This blog is about 3 stories.

1. The start-up year for a very different sort of Graduate School of Education. It's a tiny subset of...
2. ...The much larger, national effort to transform teaching and teachers. That is a big subset of...
3. ...A multi-kajillion-dollar effort to improve the ludicrous odds (7% or so) of a poor kid ever getting a college diploma.

Fun Read: Bill Gates interview

Posted: February 5th, 2013 | Author: | | 2 Comments »

Dana Goldstein and some others interviewed Bill Gates. Worth reading.

Gates said he feels growing concern about the survivors of once-deadly childhood diseases like malaria and polio, who often arrive at school with cognitive delays that make it difficult to learn.

Gates gives to education reform in USA and to health/immunization work in the Third World. I wonder if he’ll tackle education reform in the Third World. Or perhaps that just spirals out of control in terms — i.e., loss of mission discipline, trying to solve too much, and not solving much at all.

I looked up his annual letter for a clue. There’s a mention of the U.N. focus on universal access to primary school, but no mention of Gates Foundation directly tackling either education access or quality in poor countries. Makes sense to me. There’s only so much one man couple (Bill and Melinda) can do.

So what did Gates say about education reform in the USA? DG writes:

He hinted that his foundation may soon invest resources in alternate rankings of American colleges, saying the true metric for success in higher education should be whether a school accepts a student “with a combined SAT score of 600, and they got $100,000 jobs, and they’re super happy.”

That’s a great idea. Essentially it’s “value-added” applied to colleges.

Disclosure: Gates Foundation funds a group called NextGen, which funded the Match Next “blended learning school” I sometimes write about here.

Disclosure: I own a MacBook Pro.

Coming Attractions: I have many thoughts to share on the latest publication of the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching Project. But I haven’t organized them yet, so it’ll have to wait.

2 Comments on “Fun Read: Bill Gates interview”

  1. 1: Ed L said at 3:19 pm on February 5th, 2013:

    You might find this blog post re changing mix of Gates’ education spending over the years:

    http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2013/02/shifting-strategies-at-gates-who-wins.html

    I’m skeptical about value-added for universities, since the goals of universities are even more complex and multifaceted than K-12. But I’m all in favor of figuring out how to incentivize teaching in higher ed. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m in favor of a return to more institutional specialization, with a small number of research universities focusing intensely research, but other colleges and universities returning to a greater focus on teaching and applied research (improvement cycles, development of curriculum, etc).

  2. 2: Michael Goldstein said at 4:16 pm on February 7th, 2013:

    Hi Ed,

    Yep that was interesting. Seems to me like the Gates edu-change is 2 simple things. Tried direct grants to change high schools, didn’t work, stopped. Learned along the way that teaching needed to change. To change nature of teaching, need to touch…curric, comp, eval, politics, research on “what works.” All their spending kinda logically follows, no? Not sure how the professor constructs it as much of a puzzle. Seemed more like tone was that it was a trust issue (they used to help schools, but now they have all these intermediaries) instead of a strategy change with fairly straightforward implications.

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