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High Tech High 2.0
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Mar 08, 2007 10:27 AM
from the you-wanted-backward-compatibility? dept.
from the you-wanted-backward-compatibility? dept.
theodp writes "A week ago, in his How to Keep America Competitive Op-Ed, Bill Gates touted the Gates Foundation-backed High Tech High as the future of American education. One small problem. Two days earlier, tearful Bay Area High Tech High students — recruited by a Bill Gates video — were told that their school of the future has no future. So would Bill be too embarrassed to lay out his education plan before the Senate Wednesday? Nah. Not too surprisingly though, mentions of High Tech High were MIA in Bill's prepared remarks (PDF), which touted Philly's imaginatively named $65M School of the Future, built under the guidance of Microsoft, as the new school of the future. Committee politicians reportedly embraced virtually all of the suggestions made by Gates."
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Sigh (Score:2)
Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation (Score:3, Informative)
There was also, more to the point, this story via the Register: Gates demands better schools as Gates-backed school closes [theregister.co.uk] and this much more detailed story [insidebayarea.com].
If this is an example of how the deals are made and how things are managed, it points to another classic example of 'the microsoft touch' screwing things up. It quickly reads as a tremendous gift of techn
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Aren't you the cock-eyed optimist.
Useful translates into one of two things:
Skills which are marketable and courses which threaten no one.
No difference, fundamentally,
High tech high? (Score:4, Funny)
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I hope they are refering to this: (Score:2)
and not this:
Wonder Drug Inspires Deep, Unwavering Love Of Pharmaceutical Companies [theonion.com]
naturally (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course they embraced his ideas. Hes the richest man in the world. Every politician want s to be him.
Re:naturally (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
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Which is completely correct considering how corrupt the Philadelphia political scene, as a whole, is. The rest of the state funnels tens of millions of dollars worth of subsidies to the city every year to prop it up. For example, the South Eastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA), which provides bus se
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.25 cent is 1/4 of 1 cent. You need 100 of those to make up a quarter. ".25 dollar" is a quarter.
Re:naturally (Score:5, Funny)
And then they'll Extend and Extinguish them?
Parent
H-1Bs are not the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
If America wants to stay competitive, force these companies to start paying real salaries for scientists and engineers. People will seek these career fields if the salaries are right, and the supply problem will go away.
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The real problem with the H1B program is that it exports a bunch of knowledge for no good reason. The bright folks who want to come here should be encouraged to stay, not to stay for a while.
They'd better be profitable; consider alternatives (Score:2)
More importantly, we have to ensure that it's profitable. America can't compete with the Third World on wages; it's just not going to happen. The cost of living here is just too high, and unless we want to reduce our standard of living in order to reduce the costs, we have to figure out a way to shield American compan
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If green cards were easier to obtain, and they weren't beholden to the employer who sponsors them, they would.
Of course, then they could shop the market, and they could demand a salary as high as the rest of us. So of course the corporations will never allow that to happen.
The top-level poster is spot on, all these other excuses are to divert attention from the money. It is *always* about the money. In the long term
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As specified by the employer. You forgot that part.
'Competitive' in the Silicon Valley, an area with a very high cost of living, is being defined as just under 40K/year for a Level 1 Engineer. That's the bottom quintile of starting salaries for a person with a title 'Engineer' in the DOL western region. After the H-1B wage slave pays taxes, and placement fees to the H-1B agency (or worse, works directly through such an agency structured as a consulting firm that takes a su
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The only advice I can think of for someone choosing a career today is to find something that cannot be offshored.
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They'll be automating those jobs away soon.
$65 million school of the future? (Score:3, Funny)
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Divide by 42.
Carry the one.
"$#&%! We're $300 Million in the hole!"
"Nah, we'll just ask congress to write it off until they're all paying social security, and get a huge tax break now!"
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PR, PR (Score:2)
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---and, it would seem, very successfully, as well.
But the Geek always stumbles badly when he equates his opinion of Microsoft with the public's opinion of Microsoft. How Boss's Deeds Buff A Firm's Reputation [wsj.com]
The point spread is narrow between companies that score well. Cold comfort for the Geek in that.
1 Microsoft
4 Google
8 Sony
11 Amazon
13 Disney
16 Intel
22 Apple
23 Dell
37 Verizon
38 HP
40 Wal-Mart
49 Time-Warner
58 Co
Unfortunately No Parents? (Score:3, Interesting)
That may be intentional or not & might be true or not in the actual school experience, that parents are ignored, but without parent involvement, encouragement & support, there will not be the achievement that everyone wants.
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Competitiveness? Hah! (Score:5, Insightful)
And so, is this the man we want as an example of technological brilliance? He should be inspiring young kids in MBA school, not the future engineers and programmers. His business sense goes against the entire philosophy of having a high tech school - it seems that he made his money by preventing technological advancement.
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Windows 95 came with a TCP stack included. OS/2 required you to spend an extra $80 to get the "Warp Connect" package if you intended to use the Internet. In 1995.
IBM's OS/2-native Web Explorer browser was also at all times at least one full major release behind Netscape, feature-wise.
Windows 95 took the market because it was a better consumer OS than OS/2.
Poker (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like the bay area kids have to upgrade! (Score:2)
MS != US (Score:5, Insightful)
it is not grounds to dismiss Gates' points.
America needs smarter citizens.
(who respect intelligence, and don't vote for certifiably stupid leaders)
America needs to be attractive to the best and brightest from around the world.
This requires focusing on education and immigration policy reform.
Please lets not get sidetracked on the MS bashing stuff when bigger issues abound.
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Nonsense. America already *has* plenty of smart citizens.
The problem with America is that many of its very smart/skilled citizens are currently unemployed or underemployed, but a very small investment of time could make those people productive again. A few hours of time in some cases, or even no training at all in some cases.
When I was unemployed a few years ago, I was turned down for literally *dozens* of positions that I could have easily stepped into with a few hou
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Thus the modern edumacashun system.
Besides, if we are ALL the BEST, then wouldn't that just make everyone AVERAGE ??
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This is clearly why India and Japan so completely dominate the world markets. The only way to end the massive depression the US has been in for the past 20 years is to improve our educational system, otherwise we'll just become a subsidiary of Japan, Inc.
Bill Gates says "Jump", the world says "HOW HIGH" (Score:5, Insightful)
Infuriating, but not at all surprising. Outside the geek world-- and very few geeks seem to realise this-- people think Bill Gates is a role model to be followed. He's the richest guy in the world, so people in our highly capitalist, money-obsessed society are prone to hang on his every word. Much like Christian apologists, they note the good ("Bill Gates gives billions to charity") whilst ignoring the bad (e.g. "he made those billions via anticompetitive, illegal means" / "his Foundation is a huge tax break and PR boost for himself, and has been used as a tool to push Windows on developing nations who can't afford it"). They believe that simply because he is obscenely wealthy, he is necessarily a good guy. Everyone likes to root for the biggest fish in the pond. Everyone likes to root for the winner, and Bill Gates is undoubtedly a winner. It's sad, but true-- most of the world thinks Gates is a great guy.
History doesn't look upon, say, Andrew Carnegie as a good guy simply because he gave away obscene amounts of money, but the average American today is lot more greedy, selfish and short-sighted than their counterpart of Carnegie's time, evidently...
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And that is the power of money and mindshare. My x-father-in-law and I had many debates about the merrits of Bill. He believed that in order to be one of the richest men in the world, he had to be really smart, innovative, have a great business savvy, work ethic, and could do no wrong.
I argued (from experience) that his business practices were shady (and driven from the top, so him and Balmer), that his success was from right time and connections, many succes
Did Bill lobby for more visas for HS students too? (Score:5, Funny)
Would *you* ever want to be described as a "committee politician"?
Are you saying... (Score:2, Funny)
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quiting from the dress code pdf on HTH's website:
In order to make HTHB a community where everyone feels safe, until further notice there will be restrictions on red and blue clothing.[...]
Bill and Company are good at diverting blame (Score:2, Interesting)
high tech high (Score:3, Funny)
Windows Vista Ultimate High Class List (Score:2)
A few weeks ago, an anonymous person emailed me this list. They said it fell out of Bill Gates' briefcase:
High Tech Education Concept - Windows Vista Ultimate High Class Descriptions
why education technology has failed schools (Score:2)
http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-educatio n-technology-has-failed.html [blogspot.com]
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTech nologyHasFailedSchools.html [sourceforge.net]
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving
Nice! (Score:4, Insightful)
No wonder education in America is fucked.
"It's the curriculum, stupid" -- 3 years at HTHB (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, here's what the articles aren't saying: the school sucked. The articles are making a big deal about the money issue, and yes, they are closing because of the money, but the reason they don't have funds is that they're incredibly under enrolled, and they're under enrolled because they've had so many students leave.
Initially, we had really high hopes for the school, and the first year wasn't that bad -- some good teachers, some mediocre teachers. The next year they had a new principal, and there were more mediocre teachers. As an example, that year all 10th graders (like my son) were in Chemistry. They had no lab equipment, and the instructor frequently taught them just *wrong things*. Wrong as in, the wrong value for Avogadro's number. Since the class was supposed to be a lab science, they were told they had to be doing lab work weekly. To meet that requirement, they did a "learning to measure" lab. And the next week, they did it again. For weeks on end, they essentially repeated the same basic labwork, so that the school could say they were participating in a lab component. At the end of the year, the administration apologized and admitted that they hadn't actually learned any Chemistry. Oh, and at the end of that year, many of the remaining *good* teachers left.
So, by this year, they had something like 30 seniors, and were losing those fast. They've had attrition at two ends of the spectrum. They lost students dropping out or failing out, but they have also continued to lose students at the high end of the academic spectrum. My son, for example, studied two years of math in one year in his first year there, because he was allowed to have a more independent study approach. His sophomore year he was studying Calculus with two other students, but the teacher they had assigned to oversee them -- the "10th grade math" teacher -- couldn't actually *understand* math at the pre-Calc or Calc level, so he didn't give them any tests, couldn't grade their homework, etc. For the second semester, the school agreed to have the students take community college math classes instead. That would have been fine, except the next year, they decided the students should rejoin their grade level math classes -- now 2 years behind -- and just do that.
I have tons of stories like this -- my son being taught flat out wrong things, having some classes where they learned a lot about one "project-based" subject, but had huge gaps in other areas. While some of the instructors were incredible people and really engaged my son, increasingly that wasn't true.
But what made him leave in the end was the paucity of college assistance. My son's aiming pretty high for schools, but the school was pretty much set to tell students "Pick a University of California school you want to apply to, and a Cal State school, and you're done!" Son has watched some very gifted students fall through the cracks because there wasn't enough coaching in place to help kids find and apply for schools other than that. So we reached a point where it began to appear that staying at HTHB was going to negatively impact his ability to be accepted at the schools he really wanted to attend. He ended up transfering to another small charter school, where he's doing his senior year now.
It sort of frustrates me as a parent to see all the focus be on the money situation at the school. If the school hadn't had ongoing problems with the quality of education, if it hadn't driven away high-achieving students by saying things like "academic quiz teams are not in keeping with the school's
Oh, and about the Microsoft touch (Score:3, Informative)