Celebration of Education

April 28, 2006
Remarks by William H. Gates Sr., co-chair

Thank you for that warm welcome. I bet you won’t be so nice when my beloved Washington Huskies come here to play the Sooners in September.

Of course, I’ll probably make more points in this speech tonight than the Huskies score in that entire game.

It’s an honor to be here to accept the Award of Distinction on behalf of the Gates Foundation—and to join you in paying tribute to all of tonight’s award winners.

They have decades of experience and numerous degrees in a variety of educational fields, and I’m a retired lawyer who works for his son.

Tonight’s award winners—and so many of you in the audience—are guided by an inspiring principle: that all children can do great things if they get the chance. And you live up to it by putting everything you have—your passion and expertise, your knowledge and enthusiasm—into giving them that chance.

Each of us has our own story about how we became interested in education. I’d like to tell you mine.

My son, the other Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, started their foundation because they believe what you believe: that every life has equal value—that every person, no matter where he or she lives, deserves the opportunity to lead a healthy, productive life. They also know they’ve been extremely fortunate, and they feel a responsibility to share their wealth.

At the foundation, we try to be strategic about our giving because we want every dollar and every hour we spend to do the most good for the most people.

Around the world, we see the greatest need in health. So we focus on sick people in poor countries having access to the same lifesaving vaccines and treatments that we do.

And we concentrate on driving research and development on diseases like malaria—diseases that kill millions in the developing world but don’t get much attention here.

Every year, malaria alone kills more than a million people. That’s like wiping out Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Norman—every year.

Here in the United States, we think the best way to help people make their lives better is by improving education. So let’s talk about education in the United States—public education.

It can be a pretty discouraging topic. The United States spends more money on education than any other country in the world, but we get a disappointing return on our investment. Our high school students rank just 24th in the world in math.

And despite how much we spend on our students, a third of the young people who enter ninth grade each year won’t graduate from high school. Another third will graduate but won’t be ready for what comes next—college or a good job. And the odds are even worse for Hispanics and African-Americans. Only about half of them will graduate from high school.

These statistics are shocking, but they’re not exactly news. We haven’t been ignoring the education crisis in this country. In fact, it’s been near the top of the public agenda for almost 20 years. But change on the scale that’s needed in our schools doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen in 10 or 20 years.

Think about the civil rights movement. For decades before Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, activists had been laying the groundwork for that landmark ruling. And after Brown, it took 10 years of marches and protests by millions of ordinary citizens throughout the country before Congress passed the most important civil rights legislation. And in the 40 years since then, we’ve been trying to make sure that we as a nation live up to the promise of justice for all our citizens.

In many ways, the education movement we’re building is the continuation of that movement. In fact, Bob Moses, a great civil rights activist in Mississippi who later started an organization called the Algebra Project, has said that “transforming math education in our schools is as urgent in today’s world as was winning the right to vote in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s.”

So where are we in our education movement? About 20 years ago, the Department of Education said we were a nation in crisis, with almost no strategy for solving that crisis.

Then states started launching initiatives to improve their schools. They set standards for what students should be learning, developed tests designed to measure whether they were meeting those standards, and started thinking about ways to use the results of those tests to hold schools accountable.

In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which capped this standards work, and many people thought the job was done. But in fact, we’d only finished Phase One—putting the standards in place.

Now we’ve moved on to Phase Two—making the standards work. While we must have high expectations, they are not the end we seek. They are the means to that end.

Our goal in this country must be to prepare all students for college, work, and citizenship. And our challenge is to give students and schools the support they need to reach that goal.

It is time to do the heavy lifting of figuring out how to give all our young people—no matter where they’re from, what color their skin, or how much money their families have—the chance to meet the high expectations we have set. And we’re starting to get a better sense of just how difficult this second phase is going to be.

But I’ve been encouraged by the momentum that’s been building up behind this effort in the last few months. I hope you saw the two shows Oprah Winfrey aired about the education crisis a couple of weeks ago. On those shows, Oprah kicked off a new national campaign for our kids and our schools called STAND UP.

You probably also saw that Time Magazine ran a cover story the same week with the headline: “Dropout Nation.” This dramatic call to arms—and people’s energetic response to it—give me great hope that our public education movement will succeed.

It’s a huge effort, and we should expect to be working on it for a long time, but it will succeed if we all stand up.

Our foundation has been working on education issues for six years now, and we’ve learned three important lessons about the big changes that can make schools work for all students.

First, we’ve learned that many children fall behind even before they get to school, and chances are they won’t ever catch up. How can we make standards work for all students if so many young children starting kindergarten are already unable to meet them?

Imagine what it’s like for a child who isn’t ready for the first day of kindergarten. On one side of her is a girl writing her ABC’s. On the other side is a boy who can tell time. When she comes home from school and her parents ask: “What did you learn in school today?” her answer is, “I hate school.”

It is not just that she doesn’t have the same skills as other students in her class.  It is that she’s lost confidence in herself, and formed a negative—even bitter—attitude about school.

This realization has led us to a new area of grantmaking: early childhood learning. We believe we need to intervene early in the problem cycle by making sure that all young children are emotionally, socially, cognitively, and physically ready for school in the first place.

That’s why we’re working with businesses, governments, and philanthropic foundations in Washington state to help provide high-quality early learning for children from birth to age 5.

We’re just getting started on this early learning effort in Washington, and we are following the example Oklahoma has set. I know Oklahomans are proud of their pioneering spirit, and you’ve truly been pioneers in early learning. In Oklahoma, free, high-quality pre-kindergarten is available to all 4-year-olds.

This approach is working. Pre-K enrollment in Oklahoma has increased by more than 40 percent since 2000. And a recent study by the National Institute of Early Education Research showed that children in pre-K programs here increased their math skills 44 percent and their pre-literacy skills 88 percent as compared with 4-year-olds who didn’t attend preschool.

Still, there is more to do. The challenge now is to build on this momentum and recognize that learning doesn’t start at age 4—it starts at birth. Here, too, Oklahoma is poised to be a leader. The philanthropist George Kaiser and his partners have invested in a model early learning program—opening in Tulsa this fall—that will give children the highest quality child care starting at birth.

Of course, it won’t do any good to get our children ready for school if our schools aren’t ready to teach our children.

The second lesson we’ve learned at the Gates Foundation is that our schools simply aren’t designed to get the best out of our young people. We must change our schools if we expect them to do the work of preparing our kids for the future.

At the foundation, our experience has been primarily with high schools. And we’ve found that the most successful schools around the country—schools that get every student ready for college—all have three things in common. We call them the new 3 R’s: rigor, relevance, and relationships.

Courses that challenge all children, not just the honors students. Motivating curricula that relate to students’ lives and aspirations. One-on-one relationships with caring adults like tonight’s award winners and so many of you in the audience.

Great schools take concrete action to make the new 3 R’s part of students’ everyday experience.

They create small learning environments where students meet with the same advisors every day. They insist that every graduate pass a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum, including four years of math and English. And they get students excited about learning by giving them more than textbooks and workbooks.

But it’s not enough to create a few good schools based on the new 3 R’s, or even a few thousand good schools, which brings me to the third lesson that we’ve learned: We must have school systems that work for students, teachers, and parents.

So in addition to individual schools, we’re also working with school districts and states to help them change their whole approach to education. It takes a lot of courage for state and district leaders to do what is really necessary.

New York and Chicago, for example, have closed down schools that simply weren’t getting the job done and replaced them with new schools that will. New York has built 40 new schools, and Chicago has built 20. These were tough, unpopular decisions, but they were the right decisions, and they were based on data that proved that students in these failing schools just weren’t learning.

In addition to building new schools, Chicago’s school district is working with us to devise a core curriculum that will introduce rigor throughout the other 80 high schools in the city.

We are doing this because most of their schools don’t need to be closed down, but they do need support, whether it’s a better curriculum, more professional development for teachers, or long-range space planning. These are the kinds of system-wide improvements that our schools need to make to help all students meet standards.

One thing we’ve noticed is that districts like New York, Chicago, and Boston, where authority is centralized under a mayor or another political leader, have seemed to make more progress than districts where authority is divided among school board members and a superintendent.

Centralized control is not a panacea, and it seems to work best in big urban districts. Still, it can help provide a stable direction for reform. We need to make change across the country, and it’s hard to do that when there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

Oklahoma has been an early leader in changing its approach to education. As I mentioned, in early learning, you’ve been an example to the entire country.

And you’re also getting started on great work with your high schools. In 2005, with support from our foundation, the National Governor’s Association and an organization called Achieve, Inc. launched two ambitious initiatives to improve high schools. Oklahoma is one of only 14 states involved in both of them.

As part of these efforts, Oklahoma will receive grants to design more rigorous courses and improve teaching by stepping up recruitment and offering more professional development. Your state is also receiving a grant to streamline school governance, so you’ll be better equipped to make those tough decisions that are good for the entire school system.

The changes I’ve talked about so far have been policy changes. But making standards work will also require you folks in education to think about your work in new ways.

Education used to be what you might call an individual sport. Teachers essentially handled their classes by themselves. Similarly, though schools were organized into districts, they essentially made their own rules and relied on their own initiative to get things done.

But this model simply didn’t work for all children. Too many fell through the cracks. To build a system without any cracks to fall through, education must become a team sport.

Teachers must work together to make sure their students aren’t getting lost in the shuffle. And schools need to work together to help each other deliver the best results for all kids. They also must work with their partners at the district level to get the appropriate support. This is what education will look like in the future if we make standards work for everybody.

And it means teachers and schools are also going to have to let themselves be vulnerable. As we try to learn what works best for our kids, we’re going to have to keep collecting data on how they are doing.

We’re going to have to be willing to use that data by admitting our mistakes and making big changes. Measuring our results and accepting criticism from others isn’t always comfortable, but it is absolutely necessary.

The same is true in all occupations. When I was a lawyer, I always believed that we did the best job for our clients when a team of attorneys in our firm collaborated to find solutions. I didn’t always enjoy it in the moment—especially when one of my colleagues told me I was wrong. But I was always proud of the work we did for our clients in the end.

Teaching is no different. You’re members of a team, and your goal is to give the best service to your clients—the children in your classrooms. And the more you work together and learn from each other, the better off those children will be.

For those of you who are teachers or administrators in our schools, or who are about to be—I have great envy.

American education is going to be a whole new world, and you are going to be the principal agents making this change our country desperately needs. It is daunting, but it is also going to be exciting. No one will have greater responsibility for helping our students reach their full potential than you.

I spent a lifetime working in law, and I take pride in having done so. But I take my hat off to you who are members of the education professions. You do selfless work in pursuit of a brighter future for our children and our country. Let me just say with all sincerity that there is no other work, no other service that carries the special honor that is yours.

I started tonight by thanking you for giving our foundation the Award of Distinction. Let me finish by thanking you for doing something much more important: for educating our children.

You are fulfilling our country’s most fundamental obligation and I am honored to address you.