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They also use their money to shout down competing approaches to problem solving. They were a big force in "high stakes testing" and "pay teachers who have highe
by alisonkisk 6y ago
They also use their money to shout down competing approaches to problem solving. They were a big force in "high stakes testing" and "pay teachers who have higher performing students" backed by shoddy statistical analysis.
- josephg 6y agoThe B&M Gates foundation has given 23261 grants[1]. Of course some of those projects turned out in retrospect to be regrettable. Thats way too many projects to get a 100% rate when vetting. Or to put it the other way, if you had to be 100% sure when giving money that it would work out well, there would be a lot of great causes you wouldn't be able to contribute to because of outcome risk. But even if the high stakes testing problem was entirely forseeable, thats my point! Its not simple. Bill Gates isn't Simple. He's not a comic book villain - Nobody is outside maybe mass murderers. Comic book heroes and villains don't exist in the real world. (And increasingly they don't exist in comic books either.) If you want to know what he's like, watch some interviews with the man. Gates is obviously trying to make the world a better place. And he's going to continue to do that imperfectly, because he's made out of meat like the rest of us. And yes, I'm also angry about standardized testing, and the historical stain microsoft has left on computing from the 90s. Angry and grateful, all at once. [1] https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants