Community

I am just emerging from the final sprint of my seasonal fall marathon. I've been directing a community theater production of Disney's Little Mermaid, a show which may not have a great deal of intellectual heft, but which does include a great number of moving parts.

The show ran for two weekends in our community theater, with the second weekend corresponding with our local festival. As one of the gazillion places that John Chapman turned up in his life, we have appropriated him and fall and named it Applefest, and it has grown into a regional behemoth of a festival. It always gives me a great deal to do and a great deal to think about after the dust has settled.

Things already hopping at 8 am

Fall festivals are a century-old tradition. 1920 is a watershed year in US census history-- for the first time there were more city dwellers than country- and small town folks. Small towns found it necessary to name streets when previously "Up over behind Wally Schweibeck's house" had been good enough. And because so many people were leaving their small town origins behind, it became A Thing to have a fall festival, sometime when the fall harvest was winding down but before the snow was descending. Folks would come back to the old hometown for a week or a weekend, and the town would throw a party. A century ago, Franklin, like many other places, held a full-blown Old Home Week every five years or so, and while the custom of old home weeks or harvest home festivals faded, it still holds on in some places as Homecoming.

Applefest features booths and crafts and on Saturday and Sunday we shut down the street for a 5K race and a car show, plus appearances by the high school band. There's an apple pancake breakfast, and all manner of fried foods and advanced sugar delivery systems, and live performers in all corners. But the centerpiece of the festival is the people. Filling the small town to the brim are plenty of touristy types, but like the marshmallows in Lucky Charms, there's a constant mix of local folks from all across the country. Keep walking and you will meet old friends and, if you're a teacher, lots of former students. Even when I blank on the name, I'm happy to see the face, hear the stories, find out how folks are doing.

Thursday night the high school's Hall of Fame (yes, we have one-- everybody should) inducted my friend and former band director, and people turned out from all over for that event, a reminder of how far and wide his influence stretches. Not just for those students who became professional musicians or teachers, but all the folks who grew up to make music an integral part of their lives.

Organizing picture with gangsta fish

Meanwhile, I was wrapping up nine weeks of show preparation with a cast that included a wide variety of folks from all over the region, including some old friends, some kids of old friends, and some interesting new people. Children of a guy I used to play in a band with. The nephew of a woman I took to her junior prom about 44 years ago. My son and his fiance were up to see the show, and to talk to the theater manager because they are getting married on this same stage in a few months, because they met doing theater here together years ago.

My wife walked in the 5K race while I played on the bandstand with our 160-year-old town band. She edged me out in the Who Will Run Into More Students contest. And at every performance of the show, a few hundred little girls ooh-ed and ahh-ed and called out encouragement to Ariel, absolutely carried away in wonder and joy and hearts chock full of the feels.

All right, I'm getting a little rambly, but fairly intense, sleep-deprivey weekends like this remind me of just how rich and deep and wide the web is that ties us together in this community. And yes, there are a host of issues that go with small town life and some of them are pretty ugly. But still.

For one thing, I think small town's solve some of the issues of accountability fairly organically. Not a day goes by that I do not face a student, a student's family member, or a former student. If I stink up my classroom, I have to face the people who breathe in that stink day after day after day. Where I live, nobody is separated a full six degrees from anyone. Former students, current students, or families of both (and after a few decades, there is some overlap in that Venn diagram) fix my car, pack my groceries, wait on my table, sit with me in band, perform in shows with me, pass me on the street. This is the kind of accountability that corporate types have studiously avoided for years-- I must daily look the people whose lives I affect right in the eye.

Car show day.

 
For another thing, while we are certainly not as diverse as some cities, what diversity we have is all mushed in together. The great web of connections and humanity that binds us is visible across much of its span. Human beings are so varied and rich and just plain cool. When I think of how much broader and richer and varied human experience is beyond the borders of my little corner of the world, I am just amazed. How anybody ever gets it into their head that standardizing human beings or their experience into one-size-fits-all uniformity is, on some days, absolutely beyond me. We are a huge, rich people, and I reject those whose vision for us is tiny and cramped and meager. Let's be a community, and let's be a big one.

Why Are Teachers So Stressed?

Last week at the Atlantic, teacher-author Timothy Walker took a broad look at the reports of teacher stress (a good follow-up to his earlier piece on teacher burnout). Walker did a good job of gathering up the current data on teacher stress, but he stopped short of one huge question. On twitter he opened the door to that question, so I'm going to go ahead and step through it.

Walker's compendium of current reports is a good one. Here's the Gallup report from 2014. The research brief out of Penn State this year. The admittedly unscientific survey by AFT and the BATs. He cites a representative sampling of the ubiquitous "Why I'm Quitting Teaching" letters that are now as common as empty political promises to elevate the teaching profession. And he traces the connections between teacher stress and students issues, as well as bringing in the Learning Policy Institute's recent report tying teacher stress to the huge loss of veteran teachers, in turn tied to the teacher "shortage." (He might also have folded in LPI's work showing that veteran teachers are hugely beneficial, and therefor worth holding onto.) And he wraps it up with some anecdotal data from Mike Anderson (The Well-Balanced Teacher), a traveling ed consultant.

Walker's piece makes one point exceedingly well-- there's reason to believe that teaching has become a hugely stressful line of work. His piece and the pieces that he links to suggest some causes for that (as does somebody at the Atlantic, who made the tab title of the piece "Testing, Common Core Place Additional Stress on Teachers"). Walker lumps much of it together as "an abundance of professional demands" without either the training nor the time to meet those demands. Several of the reports he cites point to the lack of autonomy and power that teachers now live with, a feeling of no control over their own work. Anderson cites the "flavor of the month" approach to instructional programs and reforms, and Anderson also believes that the barrage of demands creates feelings of incompetence among teachers.

[T]he system that we have right now in America, which is focusing on test scores and accountability, and has teachers being pulled in so many different directions at once, has got so many different pressures coming from so many different places. It’s almost like a recipe for making people feel incompetent.

Hmm. Yeah, it kind of is, isn't it.

Had Walker's editor asked for another 500 words or so, this is the spot where he might have moved on to ask why, exactly, all this stressy weight is being loaded onto teacher shoulders, as well as the related question-- is this a bug or a feature?

Let's consider some possibilities.

Oopsies 

I suppose it's possible that some reformsters simply had no idea that uber-stressed teachers would be a side effect of the reform movement. "When we get these Common Core standards launched," they told themselves, "teachers will be grateful that we have provided useful standards that make their professional lives so much better. They will be delighted that standardized testing provides such a fine measure of their work."

Yeah, it's a stretch, but remember all the folks who were certain that the only thing wrong with the Core was that it wasn't implemented quite right. If we just get teachers a little more Professional Development, a thousand beautiful Common Core blossoms will bloom, just like we'll be greeted as liberators in Iraq (where the war will be over in months).

In other words, we should never overlook the possibility that some folks are so completely divorced from reality that the only future they can see is the one that manages to bleed through their rose-colored contact lenses.

Of course, just as virtually everyone has grasped that the Mission was not Accomplished quite as soon as expected, one would have to be exceptionally thick not to notice that the rise of reformsterdom has, in fact, stressed a whole bunch of past, present and future teachers right out of the profession. So let's move on to the next group--

Tough Love

This would be the reformy crowd that always knew that corporate ed reform would lead to a lot of stress and strain for teachers, but they figured that was also the good. They're the tough camp counselor slapping the cupcake out of the fat kids' hands. The teaching profession is fat and flabby and needs to be shaped up. Education should be

We need to shake the education tree to shake out the dead wood. We need to stop coddling children and start demanding results (time to start flunking those lazy eight year olds who won't pass their reading tests). School system heads need to act like CEO's so that there will be none of this union protection for the slackers who aren't producing the kind of products we need. Yes, right-sizing any organization can be painful, but it's how we slough off the fat and get those lean, mean corporate profits desired outcomes.

We might also include the reformsters who were dedicated to rooting out the Bad Teachers, like the governor of New York who decided that if two thirds of students were bombing the Big Standardized Test, that must mean that two thirds of all teachers stink, and we'd better keep tweaking the teacher eval system until it's finding us as many crappy teachers as we already know are out there.

These folks knew that reform would create stress for teachers, and they figured that was a good thing because teachers have been fat and happy for too long. It will be better for everyone, they figure, if the system is put through some stress in the process of getting straightened out.

So what?

Then there are the reformsters who knew that teachers would find reform stressful for the same reason that animals find forest fires stressful.

For some the intent has been to redefine what a teaching career means in the same way that McDonalds redefined what it means to be a cook. Rather than trained high-skill professionals, these reformsters want teachers who are easily-replaceable content delivery systems, who simply walk through teacher-proofed programs-in-a-box (if it's Tuesday, you must be on Module 12) and move on before they can demand high salaries, pension payments, or a say in how the school is run. Old school teachers have a hard time fitting into this new role in the same way that The Rock has a hard time fitting into a costume made for a Munchkin. Stressful.

Other reformsters are thinking bigger, longing for more New Orleans-style reform where the public schools are swept away, to be replaced with charters and chains, perfectly refined systems of schools where teachers can come and go and deliver identical content to compliant students.

Of course, where there is no Hurricane Katrina, other crises must be created. Starve the schools for resources. Force them to be judged by terrible B S Tests, stewed in a VAM system that generates ratings so randomly that teachers have to feel that their fate rests on a roll of the data dice.

Stressful? Sure. It's not that these reformsters intend for teachers to feel stress. But these reformsters do intend to bulldoze away the old guard of teachers, and if that's stressful for them, oh well.

The other source of stress ?

Divining intent from results is a tricky business. I teach teenagers, so I have had the conversation a few million times in which we note that just because Chris did something that makes you feel sad, it does not actually follow that Chris intended to make you sad.

But when Chris punches you in the face, and then you point out that it's happening, but Chris goes ahead and punches you in the face some more-- well, at some point you can legitimately infer that the face-punching is intentional, purposeful, and done with full knowledge that you don't like it. Badly written, misused BS Tests are a punch in the face. Making them the center of the school system is another one. Judging schools and teachers based on bad data run through bad magical formulas is a punch in the face. Undermining, demeaning and diminishing the profession is a punch in the face. Stripping the profession of autonomy and freedom to pursue our craft so that we can seek out the best for our students-- that's a punch in the face with a thousand fists.

But for at least a decade, teachers have been inflicting another sort of stress on themselves. I think we've all heard someone say it in a lounge, in a staff meeting, in a classroom-- "It's almost like they actually want us to fail these tests. It's like they actually want the school to look bad." But so many of us don't really want to believe that the people who are supposed to be helping us make schools useful, functional, nurturing places are actually lined up against us-- that's just so scary, so upsetting, so frustrating, so rage-inducing, even so hopeless an idea, that some of us convince ourselves that just couldn't be what's going on. And then we get the extra stress of managing the cognitive dissonance, of holding onto a happier view of the world through the heavy lifting of denial. Like abused children, some teachers deal with the dissonance by telling themselves, "It must be me. It must be my fault. There must be something wrong with me." And we try to keep from creating more of the failure that we never actually manufactured in the first place. Now that is stressful.

Bug or feature?

Yeah, that was my question. And I guess my answer is that for some reformsters it's a bug, for more reformsters it's a feature, and for still other reformsters, it's just a byproduct of trying to privatize and remake a nation's entire education system, the side effect of living in a building that others are trying to demolish while you're still in it with children.

Here's what the current teachers stress is not-- some sort of act of God, some natural event that just happened to land on this generation of teachers. It's the result of deliberate actions, a purposeful assault on the public education system. It's not an accident. It's not a quirk of history on the march. 


The stress for teachers is ultimately the same stress that many professions that have been stripped of their professionalism (nursing, health care, even lawyers), and whether it's the result of ignorance or indifference, the challenge is how much we think we can stand, fight back against, or overcome. I believe we will win in the long run, but that doesn't mean that everyone can stay in the race until we make it home again. All we can do is keep running as hard and long as we can.

Sure, it's stressful. But the most important thing to remember about the stress is that it exists only because we care about the work, because we care about doing the best we can for our so-very-important charges. We feel the stress precisely because we are trying to keep running, no matter what they throw at us or how badly they break the road. We can regret that we were born to teach in these times, and that we face such unnecessary and destructive obstacles. But no matter the stress, we should never regret that we cared enough to try to do some of the most important work in the world.

Don't Wait for the Authorities

This morning we had some professional development from our local police department, The training centered around the ALICE method of dealing with an active shooter. What are we supposed to do when there's an active killer in the building?

ALICE focuses on three choices-- run, hide or fight. There were some specifics mixed, including some of the specifics of blockading a classroom door and making the mental and emotional jump to deciding you will actively, aggressively hurt your attacker. We got into some of the specifics of my building and the classrooms in it. We watched some videos. It was mostly pretty disturbing.

I'm not here to critique the methods mentioned in the presentation, nor am I going to write one more piece reflecting on the general awfulness of a world in which this kind of PD session makes sense for public school teachers and staff. I'm focusing on one moment that stood out.

After being presented with various scenarios and some of the ins and outs of how to respond, we were given one other simple message. That message was that while all three of these were options, it would be up to us as classroom teachers to choose the option that seemed best under the circumstances-- what we knew (or didn't) about the killer, our own students, the situation of our room, what seemed best in the moment.

Our police chief sent a clear message-- while he could give us options, it would be up to us to use our judgment.

Granted, this was a far different context than  instructional PD, but I was still struck by hearing a presenter say, "I'm not here to tell you what to do or what to choose. We have to trust you to use your best judgment."

How rare is it for teachers to hear that message? As opposed to the many sessions in which a presenter says, "I am here to tell you How This Must Be Done." A Common Core aligned-style set of instructions would tell us that we must always respond to every active killer situation with the exact same behavior. "It's important to know," experts would tell us, "that whenever an active shooter walks into any building in this country, the students will react exactly the same way."

The chief said something else striking-- he not only underlined the need for us to use our individual judgment in that moment, but he also kept saying that he was giving us permission to.

Now, I didn't take that as him being all high and mighty and suggesting that we had never previously been free to act without his permission. Instead, what I heard was him saying that we needed to worry less about what we were "supposed" to do, needed to worry less about whether we were following some official policy. Teachers really do worry often and much about whether we are behaving as we are "supposed." We are often lousy rebels. The police were telling us that we should go ahead and rebel, that we should worry less about following some set of rules and worry more about doing whatever it takes to save our students.

These evens, we were told, are generally over in ten to fifteen minutes. Sometimes less. It will likely all be over before any authorities to arrive, so don't wait for them. If it's happening where you are, you are on your own. Use your common sense. Make your best judgment.

It was sobering and more than a little bit depressing. But it was also a bit bracing to hear the message that as classroom teachers, we are the ones who are on the scene. We are the ones in the best position to see what needs to be done, and to do it. The modern message in education is that teachers should not be making any of the important decisions, that teachers should be following the rules and guidelines and programs laid out by the Important People. Don't try to come up with anything on your own. Wait for word from the authorities.

I don't expect to ever have to use my judgment in an active shooter situation (though I have some plans for such an occasion). The vast majority of us never will. But the session was reminder that in the classroom, in maters big and small, educational and emergency, we are the boots on the ground, the folks who are on the scene before first responders even hit the streets. It is up to us to choose, to decide, to lead, to teach. We don't need to wait for the authorities, because we are authorities, and we are already here. Anyone who says otherwise simply doesn't understand the situation.

ICYMI: More Edureading

IIt's a short list this week, but still worth reading.

The Annual Autopsy

You know I love a good analogy. Here's one more way to look at the uselessness of "data."

Education's Failure To Retain Great Teachers

Another look at the sad state of teacher retention in the ed biz.

Seven Things I learned from Attending a Charter School Board Meeting

Nancy Flanagan went to a charter board meeting and had an eye-opening experience.


Campaign Paraphernalia for Great Schools Massachusetts

$9,000,000 ought to buy you a great deal of cool stuff. Here are some suggestions for the out-of-state privatizers who are trying to finance the anti-charter-cap campaign in Massachusetts.

Order in the Court

Also in Massachusetts, the attempt to beat the charter cap by filing a civil rights lawsuit failed. Jennifer Berkshire tells that story.

PA: Charter Laws "Absolute Worst"

States have taken a variety of approaches to the business of replacing public schools with publicly funded private charters. In states like Florida and North Carolina, the focus has been on tearing down the public system to make room for the charters. But in Pennsylvania, the emphasis has been on making charters so easily lucrative that edu-preneurs find getting rich easier than printing money.

PA Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has made charter law one of his regular talking points, and charter operators have provided him with ample fodder.

For instance, back in August Nicholas Trombetta finally pled guilty to a tax conspiracy charge that he had  fought for three years, a charge that he had defrauded taxpayers to the tune of $8 million. These were federal charges brought by a US Attorney in federal court; in other words, the state of Pennsylvania was continuing to let this guy do business as usual.

After the guilty plea, DePasquale took a look at Trombetta's business dealings. Trombetta is the founder-operator of PA Cyber Charter School (until 2012, just before the fertilizer met the fan) and also the founder of Lincoln Performing Arts Center School and some other charter-related businesses. DePasquale found a number of issues, including hiring family members for big-money jobs, and funneling giant gouts of money to a no-oversight management company. All shady and costing the taxpayers millions of dollars, but also, as DePasquale notes, perfectly legal under Pennsylvania charter law. Trombetta was brought to justice in a federal court; the state of Pennsylvania was never going to so much as bother him because, by PA charter law, he was perfectly within his rights to hire a computer company that was co-owned by a trustee (board member).

Or take the Chester Community Charter School, where federal auditors found that, among other things, the owner had written an $11 million check to himself. CCCS uses one of teh oldest dodges in the charter rule book-- the school is listed as a non-profit, but it hires the for-profit corporation CSMI to run all operations. That company is run by Vahan Gureghian, one of the most rapacious edu-preneurs in the state, who has made tens of millions in the charter biz, but apparently has friends in Harrisburg who manage to get him perks, like the time his school was charged with cheating and was then allowed to investigate itself.

This was the same federal report we mentioned earlier this week, in which the auditors noted that the US Department of Education is failing to have any sorts of checks or safeguards against fraud or waste in the charter sector. CCCS made the list as an exemplar of just how open to fraud and waste the system is. So, yay, Pennsylvania.

DePasquale responded to the auditor's report by noting, again, that PA charter law stinks, and that there is little oversight required or even allowed by the laws.

“I have been your Auditor General for a little over three years and in that time we’ve found over $300 million dollars in money that’s basically been wasted in Harrisburg or related state government interests,” said DePasquale, a first-term Democrat. “Absolutely unbelievable. Some of the biggest waste we’ve found has been on the charter school side of it.”

The ability of any Democratic official to get changes made in the GOP-run legislature is-- well, it would be a break from a fairly well-established tradition. But at least DePasquale is busy telling anyone who will listen that Pennsylvania is not protecting the interests of its taxpayers when it comes to tax dollars spent on charter schools. Let's hope somebody will listen.

College Digitized and Privatized

Slice the "a" from 'audacity" and you have Udacity, the leading purveyor of for-profit, on-line college. Udacity is the dean of digitizing, the maharajah of MOOCkery. In them, we can see everything in the digitally privatized future face of higher ed that some folks love and other folks find appalling.

Born in 1967, Sebastian Thrun came from Germany and found a place as a Stanford professor and Google VP. He was the founder of Google X, the big geeky exploratory part of Google, and he has had a hand in everything from hoverboards to self-driving cars.

Thrun is also one of the co-parents of Udacity, an on-line digitized set of courses that can earn you, among other things, nanodegrees, which appear to be the same basic idea as micro-credentials, but which sound slightly more academically legit. Udacity started out as a few computer courses offered for free by Stanford, and its nanodegree offerings still seem primarily tech oriented, with everything from software debugging to interactive rendering to software development to web design to inscrutable-to-laypeople programs like full stack web developer. Plus a couple of Google-specific programs. And currently their most hugely popular offering is one "taught" by Thrun himself-- Self-Driving Car Engineer. SDCE has pulled huge numbers of interested customers students for the course that will cost $2,400 for three twelve-week terms.

The usefulness, effectiveness, and educational validity of Massively Open On-line Courses has been debated from Day One. Late in 2012 a short cyber-debate erupted between Clay Shirky and Aaron Bady. Shirky is a tech writer thinky guy, while Bady is a blogging Cinderella story who rose to prominence because he had some good thoughts, written well, about wikileaks. Their conversation begins here, with Shirky claiming that MOOCs are like recorded music. Bady replied here in Inside Higher Education.

Some of his criticism will seem familiar:

Udacity’s primary obligation is to its investors. That reality will always push it to squeeze as much profit out of its activities as it can. This may make Udacity better at educating, but it also may not; the job of a for-profit entity is not to educate, but to profit, and it will. 

But this next point is new and  interesting, and well worth resurrecting from almost four years ago:

The key difference between academics and venture capitalists, in fact, is not closed versus open but evidence versus speculation. The thing about academics is that they require evidence of success before declaring victory, while venture capitalists can afford to gamble on the odds. While Shirky can see the future revolutionizing in front of us, he is thinking like a venture capitalist when he does, betting on optimism because he can afford to lose. He doesn’t know that he’s right; he just knows that he might not be wrong.

Bady also clearly sees how these on-line institutions like Udacity as pale imitations of real education-- and are meant to be.

The giveaway is when Shirky uses the phrase "non-elite institutions": for Shirky, there are elite institutions for elite students and there are non-elites for everyone else. The elite institutions will remain the same. No one will ever choose Udacity over Harvard or U.Va., and while elite institutions like MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and my own University of California are leaping into the online education world head first, anyone who thinks these online brands will ever compete with "the real thing" will be exactly the kind of sucker who would fork over full price for a watered-down product.

And he lands on this important question:

Why have we stopped aspiring to provide the real thing for everyone? That’s the interesting question, I think, but if we begin from the distinction between "elite" and "non-elite" institutions, it becomes easy to take for granted that "non-elite students" receiving cheap education is something other than giving up. It is important to note that when online education boosters talk about "access," they explicitly do not mean access to "education of the best sort"; they mean that because an institution like Udacity provides teaching for free, you can’t complain about its mediocrity. It’s not an elite institution, and it’s not for elite students. It just needs to be cheap.

Maruia Bustillos, following up on this conversation in The Awl, asked a more pointed version of the same question.

Okay, fine, but let’s get this straight: public money has been mercilessly hacked from California’s education budget for decades, so now we are to give public money, taxpayer money, to private, for-profit companies to take up the slack? Because that is exactly what is happening. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?

Bustillos followed up with Bady, who offered this elaboration on the point:

If you start by not letting education be anything more than what it’s possible to deliver via YouTube — and MOOCs are a little more complicated than that, but essentially all the arguments for the cheapness of MOOCs are based on that model, that it’s something you can digitize and then distribute very cheaply — then if that’s all you want, if you’re satisfied with that, then yeah, MOOCs are great, because they’re cheap. But you’ve already given up on almost everything that the entire academic enterprise has been creating for centuries. So it’s that framing of the conversation, much more than Shirky’s particular argument, that drives me up the wall. 

Emphasis mine. Digitizing education requires that we reduce education to something that will fit in those digits. And aiming it at "non-elites" or "lessers" or "those people" is a cheat because it sets the bar at "well, anything that's better than nothing is an improvement of what Those People were going to get."

In other words, we look at some poor folks who get barely one meal a day and say, "Well, let's get them all a single piece of cold, day-old pizza. Granted, it's a sad shadow of actual decent healthful food, but it's better than nothing." Why are we doing that instead of asking why we can't arrange for those folks to eat as well as we do? Why do we not examine the damning charge implicit in our assumption-- that we are not willing to make sure Those People get something as good as what we've got, that we know in our hearts that we will never willingly pay the cost of getting Those People what the more fortunate among us can take for granted.

Programs like Udacity are cold, dry pizza instead of full, rich healthful education. But they let us off the hook for the problems of Those People. 

Bill Gates Wants Your Tax Dollars

On his blog yesterday, Bill Gates made his pitch to get more our of our tax dollars.

Gates notes that the Presidential campaign hasn't touched much on innovations (which I guess is true if you don't count innovative ways to repackage reality).  Invoking the 1961 moon-shot declaration of John F. Kennedy, Gates wants to make a case for four areas in which the government can spur innovation. With money.

He tries to frame this as a centrist idea by creating an imaginary extreme on one end of the debate:

I’ve heard some people argue that life-changing innovations come exclusively from the private sector. But innovation starts with government support for the research labs and universities working on new insights that entrepreneurs can turn into companies that change the world. The public sector’s investments unlock the private sector’s ingenuity.   

If he means, as his essay suggests, that some people argue that the private sector does these things while refusing any dirty government money, well, I haven't heard anybody argue that. Have you heard, for instance, of any charter schools that have insisted on finding their own funding and have refused any solitary cent of government support? No, me neither.

Gates is arguing for the same old, same old-- private corporations getting their hands on that sweet, sweet pile of tax dollars to fund their enterprise. Gates is arguing that we need to elect leaders who see that the government can make progress on the issues that face us by unlocking innovation with a big fat key made out of money. He cites the space race as one of the great public-private partnerships, but what he doesn't discuss is the manner of the partnership and the rules by which it operated. It's almost as if he thinks that just throwing money at private companies will automatically fix the problems of our world.

Well, four problems of our world.

Provide cheap, clean energy to everyone (without harming the environment).

It's a noble thought, but-- well, is the suggestion here that somehow the big energy companies don't have any money for R&D? Because I'm thinking that the big energy companies are actually wealthier than many nations.

Develop a vaccine for HIV and cure neurodegenerative diseases

And

 Protect the world from future health epidemics

Again, I applaud these goals. But medicine is a great example of how public-private partnerships have come off the rails, as witnessed by medicines like the epi-pen, developed with the support of public tax dollars, and yet manipulated by private interests for maximum private profit. The world of medicine already has a very productive public-private partnership-- the private corporations reap profits and the government keeps rules in place that protect those profits, even when the profits are indefensible and involve drugs that the public already paid to develop.

Give every student and teacher new tools so all students get a world-class education

Well, you knew this was here. Gates calls for "personalized education" with every child hooked up to a computer that will dispense and education. Oh, and teachers can just upload videos of themselves, because technology is never boring and students love to watch videos of teachers. Anyway, the private sector has started work on these things, but it would be great if the feds would kick in some R&D costs, because companies like Microsoft don't really have money for R&D either. Of course, what Gates really skips over here is that he's asking the government to fund a policy change, not a technological one. Gates is asking for funding to change the very nature of what school is and what it's supposed to do (train, in Gates world, rather than educate). Gates isn't just asking for federal help for private companies to create new tech; he's asking for federal cooperation as private companies set new national policy.

What is notably lacking?

You know what would help the government provide funding for all this private innovation? Tax dollars to hand out. You know who's gotten really good at not giving the government tax dollars? Private corporations.

For instance, Microsoft reportedly keeps almost 100 billion dollars in off-shore accounts, allowing it to avoid paying several billion dollars in taxes. They certainly aren't the only company doing this, so we can only imagine the amount of funding the government could provide if it had billions and billions more tax dollars with which to do such funding.

A good step toward that public-private partnership that Gates envisions would be for the private folks to do their part by helping fund the government so that it could unlock innovation with piles of money. Or they could acknowledge that they have held a bunch of money out of government reach and that money constitutes a federal tax rebate.

Mind you, I think public-private partnerships, properly maintained and managed, can be a great thing. But the whole business could start with an honest conversation. And if private companies want to be partners, they could start by acting like partners.