Bruce Deitrick Price:
When Bill and Melinda Gates go to Africa and see healthy people and sick people, they presumably have a single thought: what can we do to make everyone healthy? The problems are easily understood; goals can be clearly stated. Given a big commitment, there’s a high chance of success.
When Bill Gates looks at education in America and sees good students and bad students, he probably assumes that these variations are part of the human condition. That’s not a promising problem to focus on.
What fascinates Bill Gates is something else entirely: namely, the variety and incoherence from school to school, city to city, and state to state. It looks so messy and inefficient. And he thinks: a guy with my money and management skills should be able to organize all this disorder, turn it into an efficient machine, save the country, and make another fortune in the process.
Potentially all true.
But at that moment he has lost the game. Because he is no longer talking about educational goals, which must be our main concern. He is talking about standardization. He is talking about a tidier assembly line. (But nobody ever said that democracy is supposed to be tidy. Dictatorship is tidy.)
Bill Gates brought a programmer’s sensibility to education. There is a maximally efficient way to design a piece of software. So let’s do that, and stop all this other nonsense. Bad plan, even with the best of intentions.
As Bill Gates’s own experience with Vista proved, the problem lies is finding the perfect design. You (a person or a society) would have to be a fool to put all your money on one solution.
There is also some willful deception or self-deception here. If you state that henceforth all children should be able to do X, because that’s the new standard, does this mean that all children can do X? Can even half the children do X? Read some of the verbose standards, and you’ll probably conclude that virtually no kid can do X.
There seems to be a belief in magic. Outline impressive goals (“internationally benchmarked,” no less) in a technical, officious way, and every kid will automatically soar to high levels. But why would that happen? Teachers still have to teach, and students still have to learn the information, fact by fact. But our Education Establishment hates all those traditional practices. It’s so much simpler to proclaim that henceforth all children will be college- and career-ready. Presto! That was easy.
Bill Gates and Common Core are obsessed with arranging things in standardized patterns, coast to coast. So we must have standards that will somehow apply to everyone. Then we need identical curricula, and we’ll need identical tests. All of these things will be aligned to each other and symmetrically arranged, like so many neat stacks of boxes in a shoe store’s warehouse. And no one, from that point forward, will be able to think outside those boxes, try something new, or tell the Education Establishment to take a hike and stop annoying us.
Standardization or not, the key question is: do all students even want to try to do X?
In the old USSR tests were run on all students at an early age.
Some who showed little ability to abstractualize were funneled into trade schools which churned out cogs for whatever assembly line jobs the Soviets were into at the time.
Others were forced to become researchers, scientists, doctors and so on.
Now, how would you like having a doctor who hadn’t picked his career, but had been funneled into it because that was what the government needed more of at the time?
Then instead of berating Bill Gates — since the author can’t seem to decide whether he’s the Devil Incarnate or just another stupid misguided and gullible “capitalist” dupe — why not cut to the solution: complete separation of the State and education on all levels?
Does the author really think that there aren’t Common Core supporters in your local school board, too? This is about control and there are socialist control freaks all throughout the state and local educational hierarchies. You’re a fool if you think that they listen to you.
(IMO) Pretty much every product designed by Microsoft has been buggy, requiring continual fixes. The main reason is, because they have a bad habit of shipping products out before they are fully tested, leaving the public to do the beta testing. (Don’t get me wrong, I prefer Windows to Mac’s OS. Linux isn’t a bad system, but it’s a pain in the hiny to get a good GUI install).
Common Core’s odd methodology may make sense to it’s designers, but from what I’ve seen so far, it’s neither educator nor student friendly, and it’s standards are lower, not higher. I can only suspect Gates must have had the Windows Me designers come up with Common Core.
Different times over the years, I have heard of ONE teacher trying something, and it worked, and the school adopting it, and then other schools adopting it. Just like the free enterprise system works in the marketplace, the free enterprise system worked with schooling, that is why the politicians didn’t like it. An educated public can survive on their own, without government help, and today’s politicians don’t want that.