Bill Gates: Charter Schools Are Important Long-Term Strategy

Bill Gates was all over DC yesterday, talking about charter schools at every stop. He told the President-elect that investing in charters is a great example of how to think long-term while trying to rescue the economy, and repeated that thought in chatting with Wolf Blitzer at CNN. Then he stopped by George Washington U to talk to an invited audience about poverty, recession, and education – and delivered some remarkably forceful endorsements of charter schools and the charter model itself. Full text of this important speech here.

Here’s his central economic-strategy point. Note how he prioritizes charters:

“In a crisis, there is always a risk that you take your eyes off the future – and you sacrifice long-term investments for near-term gains…But I want us to have a bigger goal than getting the economy growing again. I want us to expand the number of people who are contributing to the economy and benefiting from it. The young woman who needs help paying for college, the young man whose charter school needs government support, the children whose parents need AIDS drugs, the poor family trying to farm in Ghana—if we don’t make these people part of our investments, when the economy comes back, they won’t be coming back with it.”

The centerpiece of his foundation’s new US education strategy is successful postsecondary completion for far more students, especially low-income kids. In talking about how to get there, check out the successes he named:  “In schools across the country, we’re seeing results that smash old prejudices about what poor students can achieve. High Tech High School in San Diego, Green Dot Schools in Los Angeles, Aspire High Schools in California, KIPP schools that have spread across the country, and YES College Preparatory Schools in Houston. These schools are doing work that should be talked about everywhere.”

ALL charter schools. So in the Q&A the first questioner (your correspondent) pointed out that Obama has promised to double federal spending on charter schools -- and what would Gates recommend the new Administration do with that new money to leverage these great public charter schools’ example?

He then knocked it out of the park, saying: "It's fair to say that the charter structure has been fantastic to allow for new models to be tried. And, so these high-results high schools are, a very high percentage of them are charter schools. There are some non-charters. In New York City, a number of great things were done where they used a charter-like approach in terms of simplifying the administrative requirements and simplifying some of the personnel practices to put the principal in charge, and they showed benefits there as well."

"There's really two things that the charter movement can do for schools in general. One is that we can increase the number of great charter schools, and that requires an investment. And the second is we can take the lessons from these charter schools and start to move them into the schools at large. You know, we won't have, the percentage of schools that will be charter schools isn't going to be say, a third, anytime in the future. So we really need both mechanisms."

"There's an experiment going on in Houston where KIPP and YES are really scaling up and adding and adding schools as fast as they can, and they're trying to get to be something like 20% of the high school capacity there. But that would be unusually high, as a charter school percentage. If they do get there, about 80 percent of the kids who go to four-year colleges will come out of that 20 percent, so it just gives you a sense of how phenomenally successful they can be against a background where not that many kids are going to college."

(Yes, we’re sending Bill our “market share” report showing 12 cities that already have 20% of their kids in charters.)

For a couple of years we’ve been kvetching that certain Major Figures (ahem, Oprah…) often talk about charter schools but don’t actually use ‘the C word.” Well, we’re taking Bill Gates off the list. He gets it - -and he’s using his megaphone to tell everyone from Obama on down that charter schools are an important part of the long-term solution to what ails America today.