Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History PART-3
One muggy and overcast afternoon last fall, I met with Gates and Christian in a conference room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Gates, who operates a bit like an unofficial head of state, is managed down to the precise minute by an innumerable team of handlers and schedulers and assistants. The table before him was filled with strewn papers and gadgets, a handful of folders with old-fashioned Brother P-Touch labels and two Microsoft Surface tablet computers. A plainclothes security detail stood watch in the hallway.
Photo
Christian and Gates at the Four Seasons in New York. Credit Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
Gates, who is 58, was wearing a rumpled blue monogrammed shirt. He is slim and speaks in a sort of nasal staccato, often adding exclamation to sentences that might not seem to require them. But his curiosity about education is innate and at times obsessive. Without prompting, he recounted getting a bad grade in an eighth-grade geography course (“They paired me up with a moron, and I realized these people thought I was stupid, and it really pissed me off!”) and the only C-plus he ever received, in organic chemistry, at Harvard (“I’m pretty sure. I’d have to double-check my transcript. I think I never ever got a B ever at Harvard. I got a C-plus, and I got A’s!”).
Since starting his foundation in 2000, Gates has donated about $30 billion to organizations focusing largely on global health and development. The Gates Foundation has spent more than half a billion on educational causes, which provides some context for the comparatively modest $10 million that he has personally invested in the Big History Project. Nevertheless, Gates has insisted on tracking this venture as he would any Microsoft product or foundation project. The Big History Project produces reams of data — students and teachers are regularly surveyed, and teachers submit the results from classes, all of which allows his team to track what’s working and what isn’t as the course grows. “Our priority,” he told me from across the table, “was to get it into a form where ambitious teachers could latch onto it.”
In our conversation, Gates was forthright about the challenges the project has faced, particularly early on. Few schools had teachers who were willing or able to instruct a hybrid course; some schools wound up requiring that two teachers lead the class together. Gates, who had hoped to avoid bureaucracy, found himself mired in it. “You’ve got to get a teacher in the history department and the science department — they have to be very serious about it, and they have to get their administrative staff to agree. And then you have to get it on the course schedule so kids can sign up,” he said. “So they have to decide, kind of in the spring or earlier, and those teachers have to spend a lot of that summer getting themselves ready for the thing.” He sighed.
Perhaps the largest challenge facing the Big History Project, however, is Gates himself, or at least the specter of him. To his bafflement and frustration, he has become a remarkably polarizing figure in the education world. This owes largely to the fact that Gates, through his foundation, has spent more than $200 million to advocate for the Common Core, something of a third rail in education circles. He has financed an army of policy groups, think tanks and teachers’ unions to marshal support for the new rules and performance measurements that have been adopted by 44 states. Many education experts, while generally supportive of the new goals for reading and math skills, have been critical of the seemingly unilateral way in which the policy appeared to be rolled out. The standards have engendered public anger on both the right and left, and some states, including Indiana and Oklahoma, have decided to repeal the Common Core altogether.
‘Most kids experience school as one damn course after another; there’s nothing to build connections between the courses that they take.’
In March, the American Federation of Teachers announced that it would no longer accept grants from the Gates Foundation for its innovation fund, which had already received more than $5 million from the organization. As Randi Weingarten, the A.F.T. president, told Politico, “I got convinced by the level of distrust I was seeing — not simply on Twitter, but in listening to members and local leaders — that it was important to find a way to replace Gates’s funding.” When I spoke with Weingarten last month, she elaborated on her union members’ problem with Gates. “Instead of actually working with teachers and listening to what teachers needed to make public eduction better,” she said, Gates’s team “would work around teachers, and that created tremendous distrust.”
Teachers, she continued, feared that his foundation was merely going to reduce them to test scores. While Weingarten said that she tried to work with Gates to “pierce” the animosity, she ultimately chose to part ways because “our members perceived that we were doing things in our support of Common Core because of the Gates Foundation, as opposed to because it was the right thing to do.” It was a difficult decision, Weingarten said. “Bill Gates has more money than God. People just don’t do what we did.”
The best evidence that our history courses have failed is the too common belief that we went to war in Iraq to bring it to our standards...
John
4 hours ago
Bill Gates is solely responsible for common core? Please. And Mr Sorkin is apparently unaware that the understanding and teaching of history...
japarfrey
 |
| http://easyearnoutsourcinghome.blogspot.com |
One muggy and overcast afternoon last fall, I met with Gates and Christian in a conference room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Gates, who operates a bit like an unofficial head of state, is managed down to the precise minute by an innumerable team of handlers and schedulers and assistants. The table before him was filled with strewn papers and gadgets, a handful of folders with old-fashioned Brother P-Touch labels and two Microsoft Surface tablet computers. A plainclothes security detail stood watch in the hallway.
Photo
Christian and Gates at the Four Seasons in New York. Credit Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
Gates, who is 58, was wearing a rumpled blue monogrammed shirt. He is slim and speaks in a sort of nasal staccato, often adding exclamation to sentences that might not seem to require them. But his curiosity about education is innate and at times obsessive. Without prompting, he recounted getting a bad grade in an eighth-grade geography course (“They paired me up with a moron, and I realized these people thought I was stupid, and it really pissed me off!”) and the only C-plus he ever received, in organic chemistry, at Harvard (“I’m pretty sure. I’d have to double-check my transcript. I think I never ever got a B ever at Harvard. I got a C-plus, and I got A’s!”).
Since starting his foundation in 2000, Gates has donated about $30 billion to organizations focusing largely on global health and development. The Gates Foundation has spent more than half a billion on educational causes, which provides some context for the comparatively modest $10 million that he has personally invested in the Big History Project. Nevertheless, Gates has insisted on tracking this venture as he would any Microsoft product or foundation project. The Big History Project produces reams of data — students and teachers are regularly surveyed, and teachers submit the results from classes, all of which allows his team to track what’s working and what isn’t as the course grows. “Our priority,” he told me from across the table, “was to get it into a form where ambitious teachers could latch onto it.”
In our conversation, Gates was forthright about the challenges the project has faced, particularly early on. Few schools had teachers who were willing or able to instruct a hybrid course; some schools wound up requiring that two teachers lead the class together. Gates, who had hoped to avoid bureaucracy, found himself mired in it. “You’ve got to get a teacher in the history department and the science department — they have to be very serious about it, and they have to get their administrative staff to agree. And then you have to get it on the course schedule so kids can sign up,” he said. “So they have to decide, kind of in the spring or earlier, and those teachers have to spend a lot of that summer getting themselves ready for the thing.” He sighed.
Perhaps the largest challenge facing the Big History Project, however, is Gates himself, or at least the specter of him. To his bafflement and frustration, he has become a remarkably polarizing figure in the education world. This owes largely to the fact that Gates, through his foundation, has spent more than $200 million to advocate for the Common Core, something of a third rail in education circles. He has financed an army of policy groups, think tanks and teachers’ unions to marshal support for the new rules and performance measurements that have been adopted by 44 states. Many education experts, while generally supportive of the new goals for reading and math skills, have been critical of the seemingly unilateral way in which the policy appeared to be rolled out. The standards have engendered public anger on both the right and left, and some states, including Indiana and Oklahoma, have decided to repeal the Common Core altogether.
‘Most kids experience school as one damn course after another; there’s nothing to build connections between the courses that they take.’
In March, the American Federation of Teachers announced that it would no longer accept grants from the Gates Foundation for its innovation fund, which had already received more than $5 million from the organization. As Randi Weingarten, the A.F.T. president, told Politico, “I got convinced by the level of distrust I was seeing — not simply on Twitter, but in listening to members and local leaders — that it was important to find a way to replace Gates’s funding.” When I spoke with Weingarten last month, she elaborated on her union members’ problem with Gates. “Instead of actually working with teachers and listening to what teachers needed to make public eduction better,” she said, Gates’s team “would work around teachers, and that created tremendous distrust.”
Teachers, she continued, feared that his foundation was merely going to reduce them to test scores. While Weingarten said that she tried to work with Gates to “pierce” the animosity, she ultimately chose to part ways because “our members perceived that we were doing things in our support of Common Core because of the Gates Foundation, as opposed to because it was the right thing to do.” It was a difficult decision, Weingarten said. “Bill Gates has more money than God. People just don’t do what we did.”
The best evidence that our history courses have failed is the too common belief that we went to war in Iraq to bring it to our standards...
John
4 hours ago
Bill Gates is solely responsible for common core? Please. And Mr Sorkin is apparently unaware that the understanding and teaching of history...
japarfrey
