Education, Anti-Matter, and Black Monday View 687 20110808

View 687 Monday August 08, 2011

· Bill Gates, Education, and things not discussed.

· A Requiem for Shuttle and the end of America’s Manned Space Program

Gates on Education

Bill Gates on Education: "[E]very student needs a meaningful credential beyond high school"

Bill Gates’ prepared remarks for the National Urban League, 28 July 2011:

http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Topics/Education/National-Urban-League-Speech

Rod Montgomery==monty@starfief.com

It’s an interesting speech given where it was presented. Gates still does not address the Lake Wobegon problem. No one does.

What is the key inequity in this country? What is the pivotal issue for the future? For us, the answer is education. Education is the great equalizer.

Yet perversely, the great equalizer in America is stained with inequality. Our public schools range from outstanding to outrageous. And where a child’s school is located on that spectrum is a matter of luck – where you live, when you were born, who your parents are. There is already enough in life that depends on luck. When it comes to education, we should replace luck with equity.

Yet that was not universally true when I was young. There were places with great schools – many districts in California were held up as examples – and places with wretched schools, but none of that depended on luck, because each school district was responsible for education. No one thought that education in the United States was universally awful. Moreover, the resulting economy built by the products of that education system dominated the world. American Know-How was a cliché, but it was a cliché because it was so obviously true.

That has all changed in my lifetime, and the consolidation of education into state and federal monopolies with their complete control over local districts has produced what we have now: a great inequity. I used to say that there were three institutions of enormous importance built on central control: NASA, the American Education System, and the Soviet Agricultural System. All of them could show some spectacular results in particular times and places – massive central planning can often do that – but they were all notoriously inefficient systems of resource allocation. NASA and the Soviet Agriculture System are gone. It’s not clear what will replace NASA; without a great improvement in the US economy, probably nothing. And without a great increase in the capabilities of the US education system, the economy isn’t likely to boom again. We need more American Know-How – and we don’t have it and have little prospect for getting it.

Let me acknowledge that I don’t understand in a personal way the challenges that poverty creates for families and schools and teachers. I don’t ever want to minimize it. Poverty is a terrible obstacle. But we can’t let it be an excuse. Melinda and I have been involved in some remarkable schools that prove that all students can succeed. We know you can have a good school in a poor neighborhood. We’ve seen them and been inspired by them, and so have you.

So let’s end the myth that we have to solve poverty before we improve education.

It’s the other way around. Improving education is one of the best ways to solve poverty.

The first step in reforming anything is to find out where that thing is being done well – and why. When our foundation studied the highest-achieving schools, especially the schools where poor children were doing well, we found mounting evidence that the single most important factor in a successful school is effective teaching. Data now show that students with great teachers learn three times as much material in one year as students with ineffective teachers.

This is an important finding. It has generally been known or at least suspected – see Barzun on the subject as well as some of my previous writings – but it hasn’t been widely accepted among professors of education. Perhaps now it will be.

The impact of the teacher is pivotal. BUT – that does not mean that parents, principals and administrators have fewer obligations. It means they have greater obligations … to support teachers — to provide them with the training and the college-ready curriculum and the resources they need to help their students.

To truly support teachers, we have to understand excellent teaching. So for us, the challenge became: let’s analyze the teachers whose students are making the biggest gains, identify what they do, and figure out how to transfer those skills to others.

Amazingly, we found that the field of education had done little research in this area. It knew the impact of effective teaching, but it didn’t know what made teaching effective. This gap in knowledge was disappointing, but at the same time it made me optimistic – because it confirmed that the field was now onto something that had been missed.

So our foundation is working with teachers to identify measures of effective teaching – and then develop ways to evaluate teachers that teachers themselves believe are fair.

This too is important.

Note that Gates does not directly address two key issues in schooling. He says that education is a civil right; he does not say or address the key question of equality in education. Injustice consists of treating equal persons unequally, and of treating unequal persons equally. Half the children are below average. Those below average will not benefit from a college education meaning that they will not greatly benefit from a world class university or college prep education. Gates doesn’t address this, and I don’t much blame him. It’s one of the best ways to be blackguarded as a racist.

The other issue Gates does not address is discipline. Schools that benefit from his foundation’s help generally don’t have discipline problems, because there are generally more applicants for places in those schools than there are seats for students. Undisciplined students either learn some self discipline are are replaced with others who do that learning.

The public schools are filled with students who don’t want to be there. There is no simple way to impose discipline on them under our present structure. That is a problem that is seldom addressed, and most attempts to impose discipline on unruly students are met with lawsuits and accusations. This results in inequities: students who want to learn find themselves unable to learn anything because the classroom is disorderly, and nothing can be done about that. The kids who want to learn – bright nerds, dull plodders alike – are taxed. We have known much of this for a very long time – go rent Blackboard Jungle (a 1955 movie in which my former neighbor Jamie Farr makes his film debut). Local school districts treated the problem in different way, but we have nationalized that now, and with No Child Left Behind we have made certain that most of the teacher resources will be devoted to the dull normal members of the class who can be brought from D- to C-; not much left over for those who will earn A’s and B’s. No child left behind means no child gets ahead. Nearly always.

Gates and his foundation have done good work, and he is politically savvy enough to go very slowly in promoting the notion that excellent teachers ought to be recognized and rewarded; it’s an idea that the Education Establishment from the Professors of Education down to the Teachers’ Union officials just plain hate. Gates has avoided most of the hatred, largely by not addressing the injustices of inequality: all teachers are not equal, yet they are treated equally; and all students are not equal, yet they are treated equally. This is injustice. It’s also a lousy way to run a school system, and I would bet a lot that the Gates children do not go to a school that tolerates undisciplined students or treats all students equally; or for that matter treats all teachers equally.

Black Monday

I want to get off the Deficit Dance, but the subject has to be addressed.

The Dow is down 500. In the past two weeks over two Trillion dollars in capital has vanished. How much of that is due to the Deficit Dance is hard to discern. The President spoke today to tell us how to get out of this mess. It requires that we balance the budget. We have to reduce the deficit. That requires a balanced approach. Balance means tax rises and spending cuts. The problem is that we can’t make any more spending cuts. We put those in the Deficit Agreement. Here is the President:

One vision has been championed by Republicans in the House of Representatives and embraced by several of their party’s presidential candidates. It’s a plan that aims to reduce our deficit by $4 trillion over the next ten years, and one that addresses the challenge of Medicare and Medicaid in the years after that.

Those are both worthy goals for us to achieve. But the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we’ve known throughout most of our history.

A 70% cut to clean energy. A 25% cut in education. A 30% cut in transportation. Cuts in college Pell Grants that will grow to more than $1,000 per year. That’s what they’re proposing. These aren’t the kind of cuts you make when you’re trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings in the budget. These aren’t the kind of cuts that Republicans and Democrats on the Fiscal Commission proposed. These are the kind of cuts that tell us we can’t afford the America we believe in. And they paint a vision of our future that’s deeply pessimistic.

It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them. Go to China and you’ll see businesses opening research labs and solar facilities. South Korean children are outpacing our kids in math and science. Brazil is investing billions in new infrastructure and can run half their cars not on high-priced gasoline, but biofuels. And yet, we are presented with a vision that says the United States of America – the greatest nation on Earth – can’t afford any of this.

It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors. It says that ten years from now, if you’re a 65 year old who’s eligible for Medicare, you should have to pay nearly $6,400 more than you would today. It says instead of guaranteed health care, you will get a voucher. And if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy insurance, tough luck – you’re on your own. Put simply, it ends Medicare as we know it.

http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/
2011/04/text-of-president-obamas-speech-
on-deficit-reduction.php

That speech was made on April 13, but today’s speech sums to the same: there aren’t any cuts to be made. A balanced approach means tax raises. We have to reduce the deficit and we can’t do it by actual cuts in spending.

“The fact is, we didn’t need a rating agency to tell us that we need a balanced, long-term approach to deficit reduction. That was true last week. That was true last year. That was true the day I took office. And we didn’t need a rating agency to tell us that the gridlock in Washington over the last several months has not been constructive, to say the least. We knew from the outset that a prolonged debate over the debt ceiling — a debate where the threat of default was used as a bargaining chip — could do enormous damage to our economy and the world’s. That threat, coming after a string of economic disruptions in Europe, Japan and the Middle East, has now roiled the markets and dampened consumer confidence and slowed the pace of recovery.

“So all of this is a legitimate source of concern. But here’s the good news: Our problems are imminently solvable. And we know what we have to do to solve them. With respect to debt, our problem is not confidence in our credit — the markets continue to reaffirm our credit as among the world’s safest. Our challenge is the need to tackle our deficits over the long term.

“Last week, we reached an agreement that will make historic cuts to defense and domestic spending. But there’s not much further we can cut in either of those categories. What we need to do now is combine those spending cuts with two additional steps: tax reform that will ask those who can afford it to pay their fair share and modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare.”

http://www.theroot.com/buzz/obama-us-always-will-be-aaa-country

And there we are. The only way out is to raise taxes. It will be called tax reform, tax those “who can afford it to pay their fare share”, but it will be tax increases.

The President did not explain why, if he knew from the day he took office that we needed deficit reduction, he didn’t do something about that when he had Democratic majorities in both Houses, Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, and pretty well all the power he needed to give us a budget that reduced the deficit. Instead we got TARP and STIMULUS and much more deficit spending, and the Democrats used their lame duck session majority to give us ObamaCare, which will certainly increase the deficit although it is not yet clear by how much. I note that there was nothing in the speech about ObamaCare or what the Democrats did with their two years of majority in both Houses.

But it is clear: the President does not intend to allow actual cuts in spending. It is important that the exponential growth of government spending shall be at least 5% and preferably more.

Yesterday I said that the downrating from AAA to AA+ by one rating agency wasn’t important.

Clearly the stock market did not agree with me. I note that Donald Trump does. Trump and others point out that most American companies are sound, and smart people are using this plunge as an opportunity to buy low. Gold is up. Stocks are down. Who knows what will happen in a year. It’s another reason why I try to avoid breaking news.

And there is plenty of other news worth looking at.

I also recommend the information in the charts in this commentary.