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Backlash for Gates Foundation's Education Plans

posted by mattie_p on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the corporate-sponsorship dept.
jcd writes:

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the primary backer for the inBloom educational grading and service (which also acts as a platform for third-party applications), is catching flak for its role in encouraging the outsourcing of US Education. The article (cited by RMS today) argues that though the Common Core is a scary new concept that takes power away from state and local school governance, the real danger is allowing corporate enterprises to have so much control over our classrooms. The Washington Post also reports a case where Pearson included corporate logos and promotional materials inside its test booklets."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by demonlapin on Tuesday February 18 2014, @07:34PM

    by demonlapin (925) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @07:34PM (#2020) Journal
    Public education reasonably ought to serve primarily to make sure that we don't waste human capital. Beyond that, it's silly: why do we keep people in school who clearly do not want to be there nor have anything to contribute? It's one of the worst correlation/causation confusions out there. Sure, more educated people do better on just about every measure, but it's not the possession of a piece of paper that makes it so. It's that they're generally smarter, better adjusted, and from more stable environments.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by unitron on Tuesday February 18 2014, @07:42PM

    by unitron (70) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @07:42PM (#2026) Journal

    Public education exists (and is financed by property taxes) to protect property values by keeping the place from filling up with illiterates and by making neighborhoods more attractive to buyers "because there are good schools nearby".

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    • (Score: 1) by demonlapin on Tuesday February 18 2014, @11:22PM

      by demonlapin (925) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @11:22PM (#2118) Journal
      If you swapped the student body of, say, Cal State - San Bernardino with Harvard's, keeping faculty the same, would you expect that Harvard degrees would command the same respect they do now?

      • (Score: 1) by unitron on Wednesday February 19 2014, @12:56AM

        by unitron (70) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @12:56AM (#2157) Journal

        By public education, I mean grades 1-12.

        And I don't know enough about either student body or university to answer your question, the relevance of which to what I said escapes me.

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        • (Score: 1) by demonlapin on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:01AM

          by demonlapin (925) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:01AM (#2354) Journal
          Now you're being deliberately obtuse. Harvard is widely recognized as one of the world's beat universities, and CSU-SB is the sort of school most people have never heard of. That's really all you need to know. The problem at a university level is the same as the problem at the high school level: are good schools good because of what they do (quality of teaching) or because of who their students are (quality of raw material)?

          Not everyone is capable of obtaining a meaningful high school diploma. The difference between a "good" school system and a "bad" school system largely boils down to how many of the students are there to learn, and how many are being warehoused against their will. Schools can allow people to reach their maximum potential, but what they are really bad at doing is figuring out when that maximum potential has been reached and then getting them out the door and into doing something productive.

          • (Score: 1) by unitron on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:52PM

            by unitron (70) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:52PM (#3094) Journal

            Young families buy houses because they're near good elementary schools, not because they're near good universities.

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            • (Score: 1) by demonlapin on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:06AM

              by demonlapin (925) on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:06AM (#3152) Journal
              You're ignoring what makes them good: they exclude the idiots who aren't there to learn. If you swapped the student bodies of the public schools in the worst part of New York with those of the public schools in the richest NYC suburbs, what do you think would happen? Keep funding and the teachers exactly the same.

          • (Score: 1) by unitron on Thursday February 20 2014, @01:01AM

            by unitron (70) on Thursday February 20 2014, @01:01AM (#3185) Journal

            Are you seriously giving me grief for not being familiar enough with CSU-SB to know that most people have never heard of it?

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