“America’s high schools are obsolete.” This is the line that made headlines when Bill Gates spoke to the nation’s governors at their National Education Summit in February 2005. But Bill’s assessment of the crisis in America’s high schools was even tougher than that one line conveys.

He told the governors, “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.” He said that elected leaders “should be ashamed [of] breaking our promise of a free education for millions of students.” This passionate declaration was the culmination of three years of effort to bring national attention to the plight of America’s high schools and students.

Gaining Appreciation for Advocacy
In the foundation’s early years, we assumed that our grants, some of which were among the biggest in their respective fields, would produce large, lasting impact. But we soon came up against the limitations of grantmaking and understood that without the engagement of the public and commercial sectors, our grants would always be just a drop in the bucket. The investment we’ll make in U.S. education in the years ahead is less than one quarter of 1 percent of the $536 billion this nation spends on K-12 education every year.

In 2001, the foundation established a small office in Washington, D.C., and began to explore how to build new partnerships with governments and industry. One of our first goals was to use advocacy to put high schools on the radar for policymakers and to share the lessons—positive and negative—that we had learned in our own grantmaking.  

Partnering With Governors
We soon realized that two organizations could help us reach the top decisionmakers in all 50 states: the National Governors Association; and Achieve, a nonprofit started in the mid-1990s by governors and business leaders concerned about the state of American education. In 2002, we started providing funding to both organizations in order to help their staffs develop deeper expertise in issues related to high schools.   

Until that time, governors and other key decisionmakers had done a great deal to strengthen schooling between kindergarten and eighth grade, but they had not focused much attention on the high school years. We felt we could interest them in high schools if we could convince them that only a fraction of their students were graduating ready to join the workforce or attend college. Many of the governors simply did not know the extent of the problem. As we learned by sponsoring in-depth research on graduation rates by the right-of-center Manhattan Institute and the left-of-center Urban Institute, states were using a hodgepodge of inadequate measures to determine graduation rates. Some schools were reporting graduation rates of 95 percent even if they had a thousand people in ninth grade and only 250 people graduating in 12th grade. 

A Summit is Born
When Virginia Governor Mark Warner was elected to chair the National Governors Association in 2004, we found the champion we were looking for. Gov. Warner, who was a product of public schools and the first person in his family to graduate from college, had shown his interest in high school policy by pushing for reforms in Virginia focused on the 12th grade. He also was taking steps to explore a possible run for president in 2008.

With encouragement and financial support from the foundation, Gov. Warner and Achieve President Mike Cohen set out to host a combined summit on high schools in early 2005 for the nation’s governors and top business leaders. When they invited Bill Gates to speak, we saw it as an ideal opportunity for Bill to use his credibility as a leader in the knowledge economy and as a philanthropist. 

The summit and Bill’s speech generated far more attention to the crisis in high schools than we had expected. There were about 100 business leaders and governors in the room during Bill’s speech.  But his diagnosis of the problems—and his thoughts on promising approaches to solving them—reverberated far beyond the room. More than 27 million people saw an account of the speech in newspaper reports, editorials, or television broadcasts.

Carrots for Commitments
To ensure that the summit would be more than just a collection of good sound bites, the foundation, the NGA, and Achieve used the occasion to launch a competitive grant program to encourage governors to make concrete commitments to change their states’ education systems. To qualify for the grants, states would have to commit to five “non-negotiables,” such as using one of a handful of highly rigorous methods of tracking graduation rates. We hoped to get applications from about six states for these NGA Honor States grants. Instead, 40 states applied, and 26 of them are now being funded (10 by the Gates Foundation and 16 by a consortium of seven other foundations).

In addition, 13 states representing a third of America’s students announced that they would partner with Achieve and its American Diploma Project to raise their high school graduation requirements so that all high school graduates would have the skills necessary to be successful in college and work. Within a week, nine additional states made the same commitment. With funding from the foundation, Achieve is now providing hands-on assistance to help all 22 of these states make their pledge a reality. Prior to the summit, Achieve had predicted that only four states would participate.

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