The Weekend Interview with Bill Gates: Was the $5 Billion Worth It? – WSJ.com.
In this recent article in the Wall Street Journal the writer inserted the following paragraph of editorial bias, in direct contradiction to what Mr. Gates had to say on the subject. “The reality is that the Gates Foundation met the same resistance that other sizeable philanthropic efforts have encountered while trying to transform dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider.”
As Bill Gates stated in the interview, ”We have heavy union states and heavy right-to-work states, and the educational achievement of K-12 students is not at all predicted by how strong the union rules are,” he says. “If I saw that [right-to-work states like] Texas and Florida were running a great K-12 system, but [heavy union states like] New York and Massachusetts have really messed this up, then I could draw a correlation and say it’s either got to be the union—or the weather.”
The article goes on to say:
Mr. Gates hopes that the project earns buy-in from teachers, which he describes as key to long-term reform. “Our dream is that in the sample districts, a high percentage of the teachers determine that this made them better at their jobs.” He’s aware, though, that he’ll have a tough sell with teachers unions, which give lip service to more-stringent teacher evaluations but prefer existing pay and promotion schemes based on seniority—even though they often end up matching the least experienced teachers with the most challenging students.
Teachers unions can be counted on “to stick up for the status quo,” he says, but he believes they can be nudged in the right direction. “It’s kind of scary for them because what we’re saying is that some of these people shouldn’t be teachers. So, does the club stand for sticking up for its least capable member or does it stand for excellence in education? We’ll, it kind of stands for both.”
And why should teachers not stick up for the status quo? That’s what most rational people do, which is why so many are conservative, as opposed to Conservative. What the article doesn’t mention is the influence of the students’ home environment. Perhaps because the real agenda is to promote the issue of vouchers which is the note the article ends on.
Mr. Gates is less enamored of school vouchers. “Some in the Walton family”—of Wal-Mart fame—”have been very big on vouchers,” he begins. “And honestly, if we thought there would be broad acceptance in some locales and long-term commitment to do them, they have some very positive characteristics.”
He praises the private school model for its efficiency vis-à-vis traditional public schools, noting that the “parochial school system, per dollar spent, is an excellent school system.” But the politics, he says, are just too tough right now. “We haven’t chosen to get behind [vouchers] in a big way, as we have with personnel systems or charters, because the negativity about them is very, very high.”
The truth regarding vouchers is that they won’t solve the problems of poor families. They will just bring less motivated children into the private schools. The reason the Journal supports vouchers is that they are a tax refund for parents who can afford to send their children to private schools. The Journal’s bias has always been to protect the fortunes of the wealthy. Such people, though they may resent it, can also afford to pay property taxes that support the public school system.
What would help solve the problem is for states to spread the resources evenly rather than returning to each locality the money raised from it in property taxes. This makes it particularly difficult for blighted neighborhoods to get adequate funding. But that is politically impossible too, so the problems persist and no one will solve them because they make such good campaign fodder.
