First a piece about Mr. Gates, from the Washington Post Answer Blog:

“Here we go again. Another Bill Gates-funded education reform project, starting with mountains of cash and sky-high promises, is crashing to Earth.

“This time it’s the Empowering Effective Teachers, an educator evaluation program in Hillsborough County, Florida, which was developed in 2009 with major financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A total of more than $180 million has been spent on the project since then  – with Gates initially promising some $100 million of it – but now, the district, one of the largest in the country, is ending the program.

“Why?…”

Continue reading.

And a piece in the New York Times explains that our schools are doing a better job than the rest of society:

“Here’s the good news: American schools may not be as bad as we have been led to believe.

“Ah, but here’s the bad news: The rest of American society is failing its disadvantaged citizens even more than we realize. The question is, Should educators be responsible for fixing this?…”

“In a report released last week, Martin Carnoy from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford, Emma García from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and Tatiana Khavenson from the Institute of Education at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, suggest that socioeconomic deficits impose a particularly heavy burden on American schools.
” ‘Once we adjust for social status, we are doing much better than we think,’ Professor Carnoy told me. ‘We underrate our progress..’ “

Read more.