Melinda Gates, Bill’s wife, says she gives education in the US a grade of C+, based on “international comparisons of student achievement and on the fact that only a fraction of American high school students are ready for college when they complete their studies,” the Associated Press reports via ABC News.
Melinda Gates speaks during the annual Clinton Global Initiative in Sept 2010.
(Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The practice of giving schools a letter grade is nothing new. States like Indiana, a while back, decided to reduce the quality of entire schools to a single letter grade. Magazines like Education Week annually reduce the quality of entire states to a single letter grade. But nobody, that I know of, was ever smart enough that they were able to reduce the quality of education in an entire country to a single letter grade.
Ms Gates told the AP she hopes teachers see the foundation as a partner in figuring out how to help them do their jobs. “We fundamentally believe in teachers,” she was quoted as saying. “My gosh, they’re incredible.”
I’ve written that the best thing anybody outside the classroom can do to help teachers do their job, if that’s truly what someone is interested in doing, is to make sure kids are fed properly, get new clothes when needed, and get enough sleep at home. Since I wrote that, I have heard from many teachers that they would like to have an assistant in their classrooms, so I started advocating for that.
Either of those would be my first choice if I were running one of the wealthiest philanthropies in the country. But if those things aren’t possible for Ms Gates, there are other, less effective ways to help teachers do their jobs. Unfortunately, these do not involve technology, so I do not believe the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has the smarts for any of those, either.
It’s great they sponsor forums for educators, though, so we appreciate the sincerity. But anybody who claims to be able to reduce any part of this very complex problem to a letter grade is missing the point.
It’s like critics of this website. Because we write about a wide range of school news (a LOT happens in schools, and in so many different fields), Google and Bing can’t quite figure us out. For example, the most common search term for this site is “hexagon,” because I wrote a piece defining hexagons, pentagons, and so on a few years ago. But human readers can see there’s more here—about fine arts, concussions, and other research that could affect how teachers and schools make a path for students and how students navigate that path in their own communities.
We don’t consider ourselves in competition with other websites, just another voice advocating for schools in the best way we know how. We don’t care how many hits we get or how high up this site is on search engine results. The snapshots we post of school history are what they are. The difference between the Voxitatis Research Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, besides the obvious money thing, is that I don’t pretend to get my arms around the whole of education in the country. I would consider such a thought incompatible with the learning process, which is our fundamental objective.
As many people know, spending money brings a certain joy. For many people, spending money brings more joy than making money. It makes them feel as if they’re actually getting something accomplished. On balance, I give the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation a “C+” as well. I see pockets of promise, which come from making schools aware of the possibilities of technology in the classroom, and these pockets are growing, giving me optimism.
But I also see a misunderstanding of how complex processes work in a democracy. Gates forgets that education, like democracy, isn’t a buying decision for a standardized consumer but a process for a diverse array of learners. It’s not a vote but a debate. It’s not a winner, a country on top, or a competition, but a collaboration that grows only because of its diversity. Some schools have music programs that routinely find themselves among the national semifinalists for Grammy Awards. Others have volleyball teams with a perennial presence at the state championships. Gates reduces the whole of student endeavor to a score on a one-size-fits-all rubric.
That’s not democracy, which would celebrate the differences between the US and other countries and learn from those differences because we celebrate them; that’s dictatorship that tries to make everyone play the same game—using completely irrelevant rules.
Furthermore, why do we have to be “better” than Singapore or get a higher grade? Because that’s what we’re saying when we say the US gets a C+ on the basis of international comparisons.
That just means Singapore has to be worse, which we do not wish upon them. They are good people, and their kids work just as hard as we do. By ranking our country or our states or our schools, using the reduction technique of letter-grade scoring, we imply a meaningful competition. But the competition has no meaning; only learning means anything at all in this game. Competition has its place in a democracy, but school is not the place.
We sincerely hope the Gates Foundation will get just as good a feeling from spending its billions to promote non-competitive and non-punitive collaboration among the college of educators in the US and in other countries.
