

"There's no reason only poor people should have the experience" - TED video of Bill Gates - wyday
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html

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rudyfink
The stuff on teaching was just amazing. His graph on what makes a good teacher
was jaw dropping to me. Once he put it out there, it was really hard for me to
avoid the question of why we are not focusing more on what makes good teacher
performance.

~~~
uuilly
In my opinion teacher accountability is the most pressing social issue of our
time. Gates has been all over this for a while now...

~~~
access_denied
What about paying them decently? Other than some positions at Ivy-League,
becoming a teacher is just bad math, financially speaking. Why would anyone
intelligent want to become a teacher?

~~~
wallflower
I'll try to dig up the link later but I remember a Time or Newsweek cover
story that said that the number one reason teachers quit the profession is the
students' parents. I recall two horrifying stories from it: 1) A parent
calling to complain about a 'C' that her daughter got because she _wrote_ the
daughter's report, 2) A college student handing his cellphone during class to
the professor. On the line was his irate parent to complain for his kid about
a grade.

That being said, I've discussed this with my friends many times and I've
gradually been convinced that more than anything - parents' involvement in
their education was/is vitally important. A couple of them made it out of the
ghetto.

~~~
wallflower
Could not find the link directly but it was captured by a message board:

Why Teachers Hate Parents, Time Magazine

"Ask teachers about the best part of their job, and most will say how much
they love working with kids. Ask them about the most demanding part, and they
will say dealing with parents. In fact, a new study finds that of all the
challenges they face, new teachers rank handling parents at the top. According
to preliminary results from the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, made
available exclusively to TIME, parent management was a bigger struggle than
finding enough funding or maintaining discipline or enduring the toils of
testing. It's one reason, say the Consortium for Policy Research in Education
and the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, that 40% to 50% of new
teachers leave the profession within five years. Even master teachers who love
their work, says Harvard education professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, call
this "the most treacherous part of their jobs."

"Perhaps the most complicated part of the conversation—beyond all the issues
of race and class and culture, the growing pressures to succeed and arguments
over how success should be defined—is the problem of memory. When they meet in
that conference, parent and teacher bring their own school experiences with
them—what went right and wrong, what they missed. They are determined for it
to be different for the child they both care about. They go into that first-
grade room and sit in the small chairs and can easily be small again
themselves. It is so tempting to use the child's prospects to address their
own regrets. So teachers learn to choose their words with care and hope that
they can build a partnership with parents that works to everyone's advantage
and comes at no one's expense. And parents over time may realize that when it
comes to their children, they still have much to learn. "I think that we love
our children so much that they make us a little loony at times," says Arch
Montgomery, head of the Asheville School in North Carolina. He winces at
parents who treat their child as a cocktail-party trophy or a vanity sticker
for the window of their SUV, but he also understands their behavior. "I think
most parents desperately want to do what is right for their kids. This does
not bring out the better angels of our natures, but it is understandable, and
it is forgivable."

[http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&...](http://forums.atozteacherstuff.com/showthread.php?t=8834&page=2)

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meat-eater
I read somewhere that Chris Anderson was quoted as saying that the caption for
this talk should be that "Bill gates releases more bugs into the world".

------
JesseAldridge
One very interesting question he touched on but didn't really answer: If the
market is heartless and government is incompetent, then how do we address
issues such as these?

Is philanthropy really the only way?

~~~
patio11
_If the market is heartless and government is incompetent_ , then the
government should decide on goals and pay actors in the private sector for
implementing them.

Want to figure out which teachers are the best ones? Pay for student
performance. The market will sort everything else out. You don't have to
publish standards of what makes a good teacher, heck you don't even have to
make pursuit of good teachers a defined goal, any more than you need to pass a
law saying "Make sure you hire those programmers who are ten times as
effective as the other ones."

(I know there is one glaring problem here, namely that a politically powerful
lobby considers that solution anathema, but it would work.)

~~~
jbert
> I know there is one glaring problem here

More than one, really. State schools in the UK are incentivised in a way
similar to this.

What it results in is gaming of the performance measures.

For example, pupils are steered into softer subjects where results are easier
to attain. Pupils below-but-close-to a grade increment are given more
intensive teaching at the expense of those who will attain the relevant grade
left to their own devices.

Push that down to the per-teacher level and good teachers would not want to
work with difficult pupils, since they will get poor results and less pay. "So
make the pay conditional on _improvement_ rather than absolute attainment".
OK, in which case you've just made an incentive for children to be labeled as
behaviourally difficult and academically poor so that they can be improved
more.

Want to get better teachers? Pump more damn money in. Get good managers and
get good quality people teaching. Make it a profession people aspire to work
in once more.

The thing is, you'll have to keep it up for about a generation (with not much
to show for it), to flush the system through. Good luck with that politically.

Markets are not a panacea. Particularly so with subjective measures.

Education (in the broader sense of what we want to achieve) is subjective -
even academic results are more subjective than one might think - how many
mathematics qualifications is a history qualification of the same level
'worth'?

~~~
snprbob86
I'm not really sure what I believe here, but I'm going to make the argument of
true believer in the powers of market forces. The purist objection here would
be that you need to follow through; get out of the market's way further down
the chain.

If you choose to reward achievement, you have to measure achievement. If
achievement is measured by standardized testing, then people will game the
metrics. However, if the market chooses the testing procedures, it will reward
metrics which are harder to game. This would take several iterations (read:
many years) to stabilize, but it should converge on some sort of solution.

I think the fundamental problem here is forcing the market to not become
complacent. This sort of thing needs to be done like a genetic algorithm.
Every state tries a different testing procedure and then tests cross-pollinate
and evolve under the pressure of market forces. There would need to be some
way to reward experimentation as well, so that we don't wind up with one
homogenized solution that stops progressing; there would need to be "random
mutations".

~~~
unalone
Market forces aren't infallible. They're compromised by a profit motive, and
that's not always a good thing.

If you want to see a market in action, look at TV networks. The big networks
move farther and farther away from actual reporting. They go for lowest-
common-denominator. The channels that _do_ produce great pieces of TV either
do it only sporadically, or they're pay-for channels that attract a more
sophisticated audience. Even then, the show that critics call the greatest
show in history - _The Wire_ \- had to fight to get its last season aired. It
had an extremely small viewing audience.

 _However, if the market chooses the testing procedures, it will reward
metrics which are harder to game._

Which metrics possibly exist that can't be gamed? The minute you have any
metric, you're creating a "good" and a "bad" scale, and that means that people
can cram towards the good as much as possible.

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netcan
What you often see on TED presentations is that these people know how to make
a single simple powerful argument. It's actually quite difficult. They get the
right graph up there.The right numbers or facts that make the combination of
reason & emotion click.

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rmobin
He's right about the importance of education and the poor state of it in the
US, but I'm not convinced that the private sector can't handle it. Inside
American Education ([http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-
Sowel...](http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-
Sowell/dp/0029303303)) is a really interesting book on what our current system
is like (although a bit dated, it's from 1992).

~~~
benzim
The private sector could handle it. He points to private schools that are
already succeeding with the poorest children. The problem is how to get the
government and unions out of the way so successful ideas can be widely
applied. I think a voucher system would quickly begin to solve many of
Americas education problems. Such systems have already succeeded in Sweden and
parts of the US.

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chriskelley
He releases them at 5:10... but it's a great talk, be sure to listen to the
whole thing.

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schmave
As a few other people here have suggested, standardized test scores are a
pretty narrow measure of education quality. Bill Gates mentioned that everyone
in the room had probably had a few great teachers to get them to where they
are now. When I think about the great teachers I have had, I certainly don't
think they were great because they raised my standardized test scores. They
were great because they gave me a much deeper understanding of a topic, or
opened my eyes to something I hadn't seen before.

Yes, the best teachers I had may have increased my standardized test scores
some as a side effect, but it would be an insult to them if that's why I
admired them so much as teachers.

Test prep can be done in a factory, but not education.

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known
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I DO and I UNDERSTAND. -- Confucius

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Klonoar
Eh, I don't really see the big deal about releasing some mosquitos into the
crowd. I did enjoy his talk, though, pretty well thought out.

~~~
vinutheraj
Yea ... if they were malaria infected, it would have been a different story
though. I thought that's why there was a big deal, that maybe he released
infected ones.

Dont know whats the big deal over simple mosquitoes !

~~~
randallsquared
Just an awareness thing. Since he was _talking_ about malaria-carrying
mosquitos when he released them, releasing them had a greater psychological
impact than otherwise.

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cunard3
Another (earlier) thread on a similar theme: Ken Robinson says that the
teachers who can encounter their kids and allow them to be creative can
thereby allow them to have tools they'll need in the present post-industrial
world. He specifically mentions what he calls "inflation" meaning a BA used to
be something, then it was an MA, and now a PHD. I've watched it a few times
now. His point about valuing math above music or art is well taken, by me
anyway.
[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html)

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steveblgh
Watched until 1:40. That chart could be taught in school as "how to lie with
data": reduction from 20 to 10 made to look more dramatic by changing the
scale.

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lecha
Re: education So Gates has been all over this, and there are many components
to it.

The question to _this_ forum is, what technology is needed to help make great
teachers? To Tim O'Reilly's slogan, this is clearly the stuff that matters.

------
adamc
Made me think of the Lorax: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing's going to get better. It's not."

~~~
mynameishere
It was Lorax-style thinking that got ddt banned throughout much of the world,
resulting in millions of deaths.

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baddox
Isn't he AGAINST malaria? If so, shouldn't he say, "There's no reason ANYONE
should have the experience"?

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keltecp11
My new favorite TED.

~~~
cubix
I always feel a little frustrated when I listen to Gates. He's notorious for
his bluntness in business, behind closed doors. However, in public he can come
across as disingenuous -- passive-aggressive even. Why doesn't he chastise the
incompetent teachers and rapacious unions more directly? You can tell he wants
to, and probably does at the dinner table. Perhaps he fears a backlash against
MS.

~~~
ewanmcteagle
What more would it accomplish? It would just be emotional ranting. Often that
kind of thing adds more adversarial elements to the problem and improves
nothing.

~~~
cubix
I'm not suggesting he work himself into a foaming-at-the-mouth sort of rage,
but there's an unsettling disconnect between the subject matter -- the plight
of generations of students caught in bad public schools -- and his emotional
tone. Personally, I value sincere communication and feel a little anxious when
someone is forcing me to read between the lines. There is a place for
justified anger in communication, as long as it remains civil.

As for the practical consequences, if there is a congruency between the words
and how they are expressed (body language, tone, etc.), the message tends to
land a little heavier.

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mynameishere
Do people really need charity in order to get bednets? How much does a damn
net cost? How much does ddt cost?

~~~
DXL
In 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7
billion lived on less than $2 a day. When you're living with such an income,
you're probably starving and hoping you make it through another week. Even if
it were possible for someone to save the amount needed, there may still not be
a shop around where you can buy one, especially in rural areas.

~~~
mynameishere
Eh, if people can buy clothing, they can buy a net which is a cheaper item.
They cost 15 dollars on amazon, and the wholesale price is probably about 50
cents. It's not like the whole continent is still living with bones through
their hair,

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25afr...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25africa.html)

~~~
whughes
These people aren't going to be buying clothing either. 50 cents is your daily
meal.

------
icode
Maybe Bill Gates should be put in a jar and be told: There is no reason only
animals get treated like objects.

I know, most people will think mosquitoes aint important and have no feelings.
That they are like machines.

Personally, when I look at the behaviour of mosquitoes, they have a lot in
common with me and you. So I would prefer to leave them alone and let them
decide on their own where to go. What if some more complex animal then humans
comes along and decides "Oh, humans are so simple. We can just treat them like
stones or wood". Would we agree?

~~~
davidw
Having spent more than my share of time in the mosquito-infested plains of
northern Italy, I am more than happy to mercilessly squash any of the damn
things that are around me. I wouldn't react very well to a person who spent
their nights making buzzing noises in my ears and biting me, either.

