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Bill Gates: Presentation to the National Governors Association

by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Feb 28, 2011

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On February 28, 2011, Bill Gates spoke at the annual meeting of the National Governors Association. States today are grappling with budget deficits, while also confronting deep education deficits.

On February 28, 2011, Bill Gates spoke at the annual meeting of the National Governors Association. States today are grappling with budget deficits, while also confronting deep education deficits.

Over the last four decades, the per-student cost of running U.S. K-12 schools has more than doubled, while student achievement has remained flat, and other countries have raced ahead. In his presentation, Bill Gates encourages the nation's governors to "flip the curve" on how much we spend vs. how well students do in school.

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The billions of dollars in state budget shortfalls are projected to continue for the foreseeable future. In the years ahead, states will make tough choices that affect the future of the country in many important areas, including education. We need to dedicate more resources to understanding the tradeoffs ahead.
Our high school scores in math and reading have been flat since the 1970s. Compared to 35 developed countries, we now rank just average in reading and below average in math. The story is similar in higher education. When it comes to the percentage of college students who graduate, we’re flat and falling behind other countries.You know these figures better than I do. Improving them is a central challenge of your work. But the budget crisis has put you in a corner. You can‘t improve schools without reforms. You can‘t fund reforms without money. And there is no more money. This graph shows how costs since the 1970s have increased, while achievement over the same span has been flat. Together, they make a vivid case that whatever we may have bought with that money – we did not buy higher achievement.
Our challenge as a country is to flip the curve. For decades, our education costs have gone up while performance stayed flat. Now we need our performance to go up even if spending stays flat.
The good news is we have great teachers and great institutions. If we knew how to identify those exemplary, highly effective teachers and institutions—and how to spread the practices that make them great—it would have an enormous impact on the entire system. But in the current system, we haven’t tapped into the dynamic of “everybody learns from the best and gets better.” Take sports, where the pace of improvement has been unbelievable. Since 1900, the record for the fastest mile has been broken 33 times. But in teaching math, Mr. Jones in 1900 may have done it better than anyone alive today. Or maybe Ms. Jones today is the best ever. But because we don’t have the tools to identify great teachers and capture what makes them great, we can’t learn from the best to get better.
Because we haven’t known how to measure effectiveness, we’ve tried to improve by adding more teachers instead of helping teachers be more effective. This budget crisis is a challenge your predecessors didn‘t have. On their watch, state revenues were rising, so they could push reforms with big price tags. Schools hired new staff, added more specialists, and reduced class sizes. We went from one adult for every 19 students to one adult for every 8 students. These have been costly changes, and they have not led to better student achievement .There is a well known study out of Tennessee that found some increased student achievement from smaller class sizes in Grade 3. But those findings – even if true – do not end the debate. Proponents have to argue that reducing class sizes promotes student achievement better than any other possible use of that money. And there is a lot of money tied up in class-size requirements. Conservative estimates suggest that we can save more than $10,000 per classroom by increasing class size by just four pupils. If we pay some of that money to our best teachers for taking in more students, we accomplish three goals at once – we save money, we get more students in classrooms with highly effective teachers, and we give our best teachers a real raise, not just for being good, but for taking on more work. If we did this nationally, we could put nearly 2 million more students in a classroom with a top teacher—and that‘s just in elementary school.
Right now, our foundation is engaged with nearly 3,000 teachers and their unions in seven urban school districts to determine how to recognize effective teaching, measure it, and transfer those skills. These teachers have opened their classrooms to visitors, to video cameras, to new assessments, to discussion about their practice. Research teams are analyzing videos of more than 13,000 classes, putting special focus on classes that showed big students gains and trying to understand how the teachers did it. Teachers are also watching the videos to get the real-time feedback they want and need to improve their practice. Our goal is to develop multiple measures of effective teaching that teachers endorse and that help teachers improve.
Right now, because we don’t know how to recognize effectiveness, we spend a lot of money on proxies for effectiveness, things we hoped had an impact of achievement. We spend $50 billion a year on automatic salary increases based on teacher seniority. It’s reasonable to suppose that teachers who have served longer are more effective, but the evidence says it’s not true. After the first few years, seniority seems to have no effect on student achievement. Another standard feature of school budgets is a bump in pay for advanced degrees. They have almost no impact on achievement, but every year, they cost $15 billion (more than $200 per student) that would help students more if we spent it in other ways.
The National Governors Association was crucial in developing the Common Core State Standards, which are an important component of effective teaching. The common core builds a foundation for defining and measuring excellence – and that will give traction to many reforms that follow.These standards are relevant, because they’re based on the knowledge and skills people need. They’re clear, so you can test whether a student knows them. And they’re consistent across the states that adopt them, so educators can work together to improve our schools.Aligning teaching with the common core –and building common data standards – will help us define excellence, measure progress, test new methods, and compare results.
We have many great educational institutions that point the way forward. Two years ago, Melinda and I visited KIPP High School in Houston, Texas. We were amazed by what we saw. The graduation rate in the Houston Independent School District is less than 70 percent. But KIPP graduates more than 95 percent of its students, and almost 90 percent of the graduates go on to a four-year college. After sitting in on a class at KIPP, however, I realized that statistics alone don’t quite capture the magic of the place. The atmosphere was totally different from anything I experienced when I was in high school—and totally different from anything that exists in 99 percent of classrooms today. At the end of the day, I asked one teacher what he liked best about KIPP. He said that when he taught in the district, he couldn’t be sure that his students would have an effective teacher the next year. He worried that his hard work wouldn’t end up making a difference in their lives. But at KIPP, he said, he didn’t worry; he knew his students would keep on learning, graduate, and go on to college—and a successful future. Charter schools like KIPP are especially important right now because they have more freedom to innovate. Our school system desperately needs brand new approaches, and testing and proving new approaches is something charter schools are good at.
There are also innovative higher education institutions that show us how to get substantially better results. I recently visited Tennessee Tech, where the graduation rate is much higher than average. Why? It is organized for student success. Tennessee Tech uses a rigorous advising system to make sure students know exactly which courses they have to take in order to get the credential they need for a good job in the local economy. The schedule is predictable, with classes from 8-2 every day, so students who are balancing school with a job and family can make it work. The faculty and staff are completely focused on supporting their students and helping them complete their course of study in as short a time as possible. All the community colleges in Tennessee are looking to integrate the approach pioneered at Tennessee Tech, and other states, like Indiana, are looking into similar changes. The really innovative higher education institutions graduate more students, in less time, and at lower cost to the state. We have to capture those best practices so more institutions can learn from them and provide a higher-quality, lower-cost education.
One area that’s particularly ripe for innovation is technology in the classroom. So far, technology has hardly changed the formal education system at all. And that’s a shame, because I am confident that technology can lead to extraordinary improvements in teaching and learning.Rocketship Education in San Jose, California provides a powerful example. They divide the curriculum into two, a critical thinking component done in a more traditional way, and a basic skills component done using educational software. The software lets students proceed at their own pace by assessing their progress and showing them exactly what they need to work on. This hybrid model has gotten great early results, and it saves money, too. There are similar advances in higher education. Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative creates college-level on-line and blended courses. Initial evaluations have found that students in these courses can learn a semester’s worth of material in half the time. Beyond the classroom, Valencia Community College in Florida uses an on-line advising and student support system called Atlas. Atlas helps students chart a clear course through their degree program. It is a single source of information for students trying to plan their education. Atlas also helps the college collect data about how students structure their schedules, so advisors can provide more useful feedback. Atlas is one of the main reasons Valencia has improved its graduation rate to almost triple Florida’s average.
In order to share promising practices (like those at Tennessee Tech) more widely, institutions need first to know what the meaningful metrics are and then build the capacity and infrastructure to collect the appropriate data. Under the Complete to Compete initiative, the NGA and Complete College America developed a set of metrics that will help policymakers monitor states’ progress and compare performance among states and institutions.
Some schools are thinking about trying to get through the year with furloughs, layoffs, or hiring freezes. But when you apply short-term fixes to long-term problems, you can do more harm than good. Furloughs are a prime example. That‘s just saving money by closing schools. It‘s quitting on the kids. These efforts to close budget gaps make it harder to meet your other challenge – increasing student achievement and completion rates despite budget challenges.We have to be bold and find ways to spread key things like great teaching and innovative institutional design to get significantly better results.
We need to do a lot more to understand the key levers to drive the change we need. One great place to start is the book Stretching the School Dollar, by Marguerite Roza and Rick Hess. There are some clear do’s and don’ts. Measure and support effective teaching: This is the key to using resources better and helping teachers improve. Without this information, we can only add adults, instead of using adults more effectively. Lift caps on class size: Spending money on smaller classes has prevented us from focusing on teacher effectiveness, innovation, and other key reforms. In tight budget times, our resources should be spent elsewhere. Identify high performing colleges: Within each state are both high and lower performing colleges – and colleges where costs vary substantially. It makes sense to look at the data, find the colleges that are getting the job done, and set your policies accordingly. Research and develop technology: Technology can personalize learning, assist teachers, and expand the reach of the best schools and teachers. Building a stronger, more sustainable education system requires that schools use technology in new ways to accomplish more. Don’t seek furloughs: Furloughs reduce days of service, and thereby increase your cost per day (since benefits are loaded on fewer days of service). Furloughs also leave compensation trajectories intact, so that you have to keep furloughing every year to maintain level spending. Don’t put more money into degrees or longevity pay: We can no longer double down on investments that get a low return. Of course, you’ll meet your current commitments, but, for example, master’s bonuses should get no cost-of-living increases. Don’t limit college enrollments. Higher education institutions would do better to figure out how to serve more students as a way to close gaps, than they would to serve fewer. (More students means more tuition.)
We can flip the curve. Our best chance to change budgets starts now. We have to follow the examples of success. We have to identify what works and then spread those best practices. We have to encourage innovation. You can lead this change, but you can‘t be expected to do it alone. You‘ll need friends in business and philanthropy to stand with you. You can count on me. You‘ll also need the support of voters, parents, regents, and school boards. But most of all, you‘ll need the help of teachers.

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