Bill Gates on Education Reform

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Sunday November 28, 2010 · 9:12 PM PST

2010/11/28 · 21:12

On Friday, November 19th, Bill Gates was in Kentucky giving a speech on education. The Seattle PI had the AP summary the next day:

On Friday, billionaire Bill Gates took aim at school budgets and the master's degree bonus.

"My own state of Washington has an average salary bump of nearly $11,000 for a master's degree - and more than half of our teachers get it. That's more than $300 million every year that doesn't help kids," he said.

"And that's one state," said Gates, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at a speech Friday in Louisville to the Council of Chief State School Officers. Gates also took aim at pensions and seniority.

TheRain

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Sunday July 26, 2009 · 3:36 PM PDT

2009/07/26 · 15:36

The idea of linking student achievement to teacher evaluation has been around for quite some time through a variety of titles--merit pay, performance pay, incentive pay, etc. It's also a concept that gained new traction last week when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan released information about the Race to the Top program that the DoE is using to push for state-level changes that favor charter schools, merit pay, and linking student test scores to teachers.

One of the notions that you often here during these discussions is, "The good teachers have nothing to be afraid of." Let's talk about that for a bit.

Last year, for one of my Master's classes, I dug into testing data I had on hand for the first grade team in my building. These are real numbers and real averages with real kids behind them; the test in question is the Measures of Academic Progress, from the Northwest Evaluation Association.

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Bill Gates on Education Reform

The Messy Question of Teacher Quality