Here's Bill Gates' TED talk "Teachers need real feedback," which is no doubt true, but ... Bill's video-within-a-video of what every classroom "could look like" is pretty hilarious. Bizarrely, Gates' TED talk is from just last month. Considering that he's been mucking around in education for 14 years, you'd think he'd be less naive by now.
(If you don't like watching videos, here's Diane Ravitch's transcript.)
(If you don't like watching videos, here's Diane Ravitch's transcript.)
Starting at 5:30 in to the TED talk is a video about how Bill's new teacher evaluation system is working wonderfully in a classroom in Johnston High School, Iowa.
The classroom appears to have a student body made up of about 14 blonde and 8 brunet white kids. (There seems to be one black student on the edge of one shot, but he doesn't seem to show up in other shots -- this video could represent multiple classes.)
The classroom appears to have a student body made up of about 14 blonde and 8 brunet white kids. (There seems to be one black student on the edge of one shot, but he doesn't seem to show up in other shots -- this video could represent multiple classes.)
Johnston is a fast-growing white flight suburb of Des Moines. In 2010, the demographics of Johnston, Iowa were:
The racial makeup of the city was 91.0% White, 2.2% African American, 0.1% Native American, 4.6% Asian, 0.6% from other races, and 1.5% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.0% of the population.
If it's Iowa and the second biggest ethnic group is Asians, it's pretty high end. Also, the students in the video are slender, so this is clearly an upscale school.
From Zillow, here are the demographics of Johnston High School:
School District White, non-Hispanic 91% 88% Black, non-Hispanic 4% 4% Asian/Pacific Islander 3% 5% Hispanic 2% 3% Native American or Native Alaskan 0.5% 0.3%
Only 13% of Johnston High students qualify for reduced price lunches compared to almost half of all students nationally.
Wikipedia doesn't give the 2010 income figures for Johnston, but back in 2000: "the median income for a family was $97,322." Nearly six figures in 2000 in Iowa must put that community at the 95th percentile or higher. A 2011 US News article listed the Des Moines metropolitan area, with its cost of living at only 90.6% of the national average and median income of $56,576, as having the highest cost-adjusted standard of living in the country. And Johnston is gold-plated by Des Moines standards.
Bill ends his video about Johnston High at 7:58 with the assertion:
every classroom could look like that
Of course, nobody, Gates or his TED audience, gets the joke.
Understand that philanthropy is about little more than social status and social status is pretty much limited to that which appeals to young women as morally superior.
ReplyDeleteAs it stands, people like Bill Gates will do little of real value to help humanity.
For example, consider Gates' work with malaria.
The “cure” for malaria is known and has been put into practice in the US since the New Deal — housing construction standards that enclose, not the healthy, but the virulently sick from exposure to the vectors so as to prevent the evolution of virulence via horizontal transmission. See Paul Ewald’s work on the evolution of virulence.
But young women find the idea of mosquito nets around the healthy and treating the sick more appealing than the idea of evolutionary medicine so Bill Gates et al fund accordingly.
Pftt.. This teacher. Get all the credit for being able to get a job in an high income/low NAM area.
ReplyDeleteThat's it.
Gates also funds genetically-modified crops and proprietary seeds (seeds are property of Monsanto, not the farmer) in Africa.
ReplyDeleteThe first commenter (at 6/8/13, 7:28 PM) has it exactly right but forgot to add that some philanthropy is just another business opportunity.
In the future, everyone will be a white billionaire if he applies himself diligently enough. The American Dream!!
ReplyDeleteYou see something this in some of the new TV ads like the one for State Farm with the NFL stars. The classroom in the State Farm ad is mostly white, with all white teachers and administrators. State Farm is clearly trying to associate their product with "good schools" and the NFL, two things about America that are still popular and desired.
ReplyDeleteI watched the video closely and there does seem to be one Hispanic girl, one Asian girl and one Black boy in the class but you have to look sharp to spot them.
ReplyDeleteAt&T also has a manipulative TV ad featuring "good schools":
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnA3C9Af_oc
Steve, I think you might have blogged before about - or perhaps it was a commenter who mentioned something about - how they do testing for blue collar occupations and how you have to have a minimum of 90 IQ or something to be a commercial truck diver and so forth.
ReplyDeleteIf so, how did this guy get to be a "heavy equipment operator", and if not, why not?:
http://news.yahoo.com/operator-philly-collapse-deaths-turns-self-214931287.html
"A heavy equipment operator with a lengthy rap sheet who is accused of being high on marijuana when a downtown building collapsed onto a thrift store, killing six people, surrendered Saturday to face charges in the deaths, police said."
"Authorities believe the 42-year-old Benschop had been using an excavator Wednesday when the remains of the four-story building gave way and toppled onto an attached Salvation Army thrift store, killing two employees and four customers and injuring 13 others."
Well it is all pretty comic considering that Gate dropped out of college after his freshman year, and the fact that outside of computing he is scarcely educated at all. Goodness, just listen to him speak or read his prose.
ReplyDeleteThat he is taken seriously shows just how childish oure "values" are. Gates as delivered some of the worst software product in the last 50 years--he has used his customers as a Quality Assurance team. He has hired tens of thousands of foreigners to control wage costs.
Just how is it that Gates knows something about "education"?
He may be rich, but he is only marginally civilized. He really is not educated at all. "Knowledge" of programming languages or computer architecture are in a higher sense not "knowledge at all. they are skills.
TED: the Readers Digest of the Technorati.
Another TV ad featuring "good schools", this time from Benjamin Moore.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ispot.tv/ad/7LF8/benjamin-moore-classroom-paint-featuring-candice-olson
It's amazing that corporate America uses the imagery of "good schools" to market their products, but at the same time they want the government to implement policies (ie mass immigration) that would undermine these "good schools" and more importantly, communities.
If so, how did this guy get to be a "heavy equipment operator", and if not, why not?:
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of peepul do you think staff and boss the Dept. of Motor Vehicles in Philly and the corresponding PA state agency?
From their point of view, he's a brother who needs a second chance and a job, so why not give him the job?
Besides, all the smart white peepul nowadays think pot ought to be legal, so what's wrong with a little smoke?
Have a heart. Don't be so old-fashioned. You've got to accept the fact that America is changing. It's not the harshly judgmental, puritanical country of your long ago youth.
;0)
This is a weak post. Bill Gates is making some reasonable points about education. He avoids HBD issues, but so does everyone. HBD is an important, but dark and depressing truth. TED is about uplifting and entertaining ideas and HBD really doesn't fit that at the moment.
ReplyDeleteAs it stands, people like Bill Gates will do little of real value to help humanity.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes you think the goal is to help humanity?
http://www.pritzkermilitarylibrary.org/Home/Michael-Wilmington-Dann-Gire.aspx
ReplyDeletehttp://youtu.be/R4v_yRFf4-Y
ReplyDeleteIdiocracy
A camera in every classroom? That's just creepy. What about all these pedophile teachers we hear of?
ReplyDeleteOf course, nobody, Gates or his TED audience, gets the joke.
ReplyDeleteI guarantee you that Gates/Buffett/Munger all privately acknowledge the reality that is HBD (even if they are unaware of the specific term or the 'movement').
Gates has just built out a database that will collect information on all school children, grades K thru 12. He is doing something here that will put the NSA to shame...
ReplyDeleteQuote:
In operation just three months, the database already holds files on millions of children identified by name, address and sometimes social security number. Learning disabilities are documented, test scores recorded, attendance noted. In some cases, the database tracks student hobbies, career goals, attitudes toward school – even homework completion."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/03/us-education-database-idUSBRE92204W20130303
"If it's Iowa and the second biggest ethnic group is Asian, it's pretty high end." That's a pretty good indicator of which suburbs have the good schools pretty much anywhere you live. That's especially true where I live (the Atlanta metro area) where it is close to impossible to find even an elementary school district that is 90% + white. I'm looking for a new house, now that I have kids. The parameters I'm setting are (1) the 2nd largest ethnic group in the school district is Asians and (2) the nearest high school must have a NAM population no more than 20% of the student body. It's do-able, although it greatly narrows down my choices with my price range, and the commute will be awful.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, an excellent site for researching schools is GreatSchools.com. I wonder how many visitors to that site are like me in that the first section they visit on any school page is the student body demographics. I imagine the website would go out of business if they stopped publishing that data.
While Bill Gates is utterly clueless about the diversity issue in the classroom, those in our media certainly are not.
ReplyDeleteIt is simply inconceivable these days that a classroom might be presented in a positive light like this on a newsprogram, or in a newspaper photo, without at least one -- and usually many more -- minorities being prominent.
On NBC News a while back a segment dealt with the excellence of elementary education in Finland. Somehow, they managed to find a classroom in which there was a kid of African ancestry, and he was made conspicuous in the shots. Now I gather that the African representation in Finland is well below the 1% threshold, closer to 1 in 1,000. One wonders, how much word did they have to do to find this kid?
Nothing could be more obvious than that the media have a very deliberate policy to represent "diversity" in all their news, and will go to great lengths to implement it.
The thing is, such a policy is also quite deliberately distorting in many cases. It really does seem to me that they have a responsibility to inform their readers of such distortion, conscious as it is. They can justify it however they want -- but such deception (and that is what it is) from a news organization has no right to go unacknowledged or unjustified.
A camera in every classroom? That's just creepy. What about all these pedophile teachers we hear of?
ReplyDeleteCameras and mics covering every square inch of built-up gov't property, 24/7; cameras and mics covering every public employee every minute they're on the clock. Starting with the ones that deal with private citizens (IRS, police, schools, services, etc).
Not creepy. Awesome.
I guarantee you that Gates/Buffett/Munger all privately acknowledge the reality that is HBD (even if they are unaware of the specific term or the 'movement').
Then Gates has some big ole balls, and quite the "eff you" streak, which I kinda doubt.
One of the original "big data" guys doing government work (intelligence, government statistics, etc) who also was influential in reviving the field of neural nets after Minsky deep-sixed the field for decades, told me that the reason Iowa performed, as a separate country, among the top nations in the world on SAT scores was due to Iowa's historic leadership in teacher feedback. Having taught statistics at Harvard, he had been forced to discard the reflexive response that Iowa's high SAT scores were due largely to its participation rates being biased by the fact that not all students are required to take it -- since even after adjusting for that variable a Harvard study concluded Iowa's score would plummet from #1 to *drum roll* an abysmal #2. #1? North Dakota. Hmmm... North Dakota and other upper midwest States did not have the leading role in standardized testing of Iowa, yet they scored at the top along with Iowa. Hmmm....
ReplyDeleteI didn't want to strain our professional relationship by pointing this out to him -- as he clearly had been given this "explanation" by his Ivy league "betters" -- and every time I challenged him on one of these points of dogma his voice would rise in pitch an octave and become very agitated, requiring me to do remedial work on our relationship. You see, he was yanked out of one of these upper midwest families at the age of 14 by the Ivy league because of his off-the-charts intelligence. I once told him he had been "taken out" as a potential threat to the Ivy league by this and he virtually screeched that he had, rather, been "taken in". Uh.... OK.
Anyway, so here we have Gates failing to point out the fact that the entire upper midwest has historically, at least before the coastal elites grabbed the young women out of their human ecologies of origin (thereby gutting the culture of its biological continuity), had among the highest scholastic aptitudes when compared as separate nations internationally. I mean he at least could have fallen back on a comparison between States, while maintaining the (deceptive) implication that even Iowa is abysmal internationally. But no, he had to go beyond even that denial to implicitly deny that Iowa, the place he chose as an exemplar for his foundation's program in "giving teachers the feedback they need", was ahead of his foundation by nearly 100 years.
Well, *I'M* impressed.
To Anonymous 6/9/13, 6:22 AM
ReplyDeletesaid...
" ... By the way, an excellent site for researching schools is GreatSchools.com. I wonder how many visitors to that site are like me in that the first section they visit on any school page is the student body demographics. ... "
I learned to use the site http://www.greatschools.org/
in this manner, reading J.Derbyshire.
With invariable respect of Mr.Sailer,
your F.r.
>Have a heart. Don't be so old-fashioned. You've got to accept the fact that America is changing. It's not the harshly judgmental, puritanical country of your long ago youth.<
ReplyDeleteI don't agree with the criticism behind this snark. What put this drug-addict into his position of heavy equipment operator wasn't compassion but malice. Consider that there must have been at least one qualified, non-drug-addict who was white who applied for this position. The reason the diversity was chosen over the white is out of hatred for the white, not out of kind, big-hearted, compassionate feelings for the diversity.
There is this hateful, fascistic notion going around that "compassion" is the enemy - that being an a--hole is the only way to progress. It's based on the mistaken premise that what motivates the cultural Marxists is love ("bleeding heart"), so love must be the enemy. No. The truth is more disturbing than that. The way this irresponsible killer's hiring manager decided was most probably like this: "We can hire John White or we can hire the brother. F**k John White - we need to stick it to the white boy. So throw the brother in." There was no genuine sympathy for the brother involved. In fact, if you look carefully, you'll see that other brothers are the target of most black crime, including violent crime up to homicide.
What motivates our enemies isn't compassion for each other, but malice toward us.
OT:
ReplyDeleteThis seems to combine two of your favorite subjects -
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-league-stew/ben-verlander-mike-yastrzemski-kacy-clemens-headline-draft-005500821.html
I'm at a university in Iowa and have dated a couple of girls from Johnston. Everything Steve says jives with what I've been told: the bulk are well-off and typically have a parent who either works for Pioneer, an engineering division of DuPont, or John Deere's financial division.
ReplyDeleteFor the Heartiste crowd looking for data points, I've found the chip-on their-shoulder Johnstonian girls with parents earning in the the mid 5k range put out way better than their elite counterparts. Ah, the power of relative status.
Gates is also a petty and vindictive little tyrant. His leadership "style" at Microsoft was built essentially on keeping the lower orders bowing and scraping at this throne.
ReplyDeleteA few stolen ideas parlayed into a gigantic success based on a few products and a brutal, cut-throat marketing approach.
Great success, yet the record of failure at Microsoft was quite staggering. The place is neck deep in failed projects and billions wasted. The gigantic cash cows of Windows and Office and later the back-office products (SQL, Exchange, etc.) kept the whole leaky boat afloat and still do.
It's little wonder that Microsoft hires all the cheap labor it can considering how horribly inefficient and ineffective their leadership has been, in general.
"TED: the Readers Digest of the Technorati."
ReplyDeleteWell said. I've tried to watch a couple of TED talks - but they always just look like sales-pitches by pretentious bullshit artists. Everybody is a salesman now - it's what has helped ruin this country.
If Gates really believes in this, why doesn't he just bankroll it. He can afford to drop $5 billion if he really thinks its worthwhile.
ReplyDelete"every classroom could look like that"
ReplyDeleteAnd you can bet that whatever little boutique billionaires-only school that Gate's kids attends looks just like that.
"Gates has just built out a database that will collect information on all school children, grades K thru 12. He is doing something here that will put the NSA to shame.."
ReplyDeleteYeah- virtually the whole "education reform" apparatus leads back to Gates. He is a megalomaniac of the worst sort. I have no idea why he wants to insert his ideas into Ed policy, considering he never attended public schools, and barely attended college. What insight does he have on "failing" schools?
They've been showing the Fast/Furious oeuvre on local TV over the weekend so I began out of order with the Japan one. After the protagonist flames out in an attempt to impress the Latina-looking girlfriend of the local street-racing race man, bumbling hero's handler (a native) asks him, "Why don't you find yourself a nice Japanese girl like the rest of the white guys do"
ReplyDeleteSteve, I think you might have blogged before about - or perhaps it was a commenter who mentioned something about - how they do testing for blue collar occupations and how you have to have a minimum of 90 IQ or something to be a commercial truck diver and so forth.
ReplyDeleteYou need to stick around and keep reading. Sailer will explain how giving in to labor unions' every demand quite logically prevents any such accidents, and strengthens the middle class as well.
ReplyDeleteThere is this hateful, fascistic notion going around that "compassion" is the enemy - that being an a--hole is the only way to progress. It's based on the mistaken premise that what motivates the cultural Marxists is love ("bleeding heart"), so love must be the enemy. No. The truth is more disturbing than that. The way this irresponsible killer's hiring manager decided was most probably like this: "We can hire John White or we can hire the brother. F**k John White - we need to stick it to the white boy. So throw the brother in." There was no genuine sympathy for the brother involved. In fact, if you look carefully, you'll see that other brothers are the target of most black crime, including violent crime up to homicide.
Are the victims' race known? IOW did the guy kill his own?
ReplyDeleteYeah- virtually the whole "education reform" apparatus leads back to Gates. He is a megalomaniac of the worst sort. I have no idea why he wants to insert his ideas into Ed policy, considering he never attended public schools, and barely attended college. What insight does he have on "failing" schools?
Because Gates wants the status of do-gooder, all folks of good will know that achievement is entirely determined by how the little humans are nurtured. Gates is prostrating himself before the idol of nurture. He can't accede to the belief that some groups of folks got the free gifts of selection.
Yeah- virtually the whole "education reform" apparatus leads back to Gates. He is a megalomaniac of the worst sort. I have no idea why he wants to insert his ideas into Ed policy, considering he never attended public schools, and barely attended college. What insight does he have on "failing" schools?
ReplyDeleteUh, you do realize Gates is one of the richest people in the world, right? That gives him the presumption of expertise on every issue, and rightly so. When you make your first billion, then you can second-guess gates.
I'm not a fan of Gates or Microsoft by any means. But Gates cannot possibly monitor every project of the Gates Foundation. And secondly, he completed Math 55 at Harvard. That is objective proof that he is very bright. As someone who has a math background and knows people who took the course or at least tried, I can attest it's a big deal.
ReplyDelete"When you make your first billion, then you can second-guess gates."
ReplyDeleteSave us, oh lord, from the logorrhea of the sycophants.
>Are the victims' race known? IOW did the guy kill his own?<
ReplyDeleteI think you may have misunderstood my point. To repeat, the cultural Marxists aren't motivated by "bleeding-heart compassion and nonjudgmentalism" toward the unfortunate, the discriminated-against, etc. They are instead motivated by malice toward the fortunate, the undiscriminated-against, etc.
The point is that the irresponsible druggie was more likely hired not out of compassion and sympathy for him, but instead 100% out of hatred for any non-diverse candidate for the job.
Nobody voluntarily chooses a markedly bad candidate over a qualified one because they feel compassion or sympathy for the bad one. That's the cover story. What motivates extraordinarily bad hiring decisions of this kind is not other than malice toward the qualified candidate(s). "Helping people" or "compassion" isn't the problem here, because it isn't involved in these cases. Only malice is.
"Uh, you do realize Gates is one of the richest people in the world, right? That gives him the presumption of expertise on every issue, and rightly so. When you make your first billion, then you can second-guess gates."
ReplyDeleteKate- I hope you are being sarcastic.
One of the original "big data" guys doing government work (intelligence, government statistics, etc) who also was influential in reviving the field of neural nets after Minsky deep-sixed the field for decades, told me that the reason Iowa performed, as a separate country, among the top nations in the world on SAT scores was due to Iowa's historic leadership in teacher feedback.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Wiki says that this guy, Everett Franklin Lindquist, developed the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, which is a standardized test for elementary school students. I remember as a kid in elementary school in an east coast state having to take the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills every year and wondering why we had to take it if it was from Iowa. I guess it was a good test or something.
Understand that philanthropy is about little more than social status and social status is pretty much limited to that which appeals to young women as morally superior.
ReplyDeleteYes, but you phrase that in a way that makes me think you have the arrow of causation backwards: status appeals to women; when what grants status changes, so does what appeals to women; you could grant status to polka tomorrow and women would suddenly find it appealing.
But young women find the idea of mosquito nets around the healthy and treating the sick more appealing than the idea of evolutionary medicine so Bill Gates et al fund accordingly.
Yep, you've got it backwards.
A few observations:
ReplyDelete1. He sounds like a programmer, unsurprisingly. "Find the best teachers, figure out what they do right and repeat it" never mind that all classrooms, regions and students are different. Well, they just have to change. Also, thinking there is one right way to be a teacher and the teachers with the best results represent the "best" method.
2. I grew up in Iowa and when I saw that classroom I thought "where are the Mexicans and why are the white kids thin and dressed so well?"