So Bill Gates has been making the rounds...

[AndromedaPatFan]

He's got an IQ ~ 160. He's trivially among the smartest fraction of the worlds population. Like 1% of the top 1%.

He's amaizing at code, and business, and philanthropy. I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that he might have some good ideas regarding education.

I don't know that he's as as good with education as he is with business, but I do know he's smarter than the next 10,000 people I'm going to pass on the road.

I wasn't aware that 160 put one in the top .01%, but I won't argue the point when it can so easily be looked up. :) I also doubt you have an accurate IQ score on Bill.

He IS smart, and you can include academics in that. By the time he dropped out of Harvard he'd taken some challenging graduate courses, and of course he had business efforts at the same time. On the other hand, I taught a guy who took three different challenging grad courses at Harvard as a sophomore, and while he was certainly .01% smart, he hasn't changed the world much in later life. (I think he went to work at IBM Research and didn't do anything particularly noteworthy.)

Bill is said to be a very good coder but not a great one, by people in a position to judge.

I can hold my own in discussions with Bill, but I can't blow him away, and I've had IQ scores a lot higher than 160. I haven't changed the world much more than my aforementioned student has.

Like most successful tech entrepreneurs, Bill at various times has believed his own marketing too completely, leading him to say erroneous things.

Bottom line: Bill deserves to have his opinions listened to on any subject to which he's given a lot of thought. But that doesn't mean they're actually correct.

[ForWhoForWhat?]

Bottom line: Bill deserves to have his opinions listened to on any subject to which he's given a lot of thought. But that doesn't mean they're actually correct.

I'll do you one better, and i think this quite generous:

“When philanthropists have potentially useful ideas about education, they should by all means try them out, establish pilot programs, put their money where their mouths are. But before government officials incorporate those ideas into policy, they must study them carefully and make sure that what sounds reasonable in theory works in practice”

Unfortunately, that’s not what we do when it comes to Bill Gates. “He’s rich so he MUST know what he’s talking about on everything. Quick lets do whatever he says!!”

this testing thing would be at least his 2nd major eduflop. His first being "small high schools are the key to academic success". Bloomberg ate that up like candy and revamped NYC high schools accordingly. The research came out AFTER the wide spread Gates-influenced changes and revealed that the small schools model does not work. Oops.

There is also some speculation that Gates is flip flopping on testing because testing is also Michelle Rhee's baby and he's trying to distance himself from her mess.

[ForWhoForWhat?]

DC Custodians were evaluated by Student Test Scores

Yes, even the janitors were judged, not by their ability to mop up puke, but by how well Timmy did on the test.

[thelittlecheese]

...except that is opinion, not fact.

Look it up. Eugenicists created the Birth Control League and after the Nazi's in WWII stained the whole eugenics movement, the Birth Control League changed it's name to Planned Parenthood. Those are FACTS. And you should STOP trying to give people info that isn't true.

Which isn't the same as Eugenics.

Eugenics and 'population control' are not the same thing.

And that is the end of the discussion because you obviously haven't read up on anything regarding this topic and the govts who have tried eugenics in the past. Go read and then come back and we can discuss this like rational, educated adults.