Do-gooder Bill Gates tries to solve the education dilemma.

Along with international humanitarian aid, Bill Gates (through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) is attempting to solve the problem with education in the United States. It is well known that the United States lags far behind other advanced nations in terms of education, and the causes of that failure just keeps getting redefined and reworked, with no real progress in understanding why. Of course, the cause is rather simple but is unacceptable when the country is committed to the egalitarian religion—our students are innately less intelligent than students in other advanced countries.

The year 1965 was a big year for civil rights and for opening up immigration. Since then, there has been a keen interest in closing the achievement gap between Blacks and Whites, and to a lesser extent between Whites and Hispanics. So while millions of low achieving Amerindians from Mexico started flooding the country, educational achievement has declined over time to the consternation of educators, government and the business community.

There are actually two agendas at work. The first, prior to massive immigration from Mexico and other third-world countries, was to close the achievement gap between Blacks and Whites. Note that it is rarely stated that the goal is to bring Blacks up to Whites in education—the egalitarian agenda would have been just as happy to meet this goal by Whites doing a little less well and Blacks doing a little better. The objective was equality, not better education overall. The second agenda came later as the United States was increasingly compared to other nations and we were falling behind—we need to catch up, especially in math and science, to compete in a global economy. Though these objectives can be somewhat contradictory, they are mixed together in the jargon of education reform.

George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind has been recognized as a failure, though not officially stated as such. Instead, Obama wants to start over though his educational reforms have not been clearly defined as of yet. But there is another player in town with Bill Gates jumping into the fray. Bill Gates in 2000 implemented a program to improve education by breaking up large schools into smaller schools. Unfortunately, it was determined that student body size had little effect on achievement. Back to the drawing boards.

The Gates Foundation now has turned its attention on the teachers. It has selected several school districts and plans to reward or punish these school teachers according to how well they perform in raising student performance. This sounds like a rehash of the No Child Left Behind program where teachers quickly adopted “teaching to the test,” providing the duller students with additional schooling, or keeping them in school through the summer so they wouldn’t forget what they have learned, to out-and-out cheating on standardized tests. When a teacher is encumbered by innately less intelligent students, they will naturally manipulate the system to protect their own monetary interest. And why shouldn’t they? Is it their fault that they are teaching either above average or below average students?

Public teachers are unionized and so far they have been able to blunt the effects of holding individual teachers responsible for the poor performance of below average students. However, as home schooling, vouchers, charter schools, and other non-union competitors vie for public funds, there will be increasing pressure for the eventual privatization of education as each program fails to improve the performance of failing students. And it is not as if this is all new. Educational reforms are just the re-mixing of tried and failed remedies because the empirical data, if vigorously applied to education, would lead to the one conclusion that has been consistent for over 100 years—if you want to have children learn more you need to have smarter children to start with. And even if you can raise scores in children by teaching to the test and providing more instruction, when they become adults they will only be as intelligent as their genes permit.

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 12:28 PM in Education
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