A Glimmer in the Darkness

I've been saying for some time on this blog that we are in a cultural depression and not a financial one. There is no difference between having a huge swath of young, black men in prison and finding ourselves over our heads in debt. They are one and the same. We wanted all the benefits, but weren't willing to work for them whether that was sex or goodies. Sex without marriage means boys without fathers which leads to lots of young men in prison. Buying things on credit without the ability to pay it back means bankruptcy.

Recently, over at the Marginal Revolution blog, comes this tiny sliver of good news.

Bill Gates, now a full-time philanthropist, gave a good talk. Especially interesting was the section on his efforts to improve education. Bill’s first multi-billion dollar efforts in this area were not very successful. It’s now clear he sees the problem as much more political than technological. He noted, for example, that a New York law actually prohibits data on student performance to be used in a teacher’s tenure decision. Amazingly, in some union contracts a principal is allowed to enter a teacher’s classroom for the purpose of evaluation only once in a year and the teacher must be given advance notice! This is much harder hitting stuff than Bill has been saying over the past few years although he still isn’t talking about vouchers and competition which is a must to improve the education system.

Bill Gates, the ultimate example of success and thoroughly steeped in our modern culture of do-your-own-thing, is finally seeing the light. Eventually, he and the libertarians will learn that vouchers will fail as well since children from single parent homes do just as poorly in private schools as they do in public ones. Still, this is a good first step. A billionaire with his heart in the right place is having the scales fall from his eyes and is learning about the real world.

I'm encouraged.