by David Safier
Interesting
conversation with Bill Gates from NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Most of the column deals with Gates' commitment to fighting third world poverty and disease — good, hopeful stuff — but toward the end, Gates talks about his continuing efforts to improve education in this country.
What I like about Gates on education is that he's not an ideologue. He's the same Bill Gates who single-mindedly, ruthlessly, figured out how to make Microsoft products successful. He doesn't care about which educational camp he's in. He cares about what works.
For years, his foundation has been pushing smaller schools as a solution to our educational woes — sometimes breaking a larger school into smaller units in the same building. His conclusion?
“Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way,” he acknowledges. Small schools succeeded when the principal was able to change teachers, curriculum and culture, but smaller size by itself proved disappointing. “In most cases,” he says, “we fell short.”
So he's changing his emphasis, like an entrepreneur who realizes a product that isn't working has to be revamped or discarded.
Now, he's focusing on teacher quality.
“It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one,” Mr. Gates writes in his [annual] letter. “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.”
It may be amazing to Gates, but not to me. If you can amass a group of very-good-to-great teachers in a school, it's going to do terrific things. If your teachers are mediocre-to-poor, no principal and no "lesson plans in a can" will do the trick.
Gates also supports the charter school movement. I hope he's smart enough to see that unregulated charter schools are as subject to serious abuse as the unregulated marketplace, and that well regulated charters, given independence with guidelines and oversight, are a worthwhile addition to our educational landscape.
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