[LUAU] Bill Gates on high school standards

[Jim Thompson]

I thought people might be interested reading Bill Gates' speech to  
National Education Summit on High Schools:

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/MediaCenter/Speeches/BillgSpeeches/ 
BGSpeechNGA-050226.htm  or in-line below.  Its ok, it doesn't say  
"Microsoft" or "Windows" anywhere.  In fact, the only use of  
"computers" is to illustrate how antiquated today's high-schools are.   
See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/28/politics/28govs.html

Also, Jaron Lanier and Will Wright (designer of "Sim City" & "The  
Sims") had some interesting ideas on a "pure greed" argument for  
funding (high) schools. We'll need that generation to make a lot of  
money in order to pay down the mounting deficit and the value of  
computer games (and play) as a learning device.  (Echo's of Papert,  
though he's never mentioned.)

This is an audio recording (MP3 or AAC).

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail384.html


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Prepared remarks by Bill Gates, Co-founder

Thank you for that kind introduction.

I also want to thank you, Governor Warner, and your fellow governors,  
for your leadership in hosting this education summit on America’s high  
schools. It is rare to bring together people with such broad  
responsibilities and focus their attention on one single issue. But if  
there is one single issue worth your focused attention – it is the  
state of America’s high schools. 

  Many of us here have stories about how we came to embrace high schools  
as an urgent cause. Let me tell you ours.

  Everything Melinda and I do through our foundation is designed to  
advance equity. Around the world, we believe we can do the most by  
investing in health – especially in the poorest countries.

  Here in America, we believe we can do the most to promote equity  
through education.

  A few years ago, when Melinda and I really began to explore  
opportunities in philanthropy, we heard very compelling stories and  
statistics about how financial barriers kept minority students from  
taking their talents to college and making the most of their lives.

That led to one of the largest projects of our foundation. We created  
the Gates Millennium Scholars program to ensure that talent and energy  
meet with opportunity for thousands of promising minority students who  
want to go to college.  

  Many of our Scholars come from tough backgrounds, and they could bring  
you to tears with their hopeful plans for the future. They reinforced  
our belief that higher education is the best possible path for  
promoting equality and improving lives here in America. 

  Yet – the more we looked at the data, the more we came to see that  
there is more than one barrier to college. There’s the barrier of being  
able to pay for college; and there’s the barrier of being prepared for  
it. 

  When we looked at the millions of students that our high schools are  
not preparing for higher education – and we looked at the damaging  
impact that has on their lives – we came to a painful conclusion:  

  America’s high schools are obsolete.  

  By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken,  
flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of  
those points.   

  By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working  
exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know  
today. 

  Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is  
like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old  
mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.     

  Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of  
another age.  Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st  
century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions  
of Americans every year.

  Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready  
for college, work, and citizenship.  

  The other two-thirds, most of them low-income and minority students,  
are tracked into courses that won’t ever get them ready for college or  
prepare them for a family-wage job – no matter how well the students  
learn or the teachers teach.  

  This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.  

  In district after district, wealthy white kids are taught Algebra II  
while low-income minority kids are taught to balance a check book!  

  The first group goes on to college and careers; the second group will  
struggle to make a living wage. 

  Let’s be clear. Thanks to dedicated teachers and principals around the  
country, the best-educated kids in the United States are the  
best-educated kids in the world. We should be proud of that. But only a  
fraction of our kids are getting the best education.  

  Once we realize that we are keeping low-income and minority kids out  
of rigorous courses, there can be only two arguments for keeping it  
that way – either we think they can’t learn, or we think they’re not  
worth teaching. The first argument is factually wrong; the second is  
morally wrong. 

  Everyone who understands the importance of education; everyone who  
believes in equal opportunity; everyone who has been elected to uphold  
the obligations of public office should be ashamed that we are breaking  
our promise of a free education for millions of students.  

  For the sake of our young people and everyone who will depend on them  
– we must stop rationing education in America.    

  I’m not here to pose as an education expert. I head a corporation and  
a foundation. One I get paid for – the other one costs me. But both  
jobs give me a perspective on education in America, and both  
perspectives leave me appalled.  

  When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling  
abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In math and  
science, our 4th graders are among the top students in the world. By  
8th grade, they’re in the middle of the pack. 

  By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all  
industrialized nations.   

  We have one of the highest high school dropout rates in the  
industrialized world. Many who graduate do not go onto college. And  
many who do go on to college are not well-prepared – and end up  
dropping out. That is one reason why the U.S. college dropout rate is  
also one of the highest in the industrialized world. The poor  
performance of our high schools in preparing students for college is a  
major reason why the United States has now dropped from first to fifth  
in the percentage of young adults with a college degree.  

  The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but  
so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more  
students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice  
as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six  
times as many graduates majoring in engineering.

  In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply  
of knowledge workers, America is falling behind. 

  That is the heart of the economic argument for better high schools. It  
essentially says: “We’d better do something about these kids not  
getting an education, because it’s hurting us.” But there’s also a  
moral argument for better high schools, and it says: “We’d better do  
something about these kids not getting an education, because it’s  
hurting them.”  

  Today, most jobs that allow you to support a family require some  
postsecondary education. This could mean a four-year college, a  
community college, or technical school. Unfortunately, only half of all  
students who enter high school ever enroll in a postsecondary  
institution. 

  That means that half of all students starting high school today are  
unlikely to get a job that allows them to support a family.   

  Students who graduate from high school, but never go on to college,  
will earn – on average – about twenty-five thousand dollars a year. For  
a family of five, that’s close to the poverty line. But if you're  
Hispanic, you earn less. If you’re black, you earn even less – about 14  
percent less than a white high school graduate. 

  Those who drop out have it even worse.   Only 40 percent have  
jobs. They are nearly four times more likely to be arrested than their  
friends who stayed in high school. They are far more likely to have  
children in their teens. One in four turn to welfare or other kinds of  
government assistance.  

  Everyone agrees this is tragic. But these are our high schools that  
keep letting these kids fall through the cracks, and we act as if it  
can’t be helped.

  It can be helped. We designed these high schools; we can redesign  
them. 

  But first we have to understand that today’s high schools are not the  
cause of the problem; they are the result. The key problem is political  
will. Elected officials have not yet done away with the idea underlying  
the old design. The idea behind the old design was that you could train  
an adequate workforce by sending only a third of your kids to college –  
and that the other kids either couldn’t do college work or didn’t need  
to. The idea behind the new design is that all students can do rigorous  
work, and – for their sake and ours – they have to.

Fortunately, there is mounting evidence that the new design works. 

  The Kansas City, Kansas public school district, where 79 percent of  
students are minorities and 74 percent live below the poverty line, was  
struggling with high dropout rates and low test scores when it adopted  
the school-reform model called First Things First in 1996. This  
included setting high academic standards for all students, reducing  
teacher-student ratios, and giving teachers and administrators the  
responsibility to improve student performance and the resources they  
needed to do it. The district’s graduation rate has climbed more than  
30 percentage points.

These are the kind of results you can get when you design high schools  
to prepare every student for college.  

  At the Met School in Providence, Rhode Island, 70 percent of the  
students are black or Hispanic. More than 60 percent live below the  
poverty line. Nearly 40 percent come from families where English is a  
second language. As part of its special mission, the Met enrolls only  
students who have dropped out in the past or were in danger of dropping  
out. Yet, even with this student body, the Met now has the lowest  
dropout rate and the highest college placement rate of any high school  
in the state.
     
These are the kind of results you can get when you design a high school  
to prepare every student for college.  

  Two years ago, I visited High Tech High in San Diego. It was conceived  
in 1998 by a group of San Diego business leaders who became alarmed by  
the city's shortage of talented high-tech workers. Thirty-five percent  
of High Tech High students are black or Hispanic. All of them study  
courses like computer animation and biotechnology in the school's  
state-of-the-art labs. High Tech High’s scores on statewide academic  
tests are 15 percent higher than the rest of the district; their SAT  
scores are an average of 139 points higher. 

  These are the kind of results you can get when you design a high  
school to prepare every student for college.  

  These are not isolated examples. These are schools built on principles  
that can be applied anywhere – the new three R’s, the basic building  
blocks of better high schools: 
	• 	 The first R is Rigor – making sure all students are given a  
challenging curriculum that prepares them for college or work;
	• 	 The second R is Relevance – making sure kids have courses and  
projects that clearly relate to their lives and their goals;
	• 	 The third R is Relationships – making sure kids have a number of  
adults who know them, look out for them, and push them to achieve.

  The three R’s are almost always easier to promote in smaller high  
schools. The smaller size gives teachers and staff the chance to create  
an environment where students achieve at a higher level and rarely fall  
through the cracks. Students in smaller schools are more motivated,  
have higher attendance rates, feel safer, and graduate and attend  
college in higher numbers.

  Yet every governor knows that the success of one school is not an  
answer to this crisis. You have to be able to make systems of schools  
work for all students.   For this, we believe we need stable and  
effective governance. We need equitable school choice. We need  
performance-oriented employment agreements. And we need the capacity to  
intervene in low-performing schools. 

  Our foundation has invested nearly one billion dollars so far to help  
redesign the American high school. We are supporting more than fifteen  
hundred high schools – about half are totally new, and the other half  
are existing schools that have been redesigned. Four hundred fifty of  
these schools, both new and redesigned, are already open and  
operating. Chicago plans to open 100 new schools. New York City is  
opening 200. Exciting redesign work is under way in Oakland, Milwaukee,  
Cleveland, and Boston.   

  This kind of change is never easy. But I believe there are three steps  
that governors and CEOs can take that will help build momentum for  
change in our schools.  

  Number 1. Declare that all students can and should graduate from high  
school ready for college, work, and citizenship.   How would you  
respond to a ninth grader’s mother who said: “My son is bright.  He  
wants to learn. How come they won’t let him take Algebra?” What would  
you say?   I ask the governors and business leaders here to become the  
top advocates in your states for the belief that every child should  
take courses that prepare him for college – because every child can  
succeed, and every child deserves the chance. The states that have  
committed to getting all students ready for college have made good  
progress – but every state must make the same commitment.
 
Number 2. Publish the data that measures our progress toward that goal.  
The focus on measuring success in the past few years has been important  
– it has helped us realize the extent of the problem. But we need to  
know more: What percentage of students are dropping out? What  
percentage are graduating? What percentage are going on to college? And  
we need this data broken down by race and income. The idea of tracking  
low-income and minority kids into dead-end courses is so offensive to  
our sense of equal opportunity that the only way the practice can  
survive, is if we hide it.   That’s why we need to expose it. If we are  
forced to confront this injustice, I believe we will end it.

  Number 3. Turn around failing schools and open new ones. If we believe  
all kids can learn – and the evidence proves they can –then when the  
students don’t learn, the school must change. Every state needs a  
strong intervention strategy to improve struggling schools. This needs  
to include special teams of experts who are given the power and  
resources to turn things around.  

  If we can focus on these three steps – high standards for all; public  
data on our progress; turning around failing schools – we will go a  
long way toward ensuring that all students have a chance to make the  
most of their lives. 

  Our philanthropy is driven by the belief that every human being has  
equal worth.  We are constantly asking ourselves where a dollar of  
funding and an hour of effort can make the biggest impact for equality.  
We look for strategic entry points – where the inequality is the  
greatest, has the worst consequences, and offers the best chance for  
improvement. We have decided that high schools are a crucial  
intervention point for equality because that’s where children’s paths  
diverge – some go on to lives of accomplishment and privilege; others  
to lives of frustration, joblessness, and jail. 

  When I visited High Tech High in San Diego a few years ago, one young  
student told me that High Tech High was the first school he’d ever gone  
to where being smart was cool.  His neighborhood friends gave him a  
hard time about that, and he said he wasn’t sure he was going to  
stay. But then he showed me the work he was doing on a special project  
involving a submarine. This kid was really bright. It was an incredible  
experience talking to him – because his life really did hang in the  
balance.  

  And without teachers who knew him, pushed him, and cared about him, he  
wouldn’t have had a chance.

  Think of the difference it will make in his life if he takes that  
talent to college. Now multiply that by millions. That’s what’s at  
stake here.   

  If we keep the system as it is, millions of children will never get a  
chance to fulfill their promise because of their zip code, their skin  
color, or the income of their parents.   

  That is offensive to our values, and it’s an insult to who we are. 

  Every kid can graduate ready for college. Every kid should have the  
chance.   

  Let’s redesign our schools to make it happen.

Thank you very much.  


   
  
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