Bill Gates: Charters Should Lead Innovation
The nation's charter schools should use their freedoms to boldly innovate and create promising strategies and practices that can be used by all schools, Bill Gates said to an audience of thousands of charter school operators and supporters this morning.
Gates, the founder of Microsoft, is the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more funding to education than any other philanthropy in the nation. He expanded on his remarks and answered questions about a few more subjects in an interview with me after his public remarks.
"The fact is the majority of children in the country are attending schools that don't work for them. So it's imperative that we take the risk to make change," Gates said to the audience at the National Charter Schools Conference in Chicago. "Not just small change at the margin, but dramatic changes that are centered around the student. I believe the seeds of that new approach are