Bill Gates, Washington State, and the Nuisance of Democracy

The fundamental problem with saying that this money should go to the public school system in order to make it better is that we don't know how to make the school system better. It doesn't matter how much money is thrown at anyone in education because everyone is doing it wrong. Throwing more money at the public educational system will simply result in schools that are exceedingly good at cranking out students that excel at taking tests and memorizing useless facts instead of actually being good at something.

Every argument against Charter schools that I heard during the debate was focused almost universally on money. It was always about money. Teachers seem convinced that in order to make our school system work, they just need more money, when in fact the entire public educational system has already driven off a cliff.

Charter schools won't be better than public schools because of money, they'll be better than public schools because they try fundamentally different ways of teaching kids. Nobody can fix the educational system until we find better ways to educate children. Until we can find a way to instill creative problem solving and encourage innovative thinking instead of violently shoving children's brains into boxes, nothing is going to change, no matter how much money is thrown at the problem.

In a world where computers are better at following instructions than any human being ever will be, creativity is the one single advantage we have, and the regulations hovering over the public school system are doing their best to utterly destroy any creative spirit our children might have had. Our society is being shaped not by the kind of intelligence that is measured by a test, but by the innovative spirit of people who think outside the box. It's time the educational system started thinking outside the box, too.

Wealthy individuals and groups have power to publish advertisements and arguments for their ideas/proposals to try to change the mind of the voters. Attempting to convince the voters your right is not undemocratic, it's the core of democracy.

Additionally, anyone who believes that the plutocracy has more power in America now than ever before is entirely ignorant of even general American history. It wasn't that long ago where there was so little regulation on business, political and police bribes so common, that the wealthy could ignore any law they wanted without any fear of reprisal.

"The New Prophets of Capital" by Nicole Aschoff explores these themes

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00N6PCK4U

I kid but only a little.

If the man had directly funded a school and gotten unquestionably superior outcomes the conversation would be rather different.

Instead, all he has to show are policy successes, often at great expense, but for such an ostensibly data-driven program where are the successful educational outcomes?

I get that handling this on the national level is a much more difficult problem to find an amicable solution that appeals to everyone's ideological sensibilities. But, at the state and local level, the abuse that money brings to the equation should be--nay, is--much easier to solve. It requires but a few sensible rules that permit the greatest possible latitude for citizens to participate in, guide, and organize their local governments to their notions of what constitutes good government and social policy, while protecting their local and state governments from outside influence. That state legislatures do not enact these rules is, in my opinion, but a reflection of the corrosive and perverting effect of money--and the desire for it--on all political activity.

- For all local and state-wide policies--especially coercive public policies--one must be a resident of the local/state entity to participate in any way, be that financial, putting one's boots on the ground, or having any other recognized part in the process.

- Make it illegal to hire an out-of-state company who brings in out-of-state workers to collect signatures for your desired proposal. Need to collect signatures? You must only use residents of the state in which the proposed policy will take effect. Require that they must be unpaid volunteers. Interrogate the signature-collection process, and invalidate all signatures collected by anyone who is not a resident of the local/state entity that will be affected by the policy.

- No more allowing wealthy citizens, who are not residents of the local/state entity affected by the proposed policy, to donate to the cause. Completely remove the ability for wealth to escape its local boundaries. There is no reason a wealthy resident of Oklahoma should be able to involve themselves in the local and state issues happening in New York. This requires a real, sensible definition of being a resident—not, say, owning a home in a place you do not actually spend your time living. Want to weigh in on a local issue? Better be a resident of the city limits.

There are plenty of reasonable ways we could protect states and cities from being overwhelmed by the unbalanced competition for mind- and vote-share that comes from allowing moneyed interests stepping into local/state political and social issues.

Perhaps once we tackle protecting government by and for the People at the local and state levels, we could then work together to tackle the same issues at the national level.

> It’s interesting how Gates seems to give every excuse in the book for why he “failed” to drastically improve academic achievement despite the time and money spent on his mission.

> His first excuse is that compared to the cumulative 600 billion dollars in government spending on public schools, he only had 5 billion to spend. Of course, he is talking as if that 5 billion was equally scattered among all the public schools in the United States. We know that his small school models had enough funding and opportunity to test whether his experiment would work, which by his own admission, did not meet his standards.

> Then he and the writer of the article suggest that it was the powerful teacher unions that thwarted the success of Gates foundation initiatives. But later on, even Gates admits there seems to be no correlation between student achievement and the strength of unions in particular states. Although suprisingly, the two states he mentioned as being strong union states , Massachusetts and New York, are ranked # 2 and #5, respectively by NAEP results in student performance.

> If it sounds like a man who is grabbing at straws, he is. He admits as much when talking about measuring teacher effectiveness. I was slightly embarassed for him, when he mentioned the movie, “To Sir, With Love” as an inspiration for his new initiative in taping teachers in real classroom settings. You don’t see the president of the United States saying,” I watched the movie Saving Private Ryan”, and then proceed to discuss how the war in Afganistan can be won. What presidents usually do is to talk with military experts, diplomatic advisers, academics, political advisers, etc.

> But not this guy – he wants to watch hours and hours of tape on military engagements in the mountains of Afganistan and write a report on how soldier effectiveness can be rated. The thing is, if he were really a scientist, I’d say fine – but he isn’t one really. What he is – is a businessman. Unfortunately, what business knows about computer chips and factory output doesn’t translate into the complex lives of human beings.

Plus an anonymous confessional from an actual student:

> I attended a high school funded by the Gates Grant from 2003-2007, and let me tell you, it was a giant, flaming, trashcan fire of poor management, lack of consistency, and almost entirely unsupported beyond the initial investment in creating it. The original Principal bailed before the end of the first year (and isn't even in education anymore, if I hear correctly), about 2/3rds of the staff had been replaced by my second year.

> At start, it was two grades of 160 kids, 9th and 10th; when the 10th graders, the folks who graduated one year before, finally graduated, their class consisted of 13 kids. My class, that original 9th grade, graduated 50 people. I almost didn't graduate, since we had no gym and no way to earn the appropriate PE credit until they introduced Yoga in my senior year. We also began with no "D's", only A, B, C, and Fail, but since they did an absolute shit job at explaining this to prospective students and their families, we ended up getting a lot of kids that wouldn't have cut it in the "normal" high school, and ended up a de-facto alternative, with D's introduced in the second year.

> Other initiatives that sprung up from his "philanthropy" include the creation of separate "schools" at a lot of the local high schools; basically, it was kind of treated like in college, where if you wanted to, say, go into Medicine, you picked "Biomed Academy," and took a certain set of classes with that in mind. So, y'know, pick your future at the end of Junior High.