Because the best things in life are free.

 
Bill Gates Takes America’s Governors to School

Leave it to Bill Gates to shake up the National Governor’s Association meeting. Despite not suggesting anything revolutionary, having a person of his stature excoriating all governors present for not fixing America’s high schools was long overdue. He also voiced strong support for smaller class sizes, and smaller high schools. Gates is no demigod, but his criticism does mean two separate things. One, it means he feels he has to do better to attract talent from overseas where he cannot find it domestically. But two, this business reality may convince Gates to open the floodgates and have Microsoft lobby much harder for educational reforms.

Still it’s a bit curious to hear this from a man who spends much of his time hiring cheaper workers from overseas to do the same job Americans can. In his defense, Gates claims that there are simply not enough “quality” engineers and scientists to fit his needs. That could be true; watchdog groups like WashTech.com detail a Microsoft all too eager to purge those workers who can be replaced by hiring someone in India. It’s perfectly acceptable to use outsourcing to replace someone worth $72,000 with someone worth $56,000 but a tragedy to substitute someone earning $42,000 a year with a person paid $24,000.

Nevertheless, Gates’s analysis is completely accurate. However, the causes of these problems are incredibly varied. They range from an overemphasis on athletics by school departments, a lack of a national curriculum, the desire to use liberal immigration laws to keep the cost of labor down, to white flight. And opposition to change is a surprising alliance of people from the Catholic Church to most large teacher’s unions to Wal-Mart to major media conglomerates. The Catholic Church because of their ownership and maintenance of a whole shadow system of education, teacher unions because higher wages inevitably would be tied to less job security, Wal-Mart because skilled workers would command higher wages and likely unionize, and major media because they lose millions on televising pro sports with the hope it will attract men without a college education to watch their programming.

Lucky for Bill, educational initiatives tend to be popular. His job, it appears, will be to crack the whip.
posted by Thomas at 12:48 AM 0 comments