Bill Gates recently gave a talk about what his foundation is up to.  Apparently he is dedicating most of his time and money towards alleviating suffering due to Malaria and improving US education.  You might have seen a news story on this talk because this is where he released a jar full of mosquitoes for some reason.

I don’t have a lot to comment about his Malaria crusade aside from the fact that it seems that the use of DDT could save millions of lives.  Too bad the enviro-nuts hate children in third world countries.

I found his findings on education to be a lot more interesting.  I think the facts that he introduced in this speech show that our centralized education system is hopelessly flawed.

Gates talked how research that he’s funded finds no correlation between how we reward teachers to the job they actually do.  He says that a teacher that a teacher getting a masters degree is nearly useless in predicting how a teacher will educate their students.  He also found that additional experience after three years of teaching is also irrelevant when it comes to judging how well a teacher teaches.

And what do we reward teachers on?  We pay them more for length of service and for getting a useless masters degree. 

He also discussed how in many localities it is impossible for the administration to properly evaluate the job a teacher is doing.  The blame goes to union contracts which limit the amount of oversight the administration can perform.  (And of course the same contract would keep the teacher employed, hurting the children, no matter what was found.

Gates didn’t propose any answers to the problems he identified.  I’d like to do that for him.  We need to break up the public school monopoly.  We need to make it so that a teacher who is not doing their job can be fired.  The simple answer is to get school vouchers so that the parents can pick out schools that are best for their kids.  Right now the schools seem to primarily exist to benefit the teachers.