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The article mentioned the Gates foundation which has terrible records in education initiatives: - The big failure in small schools initiative: https://margina

• JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Interestingly, its still their money, and still their choice where to use it.
  • temp8964 6y ago
    Yes. Even when they are probably doing more harm than good.
    • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      We learn. That's not harm.
      • pfortuny 6y ago
        At the expense of others. That is.
        • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
          Not so much? Hard to do worse than we already are :)
  • ramraj07 6y ago
    It is money made by shitty business practices, and now that the great Gates has realised that there is indeed an upper limit to personal hedonism they’ve elected to do the voyeuristic hedonism - now with the intermediates of poor people everywhere; or as similar to how Morty put it, “just sounds like masturbation with extra steps.”
  • lmm 6y ago
    Money that you've earned honestly and paid your fair share of taxes on is yours free and clear. Profits from an illegal monopoly that you've avoided tax on via a 503c not so much.
• sjg007 6y ago
  Successful schooling involves a parental component. We probably need a way to pay parents to help their kids with school. The other thing I noticed with the pandemic and distance learning is that kids do really well in small groups (2-4 kids) and extremely well 1:1. This is a tutelage model. I felt that the classes that went best for my kids incorporated the small group style. In this model, the general education itself can be recorded and the small groups live which work really well. I think this is the future but there's a lot of push back on that.
  • danans 6y ago
    > The other thing I noticed with the pandemic and distance learning is that kids do really well in small groups (2-4 kids) and extremely well 1:1. Small group learning has been a standard part of education for a few decades. It is way too early to make claim that the pandemic version of this has improved things. Anecdotes thus far have pointed to some kids doing well in pandemic small groups and 1:1 while others are doing terribly, but data about the effects has not even been collected yet, much less analyzed or conclusions drawn.
    • sjg007 6y ago
      It's always way too early or way too late in the let's do nothing world.
  • temp8964 6y ago
    > We probably need a way to pay parents to help their kids with school. Check this great interview: Glenn Loury & Roland Fryer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL1peNBAnns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL1peNBAnns
    • sjg007 6y ago
      That was a great interview. I wonder if we could engage college grads and college students with tutoring jobs that reduce their student loans at the national level. You could do some amount of tutoring and get a credit reduction. This way you don't have to do a Teach for America type job or work for a nonprofit but maybe get a little help paying things down.
• throwaway5752 6y ago
  Most startups fail, and we often talk about how that's a good thing. Absent capital constraints, why is that different for charitable initiatives? Gates is devoting resources towards nuclear (Terrapower) and nuclear has a terrible track record in effeciency (LCOE) and generation as a total percent of fleet capacity. Should he stop trying there? I would argue it isn't. I would argue the same for trying to improve education.
  • temp8964 6y ago
    Not the same. Try failed engineering wouldn't harm anybody (except wasting money). Try bad social policy, could harm people you experimented on. It also has broad impact on the society. Quote: "..., there is nothing inherently wrong with trying a reform and having it fail. The key is learning from failure so that we avoid repeating the same mistakes. It is pretty clear that the Gates effective teaching reform effort failed pretty badly. It cost a fortune. It produced significant political turmoil and distracted from other, more promising efforts. And it appears to have generally done more harm than good with respect to student achievement and attainment outcomes." https://www.educationnext.org/gates-effective-teaching-initiative-fails-improve-student-outcomes/ https://www.educationnext.org/gates-effective-teaching-initi...
    • fossuser 6y ago
      Therac-25? There are so many other examples, this comment is just wildly wrong. Trying things has some inherent risk of failure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth working on hard problems. It just means you do the best you can to account for that risk (and learning from it to not make the same mistakes again). Edit: You added the quote which I don’t disagree with in sentiment (I don’t know specifics of the policy in question).
      • temp8964 6y ago
        If you care about education reform, I guess you must have heard of the Common Core. In the field of education reform, almost nobody thinks a national standard is critical / essential to the education reform in the country. It created huge huge political turmoil for many years. Both left and right were against it, but it got pushed through. Now it is gone, nobody cares. Imagine the resource wasted on this meaningless effort which could have been used for something else.
• scythe 6y ago
  >Now it is funding anti-racist math: https://equitablemath.org/ https://equitablemath.org/ In my limited experience, a lot of students seem to have specific weaknesses with the subjects that are traditionally taught in middle school. Manipulating fractions, applying the distributive property consistently, and simply understanding how to dereference a variable by inserting an equivalent number or expression -- I have multiple students messing these up pretty much every week. With that said, this website is extremely discouraging. There are five "steps" on the front page but no specifics, and buzzwords everywhere, suffused with no-duh filler content and paraphrased repetition.
  • lowercased 6y ago
    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11... I dug in a bit and found that and... as progressive as I would like to think I am, I'm 100% confused as to how "focus on getting the 'right' answer" and "independent practice is valued over teamwork" is... 'white supremacy' showing up in math. HN may not be the place to discuss this, but... am I missing something obvious?
    • zozbot234 6y ago
      > HN may not be the place to discuss this, but... am I missing something obvious? The Gates Foundation are likely giving money to these efforts so as to balance out the heavy "learn to code" focus of most other SV-tech educational efforts. It's the anti-white-supremacy equivalent of buying carbon offsets for your dirty energy use.
      • human 6y ago
        You are so right and it’s sad to see.
    • ojnabieoot 6y ago
      HN is unfortunately the extremely wrong place to discuss this :( Language like that can be used by bad-faith folks here to push the (false and ridiculous) idea that the Equitable Math people don’t care about mathematical rigor or logical reasoning. The idea is that those attitudes encourage hypercompetitiveness among children and inappropriately reinforce the idea that math grades are a measure of “inherent ability.” - “Independent practice is valued over teamwork” encourages a classroom where the “best students” come from families who can afford private tutoring - “focus on getting the right answer” means that teachers don’t get an appropriate sense of where students are actually struggling, and again incentivizes the affluent privately-tutored student who doesn’t have to worry about explaining their answer. It is not that either of these are inherently “white supremacist,” but they are inherently poor measures of mathematical understanding. The racism connection comes in by the fact that these are measures which can be “juked” by affluence, and that students from rough backgrounds are unfairly penalized. Given that racism in US teachers is also a big problem, it can lead to ugly situations like “Jimmy is dumb at math and can’t do Algebra II” rather than “Jimmy makes a lot of dumb sign errors and needs specific practice.” In particular: these are (nominally) race-neutral criticisms of US public education with especially acute impact for black students, but also affect white students from tougher backgrounds.
• flaque 6y ago
  The tone of these articles is really unfortunate. Very much positions the donors as bad guys, their own admission of failure as proof that they’re bad guys, and that the problems are fundamentally unsolvable and that we shouldn’t do anything. It’s fine to note programs that don’t work; but schadenfreude in fully-funded experiments with the goal to help children is counter-productive.
  • xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
    Well, Gates is a bad guy. He was a robber baron who decided that stealing a whole lot of money makes him the world's leading expert on everything. He has no training in pedagogy, epidemiology, sanitation, or really anything else relevant to the missions of his organization, yet he seems to actually believe he's a Great Scientist Using Evidence-Based Approaches to Save the World. He lives in a $200 million house yet has funded a billion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince people he's generous. I laugh at Elon Musk when he thinks getting fired from Paypal means he knows how to run a car company. I also laugh at Bill Gates when he thinks stealing the worst desktop operating system makes him a doctor. We can't overthrow our masters. At least let us make fun of them.
    • boomboomsubban 6y ago
      >yet has funded a billion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince people he's generous And let's not forget the scummy secondary benefit of Gates donating tons of money into soneth education. It undoubtedly is going to have some influence on what computers they use and teach, further entrenching Microsoft as place.
    • MauranKilom 6y ago
      > He has no training in pedagogy, epidemiology, sanitation, or really anything else relevant to the missions of his organization I'm confused by this statement. It only counts as training if you did it around age 20? Or what makes you think that someone who is spending this much time, effort and money on a given topic would not arrange for appropriate (or rather, excellent) training on it? Or is this something you conclude by starting from the assertion that Bill Gates must be a bad guy?
• westurner 6y ago
  Unbelievable. Rather than diminishing the efforts of others, you could start helping by describing your own efforts to improve education (in order to qualify your ability to assess the mentioned and other efforts to improve education and learning) In context to seed and series funding for a seat on a board of a for-profit venture, an NGO non-profit organization can choose whether to accept restricted donations and government organizations have elected public servant leaders who lead and find funding. Works based on Faust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_Faust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_Faust
• GoodJokes 6y ago
  anti-racist math INSTRUCTION. Not math itself. Perhaps read your own links.