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by sobkas 134 days ago
>The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity?

So he is no longer a billionaire? And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls? The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone? Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was. What a sacrifice it was for him...
1 comments
com2kid 134 days ago
They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard.

Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.

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sobkas 134 days ago
>They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard.

It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary.

>Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.

They helped so many people by not allowing them getting covid vaccine or by fighting generics? Also their "good" deeds weren't without negative consequences that could be avoided if someone actually listened to people they were "helping".

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JuniperMesos 134 days ago
> It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary.

Why are charter schools bad? What is the ostensible easy way to improve US education that you know for sure will work?

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sobkas 133 days ago
Easy way is not doing charter schools. Why are they bad? Charter school can choose what children they will teach when public schools don't have that choice, then people point at charter schools as having higher outcomes. In essence charter schools are a tool to discriminate students from poor families.
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com2kid 133 days ago
It is complicated.

I am a big supporter of public schools, but I also understand that only allowing rich parents to opt out of public schools can lead to some very bad outcomes as schools don't have to respond directly to public pressure.

Recently the Seattle public schools reverted some very bad decisions because so many parents in Seattle pulled their kids out of public schools to go to private, at such a high numbers it started to cause budget issues.

That was only possible because the so many parents here can afford to do that.

Another example is with how many schools stopped using phonics for reading and an entire generation of kids ended up with poor reading skills. No marketplace of ideas means even if parents wanted to have their kid learn phonics, only rich parents could afford to switch to private schools. Even today Seattle schools is just slowly switching back to phonics (my local school is a pilot for returning to phonics! Year later!)

Same goes for 1:1 laptop usage. Evidence now shows that every school that moves to one to one laptops (a dedicated laptop for every kid in every classroom) has educational outcomes plummet. It will take years of concerted effort by parents to get those laptops out of public schools (to be fair, took years of effort to get them into the schools....) and break the contracts to school district has with technology providers.

Having all the kids in the city go to a single School district has many huge benefits that lift everybody up, and a well-funded public school system is essential to democracy.

But there are also issues with putting all your eggs in one basket.

I don't think anyone has a good solution to these problems.

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