SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Monday that the U.S. higher education system is the envy of the world but primary and secondary schools are failing to get students ready for college.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Gates said the experience of being a parent of three kids – ages 10, 7 and 4 – has led him to spend more time thinking about schools.
His fifth-grade daughter doesn’t ask for help with her homework but she does e-mail tests to her dad from her tablet PC, Gates said.
“I’m willing to help with homework. My kids have so far been pretty independent,” he said.
Microsoft has long competed to hire smart, well-educated people, Gates said. Education also is a major focus of his philanthropic work through the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation.
“This nation has to do something very challenging, which is to provide a strong education to almost every student,” he said.
Specifically, he said the U.S. education system needs higher standards, clear accountability, flexible personnel practices and innovation.
Gates, whose children are in private schools, said every state should require students to take three or four years of math and science to graduate from high school; 25 states currently have such requirements. He wants states to have the power to intervene at low-performing schools.
“Real accountability means more than having goals; it also means having clear consequences for not meeting the goals,” he said in a speech earlier Monday to Washington educators who came to hear the results of an education task force.
Gates wants schools to have the ability to pay the best teachers better and offer incentives to attract people with rare abilities.
“It’s astonishing to me to have a system that doesn’t allow us to pay more for someone with scarce abilities, that doesn’t allow us to pay more to reward strong performance,” he said. “That is tantamount to saying teacher talent and performance don’t matter and that’s basically saying students don’t matter.”
He also spoke of some creative school programs – particularly charter schools run by private companies – that should be a model for innovation in the nation’s schools.
Gates said that whenever he speaks about the importance of college graduates to the economy, he expects someone to mention the fact that he dropped out of Harvard to form his software company and never finished his degree.
“My answer is: ‘What do you mean – never?’ When I left college to start Microsoft, I told my mom and dad I was going on leave. So, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it,” Gates said.
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