Bill Gates’ $5 Billion View 684 20110724

View 684 Sunday, July 24, 2011

Amazon has quietly launched Birth of Fire by Jerry Pournelle. That’s not strictly correct. Of course I uploaded it – thanks to Eric Pobirs and Rick Hellewell who got it into proper Kindle formatting so it looks good, a task that is tougher than most eBook publishers seem to realize – but Amazon still officially lists the book as under consideration in its reports to me. But Amazon also tells me that a dozen or so copies have already been sold, and when I went looking for it I found it listed for sale despite their not telling me that it has been published. Apparently all the departments at Amazon aren’t quite in synch.

Life at Chaos Manor has been chaotic over the weekend and we continue to be an interrupt driven system. I hope to recover from that and get some real work done shortly, but I didn’t get much done today. Alas.

The Saturday Wall Street Journal has an important article/interview with Bill Gates on education. Gates has spent a lot of money trying to improve American public education. The article, “Was the $5 Billion Worth It?” asks a significant question: could Gates have spent that $5 Billion on improving education in some better way? The answer is a bit more complex than it seems. My own theory is that $5 Billion distributed as prizes with specific goals could change the way education is done in this country; but it would have to be very carefully done. The stakes are enormous. And Gates did learn a lot for his $5 Billion.

I intend to write a lot more on this subject, and to reference this article again; but if you missed it, it’s worth looking up and reading. There is a sense in which there is no more important question facing this country. The public school system consumes an enormous part of government budget, and is responsible for the lion’s share of public deficits in many states. It’s the biggest item in the California budget. All that money is spent now with the primary goal of satisfying unions, which is to say, keeping every teacher employed regardless of competence, even minimum competence, down to the point of insanity. In the Los Angeles School District some 7 teachers have been dismissed for incompetence in a dozen years. Another hundred or so have been isolated from all contact with students, but are still paid full salary. Make it 200 in 10 years and it’s still a tiny number for a system that employs tens of thousands of teachers. Of course some of them are incompetent. Some started incompetent, some achieved incompetence, and some may have had incompetence thrust on them by an accident or just plain burnout. However they became incompetent, they are: and one of the things Gates’ research has shown – although he doesn’t like to say it flat out because he is trying to maintain some level of civility with the teacher unions – is that you can improve most schools by a factor of two by firing the 10% least competent teachers. This shouldn’t be surprising: it’s the case with most organizations. Weeding out the worst is always an effective means of increasing the efficiency of an organization. Gates has also shown conclusively something that honest education theorists have know for fifty years: class sizes don’t matter much, and spending more money seldom improves schools.

The single most effective thing you can do to improve a school is to fire the worst teachers and distribute their students among the remaining teachers. The increased class size won’t matter much: the school will improve quickly and visibly.

With many schools it can be quite dramatic. Most teachers know it. Most teachers know who the incompetent teachers are. Yet incompetent teachers are seldom if ever removed. Any attempt to get rid of the worst – and the worst can be really really bad, obviously bad, hilariously bad, and everyone knows it – and any attempt to get rid of them is met with implacable opposition and fanatic resistance by the teacher unions who are willing to sue school districts into bankruptcy if that’s what it takes to protect the incompetent. That’s hardly surprising, nor is it astonishing that the unions will at the same time claim that all they want is to protect the best interests of the kids; but it is a bit surprising that parents never catch on, and the best teachers, who are thoroughly aware of all this, almost never speak out. Of course they don’t dare. Teachers unions may claim to be professional associations, but many of them are more than willing to employ tactics that might shock even a mob-controlled garbage collector union. Bring a good teacher is hard enough: it’s a bit much to ask good teachers also to be crusaders against the system at the same time.

And so, like the Deficit Dance that results in delayed Social Security checks while the Bunny Inspectors continue with their inflated salaries, generous benefits, and high benefit pensions, the beat goes on. Better to protect the incompetent than help the kids learn something. Just as it is better to hold up a Veteran’s check than to eliminate the Department of Education SWAT team. (And now I am informed that NASA has a SWAT team. One wonders how long that will go on.)

The purpose of government is to hire and pay federal employees. It does that first, before paying debts, before paying out Social Security benefits that the recipients paid into for years, before – well, before anything. We’ll default before we begin serious cuts that eliminate needless departments and agencies of government even though we can live without what those agencies do and we have to borrow the money to let them go on doing it. But that’s a familiar rant, and it’s late.

Bill Gates seriously wants to change the world for the better, and he has the largest single Foundation in the land, larger than the next three combined. He has shown his willingness to spend money to get results. And mostly he has found that the politics are just too tough, even given his fortune. “It’s hard to improve public education—that’s clear. As Warren Buffet would say, if you’re picking stocks, you wouldn’t pick this one.” Give money to alleviate AIDS in Africa and everyone will say you’re a fine fellow. Try to induce real educational reform and you will soon find you are denounced as a villain.

One of Gates’ problems is egalitarianism. Gates has said often that every American child deserves a world class university prep education. That goal is unattainable even in Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average, because not even all those who are above average can or should go to university, and a world class university prep education doesn’t necessarily equip them to do much in the real world. I understand that there can be real value in a university prep education coupled with some practical instruction, and if all the children were really above average this might be a goal worth striving for; but everywhere except in Lake Wobegon half the children are below average, and condemning all the children to a world class university prep education dooms about half of them to a school life of hell followed by being thrust out into the School of Hard Knocks unprepared to do anything anyone would pay you money to have done. OK – I exaggerate. But not by all that much.

But that leads toward the essay I need to write, and this is not the time to write it.

I do commend the article/interview to your attention.

The same issue of the Wall Street Journal has Peggy Noonan saying “Out of the Way, Please, Mr. President”. She seems to believe that Obama is sincere but misguided. I hope she is right. The Deficit Dance continues and moves ever closer to the edge; once the US actually defaults on its debt – which it does not have to do, since the government takes in more than enough money each month to service the debt and pay the military, and pay enough people to write the checks – once default actually happens, interest rates will soar. At that point we won’t be able to borrow enough to roll over the debt.

At this point it begins to look as if the best we can hope for is a short interim “solution” in which we kick the debt can down the road a bit further. We won’t default, but the bunny inspectors need not fear for their jobs. Nor need needless employees of the Department of Education, cosmetic inspectors, those who enforce the Disabilities Act, and all the others who do things that we just might be able to live without borrowing money to pay for. When it’s over they’ll be safe. The President wants to get past the 2012 election. So do the public employee unions. And we sow the wind.