Yes that Bill Gates.
I know a lot of progressives hate Bill Gates. They see him as a corporate vampire who built an empire by sucking the creative blood out of all his rivals, and perhaps that is not a wildly inaccurate account of his leadership of Microsoft.
But now there is this new side we have been able to see of Bill Gates. It turns out that he is also an amazingly generous person, anxious to deploy his prodigious skills and talents to solving the problems he finds in the world. We all hear so much abut the work he has done through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to address medical problems in Africa and elsewhere. At the same time, however, he has busied himself addressing the deficiencies of American education that compelled him as head of Microsoft to hire thousands of engineers from other countries. He realized more tangibly than most people how the American educational system was failing the students and in turn failing the country, and he has worked to test models and discover solutions to the low math and science test scores, the low achievement in general, and inequality of access across the country.
If the next Secretary of Education is going to be charged with repairing the generational problems of American education and especially the disastrous effects of the No Child Left Behind diversion of recent years, we will need someone who is innovative, non-ideological, and willing to try brand new ideas, from which the workable models are selected.
Like Mr. Obama himself in his work with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Gates has long taken great interest in reforming America’s schools. He has frequently bemoaned the fact that he had to hire so many of his engineers from Delhi and Bangalore because American schools were just not producing enough well-prepared students. He has spent billions through the Gates Foundation on early education scholarships, school reform efforts, and the like. Look at the broad overlap between the Gates Foundation’s Educational programs and the Gates Foundation’s Educational programs and the Obama Education agenda Obama Education agenda.
Whatever else people think about him, Gates has proven himself capable of clearly analyzing a problem, testing possible solutions, and arriving at frequently cunning approaches.
Several of the other figures being mentioned are highly qualified and would undoubtedly do a great job, but would there be any better way to highlight education in the Obama era than to put the high profile and innovative Bill Gates in the cabinet? Perhaps the same results could be obtained with the selection of Colin Powell, another wildcard sort of pick who has devoted much of his second career life to education. But I think Gates is the best pick.