Bill Gates: Charters Should Lead Innovation

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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.

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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