State Budgets and the Worsening of Education System in the U.S.: Presented by Bill Gates

Name
Institutional Affiliation
Reflection 2: State Budgets and the Worsening of Education System in the U.S.: Presented by Bill Gates (Founder of Microsoft)
Date of the Lecture and Speaker’s Background
The talk “How state budgets are breaking U.S. schools” by Bill Gates was in March 2, 2011. Bill Gates is an enthusiastic techie and often referred to as a shrewd business mogul. While at Microsoft, the company he cofounded, he transformed the world in the technology industry. He is now pursuing the same cause of changing lives through his philanthropic work and his incessant passion to innovate.
Summary of the Topic Presented
In this talk, Bill Gates points that the school systems in the United States are financed by 50 states, and that the state budgets are flooded with accounting tricks that often disguise the actual cost of pensions and health care cost, which are burdened with the ever-worsening federal deficits. The education system, according to Gates stands to lose. The stakeholders in the education system seem to be interested in either their special interests or short-term goals that leaves them with no chance to think about the real implications this could have in the future.
The speaker points out that the problem emerged due to an assumption that state budgets are largely balanced, while hiding the reality that there are holes in spending, a case that led to the Enron scandal. Such an imbalance in spending, according to Gates, would escalate in a crisis in the education system, where little funding will go to science and innovation, with California, Microsoft and Google spending about 100, 38 and 19 billion respectively. Gates suggests that if new tools such as the Internet, good books and sustainable accounting practices are exploi...