https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/interview-wit...

> It’s interesting how Gates seems to give every excuse in the book for why he “failed” to drastically improve academic achievement despite the time and money spent on his mission.

> His first excuse is that compared to the cumulative 600 billion dollars in government spending on public schools, he only had 5 billion to spend. Of course, he is talking as if that 5 billion was equally scattered among all the public schools in the United States. We know that his small school models had enough funding and opportunity to test whether his experiment would work, which by his own admission, did not meet his standards.

> Then he and the writer of the article suggest that it was the powerful teacher unions that thwarted the success of Gates foundation initiatives. But later on, even Gates admits there seems to be no correlation between student achievement and the strength of unions in particular states. Although suprisingly, the two states he mentioned as being strong union states , Massachusetts and New York, are ranked # 2 and #5, respectively by NAEP results in student performance.

> If it sounds like a man who is grabbing at straws, he is. He admits as much when talking about measuring teacher effectiveness. I was slightly embarassed for him, when he mentioned the movie, “To Sir, With Love” as an inspiration for his new initiative in taping teachers in real classroom settings. You don’t see the president of the United States saying,” I watched the movie Saving Private Ryan”, and then proceed to discuss how the war in Afganistan can be won. What presidents usually do is to talk with military experts, diplomatic advisers, academics, political advisers, etc.

> But not this guy – he wants to watch hours and hours of tape on military engagements in the mountains of Afganistan and write a report on how soldier effectiveness can be rated. The thing is, if he were really a scientist, I’d say fine – but he isn’t one really. What he is – is a businessman. Unfortunately, what business knows about computer chips and factory output doesn’t translate into the complex lives of human beings.

Plus an anonymous confessional from an actual student:

> I attended a high school funded by the Gates Grant from 2003-2007, and let me tell you, it was a giant, flaming, trashcan fire of poor management, lack of consistency, and almost entirely unsupported beyond the initial investment in creating it. The original Principal bailed before the end of the first year (and isn't even in education anymore, if I hear correctly), about 2/3rds of the staff had been replaced by my second year.

> At start, it was two grades of 160 kids, 9th and 10th; when the 10th graders, the folks who graduated one year before, finally graduated, their class consisted of 13 kids. My class, that original 9th grade, graduated 50 people. I almost didn't graduate, since we had no gym and no way to earn the appropriate PE credit until they introduced Yoga in my senior year. We also began with no "D's", only A, B, C, and Fail, but since they did an absolute shit job at explaining this to prospective students and their families, we ended up getting a lot of kids that wouldn't have cut it in the "normal" high school, and ended up a de-facto alternative, with D's introduced in the second year.

> Other initiatives that sprung up from his "philanthropy" include the creation of separate "schools" at a lot of the local high schools; basically, it was kind of treated like in college, where if you wanted to, say, go into Medicine, you picked "Biomed Academy," and took a certain set of classes with that in mind. So, y'know, pick your future at the end of Junior High.