There was much stirring after Bill Gates announced that soon he would be expecting schools to follow a model based off his business, Microsoft, instead of the current model. This would push students to work harder because they are being pinned against each other grading based on a curve. This type of  “Darwinism” can make it so students can fall behind further, it promotes the acceleration of students whom are above the curve, which would be beneficial to an educational system.

One reform this system would include would be more rigorous grading of teachers. Already 36 states improved how they evaluate teachers, but this would make it even harsher on the teachers so that they would continue to be evaluated, but to a stronger degree. Although, teachers have been demoralized in this way, decreasing their rate of satisfaction.

On the topic, history teacher Michael Kaul said, “In order to do that, you first have to develop a criteria to evaluate teachers, and determine things teachers need to be measured on. Test scores alone do not provide adequate enough information for evaluation. There is a personal level of education that cannot be put into grades.”

Grading off a scale means that there is only a certain amount of A’s in a classroom and in order to achieve higher grades it is not necessarily needed to complete all the work in the class, but as long as a student is in the upper half of a class they get graded higher.

This is beneficial to children’s education because it pushes students to become more involved and push harder to achieve good grades. This would be obviously more positive to those students that commonly do their work, but with the amount of remedial courses and social policies such as the “No Child Left Behind Policy” the value of the “A” has decreased. This would be a strong and effective way to bring value back to it.

Another reform that is promoted by the model was the enforcement of teamwork within the school between students. This promotes more group related projects and more team building activities. Activities like this are intended to make a student body feel more like a work team.

Although it is true that team building and bonding helps to draw groups of people together, group projects can prove to be harmful towards students grades, being held down from other student in the group is an issue. It is unfair for those student’s who put in the correct amount of effort and strive for a great project, yet get a bad grade due to others.