"There's no reason only poor people should have the experience" - TED video of Bill Gates

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html

by wyday • 17 years ago

142 70 17 years ago

keltecp11• 17 years ago

My new favorite TED.

cubix2• 17 years ago

I always feel a little frustrated when I listen to Gates. He's notorious for his bluntness in business, behind closed doors. However, in public he can come across as disingenuous -- passive-aggressive even. Why doesn't he chastise the incompetent teachers and rapacious unions more directly? You can tell he wants to, and probably does at the dinner table. Perhaps he fears a backlash against MS.

ewanmcteagle• 17 years ago

What more would it accomplish? It would just be emotional ranting. Often that kind of thing adds more adversarial elements to the problem and improves nothing.

chriskelley• 17 years ago

He releases them at 5:10... but it's a great talk, be sure to listen to the whole thing.

rudyfink• 17 years ago

The stuff on teaching was just amazing. His graph on what makes a good teacher was jaw dropping to me. Once he put it out there, it was really hard for me to avoid the question of why we are not focusing more on what makes good teacher performance.

uuilly• 17 years ago

In my opinion teacher accountability is the most pressing social issue of our time. Gates has been all over this for a while now...

omouse• 17 years ago

Not only Gates, but Alan Kay and Seymour Papert have been gunning for constructivist ideas for longer than Gates I think.

access_denied2• 17 years ago

What about paying them decently? Other than some positions at Ivy-League, becoming a teacher is just bad math, financially speaking. Why would anyone intelligent want to become a teacher?

abas• 17 years ago

I agree. I'm not sure that the technological techniques he mentioned will be very successful though. I think video of great teachers will help some, but as he said in his description of a great teacher: they are looking around and seeing what kids are paying attention, etc. I think kids will benefit the most from that kind of attention and I think that is even more true of at risk kids.

One thing I think might help is to have teachers observe each other. I taught a bit in grad school and would have liked to observe some of the other teachers who were really good and to have them observe me and give me suggestions.

I associate with a nature school that runs weekly programs for home schooled kids (the kids come one or two full school days a week). The instructors and helpers interact with all the kids throughout the year (they break into groups, but change it up a lot). During prep time they will talk with each other about the individual kids - where they think they are at and what they can do to help the kids grow. I've been really impressed and was thrilled with the adult programs I have done with them. The instructors aren't paid very much either, they are passionate about it though. And they have helpers who are doing it for free (some are actually paying a little for it as part of an apprenticeship program).

amichail• 17 years ago

Probably the issue is that most teachers are quite bad and there's a limit to how much they can improve. So most teachers probably don't want any of this.

olavk• 17 years ago

Perhaps I didn't understand fully, but didn't he just say that nobody knows why some teachers are better than others?

schmave2• 17 years ago

This graph, shown at 12:50, shows how good four different factors are at predicting whether a teacher will raise the test scores of her students, and they are:

1) Past Performance (presumably, whether the teacher raised his students' test scores the year before, although it's not defined)

2) Whether or not the teacher majored in math

3) Whether or not the teacher participated in TFA

4) Whether or not the teacher has a Master's in Education

The best predictor is #1, which just means that the best predictor of whether a teacher is good at raising test scores is to see if they were good at that last year too. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.

dominik2• 17 years ago

Enlightening talk.

On teachers, Gates says that after 3 years, a teachers' performance generally doesn't change.

He put up a graph of what influences teachers' performance. By far the greatest effect came from 'past performance,' distantly followed by a having a math degree (for math teachers), and Teach for America experience. Almost negligible came the last item, 'having a masters degree.'

Next, Gates looked at the incentive structure within schools -- it's primarily seniority based, with a bonus if someone has a master's degree.

He noted that good teachers leave the system at a rate slightly higher than that of bad teachers.

He contrasted charter schools such as KIPP (http://www.kipp.org/), where the school evaluates teachers on their performance -- with the traditional model.

The traditional model contractually limits how schools can evaluate their teachers, for example, a principal is contractually not permitted to sit in on a teacher's class more than a few times a year (sometimes even once per year), and even those times, the principal must provide advance notice. Gates compared this to running a factory with some workers "making crap" but the management being banned from observing them without prior notice, so that the workers "might actually try and fool you into thinking we're doing a good job in that one brief moment."

Gates next noted that even a teacher wanted to improve -- can't. New York, for example, passed a law banning schools using teacher improvement data to determine tenure.

Gates closed noting his optimism, praising the testing data for revealing something. He posited the idea of using digital video to record all public school classrooms to give teachers the opportunity to review their work and consult with each other to improve. Gates said: "By thinking of this as a personnel system we can do it much better."

He mentioned _Work Hard, Be Nice_, a book about KIPP: http://www.amazon.com/Work-Hard-Be-Nice-Promising/dp/1565125... Gates said he sent everyone at the TED talk a free copy.

He finished by saying he thought "education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have." He mentioned the House-version of stimulus bill had funding for "these data systems," but the Senate version took that out, because "there are people threatened by these things." He reiterated his optimism, however, saying that people were beginning to recognize the importance of education.

xenophanes2• 17 years ago

You're telling me that past performance influences future performance of teachers? Like, causes it?

I think you must mean predicts. I hope Gates didn't say influences.

jbrun• 17 years ago

Teachers vs. Quarterbacks

Here is a very good article by Gladwell comparing the difficulty in finding good teachers to that of choosing NFL quarterbacks:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_...

Klonoar• 17 years ago

Eh, I don't really see the big deal about releasing some mosquitos into the crowd. I did enjoy his talk, though, pretty well thought out.

vinutheraj• 17 years ago

Yea ... if they were malaria infected, it would have been a different story though. I thought that's why there was a big deal, that maybe he released infected ones.

Dont know whats the big deal over simple mosquitoes !

randallsquared• 17 years ago

Just an awareness thing. Since he was talking about malaria-carrying mosquitos when he released them, releasing them had a greater psychological impact than otherwise.

netcan• 17 years ago

What you often see on TED presentations is that these people know how to make a single simple powerful argument. It's actually quite difficult. They get the right graph up there.The right numbers or facts that make the combination of reason & emotion click.

JesseAldridge• 17 years ago

One very interesting question he touched on but didn't really answer: If the market is heartless and government is incompetent, then how do we address issues such as these?

Is philanthropy really the only way?

adamsmith• 17 years ago

I know what you mean. I also got the sense that he was talking about a new kind of entity.

Or we could just go with Bill Gates for President in 2016.

patio112• 17 years ago

If the market is heartless and government is incompetent, then the government should decide on goals and pay actors in the private sector for implementing them.

Want to figure out which teachers are the best ones? Pay for student performance. The market will sort everything else out. You don't have to publish standards of what makes a good teacher, heck you don't even have to make pursuit of good teachers a defined goal, any more than you need to pass a law saying "Make sure you hire those programmers who are ten times as effective as the other ones."

(I know there is one glaring problem here, namely that a politically powerful lobby considers that solution anathema, but it would work.)

jbert2• 17 years ago

> I know there is one glaring problem here

More than one, really. State schools in the UK are incentivised in a way similar to this.

What it results in is gaming of the performance measures.

For example, pupils are steered into softer subjects where results are easier to attain. Pupils below-but-close-to a grade increment are given more intensive teaching at the expense of those who will attain the relevant grade left to their own devices.

Push that down to the per-teacher level and good teachers would not want to work with difficult pupils, since they will get poor results and less pay. "So make the pay conditional on improvement rather than absolute attainment". OK, in which case you've just made an incentive for children to be labeled as behaviourally difficult and academically poor so that they can be improved more.

Want to get better teachers? Pump more damn money in. Get good managers and get good quality people teaching. Make it a profession people aspire to work in once more.

The thing is, you'll have to keep it up for about a generation (with not much to show for it), to flush the system through. Good luck with that politically.

Markets are not a panacea. Particularly so with subjective measures.

Education (in the broader sense of what we want to achieve) is subjective - even academic results are more subjective than one might think - how many mathematics qualifications is a history qualification of the same level 'worth'?

randomtask• 17 years ago

Couldn't you argue that philanthropy is really just a product of the market?

barrkel• 17 years ago

And in so far as government represents the interests of its electorate, so is it.

Of course, campaign finance distorts the incentives, which is why it needs to be reformed.

mseebach• 17 years ago

The market is heartless, for the same reasons government isn't - the hearts of the citizens. Markets don't feel, because they need to reflect the feelings of stakeholders, politicians do feel because they are increasingly elected to impose their feelings on citizens.

rmobin• 17 years ago

He's right about the importance of education and the poor state of it in the US, but I'm not convinced that the private sector can't handle it. Inside American Education (http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowel...) is a really interesting book on what our current system is like (although a bit dated, it's from 1992).

benzim• 17 years ago

The private sector could handle it. He points to private schools that are already succeeding with the poorest children. The problem is how to get the government and unions out of the way so successful ideas can be widely applied. I think a voucher system would quickly begin to solve many of Americas education problems. Such systems have already succeeded in Sweden and parts of the US.

meat-eater• 17 years ago

I read somewhere that Chris Anderson was quoted as saying that the caption for this talk should be that "Bill gates releases more bugs into the world".

icode• 17 years ago

Maybe Bill Gates should be put in a jar and be told: There is no reason only animals get treated like objects.

I know, most people will think mosquitoes aint important and have no feelings. That they are like machines.

Personally, when I look at the behaviour of mosquitoes, they have a lot in common with me and you. So I would prefer to leave them alone and let them decide on their own where to go. What if some more complex animal then humans comes along and decides "Oh, humans are so simple. We can just treat them like stones or wood". Would we agree?

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

if this bothers you enough to spend time commenting the meat industry should have you out bombing buildings at night.

I devote my resources to the sentient first.

davidw• 17 years ago

Having spent more than my share of time in the mosquito-infested plains of northern Italy, I am more than happy to mercilessly squash any of the damn things that are around me. I wouldn't react very well to a person who spent their nights making buzzing noises in my ears and biting me, either.

known• 17 years ago

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I DO and I UNDERSTAND. -- Confucius

adamc• 17 years ago

Made me think of the Lorax: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing's going to get better. It's not."

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

It was Lorax-style thinking that got ddt banned throughout much of the world, resulting in millions of deaths.

lecha• 17 years ago

Re: education So Gates has been all over this, and there are many components to it.

The question to this forum is, what technology is needed to help make great teachers? To Tim O'Reilly's slogan, this is clearly the stuff that matters.

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

Do people really need charity in order to get bednets? How much does a damn net cost? How much does ddt cost?

DXL• 17 years ago

In 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day. When you're living with such an income, you're probably starving and hoping you make it through another week. Even if it were possible for someone to save the amount needed, there may still not be a shop around where you can buy one, especially in rural areas.

mynameishere3• 17 years ago

Eh, if people can buy clothing, they can buy a net which is a cheaper item. They cost 15 dollars on amazon, and the wholesale price is probably about 50 cents. It's not like the whole continent is still living with bones through their hair,

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25afr...

chez17• 17 years ago

Not to be mean, but this is a little ignorant. The areas in which Gates does his work are extremely impoverished. Getting food is a real issue, having a bed net is a luxury.

schmave2• 17 years ago

As a few other people here have suggested, standardized test scores are a pretty narrow measure of education quality. Bill Gates mentioned that everyone in the room had probably had a few great teachers to get them to where they are now. When I think about the great teachers I have had, I certainly don't think they were great because they raised my standardized test scores. They were great because they gave me a much deeper understanding of a topic, or opened my eyes to something I hadn't seen before.

Yes, the best teachers I had may have increased my standardized test scores some as a side effect, but it would be an insult to them if that's why I admired them so much as teachers.

Test prep can be done in a factory, but not education.

baddox• 17 years ago

Isn't he AGAINST malaria? If so, shouldn't he say, "There's no reason ANYONE should have the experience"?

steveblgh• 17 years ago

Watched until 1:40. That chart could be taught in school as "how to lie with data": reduction from 20 to 10 made to look more dramatic by changing the scale.

cunard3• 17 years ago

Another (earlier) thread on a similar theme: Ken Robinson says that the teachers who can encounter their kids and allow them to be creative can thereby allow them to have tools they'll need in the present post-industrial world. He specifically mentions what he calls "inflation" meaning a BA used to be something, then it was an MA, and now a PHD. I've watched it a few times now. His point about valuing math above music or art is well taken, by me anyway. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools...

"There's no reason only poor people should have the experience" - TED video of Bill Gates

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