Bill Gates Rant!!!

I haven't posted a good rant in a while, and the end of the year seems to be a good time to get one in. I have to say that I hope that people will read this one though, because I think that it gets to the heart of a few important issues in education - plus, I actually did my research : )

Recently Newsweek's online magazine ran an interview with Bill Gates and Randi Weingarten with the title "Fixing Our Nation's Schools" (you can read the whole thing here). For those of you who don't know, Randi Weingarten is the outspoken and controversial president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Bill Gates is Bill Gates.

These are two people for whom I have a great deal of respect, and who have spent a lot of time, energy, and, in Bill Gates's case, money dealing with our ailing school system. Both of them are intelligent, committed and persuasive, and they are both appallingly wrong.

Ms. Weingarten's particular wrongness is, rather famously, the unwillingness to accept the idea of using test scores in teachers' evaluations. Basically, she is the most public symbol of the inability of schools to get rid of "lemon" teachers, and she is totally wrong in this respect, but for some interesting reasons.

I really want to do a rant at some point about Ms. Weingarten and the misunderstood wrongness of the teachers unions. But it's going to have to wait because my beef right now is with Bill Gates - or actually with the countless people who are now making the same false statements that he makes in this article.

Bill Gates, through his great fortune and a rather surprisingly strong showing of public spiritedness, has put himself front and center on the issue of education reform. Again, I have enormous respect for what he has accomplished. I especially admire his desire to give not only some of his vast wealth, but also some of his admittedly great intelligence and experience. Unfortunately, in this case, he is wrong wrong wrong.

In the Newsweek article, Mr. Gates makes the argument that the problems with the schools are not primarily financial. He argues that what is needed is not more money, but a better use of resources. His suggestions include researching the best teaching methods from around the world, improving teacher training, and (in opposition to Ms. Weingarten), instituting a merit based performance system in which teachers are rewarded or fired based, at least partly, on measurable results.

What Gates is suggesting is that the solution is not more money, but more smarts. It is the same argument used by many politicians and pundits when they want to talk about fixing huge problems without using the forbidden words "increase taxes". (To his credit, Bill Gates doesn't actually use the egregious phrase "throwing money at the problem" - in English class we teach students about loaded words, and this is one of the most common examples in these absurd days - If your children are starving and you want to feed them, is this "throwing money at the problem"?)

The problem with Gates's argument is that he in almost entirely right. We should do all of those things. We should have done them fifty years ago, but the sooner the better.

Where he, and so many others, err these days is in the assertion that the problem is not primarily financial. The inconvenient, but inescapable reality is that the problem is primarily financial in two overwhelmingly important ways.

First, as I have brought up in this blog before, the amount of time that our students actually spend in school is shamefully small compared to the rest of the world. I don't want to get into too much detail about this here since I have before, and to his credit Gates does make this point. But it is a huge issue, and we are doomed without addressing it. Malcolm Gladwell makes the same point in his terrific book Outliers, and it is one of the big ugly elephants in the room of current American policy. Again, without going into too much detail, suffice to say that every extra day of education is insanely expensive.

Before getting to the next, and more insidious, aspect of Gates's argument, I want to make a point here. When talking about the expense of a longer school year, please don't think that this is only due to teacher's salaries. What I mean is, that if the powers that be told us educators, "You need to teach for an extra month each year, and we're not going to pay you any more," I would be upset about this - who wouldn't be? - but I would do it, and I would guess, so would most teachers in the long run.

Of course this isn't what would happen - they would end up paying teachers more - but my point is that this is only a part of the enormous expense. There are also insurance, maintenance, administrative costs, busing, etc. that make increasing school time a daunting task.

But this brings me to the main point of this rant and to the heart of the wrongness of so much of our national debate on this issue. Namely, that when Bill Gates and others claim that a simple increase of spending is not the answer to our problems, there is the spoken or unspoken implication that what this means is an increase in each teacher's salary. While I would love more money (again - who wouldn't?) Gates is correct that this is not what is needed.

What is needed - desperately and critically - is more teachers. Or, more precisely, smaller class sizes, which are facilitated by having more teachers in a school. And this is a profoundly financial issue.

Gates makes the astonishingly misleading argument that we spend more money per pupil than anyone else in the world - including countries like China and Finland that are currently eating our lunch in terms of education. And this is true, but it is meaningless because their class sizes are half as large as ours at most!!!!!!

Here is the unsexy but irrefutable research from the Department of education:

The US Department of Education recently looked at the achievement levels of students in 2,561 schools across the nation, as measured by their performance on the national NAEP exams. The sample included at least 50 schools in each state, including those from large and small, urban and rural, affluent and poor areas. After controlling for student background, the only objective factor that was found to be correlated with higher student success as measured by test scores was class size –not school size, not teacher qualifications, nor any other variable that the researchers could identify.

You can see the full study here if you've got some time.

That's it - smaller classes. Why is this? Just for the obvious reasons: they are easier to manage, students get more attention, and everybody has a better educational experience. There is nothing exciting about this, but it is absolutely critical.

As I said, I did my research, and here are the statistics for classes in Finland in education - they are about half as big as ours. (Class sizes for China have traditionally been larger than Finland's, but they have been shrinking as China has become wealthier, and there are strong cultural factors in china that, unfortunately, would be almost impossible to replicate in the United States, such as a strong family focus on education.)

So there you have it: more days and smaller classes. A lot more money.

Does this mean that good teaching doesn't matter? No, it just means that, on a large scale statistical level, there is simply nothing else besides these two issues that can be quantified. And as Mary Kennedy and many others have noted, although we know what good teaching looks like, we still have very little idea of how to make it happen with any regularity.

Again, I am totally behind Gates on many issues: discover the best teaching practices, teach them to new (and veteran) teachers, and reward or punish them based on measurable data.

But, as a country, are we serious about educational reform?

Then what we need are more teachers (and the space to put them in) to create smaller classes. This is the only thing besides time that has been proven to make a measurable difference, and it is indeed primarily a financial issue. In fact, it is incredibly expensive. But that is the issue, and unless someone is addressing it, they are not truly acknowledging reality, no matter how successful they may be in business.

Hope you all had a great 2010!!!

Peace & Love,

Patrick