TED talk: Blog and video

Today I was looking on TED for an interesting blog page. I came accross issues relating back to highschool drop outs. This blog gives not only a video relating back to Bill Gates' speech on economic issues, but also dealing with education.

The beginning of the blog explains when the air date for the PBS and TED talks education broadcast will be shown. The video segment that is accompanied with the blog displays Bill Gates. He goes on to speak about state budgets and why they are important for us to keep in mind. The two main reasons he gives deals with; Big money, and Little scrutiny. He mentions that there is a deficit of 10%, where the money seems to be lost, and that there is little notice of how this amount of money goes unaccounted for. Gates tried to explain issues among revenue imbalances and how they were found, or covered up. He uses California as an example (Mostly due to the idea of that's where he is giving this segment of the TED talk), and mentions some of the ways that the issues of deficit go unnoticed; Borrowing money from private markets, borrow more from taxpayers and withhold about 110%, deferring school payments, and sell off revenue from tobacco products. One of the major points he goes over is with the healthcare issue, which will need even more money shoved into it. With the lack of money going to healthcare, money will be cut by half that will be for Education spending and funding.

He also mentions some of the impacts that an issue or procedure like this is going to have on education, such as no incentives for excellence, no bold experiements and no teacher effectiveness measurement. Towards the end of his speech, he gives a few mentions of books that parents, teachers and basically everyone should look into that deals with spending, Educational Economics: Where Do School Funds Go? by Marguerite Roza is one of the books that he mentions. He also mentions that there needs to be a strive for better accounting, like private accounting.

I think that this is somethign that should be looked at. Because of state funding issues, and it's not only happening within California, but elsewhere. This all relates back to tuitions, affecting high schools to colleges.