The Gates Foundation Engages Its Critics 216
sam_handelman writes "The Gates Foundation responded to the critiques of its policies (previously discussed here) by inviting its critics at Education Week Teacher to a dialog on its own site. Edweek blogger Anthony Cody answered the challenge. The two sides negotiated a five-part series of post and counterpost, which can be viewed on both sites. Previous exchanges include Cody's question, Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It?, and an answer from the Gates Foundation's Global Press Secretary, Chris Williams, Poverty Does Matter — But It Is Not Destiny. The final round of the dialog has begun, and is available for comment on the Gates Foundation's own blog. Slashdot readers may not know about Gates' sponsorship of specific edutech industry partners, such as Rupert Murdoch's Wireless Generation, and Pearson Education. Cody poses tough questions, including, 'Can the Gates Foundation reconsider and reexamine its own underlying assumptions, and change its agenda in response to the consequences we are seeing?' According to the agreement, the Gates Foundation will answer in the coming week, concluding the series."
Index of Posts and Responses (Score:5, Informative)
Yeesh, what an IA mess. Duplicate blog posts and comment threads across multiple blogs, duplicate author names on blog posts... and if there's an index to the entire discussion, I couldn't find it. So I made my own.
Here are all the posts and responses thus far:
1:
Anthony Cody: How Do We Build the Teaching Profession?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/07/dialogue_with_the_gates_founda.html [edweek.org]
July 23, 2012
Ivrin Scott responds for the Gates Foundation: How Do We Build the Teaching Profession?
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/07/A-Response-to--How-Do-We-Build-the-Teaching-Profession [impatientoptimists.org]
July 30, 2012
2:
Vicki Phillips writes for the Gates Foundation: How Do We Consider Evidence of Student Learning in Teacher Evaluation?
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/How-Do-We-Consider-Evidence-of-Student-Learning-in-Teacher-Evaluation [impatientoptimists.org]
August 7, 2012
Anthony Cody responds: How do we Consider Evidence of Learning in Teacher Evaluations?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/responding_to_the_gates_founda.html [edweek.org]
August 8, 2012
3:
Anthony Cody posts: Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/can_schools_defeat.html [edweek.org]
August 13, 2012
Chris Williams responds for the Gates Foundation: Poverty Does Matter--But It Is Not Destiny
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/Poverty-Does-MatterBut-It-Is-Not-Destiny [impatientoptimists.org]
August 20, 2012
4
Irvin Scott for the Gates Foundation: K-12 Education: An Opportunity Catalyst
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2012/08/K12-Education-An-Opportunity-Catalyst [impatientoptimists.org]
August 28, 2012
Anthony Cody responds: What is the Purpose of K-12 Education?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/Gates_Foundation_Dialogue.html [edweek.org]
August 29, 2012
5:
Anthony Cody asks: What Happens When Profits Drive Reform?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/09/the_dialogue_with_the_gates_fo.html [edweek.org]
September 03, 2012
Gates response to come.
Re:Index of Posts and Responses (Score:0, Informative)
Gates response to come.
"To come?" Here, let me save you the trouble. Bill Gates (maybe in not so many words) will say:
"Fuck you. Pay me. And by pay me I mean agree to purchase Microsoft software, agree to draconian anti-piracy restrictions, and oh yeah, sign this other thing that requires you to be a full-on defender of pharmaceutical patents so that when the free charity shit we're giving you dries up you'll know the right place to buy some more."
There's his response written in blood on the wall.
Re:As Steve Jobs might conclude (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of the reforms the Gates Foundation has brought about in public education are actually bad. The "Criticism" section in that Wikipedia article doesn't begin to describe it. The best explanation you can easily get is by doing a Google or Wikipedia search for "Diane Ravitch" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Ravitch [wikipedia.org] and her longest explanation I know of, outside of her books, is her New York Review of Books article.
She refers to Gates as a member of the "billionaire boys club" that is "reforming" education according to some fads that they picked up, which aren't supported by scientific evidence. Ravitch was an assistant secretary of education under GHW Bush and Bill Clinton. She started out believing in charter schools, free market incentives, high-stakes testing, and all the other neocon reforms. But she said that when the data came out, it didn't support those reforms.
The one factor that is most strongly associated with student achievement, according to Ravitch, is family income. So when you reward teachers for raising student test scores, you're mostly rewarding them for having high-income students, and when you fire them for missing the test targets, you're firing them for teaching in poverty schools.
The Gates education reforms depend heavily on high-stakes testing. But according to repeated analyses, the tests they use today to fire "underperforming" teachers are statistically invalid. There was a debate over that in Science magazine last year, in which the author who was defending the tests admitted that they weren't valid, and his argument was that we should continue to use them and try to improve them.
New York City gave all its math and English teachers rankings based on their students' scores in a standardized test (which wasn't scientifically validated), and education commissioner Joel Klein made the results for individual teachers public, despite the risk of unfairly shaming teachers. One fundamental problem is that they don't have enough statistical power to evaluate individual teachers. A science teacher did a standard statistical analysis, and he found out that they had an essentially random distribution. He made the point that every teacher knows that beginning teachers improve a lot from their first to second year (conversely, most teachers agree that they had a lot of trouble in their first year). But yet, when you compare the scores of the teachers in their first year to the same teachers in their second year, the correlation was random. According to these tests, teachers don't improve with experience. It doesn't make sense. And yet, NYC is firing teachers on the basis of these tests.
Financial incentives and bonuses for teachers have been tested in randomized, controlled studies -- and they don't work. Students don't perform any better when their teachers get bonuses for higher test scores. OTOH, it's hard to be a dedicated teacher if you don't know whether you'll have a job in 10 years, your pay is going down because NCLB has destroyed your union, and politicians like Joel Klein attack you, call you incompetent, and humiliate you.
If you needed proof that these reforms aren't working, look at Michelle Rhee's experience in the Washington DC schools system. Her followers were touting her as a genius who was tough on students, got rid of incompetent teachers and principals, and rewarded the master teachers and principals who raised the test scores with generous financial bonuses. They it turned out that the teachers and principles were raising their tests scores by cheating, which was picked up by the internal verification procedures in the tests -- and Rhee knew about it. There have been cheating scandals in high-stakes testing schools around the country. When you fire teachers who don't raise test scores, what do you expect them to do?
Bill Gates and the other "reformers" have turned teaching from a comfortable, respected job where people were paid well but not extravagantly, and motivated by
Re:As Steve Jobs might conclude (Score:5, Informative)
Teachers' ability is correlated with student results. The tests that they use to measure teachers' ability is not correlated with student results. The same teachers rank in the top 10% one year, and the bottom 10% the next year. Obviously the tests aren't measuring the teachers' ability.
The effect of student poverty is far greater than the effect of teachers' ability. The test scores are primarily measuring student poverty, according to Ravitch.
Teachers' ability is correlated with experience. Teachers who have been teaching for 20 years can get better results than charter-school teachers who are on the job for 3 years and quit, as many of them do. If you want teachers to stay on the job for 20 or 30 years, you have to pay them enough to raise a family and send their own kids to college.
Re:charity (Score:0, Informative)
yes, but they take home less than 1/3 their normal salary as the average tax rate is 31%. Lets put this in perspective;
1. (your view)
a. $40000 income
b. 31% tax rate (-13.3k)
c. Healthcare charge (Your number) -5.0k
d. Take home $21700
2. (A more conservative approach)
a. $40000 income
b. 19% tax rate (-$2.2k)
c. Healthcare charge (Your Number) -10k
d. Take home $27800
In the end there is $6100 in savings to do it yourself. Yes I understand that we have to support those who can't support themselves, but holy carp... I can do better myself