An alert reader brought this interesting Newsweek article to my attention; in it, Bill Gates and Randi Weingarten discuss the education problem. The header asks ‘Can the billionaire philanthropist and the head of the American teachers’ union find common ground — and fix our nation’s education system?’
My first thought was, No, absolutely not. This is a TERRIBLE idea.
My second thought was, Why the hell are they asking Bill Gates what he thinks, anyway?
Gates is not an expert about teaching, learning, or fixing Byzantine policy problems. His expertise is limited to computing and being the CEO of your own company, where you can make all the rules exactly the way you want.
And yeah, he’s clearly a smart guy. But that’s exactly the problem. He was a driven student with access to immense resources that let him develop his very particular kind of intelligence on his own terms. That simply isn’t going to happen for most students.
And most importantly, he hasn’t taught. Ever. Giving talks to legions of geek boys (or men) doesn’t count, because they too have the drive and the particular kind of intelligence he does. I’d like to see him deal with a sullen verbally-oriented slacker. Or a few tattooed art geeks. Or ten emo kids who’ve decided to get really medieval and write everything by hand, in flourishing script, just to irritate you.
As it is, his regard for quantitative measures of teacher success is a dead giveaway. It’ s also utterly predictable; that particular kind of intelligence does not excel at communicating complex, non-numerical spectrums of meaning with other human beings. Which is kind of what you have to do if you’re a teacher.
(By the way, has anyone noticed how Microsoft has basically been forced to make its interfaces more and more Apple-like to remain competitive? That’s because Apple won the usability — i.e. ‘normal people can use this’ — contest. Yeah…)
I think it’s admirable that Gates wants to help, and I sympathize with some of his frustrations: why is this so expensive? Why can’t we just fix it? Why all the red tape? Ironically, his own participation may be contributing to the problem — if he’s so gung-ho about making quick change, he should realize that bringing in ‘expert’ after useless ‘expert’ is a big part of the expense and time problem.
Weingarten has adjuncted, and it shows. Her views reflect a much better understanding of how teaching works, and she makes some excellent points about the need to trust teachers as ‘experts’ in their own right.
I understand that if you give billions of dollars to a charity, you want to make sure it’s run well. But rich businesspeople like Gates are not helping when they interfere in matters they simply don’t understand. I don’t know much about entrepreneurship, but I’ve heard a lot about ‘angel investing’, wherein (apparently) rich people throw money at your brilliant project, then leave you alone. This is exactly what beneficient kings have done for the last five thousand years: ‘Wow, that there treatise sure is a knockout, Leonardo! Keep up the good work!’ As old-fashioned as it is, I prefer it to the mentality where giving money automatically means you have a say in what’s going on.
See, this is why I don’t read real news. The Weingarten/Gates conversation was just depressing to me. They’re both giving it the old college try, I think. But they have so little common ground it’s like they’re each having a different conversation. It’s beyond Mars and Venus; bubalas, we’re talking different solar systems here.
And if Gates, whose money is power, really represents the average non-teacher’s understanding of what education needs, I am truly glad I got out.
See, I think I got out just in time. (*wipes forehead*) I read the article and thought much the same thing.
It’s true, you made a narrow escape!
the whole system is broken! kathie black is running NYC public schools after joel klein, what is this?!?!?! they make education reforms/policies like a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; it’s not that hard people!! get someone with experience in a practical, professional and theoretical level to straighten the system out. but no, let’s us have the corporate CEOs run our schools like a wall street circus. or a media franchise.
Media franchise I’m okay with as I believe in infotainment. But CEO’s leaping into education, certainly not! And Winston Churchill? Very classy.
If it helps… the Gates foundation is giving a lot of money to researchers at Rand Corporation to study these issues…
No, unfortunately that doesn’t help much…’objectivity’ is a lie. Hence the desperate attempts to reduce human experience (like say, teaching quality) to numbers assessed from irrational humans. Well-intentioned but grrr anyway.
Bill Gates teaching.
For the novelty id go to his class just once and throw paper aeroplanes at his head. lol
Ah, just the sort of reader we’re looking for over here! Thanks for commenting!
We did a “unit” on education reform in one of my undergrad writing classes. We watched the trailer for “Waiting for Superman” and we discussed the messages it sent, etc. And then I asked the students why Bill Gates was being interviewed about education, as an expert. We came to much the same conclusions as you did. This was also an important lesson for the students when it came time for them to write their own argument essay, using “experts” to back up their claims; depending on who your audience is, your definition of expert will shift dramatically.
But it is pretty reprehensible that a man who dropped out of college can dictate education reform. The question I asked my students, could you imagine a young Bill Gates, brilliant and gifted, being forced to write standardized tests? He would have probably dropped out a lot sooner.
I’m so glad to hear you’re pushing media literacy in your classes! The need to question ‘experts’ (unless it’s me, of course) is very high on the list of skills necessary in the new world of over-information but these kids today are so obedient to authority in some ways. I just don’t get it.
Good point about the irony of Gates pushing standardized tests…but again, I do think there’s a correlation between that particular brand of intelligence and a failure to appreciate the nuanced spectra of actual human experience.
I read the article as well, and while I admire Bill Gates for what he has accomplished in his life and for his philanthropy, what in the world ever gave him the idea that he’s an expert on what the educational system needs? There are a lot of flaws in our country’s system, without a doubt. But there are reasons people specialize–and YES, teachers SPECIALIZE…I would never walk into an operating room and tell the surgeon I think they are going about it all the wrong way…nor would I tell the mechanic who fixes my car how they should do their job. People who are IN education know that any teacher worth their salt gives far more time, energy, and cash to do their job well than do people in countless other professions. A huge problem with the system is not with the teachers and “how many minutes” they dedicate to a particular thing–it’s with parents who feel their children are ENTITLED to act however they choose to act, who don’t see the importance of working with their children on homework but instead encourage their child to blow off their homework in lieu of whatever the day’s extracurricular activity is, who don’t teach their children to have pride doing their work well, who think that teachers already get paid far too much for trying to teach over the noise of kids who don’t respect the teacher/classmates/educational process/THEMSELVES enough to ZIP IT when they’re in the classroom. The list could go on forever, and yet I can’t think of too many things I’d rather do as a career.
Bill Gates certainly has the right to ask questions and pose solutions, and if he wanted to make financial contributions that would have an impact on the educational system as a whole, I think that would be absolutely ducky! Unfortunately, I think he put his foot into his mouth on this topic…
Agree, agree, agree. Parents are part of the classroom problem when they have raised children without etiquette or focus.
As for what makes Gates thinks he’s got a right to tell people, I guess it’s the CEO title + success + money? Ah, the dangers of overgeneralizing your own experience to create ‘rules’ for success…
I agree with all of these comments.
And how does anyone LEARN to teach? Theory-Schmeory! It takes trial-and-error.
As far as preparation goes, being well-versed in one’s subject is probably the most important thing next to feeling comfortable as the friendly “expert” who can “[communicate] complex, non-numerical spectrums of meaning with other human beings.”
These self-evident truths I learned only after being dumped into a college freshman classroom and told “teach them how to write–apply the generalities blabbed by that Elbow guy and those other crappy writers we call theorists of ‘composition.’”
Bull****! Trial-and-error; anecdotes from other experienced teachers . . . this is how I groped along to become marginally good at teaching people how to read better. Never mind the professional lie about being able to “teach” someone how to write well in one or two semesters.
Yes, I agree that trial and error is an undervalued method for pretty much anything. This is why failure is an essential part of success — and yes, I think every teacher faces a moment of truth when they first get thrown to the wolves. Why not admit that and help deal???
Very good post! Your words on the validity of different skills are very positive and encouraging. In a totally not-corny way. I feel like, despite words about “different strokes for different folks” and so on, there’s an underlying sense in our society that “intelligence” is a single road and you can only be on one end of it or another. People who follow non-traditional paths don’t get held up for being different- they get held up as superior or lucky.
I also agree with you about “Angel investing.” I really feel like we need to bring back delegation and benevolent ruling in general. I read a Huffington Post article a while back that was a polemic against MFA writing programs. (Don’t remember the author’s name, but he was a moderately successful novelist who did not have an MFA.) He talked about how, culture-wide, we have an idea of the “democracy of talent.” He talked about it in the context of how, in a subtle way, the sheer amount of writing programs in the USA have perpetuated the idea that everyone can be a good writer if only they go to school for it.
I’m not sure how much I agree with that particular point, but it got me thinking about how much we believe today that people deserve to be good at whatever they want. (Especially the rich.) There are some aspects of that that are awesome. I love how common it is, for instance, for doctors and lawyers to take improv classes. And I love how much technology have made filmmaking and music-making accessible to the masses. But with that comes this attitude that everybody deserves to have an audience for whatever new creative pursuit they choose. Gone is the idea that creating entertainment is best left to the starving artists.
This may seem like a tangent, but it’s not. I think it’s that same attitude that makes it OK for Bill Gates to make decisions about education. I feel like, in Old Europe, there was an idea that the rich were great but didn’t really know what they were doing. They were there to finance things. Sure, emperors paid for Mozart to give them lessons, but everybody knew that the destitute Mozart was in a different league. If it were today, perhaps people would pretend that the emperor was making good music.
Thanks, and thanks for visiting! I think I’ll be writing more on multiple intelligences, as I really do believe in them. And good Lord, yes, this idea that everybody can be good at everything, or that mass approval means quality. It’s been around for a long time, but it’s still ridiculous!