Bill Gates & Education (WaPo); Cynicism can't be put back into the box
Kathleen
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Subject: Bill Gates & Education (WaPo); Cynicism can't be put back
into the box
Date: Feb 28, 2011 5:15 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
==============================================
Exposure to cynicism, be it greedy
dopes the kids actually witness or the
cynicism in the media (TV, movies) is
the biggest inhibitor to learning.
The same is true for adults - MDs,
for instance. They're taught to
despise human beings in medical
school. They laugh at their
patients.
Psychiatrists are brainwashed - literally,
please look at the definition of brainwashing
and see if it does not match exactly the
process of psychoanalysis - into thinking
that there is no such thing as an honest
person. 'That all people lie and deceive
and try to put on a front.
Children sense all this cynicism from
adults; Children see that they're held
to a hypocritical standard.
Do I have to explain how that shuts
down a mind?
Or. Might. That. Be. Intuitive?
Why should kids work when adults are
such selfish imbeciles? Why should they
try to learn anything when being a REtard
is cool? When psychiatrists tell us
you should have friends before facts?
'That one needs a personal following,
rather than an addiction to the TRUTH?
That "Life is a Popularity Contest."
As much as I can't stand authoritative
Kool-Aid Addicts ("teachers"), the fault
is not entirely theirs.
-- --
And As Additional Examples of Non-Expertise:
Bill Gates, the non-expert on vaccines
and diseases, attempts to be a world leader
in this arena, yet he, too, is too arrogant
and cynical to learn the history of vaccines.
Bill Gates stole the idea for Windows
and he thinks that makes him the world's
genius and should be respected as an
authority on the world's problems, when
Bill Gates is an authority on Rockefeller's
"business" style.
The key to it *ALL* (education) is imagery and
more emphasis on the physical world.
Amazingly enough - imagery is not something
Microsoft ever did very well.
Yet, here is Bill Gates...
Yikes.
-- --
If it all is fixable - and I am not saying
it is - then we all need to be less exposed
to the cynical.
And what would that proposal say for Social
Engineering? What would that say as regards
explaining to children about the failure of
science and medicine?
We would have to say to everyone, "Okay, Here
is what does not work: IT IS *NOT* ALL ABOUT
YOU. You have to actually *DO* *STUFF* and only
say what is TRUE or scientifically valid in order
to be respectable."
"No one is entitled to 'opinions' when facts
are available..."
Children can see that we persecute people
like Assange and Manning. Students can see
that Kennedy was shot from the front and
WTC7 fell down in under 7 seconds.
Young adults know there were no WMDs.
Everyone saw Scooter Libby on trial
for carrying out Dick Cheney's orders
to destroy the credibility of the person
who revealed that the Niger letter was lie...
Meanwhile the TV networks tell their
cameramen to jiggle the cameras when
shooting the Violent and Macho cooking
shows on TV.
Meanwhile all the families and friends
on the Reality TV shows end up destroyed.
Why?
Because they do things in front of a camera
that they would *not* do if their lives were
private - and they do these bad things to
each other... in order to SELL IT!!
This country cannot be fixed.
You can't put that genie back into
the bottle.
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/27/AR2011022702876_pf.html
How teacher development could revolutionize our schools
By Bill Gates
Monday, February 28, 2011;
As the nation's governors gather in Washington for their annual
meeting, they are grappling with more than state budget deficits.
They're confronting deep education deficits as well.
Over the past four decades, the per-student cost of running our K-12
schools has more than doubled, while our student achievement has
remained virtually flat. Meanwhile, other countries have raced ahead.
The same pattern holds for higher education. Spending has climbed, but
our percentage of college graduates has dropped compared with other
countries.
To build a dynamic 21st-century economy and offer every American a
high-quality education, we need to flip the curve. For more than 30
years, spending has risen while performance stayed relatively flat.
Now we need to raise performance without spending a lot more.
When you need more achievement for less money, you have to change the
way you spend. This year, the governors are launching "Complete to
Compete," a program to help colleges get more value for the money they
spend. It will develop metrics to show which colleges graduate more
students for less money, so we can see what works and what doesn't.
In K-12, we know more about what works.
We know that of all the variables under a school's control, the single
most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. It
is astonishing what great teachers can do for their students.
Yet compared with the countries that outperform us in education, we do
very little to measure, develop and reward excellent teaching. We have
been expecting teachers to be effective without giving them feedback
and training.
To flip the curve, we have to identify great teachers, find out what
makes them so effective and transfer those skills to others so more
students can enjoy top teachers and high achievement.
To this end, our foundation is working with nearly 3,000 teachers in
seven urban school districts to develop fair and reliable measures of
teacher effectiveness that are tied to gains in student achievement.
Research teams are analyzing videos of more than 13,000 lessons -
focusing on classes that showed big student gains so it can be
understood how the teachers did it. At the same time, teachers are
watching their own videos to see what they need to do to improve their
practice.
Our goal is a new approach to development and evaluation that teachers
endorse and that helps all teachers improve.
The value of measuring effectiveness is clear when you compare
teachers to members of other professions - farmers, engineers,
computer programmers, even athletes. These professionals are more
advanced than their predecessors - because they have clear indicators
of excellence, their success depends on performance and they eagerly
learn from the best.
The same advances haven't been made in teaching because we haven't
built a system to measure and promote excellence. Instead, we have
poured money into proxies, things we hoped would have an impact on
student achievement. The United States spends $50 billion a year on
automatic salary increases based on teacher seniority. It's reasonable
to suppose that teachers who have served longer are more effective,
but the evidence says that's not true. After the first few years,
seniority seems to have no effect on student achievement.
Another standard feature of school budgets is a bump in pay for
advanced degrees. Such raises have almost no impact on achievement,
but every year they cost $15 billion that would help students more if
spent in other ways.
Perhaps the most expensive assumption embedded in school budgets - and
one of the most unchallenged - is the view that reducing class size is
the best way to improve student achievement. This belief has driven
school budget increases for more than 50 years. U.S. schools have
almost twice as many teachers per student as they did in 1960, yet
achievement is roughly the same.
What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in
front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers
and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the
savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. (In a
2008 survey funded by the Gates Foundation, 83 percent of teachers
said they would be happy to teach more students for more pay.) The
rest of the savings could go toward improving teacher support and
evaluation systems, to help more teachers become great.
Compared with other countries, America has spent more and achieved
less. If there's any good news in that, it's that we've had a chance
to see what works and what doesn't. That sets the stage for a big
change that everyone knows we need: building exceptional teacher
personnel systems that identify great teaching, reward it and help
every teacher get better.
It's the thing we've been missing, and it can turn our schools around.
The writer is co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
KMDickson