up, don't rock the boat, kiss the whip that beats you. How compliant you are. How much abuse and corruption you can endure, without blowing the whistle. How well can you turn your head away from the deaths at Foxconn. How well can you spin death, corruption, pollution in the media.
All you shit disturbers here on slashdot would have been marked and seperated out long before you every reached the second grade.
Jobs and Wozniak would never be hired by the Modern Apple HR department.
The kids that instintively say Hell No to the brutal psyops that marks industrial schooling, the Einstiens, the gentle geniuses, the shy creative types, everyone who was marked, scarred and terrorize by the years of indoctrination called education.
Public school is an awful place. To do well in it, 'WELL' being defined by Murdoch and Gates, that to me is some kind of new and awfull hell. Evil of a brand new kind. Evil worthy of a new word.
To everyone out there still in school, you have my deepest sympathy and greatest support. I cannot even imagine how awful and soul destroying it is now.
Re:Why Fox / newcorp and not NBC / comcast? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because News Corp. already has an extensive background in surveillance.
And a long, successful background in indoctrination, for that matter.
I work in education indirectly. (Score:3, Insightful)
The "problems" in education, IMO, are multifaceted. Slapping performance metrics on top of the way things are now is only going to demoralize everyone further.
I find that teachers generally want to do well by their students. One problem is that some teachers have low or outdated content knowledge and,m accordingly, low or misplaced confidence. What is being done to "moderize" teachers? Or does that come after identifying which teachers are "bad" according to student performance on standardized tests?
Techniques to improve teaching/learning is a moving target. Teachers are desperate for that magic pill by which every student will finally understand. Like New Math. Like using computers. Like using educational games. Frankly, students will be different. Each method will probably speak to a different set of students. The "panacea" may be in maximizing the number of techniques that can be used for reaching the most students. However, we would have to ask whether the standardized student tests are set up to be able to capture the learning gained.
Also, teachers are not solely responsible for students' private lives. Maybe a student stressing over his parents' shit or being bullied. Some parents need to be involved in their kids' education and not stand by and "let" the school do the work. Learning takes some effort, so some students need to get the nonsense out of their heads enough to focus at least part of the time.
School districts need to stop being accountants for the sake of their own careers.
In US culture, everyone says they want a good educational system, yet it seems that things like money, sports, etc., receive a disproportionate amount of attention. And the role that religious nuttery and willful ignorance play serve to distract people from critical thinking skills.
I'm sure there are other points I'm missing.
Socio-economic Metric (Score:5, Insightful)
This will end up becoming a metric of parental/economic efficacy.
I'm a teacher. My students have diverse socio-economic backgrounds. The students from "better" situations, on average, perform better. The reverse is usually true also. Of course, there are always outliers, but we're talking averages.
If this information was to be used to correct those out-of-school factors, that would be great. Unfortunately, they will most likely be used to punish under-performing teachers and districts.
Re:Murdoch Political Agenda (Score:4, Insightful)
and the bulk of the population believes him to be insane due to the crap Murdoch generates about him specifically because he can't be bought.
No, the majority find Ron Paul insane for his work on a racist newsletter and his advocacy of the gold standard, neither of which has anything to do with Murdoch.
Re:This looks like a good idea? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do we trust Bill Gates' judgment on anything related to public education? This is a man who grew up the son of a wealthy politician; he has no firsthand experience with what happens in public school. He is also a college dropout. An admittedly smart, successful man, but his life experience is so far removed from those of us who grew up as public school "consumers" that, frankly, I find him to be among the LEAST qualified people to be making judgment calls regarding public education. Add Rupert Murdoch's unabashed doctrine of extremist right-wing nonsense (which includes anti-intellectualism and teacher-bashing) and we end up with an even bigger problem on our hands.
Re:This looks like a good idea? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice way of conflating your dislike of closed-source software and Microsoft in general with what Gates can do outside of said corporation.
Why was this even modded informative to begin with? You can disagree with someone without resorting to ad hominem attacks.
Re:We should already have this. (Score:4, Insightful)
[Citation needed]
Like that "alot" isn't a word?
You mean watching videos of a cartoon character doing it rather than learning how to do it themselves?
Re:Murdoch Political Agenda (Score:5, Insightful)
That's interesting and all, but the parent didn't say "Murdoch is the worst scum that has ever lived." He said, "Murdoch is scum." He didn't even say that Murdoch was the scummiest man in journalism.
For what it's worth, Hearst was just as or more scummy than Duranty, and he's a more apt comparison to Murdoch. Duranty was just a Soviet shill whereas Hearst paved the way for guys like Murdoch, started a war to sell newspapers, supported Hitler . . . need I go on?
Also, I would argue that NewsCorp's efforts to sell the war in Iraq are far more grievous than denying a famine. Even if Duranty would have reported accurately, those people still would have died. How many thousands died in Iraq because of the misinformation Murdoch spewed out to the public? If News Corp wouldn't have drummed up public support for the war it probably would never have occurred.
Re:Murdoch Political Agenda (Score:5, Insightful)
You're wrong on every point. Am I surprised? No.
Your wiki quote is cute. You left out this part:
Hearst was a supporter of Adolf Hitler from 1934 until 1938
Regarding Duranty: No, I don't think anything could have been done about the famine. Diplomacy would do nothing to sway the Soviets. Why would it? And how would it do anything? A famine means there's not enough food. When there's not enough food there's just not enough food. The Soviets just didn't want their dirty laundry aired. It was 1933. No one was going to help the Soviets. It would just have been bad press - "look how bad communism is!"
Regardless, Hearst is still a much more appropriate analog to Murdoch.
Concerning Iraq: Saddam Hussein complied with every single U.S. request leading up to the war. When he submitted an inventory of his arsenal, Bush claimed that it was inaccurate because WMDs weren't on the list. Upon invasion that inventory looked to be pretty damn accurate.
What failed to sell peace was FUD. It was a textbook example. People were scared and uncertain and Fox News fueled that FUD as much as they could. Other media outlets failed by not standing up to all the nonsense, afraid they'd look unpatriotic, but at least they didn't actively pursue war.
The "serious thoughts" coming from the anti-war movement were drowned out by jingoism, racism, and fear. Right after 9/11 Bill Maher said, "we've been the cowards, launching cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away, that's cowardly." Not long after he show was canceled. The Bush administration, Murdoch, and others on the far right successful used a national hysteria to stifle individual liberties, empower their oligarchy, and effectively wag the dog. The fact that Americans were willing to put up with blatant censorship post-9/11 (banning songs on the radio!) shows just how irrational the general populace was between September 2001 up to around 2005. In your case, the irrationality seems to be a permanent state.