Motivation and method matter more.

Bill Gates is smarter than this:

[Gates] said government needs to invest more money in education and training, especially in high school math and science, as well as in job training programs.

“Our high schools are no longer a path to opportunity and success, but a barrier to both,” Gates told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, chaired by Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“While most students enter high school wanting to succeed, too many end up bored, unchallenged and disengaged from the high school curriculum — ‘digital natives’ caught up in an industrial-age learning model,” he said.

I fail to see how more money to support the same structure we now have will produce anything other than more boredom and lagging in the global market. He goes on to recommend more “No Child Left Behind” goodness, in the process. I know a teacher or two. More “No Child Left Behind” is the opposite of what we need. Reform the system by taking the government out of it. Let the private market figure out how best to educate children. Then we should discuss how to pay for it. Until then, money will solve nothing.

He makes the same mistake in requesting more federal money for basic scientific research. But I agree with his sentiments on allowing foreigners to achieve permanent resident status.