Gates: Spending cuts don't have to harm learning

[roxiejules]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_governors_bill_gates - via Yahoo

WASHINGTON – Even in the midst of large spending cuts, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said Monday that schools can improve the performance of students if they put more emphasis on rewarding excellent teaching and less emphasis on paying teachers based on seniority and graduate degrees.

Gates spoke to the nation's governors mindful of the severe financial woes that many of them face as they try to bridge deficits totaling about $125 billion in the coming fiscal year. He said there are some clear do's and don'ts. Among the do's: Lift caps on class sizes and get more students in front of the very best teachers. Those teachers would get paid more with the savings generated from having fewer personnel overall.

"There are people in the field who think class size is the only thing," Gates said in an interview with The Associated Press prior to his speech. "But in fact, the dominant factor is having a great teacher in front of the classroom."

[rfranklin]

1. So, we'll throw five week wonders at the kids and see who succeeds...

Eventually you'll have enough cheap teachers to solve all the deficits across the country.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

2. TPATP

The Princess And The Pea

[MedicalAdmin]

3. The blue screen of death comes to a classroom.

Bill Gates - the darth vader of learning.

[roxiejules]

4. Got Dough?

Billionaires running our schools...What could possibly go wrong?



http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/01/17/936689/-How-the-Billionaire-boys-Club-is-runningand-ruiningeducation

Removing public oversight will leave the education of our children to the whim of entrepreneurs and financiers.

[madrchsod]

5. what an asshole...course we already knew that fact.

another billionaire telling us poor folks what`s good for us.

[roxiejules]

6. I Don't Want to be a Teacher Any More

Maybe it was the e-mail I got saying that the department of education in Oregon has raised the cut scores again this year by six or seven points per grade level, even though they just raised them a couple of years ago. I found out that if they would have used these new cut scores last year, over half of the students in grades 3-8 who passed their benchmarks wouldn’t have passed. That led to a realization that as a school we have very little chance of meeting our adequate yearly progress this year, but of course I’m not allowed to say that because there are no excuses. It’s hard not to feel discouraged.

Maybe it was one of the two parents who contacted me in the first few days of school to tell me that their child doesn’t particularly love my program this year. I’m so not used to that. I’ve always had kids achieving highly and loving my class. I’m just not sure how I can use the mandated materials in the required time periods, focusing on the required skills and still get kids to really love it.

Maybe it’s the fact that I lost a third of my retirement when they reformed our Public Employee Retirement System a few years back and now I keep reading about how they want to slash it even more because of the greedy teacher unions and how this is the main reason for the budget problems in our state.

Maybe it’s that I haven’t gotten a real raise in a really really long time, or that we had to cut eight days again this year to solve our state’s budget problems. So I’m taking a big hit again, and nobody seems to notice or care.

go read the whole thing..

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/26/950079/-I-Dont-Want-to-be-a-Teacher-Any-More