Eradicate malaria – here’s how


Explanation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:

See the Gates Foundation site, “Can we really eradicate malaria?”

How many times do they call for a return to DDT?

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Africa, Asia, Disease, Health care, Malaria, Politics, Public health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to Eradicate malaria – here’s how

  1. NYC Educator says:
    May 25, 2009 at 8:57 am

    I wish I could agree it would bleed over. But there’s just no comparison between charters and public schools, and the only miracle about them is their spotty results, as well as lack of transparency. If you let me run my public school with the latitude charter owners get, with kids of 100% proactive parents, you’ll see an incredible improvement. If you let me cut the dropouts from my final results and not replace them when they go, the improvement will be even more stellar. And if you give me the option to get rid of kids who don’t fit my agenda, as well as those whose parents won’t participate, well, it would be nothing short of a miracle.

    If you believe Gates and his ilk. Also, you have to believe that excluding unions or creating “union-lite” arrangements which offer no job protection will somehow benefit kids. The glaring flaw in the philosophy of “reformers” like Gates is that you need to ignore the fact that kids grow up to become adults. It behooves us to leave them better, not worse, job prospects.

    And real union, for the survival of the middle class, needs to be part of it.

    Maybe he’s doing the right thing with malaria. But that doesn’t excuse his ignorance about education, be it woeful or willful.

    Like

  2. Ed Darrell says:
    May 24, 2009 at 9:18 pm

    I don’t understand his fascination with KIPP, either. We’ve got a KIPP school here in Oak Cliff (south of the Trinity River in Dallas) that gets a lot of attention. Not to brag, but our social studies department in our previously failing school in the Dallas schools is about 10 years ahead of schedule — we raised results a couple of points, to go deeper into “exemplary” territory. KIPP has some useful ideas.

    I have this nagging suspicion that KIPP results are all Hawthorne Effect. In fact, I suspect much of what passes as “successful experimentation” in improving education is Hawthorne Effect. (See here, and here, too.)

    My suspicions are not assuaged by Ed.D. administrators who give blank stares when we talk about the effect, and who have never done research outside of education. I think a lot of what passes as research in education would be labeled fraud in any hard science.

    But his group is working seriously to end malaria. Eradication is an overly ambitious goal, but it beats the goal of DDT-poisoned anti-science types who rail against Rachel Carson without cause or data.

    Maybe the scientific pursuit of action in malaria will bleed over into his pursuit of excellence in education.

    Like

  3. NYC Educator says:
    May 24, 2009 at 6:51 pm

    I think he’s got twin goals–eradicate malaria and eradicate public education. I can’t much opine on Bill’s insights on malaria, but I watched him give a speech about KIPP in which he expressed utter amazement at educational practices I see at work every day. It’s remarkable how when people get enough money, they become authorities on public education, even though their kids wouldn’t patronize it on a bet.

    Like

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