Reading about Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation maneuvering for immunity from their
Billion dollar mistakes in African agriculture reminded me of their Billion mistake in USA education. Howard Wainer uses the example of Gates yanking around USA educational administrations as an example of people misunderstanding the math for variance in Statistics.^2 It wouldn't be a surprise that rich guys touted as programming geniuses really aren't competent in various areas of math but it probably doesn't matter if Gates understood his policy would not have the announced effects for USA education. Anybody that reads a bit into food (
FoodFirst!
12 myths^3) and agricultural policy (
Vandana Shiva on the
Green Revolution ) knows the corprate expensive-input high-debt approach is awful.. These intentional mistakes build around common misundersandings (unsupported myths) are just ways to capture organizations I imagine. It's must just be a way to inject obedient MBAs or other sorts of purposefully ignorant business people into various organization with authority, with policy-making and -implementing power... Or maybe they are just morons and not crafty diabolical controllers. Either way these examples provide more grounds, more support for Paul Goodman's explanation of the reasons for not allowing concentrated power. No particular individuals can be trusted with it, even the people that end up in the overly powerful positions were smart, kind, decent people.. It's hard to see how such people could end up in such positions...
In the late 1990s the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began supporting small schools on a broad-ranging, intensive, national basis. By 2001, the Foundation had given grants to education projects totaling approximately $1.7 billion. They have since been joined in support for smaller schools by the Annenberg Foundation..
... The availability of such large amounts of money to implement a smaller-schools policy yielded a concomitant increase in the pressure to do so, with programs to splinter large schools into smaller ones being proposed and implemented broadly (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle are just some examples).... What is the evidence in support of such a change? There are many claims made about the advantages of smaller schools, but I will focus here on just one—that when schools are smaller, student achievement improves. The supporting evidence for this is that among high-performing schools, there is an unrepresentatively large proportion of smaller schools...
We also identified the 50 lowest-scoring schools. Nine of these (18 percent) were among the 50 smallest schools. This result is completely consonant with what is expected from de Moivre's equation—smaller schools are expected to have higher variance and hence should be over-represented at both extremes. Note that the regression line shown on the left graph in Figure 4 is essentially flat, indicating that overall, there is no apparent relation between school size and performance. But this is not always true.
