From Bill Gates' First Annual Letter from the Gates Foundation:
"The private high school I attended, Lakeside in Seattle, made a huge difference in my life. The teachers fueled my interests and encouraged me to read and learn as much as I could. Without those teachers I never would have gotten on the path of getting deeply engaged in math and software.
How many kids don’t get the same chance to achieve their full potential? The number is very large. Every year, 1 million kids drop out of high school. Only 71 percent of kids graduate from high school within four years, and for minorities the numbers are even worse—58 percent for Hispanics and 55 percent for African Americans.
It surprises me that more parents are not upset about the education their own kids are receiving.
Nine years ago, the foundation decided to invest in helping to create better high schools, and we have made over $2 billion in grants. The goal was to give schools extra money for a period of time to make changes in the way they were organized (including reducing their size), in how the teachers worked, and in the curriculum. The hope was that after a few years they would operate at the same cost per student as before, but they would have become much more effective.
Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way. These tended to be the schools that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.
Even so, many schools had higher attendance and graduation rates than their peers. While we were pleased with these improvements, we are trying to raise college-ready graduation rates, and in most cases, we fell short.
I think schools need to move away from the one-size-fits-all learning that has been used for decades and move toward self-paced learning. We now have the technology to make this possible. It doesn't make sense to have some students in a class learning things they already know and others who are too far behind to understand the lesson.
Students from kindergarten on could learn self-paced phonics, reading, writing, math, science, history, geography, civics, etc. using a combination of textbooks, online lectures and computerized assignments and testing. Teachers would be available to assist students who don't understand something they are working on or to grade assignments that cannot be done on a computer (such as essays or research papers). The lectures offered by The Khan Academy prove that online lectures can be very easy to understand and very effective for students of all ages: http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy. I plan to sign my daughter up for an online school (k12.com) next year when she starts kindergarten. Tens of thousands of students are already successfully using self-paced online education.
I'm not saying that students should spend their whole schoolday on the computer. Offline classes in art, music and hands-on science could be offered. Discussion classes of literature or current affairs would promote critical thinking. Group project classes could offer assignments that promote teamwork and problem solving.
Instead of throwing money at existing schools, I think the Gates Foundation should stick to helping groups who are starting charter schools. And help them to do things that are really new and innovative. Things that use the amazing technology that is now available to us.
Once a certain method has been proven effective, the Gates Foundation and federal and state governments could then offer assistance to all public schools to move away from the outdated one-size-fits-all educational methods they currently use. It's time to stop holding capable students back and pushing struggling students forward. Let kids learn at their own pace.
Posted by: JC | July 08, 2009 at 02:47 PM