Bill Gates on Public Charter Schools - December 3, 2008 - George Washington University
Bill Gates
Goerge Washington University
December 3, 2008
"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."
Goerge Washington University
December 3, 2008
"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."