I Think Bill Gates is Trying to Kill Me

About a week ago, I read Bill Gates Pushes for Better Schools by Nancy Zuckerbrod over at the Huffington Post.

Bill Gates has become a bit of a perennial, one-man, dog and pony show in Washington. Politicians kiss his ass in the hopes of landing Microsoft campaign dollars and he is given the attention usually reserved for people who have something interesting to say. The mind-numbing redundancy of his perennial self-serving platitude makes my eyes water. Only listening to Joe Lieberman drone on makes my eyes water more.

"As a nation, we should start with this goal: Every child in the United States graduating from high school," he said.

That's commendable at face value but this country has a severe illegal immigration problem. One would think that Gates would couple this platitude with, "and, by the way, another goal is that every able-bodied citizen have a job and pays taxes before I ask you to lift the limit on H-1B visa workers."

No such luck.

"We simply cannot sustain an economy based on innovation unless our citizens are educated in math, science and engineering," Gates said.

Legislation moving through the Senate, backed by Democratic and Republican leaders, seeks to get more people to become math and science teachers and would improve training for them. The bill also seeks to get more highly trained teachers in poor schools and would offer grants to states to better align their teaching with what kids should know to succeed at a job or in college.

Gates said the nation's economy depends on keeping the country's borders open to highly skilled workers, especially those with a science or engineering background. Federal law provides 65,000 H1-B visas for scientists, engineers, computer programmers and other professionals every budget year. High-tech and other employers say that's not enough.

"Even though it may not be realistic, I don't think there should be any limit," Gates said, adding that Microsoft hasn't been able to fill approximately 3,000 technical jobs in the United States because of a shortage of skilled workers.

What Gates fails to mention is that he dropped out of Harvard with very little math, science and engineering to get where he is today. And he is no futurist because he fails to mention that many things learned in high school and college are obsolete every three years. But he's not there to reform education but to whine.

His real issue is the latter, cheap and unlimited floods of technical labor. You see I've been unemployed for about six weeks already and I've got 25+ years of technical expertise. And I'm not alone. High-tech professionals are unemployed more often and for longer periods than unskilled labor these days according to unemployment studies. But Bill Gates can't find us because he would like us to go away somewhere and drop dead.

In the past two weeks, I've applied for a half dozen jobs that I fit to a very close fit. All are local. But in a number of interviews, outrageous claims of mismatches occur. And at least two agencies have confided in private that the effect occurs with many of their clients. "It's reverse discrimination. You're a white, middle-aged guy who knows what he's doing and the industry is driven by the profits of prolonged, over-staffed, other-sourced projects - many in one stage of failure or another all over Hartford."

The issue that Gates and his disciples skirt is that the people like myself who evangelized his products to begin with are being ruthlessly thrown under the bus. He won't lose a wink of sleep over that but I do.

But his replacement workers are not cheaper or more desirable. In a recent Courant article, families of these workers often have no health insurance and leave behind expensive health care bills for tax-payers to assume. And educating children of fluid populations taxes the ability of school boards to plan expenses, enrollments, and staffing.

I wish Gates would hire unemployed Americans long before importing legions of "highly-skilled" workers. While these workers may be cost-effectively skilled they often lack the cultural sensitivity and ethical fortitude to understand American values and freedoms. When American workers are discriminated against in their own country as a new American underclass caste then I think we need to wake up.

The cost of American education no matter how you slice and dice the numbers means that a college graduate needs to make a professional salary to pay that cost back. H-1B visa workers bear no such burden. Bill Gates might want to run the numbers through his spread sheet again before trying to starve off what's left of us. We don't deserve being kicked while we're down.

This country has a rich technical workforce and Bill Gates should put it to work instead of knee haul it.

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The Amero Whitewash at the Norwich Bulletin

A few days ago I reported the peculiar circumstance that the Norwich Bulletin Search for porn brings up the Bulletin's own vendor recommendations when shopping for "porn".

Considering their simple recipe that Julie Amero should have just "pulled the plug" or "turned it off" one cannot help but wonder why the Norwich Bulletin hasn't followed their own advice.

But what has happened at the Bulletin is far more troubling. A search of the newspaper for "Amero", "porn", and "teacher" cannot find a single one of the vociferous articles penned at the Bulletin that condemned her in the eyes of the community.

You see as a parent, a technologist, and a Board of Education member I believe our schools are on the wrong track. For thirty years conservative commentators and columnists have so poisoned our understanding of children, teens and learning that our schools have become radical social experiments in intellectual torture schemes.

Our schools no longer honor the student's interests or their well-being. Schools are run to pass tests that are almost exclusively fact oriented. In a subject such as math this is less consequential.

But in discussions with about our science curriculum, I am discovering that the mandatory and punishing Connecticut Aptitude tests (CAPT) place no value on an understanding of the human body or the study of animal life. Science teachers who use valuable class time for subjects such as this risk seeing their students perform poorly on perfunctory state tests.

We are growing a generation of young adults who cannot understand the relationship of one body part or function to another. The religious fanatics who oppose science have so twisted our educational imperatives that schools can no longer teach the relationship between stem cells and the greater body, of what cells mean to each other, of the wonders of life. All they are taught is the memorization of labels and endless, dreary factoids that drain all joy out of learning.

And society's criminal neglect of our children's education does not stop there. In a world of exponentially accelerating complexity our kids are not allowed to use computers to get and process information.

And teachers use computers as though they were little more than fancy grade books, email devices, and occasional internet browsers. Their training is menial and their ability to apply computers in class is too often pathetic. Schools fall prey to all kinds of cyber-charlatans who misguide administrators and curriculum developers often resulting in the wasteful purchase of unnecessary hardware, software, or process.

The schools are not failing America, America is failing our schools.

Every student needs a dedicated computer equipped with internet access. Period. This is not a debate it is a necessity.

And a social contract must be honored. It is that the school will provide every responsible firewall and filter it can afford to avoid unfortunate access to inappropriate materials but in the end students must act responsibly and deal with unfortunate events as responsible individuals not as victims or drama award winners.

No matter what anyone does, unfortunate access to inappropriate material will happen - nothing is absolutely safe. But our mission in schools is to learn, to process the best information we can, to explore, and to think boldly and without fear. And this goes for teachers as well. They should be able to surf professionally and personally. There is nothing wrong with this as long as their historic behavior isn't deviant of the school or the community.

Information processing is the future and schools are devoid of it today. But even if our children were to surf the web freely they'd never find Julie Amero on the Norwich Bulletin site. And that's an injustice that must never be allowed to be covered up.

If the Bulletin is embarrassed by their past journalistic coverage they should admit their mistake and advocate that Julie be free on her own recognizance until this nightmarish trial is thrown out.

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On Teaching Science

The New York Times Editorial Observer has published some very interesting observations about why American Higher Education fails to produce more scientists. I can't help but think that the conclusions apply to secondary education as well.

The rabid legislators who concocted and condone the NCLB practice of anxiety, stress, and memorization are doing our children and society harm. They need to be voted out of office as soon as possible. And the institutions like the Department of Education both at the Federal and State levels are failed experiments as well.

These institutions should be decommissioned as soon as possible. The Bush administration has turned them into ugly, dogmatic, and cruel institutions meant to cause harm instead of serve the interests of children.

In the following excerpt you will note that learning is best performed as teamwork [something discouraged by high-stakes testing schemes] and that students are encouraged to stay until they learn the basics even if their grade is a 'C'.

There is no excuse for teachers, administrators, elected officials or anyone with a semblence of intelligence to continue to entertain the NCLB paradigm.

Read on, and take action.

Why American College Students Hate Science By BRENT STAPLES, Published: May 25, 2006

Science education in this country faces two serious problems. The first is that too few Americans perform at the highest level in science, compared with our competitors abroad. The second problem is that large numbers of aspiring science majors, perhaps as many as half, are turned off by unimaginative teaching and migrate to other disciplines before graduating.

Furthermore...

The new students are welcomed into a well-established community of scientists and scientists-to-be through a summer program that sets the stage for the next four years.

The students are encouraged to study in groups and taught to solve complex problems collectively, as teams of scientists do. Most important, they are quickly exposed to cutting-edge science in laboratory settings, which demystifies the profession and gives them early access to work that often leads to early publication in scientific journals. At the same time, however, the students are pushed to perform at the highest level. Those who earn C's, for example, are encouraged to repeat those courses so they can master basic concepts before moving on.

The laboratory approach keeps the students excited and prevents them from drifting off into less challenging disciplines. Indeed, according to Science, 86 percent of the Meyerhoff participants have graduated with science or engineering degrees. Nearly 9 in 10 of those graduates went on to graduate or professional programs, with a significant number earning M.D.'s or Ph.D's, or both.

Critics have sometimes accused the Meyerhoff program of cherry-picking bright students who would perform spectacularly well wherever they went to school. But the numbers suggest that the school's instructional strategy makes a real difference. Meyerhoff students are twice as likely to earn undergraduate degrees in science or engineering as similar students who declined the scholarships and went to school elsewhere. Most significantly, students who completed the Meyerhoff program are 5.3 times as likely to enroll in graduate study as the students who said no and went elsewhere.

The higher education establishment is generally startled to learn that more than half of the high-flying Meyerhoff students are black. This surprise stems from the unstated but nonetheless well-established belief that high-performing science students don't actually exist in the black community.

U.M.B.C.'s president, Freeman Hrabowski III, knows better. He has spent years expanding his school's access to high-performing minority students and has taken great pains to reassure black families that their children will be well looked after on his campus.

It has long been known that teachers' low expectations, particularly those related to race and racism, can depress student performance. At U.M.B.C., sustained success by minority students seems to have alleviated this poisonous problem. Faculty members who once looked askance when asked to take on minority students in their laboratories now clamor for them.

Off campus, meanwhile, the students are much sought after as research assistants and as candidates for summer internships. Those who finish their education and take their places in the ranks of researchers and professors often become powerful proselytizers for science.

The Meyerhoff model shows that a vibrant, well-structured science program can produce large numbers of students who excel and remain in the field. It has also debunked the myth that academic excellence and minority access are mutually exclusive goals.

Is Hartford listening? Is Connecticut listening? Is Washington listening? Can we finally get rid of the incipid representation in Washington that spends our tax dollars on dogmatic nonsense instead of learning?

C'mon, people, work with me here.

America's Being Left Behind

In a New York Times article titled: Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge? by Timothy L. O'Brien published: onNovember 13, 2005, we are being warned about what is happening to our country as a result of the current administration of this country.


see: http://tinyurl.com/bjztc


"A COMMITTEE of leading scientists, corporate executives and educators oversaw the drafting of the report, entitled "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future." To spur American innovation, it recommends enhanced math and science education in grade school and high school, a more hospitable environment for scientific research and training at the college and graduate levels, an increase in federal funds for basic scientific research and a mix of tax incentives and other measures to foster high-paying jobs in groundbreaking industries. The report cites China and India among a number of economically promising countries that may be poised to usurp America's leadership in innovation and job growth.


"For the first time in generations, the nation's children could face poorer prospects than their parents and grandparents did," the report said. "We owe our current prosperity, security and good health to the investments of past generations, and we are obliged to renew those commitments.""


This is important information. Technology leadership is often measured in just a matter of weeks or months. This concern about the threats that China, India, and other even less friendly countries pose is very real in the software community that I work in and software is just one field of many in danger.


The article goes on to say,


"Mr. Flemings said that private and public capital was not being adequately funneled to the kinds of projects and people that foster invention. The study of science is not valued in enough homes, he observed, and science education in grade school and high school is sorely lacking.


But quantitative goals, he said, are not enough. Singapore posts high national scores in mathematics, he said, but does not have a reputation for churning out new inventions. In fact, he added, researchers from Singapore have studied school systems in America to try to glean the source of something ineffable and not really quantifiable: creativity.


"In addition to openness, tolerance is essential in an inventive modern society," a report sponsored by the Lemelson-M.I.T. Program said last year. "Creative people, whether artists or inventive engineers, are often nonconformists and rebels. Indeed, invention itself can be perceived as an act of rebellion against the status quo.""


Let's emphasize something important here. For all the phony rhetoric about American education falling behind the rest of the world, we find out over and over that that hasn't been true. The rest of the world is very good at administering perfunctory education but they look this way to figure out why it isn't working.


We know why. We have got to take back the education system from those who would turn our kids into test-taking-automotons and return it to the individual development of our children.

Instead of a Boston Tea Party, let's send these unnecessary tests to FEMA until they fill in the New Orleans low land. We have got to celebrate Yankee ingenuity all over again. This is not a time to politely debate nonsensical arguments, it's a time to free the schools of unnecessary testing and fraudulent school accountability exercises - it is killing the country.


[All bolded text is due to my editorial emphasis. The original article has none.]