What's Bill Gates Doing for U.S.?

With the launch of The Gates Notes blog and tweets from @BillGates, it's never been easier to treat Bill Gates like just another of your social networking friends. Except for the fact that his to-do list, as detailed in his annual letter for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, includes wiping out pneumonia, malaria, and HIV transmission in the developing world.

Here in the U.S., the Gates Foundation has three areas of concern to address: improving teacher effectiveness, driving online education, and "a PC in every library." Of these three, the last is complete, in the sense that the foundation has overseen the installation of 49,000 computers--the lively question now is whether libraries are equipped to maintain and upgrade the hardware and software.

Online learning is an area where, like other successful pitchmen, Gates can actually claim to use the product. His post about The Teaching Company details how the Harvard drop-out has been feverishly adding to his store of knowledge without disrupting the night classes his local community college. (He also namechecks OpenCourseware from MIT, and Academic Earth.)

The online learning audience Gates sees as a dual-platform: both teachers and students. He wants teachers to be able to learn from the best among them. This ties in with his push for ways to measure and improve teacher effectiveness. It's the sort of thing that can make teachers with 30-year-old textbooks and over-capacity classrooms twitch like Clouseau's boss, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, in the Pink Panther movies. But you'd be surprised--or not--at what money can do in terms of opening doors:

To help develop an evaluation system to improve teacher effectiveness, in November we committed $335 million to partnerships in Memphis, Tennessee; Hillsborough County, Florida; Pittsburgh; and Los Angeles. The involvement and support of the union representatives in each of these locations was a key part of their selection.

Gates envisions teachers receiving pay incentives for excellence, which seems to fly in the face of Daniel Pink's model for motivation, where extrinsic motivators are only briefly effective, and are often counter-productive for the long-term. Pink argues that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are where it's at, and from my exposure to teachers who don't burn out, autonomy is a fiercely guarded job benefit.

The challenge will be to present "teacher effectiveness" in terms of mastery, and clearly delineate the ways in which such a program will avoid cookie-cutter protocols. My admittedly naive sense is that if money does enter into the equation, it perhaps ought to enter in the form of educational equity, so that teachers in poor and rural areas don't have to choose between their own poverty and a life with purpose.