Where Does Bill Gates Get Off Saying Bigger Class Size and Fewer Teachers Is The Education Solution?

[Better Believe It]

Where Does Billionaire Monopolist Bill Gates Get Off Saying Bigger Class Size and Fewer Teachers Is the Education Solution?
Gates' suggested short-changing of the nation's education system is just another strain of the oligarchs trying to take over another sector of society.
By Scott Thill
December 17, 2010

Once dominant, now America is just average when it comes to education. Its public solution, recently communicated by Microsoft mogul Bill Gates? Increased class sizes, decreased teacher counts, fewer advanced degrees, and probably more mediocrity.

It's the type of technocratic cure-all one would expect Gates to champion, and it will doubtless perform as lamely as Microsoft, which currently hobbles at $30 a share while its more intuitive tech rivals like Apple and Google respectively hover around $200 to $600. But Gates' short-changing of the nation's education system is just another strain of neoconservative austerity going viral in our global village. And it's just as short-sighted as the disaster capitalism that destroyed America's economic integrity: Increasing America's class sizes and downsizing its teachers could cost us more than it could save us.

"The oligarchy making decisions for public-school kids -- like Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates -- send their own children to private schools with comparatively tiny class sizes of 15 or less, while many of the kids in the schools they impose their policies on have classes of 25, 30 or more," Leonie Haimson, executive director for the nonprofit educational watchdog Class Size Matters, told AlterNet. "New York City children are now suffering from the largest class sizes in early grades since 1999, despite billions more spent on education. And class sizes are expected to increase again next year."

Let them, Gates has argued. According to the New York Times and the Associated Press, both Gates and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's CEO Jeff Raikes have floated the theory that teachers trump class size when it comes to educational excellence. The jackpot comes when you reward effective teachers with higher pay, they argue, regardless of their seniority or advanced degrees. Which means, in the real world outside of the fuzzy jargon, rewarding those who can pass their students and satisfy technocrats hypnotized by what the American Federation of Teachers called "quickie observations or crude test-score calculations masquerading as teacher evaluations."

Please read the full article at:

http://www.alternet.org/media/149232/where_does_billionaire_monopolist_bill_gates_get_off_saying_bigger_class_size_and_fewer_teachers_is_the_education_solution/Where

[Statistical]

1. Totally off topic; I think it is funny when people who don't understand equities

compare corporations solely by share price.

"which currently hobbles at $30 a share while its more intuitive tech rivals like Apple and Google respectively hover around $200 to $600."

Kinda like saying; "I am richer than my friend. I have a $100 bill and that poor sucker only has 5x $20 bills, everyone knows 100 is larger than 20 thus a single 100 bill must be worth more than 5 twenties.".

Anyone have a link to Bill Gates actually saying the solution is "Increased class sizes, decreased teacher counts, fewer advanced degrees, and probably more mediocrity".

[dkf]

7. All know is that the latest international comparison showing shanghai outclassing

us showed that it is better to have excellent teachers with more students than smaller class sizes with some inadequate teachers.

[roguevalley]

14. compare the time spent by kids there some of them put in

eight to nine hour days and spend weekends in schools. Can't compare.

I taught thirty years and had big classes most of the time. It is bullshit to assume that a good teacher even a champion can do the job with masses of kids that need to be done. Bullshit, thy name is bill gates, the biggest poseur in education today. If he didn't have his money, he would have nothing.

[dkf]

18. So why don't our kids do that?

And how do we get there ?

[roguevalley]

31. parents have to want it. the parents of these kids sacrifice for their

kid's education and put it FIRST. Nothing a kid does is allowed to interfere. Getting into a good school growing up is almost the most important thing a parent can do for their kid and they sacrifice. Priorities.

[Nevernose]

34. End cumpolsory secondary education

If you want your children to have anything beyond basic numeracy and literacy in China, you have to pay for it.

A system like that is too undemocratic and completely nonegalitarian for my liking, but the Chinese have learned one thing: you can't force a good education on someone. I think that in America, we have to give every family the option of a good education; we cannot force every family to take advantage of it.

[msongs]

19. those classes are cherry picked and only elite students are allowed inthem nt

[dkf]

21. Link?

I always hear this but haven't seen the numbers. Do we include everyone?

[cemaphonic]

12. FWIW, I do believe that Apple has a higher market cap than Microsoft atm.

But yeah, I thought that was a really stupid statement too.

[Boojatta]

17. Isn't it possible that Scott Thill isn't personally persuaded by

his own argument about share prices, but that he simply hopes to persuade his audience?

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. *reaches for her blood pressure meds*

[Rex]

3. It comes from a person that has never taught in a real classroom environment.

Mr. Big tough capitalist would be sobbing in tears and begging to be released from his contract in 2 weeks tops, if he had to teach in a public high school. I Nancy Grace it.

[Starry Messenger]

4. +++

Series. Every time he flaps his cakehole about teaching, I'm amazed by how little he knows about it. He literally could not know less than he demonstrates.

[aquart]

5. How many students in his kids' classes?

[HopeHoops]

6. Keep in mind that this is coming from a guy who thinks Windows is a secure operating system.

[FLPanhandle]

8. and that "there is no money in the internet"

Not someone you want to take advice from.

[HopeHoops]

10. Oh yeah, and he agreed with the president of IBM that - "no need for multitasking on desktops"

That was just an excuse for M$ being SO far behind Commodore, Atari, and Apple (not quite multitasking at the time, but close) in operating system development. Even up through Vista, if you don't explicitly shut off Windows Update, it can just take over the fucking machine and grind everything to a halt until you squash the process. OBVIOUSLY a M$ function is more important than anything YOU want to do.

[salinen]

9. I only pay attention to

billionaires.

[QC]

11. Being wealthy makes one an expert on all subjects.

It's funny how that works, isn't it? A person who gets rich by, say, building tacky subdivisions is automatically an expert on education, theology, culture, science, what have you.

[Donnachaidh]

13. Because Microsoft will *fill in* for the teacher's time

Anyone who thinks he isn't setting up this country to form yet another monopolistic income stream for HIMSELF is delusional. We bitched about Bush's setting up learning software a couple of years back.

But now one of the elites who claim to be a Dem is doing it he's a "philanthropist".

Pardon me while I :puke:

[stray cat]

15. Where does anyone on Du get off on their theories? He has his opinion and will invest to see if is

Right.

[Better Believe It]

20. Especially since we are not billionaires and therefore really smart like Gates.

:)

[Name removed]

23. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[MadHound]

24. Ah, so we should allow Gates to do what he will with our children,

Just to see if his theories work.

If you are going to do that sort of thing, you should at least be a qualified teacher, not a college drop out who got lucky, had good marketing, and was able to get by with stealing his product with few repercussions.

[WinkyDink]

28. Um, no. He will BUY school boards & adminstrators, whose budgets are under attack,

You really like the obscenely wealthy, do you not?

[Exilednight]

16. He can get away with it because he can afford to keep his kids in the smallest class size possible..

a classroom of 1.

[KansasVoter]

22. And damn his ass for trying to stop Malaria! Bastard!!!

[teacher gal]

25. Gates lives on another planet

far removed from ours.

[maryf]

26. give him another pie please

[Starry Messenger]

33. Yes!

[WinkyDink]

27. Funny how he doesn't think CHARTER schools should have large class sizes.

[Nye Bevan]

29. I think he's saying that a student is better off being in a class of 25 with a good teacher

than in a class of 15 or 20 with a terrible teacher. And from my experience, I have to agree with him. I also agree that good teachers deserve to be paid more money.

[burrowowl]

30. His Father is very intelligent!

Bill is an ass and a marketeer and not an innovator!
As regards to wealth, his Father is right on!

[LooseWilly]

32. Mmmmm, tripe!

Sure, magical teachers that can hypnotize their students and implant knowledge as if they were all hooked-on-phonics can probably teach hundreds, maybe even thousands, of brilliant students with photogenic/photographic/Memorex-esque memories... and those teachers should all be paid millions of dollars a day out of Bill Gates' pocket... but in reality-land, when class sizes rise to the 30-35 range the odds of teachers having to spend most or all of their time dealing with student disruptions (because, with that many kids, one or more will be statistically likely to be disruptive, for one reason or another) becomes pretty high. I've tried to teach classes of 38 to 42 kids... the school might as well have hired a babysitter (which, come to think of it, is about what the pay scale of an Oakland, CA substitute teacher corresponds to).

Why is Gates' verbiage-tripe being printed? Ohh right... the rich thing... my bad.