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2009 Annual Letter from Bill Gates: U.S. Education

The letter contains the
Gates vision on many health and education
topics. Here is the view on education. For the
rest, go to the url below. This shows what
we're up against in education policy. When Big
Money speaks, everybody listens, particularly
corporate politico and the media. They don't
just listen; they grovel.

Bill Gates

I was lucky enough to accumulate the wealth
that is going into the foundation because I got
a great education and was born in the United
States, where innovation and risk-taking are
rewarded. Warren Buffett is very articulate
about how every American, including him, is
lucky to have been born here. He calls us
winners of the “ovarian lottery.”

But even within the United States, there is a
big gap between people who get the chance to
make the most of their talents and those who
don’t. Melinda and I believe that providing
everyone with a great education is the key to
closing this gap. If your parents are poor, you
need a good education in order to have the
equal opportunity that our founders promoted
for every citizen. And for the country as a
whole, we believe improving education is the
key to retaining our position of world
leadership in all areas, including starting
great businesses and doing innovative research.
So in addition to the foundation’s work to
improve the lives of the poorest worldwide, we
started our U.S. Program to help reduce
inequity in the United States.

The private high school I attended, Lakeside in
Seattle, made a huge difference in my life. The
teachers fueled my interests and encouraged me
to read and learn as much as I could. Without
those teachers I never would have gotten on the
path of getting deeply engaged in math and
software. Melinda first started using computers
when she was in high school, at a time when
that was still unusual, and then she got to
study computer science and business in college,
which led to a great career at Microsoft.

How many kids don’t get the same chance to
achieve their full potential? The number is
very large. Every year, 1 million kids drop out
of high school. Only 71 percent of kids
graduate from high school within four years,
and for minorities the numbers are even worse—
58 percent for Hispanics and 55 percent for
African Americans. If the decline in childhood
deaths I mentioned earlier is one of the most
positive statistics ever, these are some of the
most negative. The federal No Child Left Behind
Act isn’t perfect, but it has forced us to look
at each school’s results and realize how poorly
we are doing overall. It surprises me that more
parents are not upset about the education their
own kids are receiving.

Nine years ago, the foundation decided to
invest in helping to create better high
schools, and we have made over $2 billion in
grants. The goal was to give schools extra
money for a period of time to make changes in
the way they were organized (including reducing
their size), in how the teachers worked, and in
the curriculum. The hope was that after a few
years they would operate at the same cost per
student as before, but they would have become
much more effective.

Many of the small schools that we invested in
did not improve students’ achievement in any
significant way. These tended to be the schools
that did not take radical steps to change the
culture, such as allowing the principal to pick
the team of teachers or change the curriculum.
We had less success trying to change an
existing school than helping to create a new
school.

Even so, many schools had higher attendance and
graduation rates than their peers. While we
were pleased with these improvements, we are
trying to raise college-ready graduation rates,
and in most cases, we fell short.

But a few of the schools that we funded
achieved something amazing. They replaced
schools with low expectations and low results
with ones that have high expectations and high
results. These schools are not selective in
whom they admit, and they are overwhelmingly
serving kids in poor areas, most of whose
parents did not go to college. Almost all of
these schools are charter schools that have
significantly longer school days than other
schools.

I have had a chance to spend time at a number
of these schools, including High Tech High in
San Diego and the Knowledge Is Power Program,
or “KIPP,” in Houston. There is a wonderful new
book out about KIPP called Work Hard. Be Nice.,
by the education reporter Jay Mathews. It’s an
inspiring look at how KIPP has accomplished
these amazing results and the barriers they
faced.

It is invigorating and inspirational to meet
with the students and teachers in these schools
and hear about their aspirations. They talk
about how the schools they were in before did
not challenge them and how their new school
engages all of their abilities. These schools
aim to have all of their kids enter four-year
colleges, and many of them achieve that goal
with 90 percent to 100 percent of their
students. Every visit energizes me to work to
get most high schools to be like this.

These successes and failures have underscored
the need to aim high and embrace change in
America’s schools. Our goal as a nation should
be to ensure that 80 percent of our students
graduate from high school fully ready to attend
college by 2025. This goal will probably be
more difficult to achieve than anything else
the foundation works on, because change comes
so slowly and is so hard to measure. Unlike
scientists developing a vaccine, it is hard to
test with scientific certainty what works in
schools. If one school’s students do better
than another school’s, how do you determine the
exact cause? But the difficulty of the problem
does not make it any less important to solve.
And as the successes show, some schools are
making real progress.

Based on what the foundation has learned so
far, we have refined our strategy. We will
continue to invest in replicating the school
models that worked the best. Almost all of
these schools are charter schools. Many states
have limits on charter schools, including
giving them less funding than other schools.
Educational innovation and overall improvement
will go a lot faster if the charter school
limits and funding rules are changed.

One of the key things these schools have done
is help their teachers be more effective in the
classroom. It is amazing how big a difference a
great teacher makes versus an ineffective one.
Research shows that there is only half as much
variation in student achievement between
schools as there is among classrooms in the
same school. If you want your child to get the
best education possible, it is actually more
important to get him assigned to a great
teacher than to a great school.

Whenever I talk to teachers, it is clear that
they want to be great, but they need better
tools so they can measure their progress and
keep improving. So our new strategy focuses on
learning why some teachers are so much more
effective than others and how best practices
can be spread throughout the education system
so that the average quality goes up. We will
work with some of the best teachers to put
their lectures online as a model for other
teachers and as a resource for students.

Finally, our foundation has learned that
graduating from high school is not enough
anymore. To earn enough to raise a family, you
need some kind of college degree, whether it’s
a certificate or an associate’s degree or a
bachelor’s degree. So last year we started
making grants to help more students graduate
from college. Our focus will be on helping
improve community colleges and reducing the
number of kids who start community college but
don’t finish.






— Bill Gates
letter
2009-02-12
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/annual-letter/Pages/2009-united-states-education.aspx

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