Bill Gates Goes to School

Buckle up! Bill Gates, wearing an expensive necktie and looking uncharacteristically formal, is now bringing the same high-speed, high-beam focus to American education that he once brought to computers and, more recently, to international aid. He called President-elect Obama last week and reports back cheerily that Obama "said all the right things" about including big money for education in the stimulus package and making fundamental school reform (not the fake kind pushed by teachers unions) a priority. Word is, Obama may even ask Gates to serve on a new high-level educational-advisory panel he's noodling, which would be quite a change for a guy who generally doesn't do committees. When I lumped Gates in with the "bomb throwers" on education, he chuckled and didn't disagree.

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Before the school bell rings, a quick read on the economy from the man who, at last count, still had a larger net worth than the GDP of 120 of the world's 180 countries. "We're going to have a heck of a recession," he says, and he has no clue about its duration or depth. He's worried about a "negative feedback cycle" with lower production and unemployment feeding off each other. He laments that exports have fallen sharply over the last three months even though American goods are cheap. And he sees the auto bailout as nothing less than a shakedown by Chicken Little executives, noting that the British public wasted $16 billion bailing out Leyland before it died, anyway.

At the same time, Gates doesn't buy that the tech revolution is winding down. "Innovation and science are going at as high a speed as ever," he says, referring to breakthroughs with voice recognition, super Wi-Fi and pharmaceuticals. "Core research staff won't be cut, and that's why we'll come out the other side."

It's the longer-term outlook he's worried about. He sees that social inequities at home and abroad are harmful not just morally but economically, which explains his obsession with confronting the high-school dropout rate. Over time, he explains, a less equal world hurts everyone.

The Gates Foundation has learned some lessons from its investments in recent years in pathbreaking schools. The first big idea—to break up big schools into smaller, more manageable units—proved insufficient without major changes in personnel. Gates argues that rigorous accountability is the only option, from mayoral control (elected school boards are mostly a menace) to principal control (teacher tenure and onerous work rules are quality-killers) to data control (IT systems that closely track performance are a must).

Betraying his own professional background, Gates shakes his head in dismay at the idea of secondary schools and colleges trying to function at all without simple software that offers them basic statistical information about how students and teachers are performing over time (for-profit colleges are an exception). Everyone in education knows why: unions have simply prevented teachers from being judged, even in part, on whether their students improve during the course of the year. It's no surprise that Gates is a believer in merit pay and incentive pay and has little use for teachers colleges as presently constituted because there's no evidence that having a master's degree improves teacher performance. You never hear Gates or his people talk about highly qualified teachers, only highly effective ones.