Improving U.S. schools tougher than global health, Gates says
Bill Gates, whose foundation has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into K-12 education and influenced state and federal policy to embrace charter schools, teacher evaluation and the Common Core academic standards, said Thursday that trying to improve education is harder than work on global health.
“When we come up with a new malaria vaccine, nobody votes to undo our malaria vaccine,” Gates said in a speech at his foundation’s Seattle headquarters. “So it’s pretty
steady progress. Every year is better than the last.”
steady progress. Every year is better than the last.”
But when you’re dealing with 100,000 public schools, politics makes changes to K-12 education much less predictable, he said.
“Because of its complexity, the relationship to management, how labor is one, you can introduce a system ... and people say, ‘No, we’d rather have no system at all, completely leave us alone,’ ” he said. “That’s a real possibility, if you don’t nurture these systems and get it so there’s critical mass. That’s a level of uncertainty that we don’t have in most areas we work in.”
Gates and his wife, Melinda, who co-chair the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reflected on the past 15 years and spoke about their plans for the future. They pledged to continue pumping resources into the Common Core State Standards in K-12 math and reading as well as efforts to improve teacher quality and personalize instruction.
Both Bill and Melinda spoke, and then answered questions from moderator Gwen Ifill of the PBS NewsHour.
The Gates Foundation has spent more than $200 million in a campaign to create the Common Core State Standards and get them adopted by 42 states as well as the District of Columbia. The Common Core State Standards spell out the skills and knowledge every student should possess by the end of each grade. They were designed to inject some consistency into the country’s public schools, where education has traditionally varied wildly across state borders.
Bill Gates said he never anticipated the political pushback to the Common Improving U.S. schools tougher than global health, Gates says - The Washington Post: