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 being sown at those schools."

He called for the elimination of state caps on charter schools, more equitable public funding for charters and better partnerships with school districts. The foundation this fall will announce a series of compacts between charters and district partners, he said.

Gates challenged charter school authorizers and managers to make sure charters are high-performing and to close those that don't meet the bar after giving them a chance to improve.

<skip>

Some education policy observers have viewed with suspicion the number of former Gates Foundation employees who have gone on to work at top levels in U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's cabinet and the support the foundation has given to Obama administration initiatives, including giving money to states to help shape their Race to the Top applications.

Gates dismissed the notion his foundation has outsized influence on the administration's agenda.

"Everyone's got the same goal in mind, which is to improve the schools," he said. "There is no agenda. If the status quo were satisfactory, we wouldn't need to be involved at all."

Besides, Gates noted, the country is far from being in agreement on how to improve public education.

"Arne's got a lot of different strategies. Some overlap . Some are different," he said. "I wish the world had one agenda it knew would work and be embraced by teachers."

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2010/06/bill_gates_charters_should_lea.html

"The fact is the majority of children in the country are attending schools that don't work for them.".


I disagree. I think the MAJORITY of children go to schools that work. However, SOME schools DON'T work for SOME students.

Does Mr. Gates address the issue of WHY those schools don't work for those students? What if it's not something the schools can fix? What if it's poverty and fear and lack of post-school opportunities?

How motivated would anyone be, regardless how fancy the school or innovative the teacher, to study hard if they knew there were virtually no job opportunities waiting after graduation, and that the cost of going to college is a lifetime of indebtedness with no more guarantee of a living-wage job than the kids who dropped out the day after their 16th birthdays? How does any school overcome that reality? By filling the kids with false hopes?

Mr. Gates needs to come out of his world of nerdy billionaires and see how the rest of us live. I think he'd find our reality is very different from his.



TG, NTY

Of course the schools are failing. If they weren't Bill would have to find somewhere else to throw his money.

should work and all that rest. Go fuck yourself, gates.

That's what these guys just don't understand, charter, non-charter, private school, etc....closing schools isn't just like shuttering a store that isn't profitable. The students and adults are invested in the school as part of their community. How can we get these billionaires to understand that the populations who are facing school closures don't have the ability to just keep starting from scratch and succeeding at the levels the outsiders think is "optimum"?

:)

they just want to make a profit...or maintain the status quo...the less people are educated, the less they can fight this status quo...the ones who care are demonized... :(

gee, bill, maybe if they started out with a million in a trust fund like you got from grandpa, they could go to lakeside prep like you did, you miserable waste of air.




Making Lakeside Affordable

The annual tuition at Lakeside is $24,250 and about 30% of our students receive need-based financial aid and scholarships. At Lakeside, all financial aid and scholarships are based on a family's need. Our finanical aid program is extensive and on average, a financial aid recipient has an approximate annual tuition payment of $7,000...

All financial aid and scholarship recipients also receive stipend grants that cover additional costs associated with school. These additional costs range from participation in the Lakeside bus program, to the purchase of laptop computers, participation in global service travel and attendance at school dances. The financial aid office is committed to working with families to determine a fair and reasonable family contribution with all of these factors in mind.

http://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=122216

the "financial aid" students still pay nearly $800/mo for a 9-mo school year. plus more for the other crap.

that's where bill's coming from.

He went to high end private schools etc growing up. His spoon may not have been platinum, but it was at least plated.

sorry, no comparison between gates & obama.

gates' g-grandpa & granpa worked for the rockefeller interests.

as mentioned before, grandpa endowed a million-$ trust fund for gates at birth.

obama, otoh, was a scholarship boy at his hawaiian private school.

no poverty-stricken kid, but not in the same league.

I was a scholarship kid at a similar school. This explains a lot.

12 -- History of King County Washington , vol. 2, pp. 516-18:

"A native of Iowa, he was born September 8, 1864, a son of Dr. Thomas G. and Mary Louise (Woodworth) Maxwell, who went to Nebraska in 1861 and the father aided in laying out the town of Lincoln. He was the first physician in that part of the state and his practice was drawn from a wide area. The mother passed away in Nebraska and in 1880 he migrated to California, settling in Santa Barbara, where he spent the remainder of his life. ... Mr. Maxwell was married October 23, 1889, to Miss Belle Oakley, a native of Dunkirk, New York, and a daughter of O. R. and Belle (Thompson) Oakley. Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell have become the parents of two sons. ... The younger son, James Willard, Jr., was graduated from the University of Washington and fills a responsible position in the bond department of the National Bank of Commerce. He married Miss Adele Thompson, of Enumclaw, Washington, and both are prominent in social circles of Seattle."


One thousand American men of mark of to-day: Twentieth century ... - Page 134
1916 - 430 pages
JAMES WILLARD MAXWELL, Banker and City Official of Seattle, Wash., was born in 1864 in Iowa. He was educated in the common schools. He is president of the National City Bank, the Title Trust Company ; and director of the Northern Life ...

The family moved to Seattle in 1906, where Maxwell founded National City Bank (of seattle) and gained a national reputation in the banking industry. Maxwell's son, James Willard Maxwell, began his own banking career in 1925 as a messenger in his ...
books.google.com


The Stillman and Rockefellers sealed their business partnership with a double marriage of their children and controlled the National City Bank for many years. James Stillman Rockefeller, a grandson of James Stillman and William Rockefeller, was president and chairman of the bank in the 1950's and 1960's. In 1955, the National City Bank merged with the First National Bank of New York to become the First National City Bank of New York, later known as Citicorp and today, Citigroup, the largest banking and financial institution of the United States of America.

http://www.raken.com/american_wealth/bankers_gilded_age/Bankers_index4.asp.

now that I know where he was educated. Not that I thought he was a scholarship kid. Sorry I wasn't clearer.

charter school deform are private school boys.

the elimination of the teachers union and private schools.

i`m not voting for union busters...

scientists and mathematicians society needs to lead us into the 22nd Century.

It would be great if society allocated as much education money to the top 2% of our students as we do for the bottom 2%.

Please note I don't want to spend less on the bottom 2%, just pleading for equal funding for the top 2%.

If we handled funding education of the disabled as poorly as we do the gifted, we'd be fighting lawsuits.

It's very shameful.

being homeschooled.

We called NCLB - No Child Gets Ahead.

Sorry my hard drive crashed five years ago and I lost the federal government source for my old stat.

There is a huge difference from one state to another. Some states don't fund gifted ed at all. I'm not up to date on federal funding levels but I suspect they are not funding gifted programs as well as programs for the disabled.

.....................................................


http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/state_policies.aspx

students produces the greatest return on the investment.

In similar fashion a dollar spent on students who will grow to be seven foot tall basketball players is better spent that on students who will be five foot tall.

Of course you might disagree but that's just the way mother nature distributed her gifts. :shrug: