Bill Gates Is Wrong - We Do Know Whether His Reforms Will Work

Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post:

“It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.”

That’s what Bill Gates said on Sept. 21 (see video below) about the billions of dollars his foundation has plowed into education reform during a nearly hour-long interview he gave at Harvard University. He repeated the “we don’t know if it will work” refrain about his reform efforts a few days later during a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative.

Hmmm. Teachers around the country are saddled every single year with teacher evaluation systems that his foundation has funded, based on no record of success and highly questionable “research.” And now Gates says he won’t know if the reforms he is funding will work for another decade. But teachers can lose their jobs now because of reforms he is funding.

In the past he sounded pretty sure of what he was doing. In this 2011 oped in The Washington Post, he wrote:

What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students.

Actually, that’s not an approach any educator I know would think is a good idea, but Gates had decided that class size doesn’t really matter. Earlier, he had put some $2 billion into forming small schools out of large high schools, on the theory that small schools would better serve students. When the initiative didn’t work out as he hoped, he moved on by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on teacher evaluation systems that in part linked teacher assessments to student standardized test scores, an approach that many assessment experts have warned against.

Now he says that the success of his experiments on public education won’t be known for a decade, but we already know that evaluating teachers by student test scores is a bad idea.

These same rank and yank evaluation systems Gates helped bring to public education systems have not worked when Microsoft used them.

As this Slate article reported, that evaluation system very well may have been the biggest thing to do Microsoft in as a company.

And yet this arrogant Gates is insistent that he is going to take the same evaluation system that split Microsoft apart, with different departements operating as private fiefdoms at war with each other and employees in the same department sticking knives in each other's backs so they won't end up at the bottom of the stack ranking, and brought it to public education.

And now he admits, "Yeah, we need about 10 years to see if it works or not..."