A Student-Data Collector Drops Out
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
[ http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/03/inblooms-... ]
[ http://www.classsizematters.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/i... ]
It also is way harder to anonymize data _and_ allow for it to be queried in the aggregate.
2^29 is about 500 million.
Individual teachers don't think this: they actually think they're supposed to help develop a student's intellect. A lot of conflict arises here.
John Taylor Gatto wrote about this in his essay "Against School". It's a good read.
teachers and school administrators are fearful of tech solutions because so many of them have been awful and have completely ignored the needs of the classroom. but that means potentially worthwhile products go unimplemented.
if you're going to do a startup, I highly recommend not doing so in the education space.
"To advance its agenda, the Gates foundation increased its spending on advocacy. From 2005 to 2009, the foundation quadrupled its annual spending on advocacy to $78 million. Accord to Sam Dillon in the New York Times, the foundation will pump an addition $100 million into advocacy over the next five to six years. That kind of money buys a lot of advocacy and support. Gates funded the groups that wrote the Common Core standards, the groups that evaluated them, and the groups that advocated for them. Gates funded liberal groups such as Education Trust, centrist groups such as the Center for American Progress and the Center on Education Policy, and groups on the Right such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Jeb Bush's Foundation of Educational Excellence, and the Media Bullpen. It funded groups that advocated for charter schools, such as the Education Equality project, and groups that argued against seniority and tenure, such as TeachFirst, TeachPlus, and the New Teacher Project. Kenneth Libby, then a graduate student known for poring through tax filings of foundations and advocacy groups, commented, 'It's easier to name which groups Gates doesn't support than to list all of those they do, because it's just so overwhelming.' [...]
Writing in Dissent, Joanne Barkan described the challenge that the aggressive venture philanthropists pose for American society:
'Can anything stop the foundation enablers? After five or ten more years, the mess they're making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they'll say, 'Oops, that didn't work' and step aside. But the damage might be irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open, an extreme degree of 'teaching to the test,' demoralized teachers, rampant corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. Who could possibly clean up the mess?'"
If you want to read about what happened the last time billionaires got involved with the school system, John Taylor Gatto does a pretty decent job documenting it in his Underground History book.
At least the info on why and how they failed would be useful to many education innovators here.
These do-gooders did not develop in a vacuum. And while personally I think the crisis in American education has been overblown, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the job the public schools are doing.
You ask Bill Gates to pay reparations -- what of the public school administrators who have presided over the failing schools of our inner cities? Will they pay as well?
Finally, in your quote from Barken, she describes problems which have already been seen in public schools, and offers no indication why corruption, demoralization and failure would be worse for the meddling of the foundations.
The issue though is that in practice they are mostly doing really bad things -- standardized testing, value-added assessment of teachers, charter schools, merit pay, etc. And of those, standardized testing and charter schools aren't even inherently bad either, it's just that again their implementations are extraordinary bad and damaging in practice.
A) Gates doesn't take the time to learn the research and the history of the fields/problems he's trying to solve.
B) For whatever issue he's trying to solve, he buys every organization that might conceivable oppose him, creating a one-truth world.
For what it's worth, there are prominent people who accuse him of doing the same thing with respect to malaria. To quote Ravitch again:
"The chief of malaria research for the World Health Organization, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained in 2008 that the Gates Foundation was stifling a diversity of views among scientists, because so many of the world's leading scientists in the field were 'locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group,' making it difficult to get independent reviews of research. The foundation's decision-making proces, he charged, was 'a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself.' In a statement that had implications for the foundation's education initiatives, the scientist said that the powerful influence of the foundation 'could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.' In other worlds, the Gates Foundation was setting the international agenda, because of its unrivaled wealth, and unintentionally shutting out competing views."
I'm not surprised, but really this is inherent in the philanthropy-based model of societal improvement. Rich people, who are (barring huge inheritance) by definition successful in at least one domain, have a large pressure to prove their general greatness by succeeding in another one, once they turn to charity. But this does not really lend itself to familiarization or deep interest. Rather, the point is to try to get some metrics up and running as fast as possible and demonstrate results— a recipe for failure, of course.
If rich people were immensely smarter than the general public, in a way that also generalized across domains, then it'd maybe work well, and not even need metrics. But they are usually not. Most rich people are of somewhere around average intelligence. Gates had some lucky breaks around being in the right place at the right time, with a lucky choice in parents, so got (much) more money than the average person. But this did not somehow give him vast insight into all problems in all other fields of human endeavor. He does not have any better insight into education than anyone else. But the problem is, he has to pretend that he does. He has to throw his money into trying to prove this falsehood true.
Albert Einstein, who was undeniably gifted in some fields of human endeavor, recognized this, which is why he was in favor of a strongly democratic approach to governance and education (he was pretty openly a socialist, in the old-school sense of the term). Now, you could argue that while Einstein was a good physicist, he was wrong on how to run a society... but that'd be just confirming his thesis. ;-)
He could do systematic reviews of all the research, like a Cochrane Collaboration fo education, and run trials across different schools.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN. We ban people for this kind of thing, especially when they don't have a history as a positive contributor.
I don't think anyone has contradicted the claims of Norman Dodd, the Reece Committee or the Cox Committee. And there was Professor Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind, in the late 1980s. It sees to have confirmed the shift in education and promotion of relative truth.
It's math curriculum does not even reach the level of precalclus by high school graduation. No one who goes to a school that's totally based on it will ever be admitted to MIT or any other serious STEM program that expects you at minimum to be ready to learn the calculus when you arrive.
It gets more interesting for post-secondary education. By law, students have to grant permission to their parents to see their college grades.
Decades ago, colleges used to post final exam test scores anonymously. How did they do that? They used SSNs. Of course, that practice is now verboten and schools actually try to use something other than an SSN as the foreign key of the student's records.
http://www.studentaffairs.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/PDFsa...
Why not just switch the model from gathering students data to creating the apps anyways and just letting the school take care of sorting out which app works best for who.
Seems to me like there could have been a bunch of better ways to handle this other than shut it down
...which is pretty much why the players in this space who are finding success are companies like Clever (clever.com), who let schools keep their existing SIS/student management software, but offer conduits to get the data out into other applications.
I know the Clever co-founders post here fairly often, they'll probably chip in on their perspective at some point.
The children of Bill and Melinda Gates – Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe – have attended Lakeside School, Seattle’s most elite, fancypants private school.
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I would never get this phrase, does it mean, it is of no use at the moment? If yes, why not say it so.
How the Gates Foundation Spins its Research http://jaypgreene.com/2012/01/07/how-the-gates-foundation-sp...
Quote: "With the latest round of reports, the Gates folks are back to their old game of spinning their results to push policy recommendations that are actually unsupported by the data."