The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently held a conference in which 250 teachers where invited to a posh resort in Scottsdale, Arizona to hear about the Foundation's emerging perspective on what they (we) do every day in our classrooms. It is fair to say that the Foundation's consistent position has been that the failure of American public education has been at the hands of lazy, incompetent, union protected teachers. I won't run from that. I place some of the blame there as well. Not everyone in my profession is excellent - despite union claims to the contrary.
On the other hand, I think that teachers should take these overtures with a grain of salt. Here's why: Bill Gates attended Lakeside, a top tier preparatory school in North Seattle. His children attend private schools. Everyone he knows and works with sends their kids to either private schools or top notch public schools. His personal perspective on education is not a struggling inner city school, it is a well funded private school with highly educated, very successful and involved parents. The difference matters.
Second, Gates is a technologist. As a programmer you know that particular coding inputs result in predictable outputs on the screen in front of you. Even if the code is layered and highly complex, the computer has no will of its own and will respond exactly as it is commanded to do in the lines of code that it is given. If the computer does not yield the desired output, it is due to an error in the input; not because the computer had a soccer game and didn't have time to run the program. This input/output schema also influences his views on education. And why not? It has made him tens of billions of dollars and works with many other Foundation initiatives - like health care. If you vaccinate children, they don't get sick. Input/Output. Unfortunately, the algorithm isn't always that simple in education.
Finally, this cozying up to teachers after having published several articles in major newspapers softening his position on teacher evaluation matrices feels like a well planned PR campaign. It wouldn't surprise me if the Foundation's next step was to create an Educator Advisory Panel to help 'inform future funding decisions'. But who would be selected to sit on that panel? A truly diverse group, or a superficially diverse group made up of bobblehead 'yes people' who enjoy being wined and dined at fancy resorts.
Only time will tell.