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Our Education Strategy

The foundation’s education work in the United States is focused on two major initiatives: ensuring that all students graduate from high school ready for college and a new effort to improve postsecondary education so that more students earn a degree or certificate with genuine economic value. Ultimately, we are working to help all young people graduate high school with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in life. Our college-ready and postsecondary success strategies are detailed below.

Read remarks from our co-chairs about the foundation’s education strategy:

Bill Gates, November 11, 2008 Melinda Gates, November 11, 2008 William H. Gates, Sr., November 11, 2008

College Readiness for High School StudentsWith our partners across the country, we have demonstrated that with the right opportunities, the most disadvantaged young people can achieve at high levels. Yet today, only 71 percent of students earn a high school diploma, fewer than six in 10 minority students graduate with their peers, and many graduates are unprepared for college. A core lesson from our work is that we need to dramatically accelerate academic performance to achieve results. We have set an ambitious goal for our work and investments: to help ensure that 80 percent of high school students graduate fully prepared for college, with a focus on low-income and minority young people reaching this target.

The three main components of our college-ready plan support this goal:

Focus on success at a higher level Empower excellent teachers Support and engage students

1From www.gatesfoundation.org/united-states/Pages/united-states-education-strategy.aspx 30 March 2009

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/united-states/Pages/united-states-education-strategy.aspx

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/william-gates-sr-2008-education-forum-speech.aspx

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/melinda-gates-2008-education-forum-speech.aspx

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/bill-gates-2008-education-forum-speech.aspx

College-Ready Education Plan (Executive Summary)

College-Ready Education Plan (Complete)

Read Vicki Phillips' speech on the College-Ready success plan, November 11, 2008.

Life Beyond High School: Postsecondary SuccessSuccess in the 21st century demands skills, attitudes, and abilities that require more than a high school diploma. Yet today only about half of all Americans have a college degree or certificate, a number that drops to about 20 percent for Hispanics and African Americans. It is no longer enough to say more young people are accessing college. For the sake of their future and our country’s future, we have to make sure more young people go on to complete college. We have set an ambitious goal for ourselves and the nation: double the number of young people who earn a postsecondary degree or certificate by the time they reach age 26. Our plan for success outlines how we will work to:

Improve the performance of the postsecondary education system Support young adult success Encourage U.S. leaders to commit to helping students complete their degrees

Postsecondary Education Success Plan (Executive Summary)

Postsecondary Education Success Plan (Complete Report)

Read Hilary Pennington’s speech on Postsecondary Success, November 11, 2008.



http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/hilary-pennington-2008-education-forum.aspx

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Documents/postsecondary-education-success-plan-brochure.pdf

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Documents/postsecondary-education-success-plan-executive-summary.pdf

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/vicki-phillips-2008-education-forum-speech.aspx

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Documents/College-ready-education-plan-brochure.pdf

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Documents/College-ready-for-all-education-plan.pdf

A Forum on Education in America: Melinda French Gates


November 11, 2008

Prepared Remarks by Melinda French Gates, Co-chair and Trustee

Editor's note: Read Bill Gates' comments at the Forum on Education, which followed Melinda French Gates' remarks.

It was a pleasure for Bill and for me to host you last night at our home, and we’re delighted to see you again this morning. We’re eager to talk with you about our work in education, because no matter how sound our strategy may be—and we are counting on your candid opinion—this work will not succeed without your support and your partnership.

We are meeting one week after an historic presidential election. President-elect Obama campaigned on the promise of change. He has expressed a strong commitment to education, and we are optimistic about the role an Obama administration will play over the next four years in supporting change in our schools.

Unfortunately, the urgent needs of our schools are competing for attention with many other important issues. As we all know, we’ve entered a financial crisis that rightly occupies the attention and concern of the country. But it should not make us forget the people whose lives are difficult even in the best of times. Because today, America’s long history of upward mobility is in danger.

Historically in America, there have been two paths out of poverty. In the decades after World War II, good wages for factory workers offered an upward path for people who were born poor and wanted to do better than their parents. You could graduate from high school at the top or your class, the bottom of your class, or not at all; if you showed up smart, eager, and ready to work, you could earn a wage that would let you support a family.

That way out is ending. The median wage for workers with no college is now close to the poverty line for a family of four. But that doesn’t really capture the problem. It’s not just that wages are shrinking; the jobs are vanishing.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that through 2014, more than half of all new jobs will require more than a high school degree. And four years from now, the United States will have 3 million more jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree and not enough college graduates to fill them.

That leaves only one path out of poverty: education—a college education. America has long known about the value of a college education–but a fair-minded critic might say: “You don’t know the half of it! You’re working to get more students into college; you should also be doing a lot more to get them through college.”


http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/bill-gates-2008-education-forum-speech.aspx

about our new focus on college completion.

We both will cite a dominant feature of both programs–and that is to build a culture of evidence and an overriding commitment to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Evidence gives you an argument for action. When you have it, you know what works and what doesn’t. When you don’t have it, you have no path to improvement.

Where there is data, we will act on it. Where there is none, we will gather it–and we will help build the systems that can store it and disseminate it.

We know the country spends well over 100 billion dollars a year on student aid. But we really don’t know what we’re getting for our money. We’re certainly not getting great college graduation rates. We have to do better. At a time of limited resources, it has never been more important to get the highest possible return on this investment—both for students and for the country.

Our goal, with your help, is to double the number of low-income students who earn postsecondary degrees or credentials that let them earn a living wage.

Earlier this year, I had a chance to sit down and talk with a young woman at a public high school in South Los Angeles. She told me she was taking a course to learn how to be manicurist in a salon. That’s a fine choice—if it’s a real choice. But for her, it wasn’t. She was locked in a course of studies that—even if she aced it—would not prepare her to go to college.

I had a look at the curriculum. One lesson involved reading the back of a can of soup in a grocery store and knowing what the contents are. That was her math class.

I haven’t talked to that young woman since then. I don’t know what she’s doing now. But I know what’s likely ahead for her. She will graduate from high school without ever knowing how far behind she is. She may get hired as a manicurist if a job’s available. If not, she will likely get a low-wage job at a fast-food restaurant or at a retail store. But after a while, she may very well say: “This is nowhere; I want to be a nurse and I’m going back to school.”

She will keep her job, because she will need the income, and she will enroll at a community college part-time. She’ll take a placement test for the nursing program, but she’ll score below the cut-off, so she’ll be sent to remedial math and English. It may take her two or even three semesters to be eligible for courses that will count towards her nursing degree. That means that even if she’s doing great, she’s basically still in high school—but paying college tuition.

Let’s say she makes it through remediation and moves into courses that start counting towards her degree. She may find that some of the required courses aren’t offered at a time she can take them, or even offered that semester at all. It may take her five years to get a two-year degree.



Most likely though, she won’t get a degree at all. She’ll get frustrated and quit. She’ll leave not with a diploma, but with a book of loan payment coupons. And her job prospects won’t be any better than they were before.

Multiply this by millions and we begin to get the picture. If we’re going to make any dent on poverty in America, we have to help more students get a postsecondary degree.

Here is how we’re going to get started:

First, we’re going to explore how the huge amount of financial aid in this country could be used as an incentive to encourage completion. This will include working with partners to develop changes in tuition and government funding so the college gets less money at the front end, just for enrolling a student, and more at the back end, after that student receives a diploma or credential.

Second, we will explore how performance-based scholarships can provide greater financial incentive to finish school. We have evidence from a pilot study in Louisiana that giving students scholarships if they increase their course load to full-time dramatically increases completion rates. We will be funding a demonstration of performance-based scholarships over the next three years in as many as eight states and 15 postsecondary institutions.

Third, we will help promote partnerships between colleges and local employers, so students know that a job is waiting if they complete the degree. This will make the courses economic assets to the students, and not obstacles. At the same time, we will be working to make sure students have more information about how to use postsecondary study to get the job they want.

Lastly, we will push for improvements that accelerate academic catch-up for students who are behind. Only one-third of all students enrolled in remedial education ever pass the exam and go on to earn college credits. One-third! The rest get bogged down in remediation and quit.

When I was a manager at Microsoft, we were experiencing dramatic growth and some employees would suddenly face demands that were beyond their skills. As a manager, I could narrowly define the skill they needed and customize a plan to help them learn it. But in colleges, the typical approach now to remediating our students is to re-teach them all or most of their prior courses. It’s one of the most costly parts of educational system, and a big contributor to our drop-out crisis. What if instead we could give them an assessment, and tell them: “You need to know three concepts. I’m going to give you a short, focused program to learn them.” It could make a world of difference.

Ultimately, here’s what I hope will happen. Imagine the young woman I met in Los Angeles enrolls in a college nursing program. But this time, the college accesses her academic records, with her permission. They learn what she did well and not so well.



r the remediation at a focused, accelerated rate.

They give her a diagnostic test, customized to her academic profile and her intended program of studies. The diagnostic test pinpoints the gaps she needs to fill for her specific program. They narrow it down to the essentials, and offer her the remediation at a focused, accelerated rate.

At the same time, she starts immediately with nursing courses—offered in the right sequence, at convenient times. If she misses a class, she can see the lecture on DVD—given by a nationally known teacher. She can download course materials, prepared by master educators. The amount of her school debt is reduced for every semester she stays in school, to give her an added incentive to keep going. And the college collects proportionately more money for each semester she completes, so it has an incentive to keep her on track.

While she’s still in school, she has a paid nursing internship arranged with a local hospital. When she graduates, the hospital offers her a full-time job, with benefits, at a starting salary of $40,000.

These are things we can do in this country, if we focus on it. But we need to put big incentives on the side of completion: heighten the payoff for students, schools, and employers—and keep knocking down the obstacles, financial, scheduling, and logistics.

Our foundation has a vision of a thriving postsecondary market of community colleges, four-year colleges, online options, and for-profit institutions that would compete for students on the basis of price, value, and convenience–with a premium paid when a student completes a degree that means something in the workplace.

In the next several years, our work will focus on two-year colleges. These are the schools that enroll the majority of low-income students. Most community colleges have open admission, low tuition rates, and with 1,200 of them around the country, most people live near one. Community colleges have untapped potential for getting students the credentials they need to earn a living wage.

We will take this cause to business leaders, labor leaders, civil rights leaders, and do everything we can to unify these voices in a call for change. And we’ll keep coming back, again and again, to call for more.

No country has the resources to guarantee a livelihood for people who aren’t willing to work hard. But nothing is more damaging to a country than to have millions of young people with no opportunities. In any society, there will always be some who perform well and others who don’t. But in a strong society, those differences are determined by people’s talent and energy and not by the income of their parents.



That’s why we’re committed to this work—we know of no better way to expand opportunity and make the future brighter for millions of Americans.

Thank you.



A Forum on Education in America: Bill Gates

November 11, 2008Prepared remarks by Bill Gates, co-chair and trustee

Editor's note: Read Melinda French Gates' comments at the Forum on Education, which preceded Bill Gates' remarks.

Good morning. Big advances only come when committed people study the same problems and build on each other’s work. It accelerates discovery, and I’m optimistic about what all of us can accomplish together.

Melinda and I believe that providing every child with a good education is the only path to equality in America. A good education means completing a postsecondary degree. And yet when we began our work eight years ago, the level of high school dropouts made even starting a postsecondary degree impossible for millions of students.

We were determined to find ways to work with our partners to turn around rising dropout rates, and increase the number of high school students who graduated from high school ready to succeed in college. We hoped that if we could build a model of a high-achieving school, it would be picked up by other schools. So we focused on 8 percent of schools, hoping that the lessons from our work in the 8 percent would scale to the 92 percent.

As Melinda said, we are determined to follow the evidence. So let me describe what we’ve found, what we make of it, and what we’re going to do about it.

There were some highly encouraging results—but I’ll start with the disappointments. In the first four years of our work with new, small schools, most of the schools had achievement scores below district averages on reading and math assessments. In one set of schools we supported, graduation rates were no better than the statewide average, and reading and math scores were consistently below the average. The percentage of students attending college the year after graduating high school was up only 2.5 percentage points after five years. Simply breaking up existing schools into smaller units often did not generate the gains we were hoping for.

On a more positive note, we saw encouraging successes in some of the new, small schools we supported, including some in New York City. Their graduation rates were nearly 40 percentage points higher than the rates in the schools they replaced. In 2006, the small schools' graduation rates exceeded those of comparable schools in the district by 18 percentage points. Chancellor Klein is here this morning, and I want to thank him and Mayor Bloomberg for their leadership.

There were a number of small school replications that were also encouraging: KIPP, High Tech High, Green Dot in Los Angeles, Hidalgo Early College High School in the Rio Grande Valley, YES College Preparatory Schools in Houston, Aspire High



http://www.gatesfoundation.org/speeches-commentary/Pages/melinda-gates-2008-education-forum-speech.aspx

Schools in California, the Noble Street network in Chicago, IDEA Public Schools in Texas. I’ll highlight just one of these: YES College Prep.

YES has done an impressive job with demographics that are the same as the lowest-performing public schools in Houston. Ninety-five percent of the students are African-American or Hispanic. Eighty-eight percent will be the first in their families to go to college. Eighty percent are economically disadvantaged.

For the eighth year in a row, 100 percent of their graduates were accepted into four-year colleges, including some of the top universities in the country. Ninety-one percent of YES alumni have either graduated from or are still enrolled in a four-year college.

Those are the top-line results of our work. They have shown us that all kids can succeed. But since our goal was not only to turn around schools, but to find good models and take them to scale, I have to add: we did not get the results we were seeking in scaling. We wanted to reach all schools indirectly, by showing clear gains and inspiring other schools and districts to replicate those models. Largely, this has not happened.

At our foundation, we believe that success ultimately means that at least 80 percent of low-income and minority students graduate from high school college ready. According to our data, the number of low income and minority students graduating college ready today is 22 percent, and that figure is increasing far too slowly. It’s unacceptable. We need to do better.

So let me describe what we make of the evidence, and what we plan to do next.

The disappointing results showed how hard it can be to convert large, low-performing high schools into smaller, more autonomous schools. To be successful, a redesign requires changing the roles and responsibilities of adults, and changes to the school’s culture. In some districts, we got tacit agreement to move forward, but then the schools weren’t willing to do the hard things—like removing ineffective staff or significantly increasing the rigor of the curriculum.

In New York City, many schools reorganized the school day to get students more time with math and reading, and they reduced the size of the school to improve relationships between students and teachers. Results showed that smaller, more personal learning environments and strong, caring bonds between students and adults can increase graduation rates dramatically. We see these structural changes as necessary, but not sufficient.

We saw that there is a big difference between graduating from high school and being ready for college. In New York City, less than 40 percent of the class of 2007 met the City University of New York's standard for college readiness on the Regent exams. And the percentage of students from small schools was no better than the rest of the city.



It’s clear that you can’t dramatically increase college readiness by changing only the size and structure of a school. The schools that made dramatic gains in achievement did the changes in design and also emphasized changes inside the classroom.

For example, YES and other models include a longer school day and a mandatory Saturday school and a summer school program, which is in line with some of the changes in the New York schools. But YES also sets academic standards that line up with the expectations of top universities.

In general, the places that demonstrated the strongest results tended to do many proven reforms well, all at once: they would create smaller schools, a longer day, better relationships—but they would also establish college-ready standards aligned with a rigorous curriculum, with the instructional tools to support it, effective teachers to teach it, and data systems to track the progress.

These factors distinguished the schools with the biggest gains in student achievement. Interestingly, these are also limiting factors in taking these gains to scale. A model that depends on great teaching can’t be replicated by schools that can’t attract and develop great teachers. A school that has great instructional tools cannot share them with schools that don’t use the rigorous curriculum those tools are based on.

We will continue the part of our work that is dedicated to improving the structure of schools, because it can help promote achievement.

But the defining feature of a great education is what happens in the classroom. Everything starts from that and must be built around it. So we’re going to sharpen our focus on effective teaching—in particular supporting new standards, curriculum, instructional tools, and data that help teachers—because these changes trigger the biggest gains, they are hardest to scale, and that is what’s holding us back.

We’re not the first people to focus on effective teaching to improve education. We’re not even the first people in this room. A growing body of evidence tells us that teacher effectiveness is the single most important factor in student achievement. If you take two classrooms from the same school, both starting out at the 50th percentile, and assign one to a teacher in the top quartile and another to a teacher in the bottom quartile, there will be a 10 percentile difference in achievement at the end of the year.

In fact, research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is across classrooms in the same school. We’ve known about these huge differences in student achievement in different classrooms for at least 30 years. Unfortunately, it seems that the field doesn’t have a clear view on the characteristics of great teaching. Is it using one curriculum over another? Is it extra time after school? We don’t really know. But that's what we have to find out if we're going to not only recognize great teachers, but also take average teachers and help them become great teachers. I’m personally very intrigued by this



question, and over the next few years I want to get deeply engaged in understanding this better.

The first step in identifying effective teaching has to be setting fewer, clearer, higher standards that are aligned with the goal of graduating students from high school college-ready. You can’t compare teachers if they’re not pursuing a common standard. I believe strongly in national standards. Countries that excel in math, for example, have a far more focused, common curriculum than the United States does.

Every student is capable of a college-ready curriculum; that has to be the standard everywhere. On our trip to Texas that Melinda mentioned, she and I spoke to a group of teachers who were working at KIPP Academy schools. When we asked them why they chose KIPP schools over public schools, one Latina teacher said: “I wanted to teach at a school where everyone believes you can go to college, even when you look like me.”

That ought to be every school in America.

Our foundation will keep working with states and districts to develop a core set of priority standards that students need to succeed in higher education, and getting states and districts to sign on. Members of the Common State Standards Coalition have built momentum on this issue—we now have governors and state education chiefs leading the effort. So we’re optimistic about this.

As states begin to embrace common standards, technology will help us create the next-generation models of teaching and learning. With interactivity, we can provide software to qualify a student or to bring a subject to life. We need to have the best lectures available online and for free on DVDs. Microsoft did this in India with math courses and saw that it was beneficial in a number of ways. They held contests to pick the most effective teachers from their lectures on the DVDs. Then they distributed the DVDs. Some students watched the lectures. In other cases, teachers watched outside of class to improve their teaching, or they would assign the lectures to kids who were ahead or behind.

And we’re not doing enough to provide data for teachers. Amazon.com knows every book you’ve ever bought from them. They can recommend five more based on what you like. But we have no such tool set for teachers. On the first day of school, a ninth-grade teacher has absolutely no idea which of her students can calculate the area of a circle or identify the elements of a short story. Teachers should know this.

The education sector desperately needs an infrastructure for creating better instructional tools—always with measurement systems in place so we have evidence that the new way works better than the old way. Without evidence, innovation is just another word for “fad.”

We need to be able to determine which curricula, which software and other instructional aids are most effective in helping teachers teach and students learn.



Doctors aren’t left alone in their offices to try to design and test new medicines. They’re supported by a huge medical research industry. Teachers need the same kind of support. We will help build the infrastructure for testing and evaluating the tools developed by others.

Teaching is a hard profession. As we heard in the video from Texas, a lot of great teachers leave school far sooner than they want to because they’re exhausted. Offering this kind of help could not only improve student performance; it could help make good teachers into great teachers, and help keep great teachers in the classroom longer.

We will also be helping states and districts build data systems that provide teachers timely feedback about student learning. One of the great benefits of No Child Left Behind, whatever its flaws, is that it requires states to track data about the achievement gap. That’s crucial information for addressing inequity, and we need to build on it.

A principal should be able to see at a glance how each student in a school is doing, and ask about those who are falling behind. We have seen people oppose this kind of data system on behalf of privacy; I don’t think that argument holds. I’m optimistic that very advanced data systems can be built that provide indispensable information on student progress while preserving legitimate privacy concerns.

Data systems, of course, will tell us which teachers are getting the biggest achievement gains every year. If we’re going to retain them, we’re going to have to reward them. It’s astonishing to me that you could have a system that doesn’t allow you to pay more for strong performance, or for teaching in a particular school. That is almost like saying “Teacher performance doesn’t matter”...and that’s basically saying: “Students don’t matter.”

If we don’t pay great teachers more, we won’t develop and keep more great teachers. This isn’t computer science; it’s common sense.

There are two extreme sides in this debate. According to the caricature, one side just wants to turn teachers into commissioned salesmen, so their whole salary is based on how much the scores improve. The other caricature says that teachers don’t want to be held accountable, so they will reject any system that ties pay to performance. In truth, designing an appropriate incentive system is difficult, but possible.

We believe in incentive systems, but we understand the concern that without the right design, they could seem arbitrary or incent the wrong things. They need to be transparent, they need to make sense, and teachers themselves need to see the benefits of the system and embrace them.

That’s why we’re going to set up partnerships in three to five areas to design a system that offers the training and tools that help every teacher improve; recruits, rewards, and retains effective teachers; and gives them incentives to work in the



schools where they’re needed most. Then we will measure whether it leads to significant improvements in student achievement

We’re going to choose districts that have strong leadership, that have a base level of data systems in place, and that have demonstrated support from teachers and the local teachers union. If the teachers don’t embrace it, it will fail.

We’re excited by certain models around the country—including Green Dot schools in Los Angeles and the schools in Prince George’s County, Maryland. We’re also encouraged by the model in Denver, where the teachers union and district administrators designed and adopted a system based on performance incentives. Teachers could choose their old pay formula, or join a new system that gives raises and bonuses for meeting test score targets and teaching high-need subjects, or working in high-need schools. The district funded the additional pay from a $25 million annual property tax levy that was approved by voters—but the only way the teachers could draw down the salary is if they enrolled in the new system.

It showed that taxpayers are willing to pay more to support their local schools—if the extra money is tied to higher achievement.

Money is tight. We need to spend it wisely. We’re now spending $8 billion a year for teachers with master’s degrees, even though the evidence suggests that master’s degrees do not improve student achievement. We’re spending billions on a seniority system, even though the evidence says that seniority, after the first five years, may not improve student achievement. We’ve spent billions to reduce class size, even though there is no strong evidence that spending money to reduce class size in high school is the most impactful way to improve student performance.

And the last thing we can afford—whether the economy is good or bad—is to pay teachers who can’t do the job. As President-elect Obama and others have pointed out: We need to give all teachers the benefit of clear standards, sound curriculum, good training, and top instructional tools. But if their students still keep falling behind, they’re in the wrong line of work, and they need to find another job.

Anyone who opposes dramatic change in our schools has to make an impossible case. Either they have to deny that our schools are failing, or they have to argue that the kids are to blame. Either view is wrong. If you believe every child can learn—and the evidence strongly supports this—then if the students don’t learn, the school must change. It won’t be easy, but it’s essential.

I am optimistic. We have better technology than we've ever had to help us identify great teachers, support their work, and spread their methods. We have ingenious ways to tap a kid’s desire to learn. We have political momentum that is bringing teachers and districts together. And we’re going to have a dynamic new president who’s committed to education. The country is ready for change. Let’s use the moment to accelerate the change in our schools.

Thank you.



A Forum on Education in America: William H. Gates Sr.

November 11, 2008

Prepared Remarks by William H. Gates Sr., Co-chair

Thank you.

On behalf of the foundation, I want to thank you all for being here today. We believe you can help us do better work, and we are grateful that you would take the time to do so--even on Veterans’ Day.

I hope you agree with me that working together to advance the cause of education is a pretty good way to observe the holiday. Our country is at its best when all people have the opportunity to make the most of their talents.

Public schools epitomize the special genius of the ideals on which this nation was founded. They are proof that the United States was, as Abraham Lincoln said, conceived in liberty. Open inquiry is indispensible to our concept of citizenship. And so it makes perfect sense that the belief that a free, high-quality education is a right for every single child is an American invention.

It is enshrined in the first state constitutions that were ratified after Independence. And today, in this state and in many others across the country, a citizen can sue state government for failing to live up to what is a “paramount duty” to provide education to all within its borders.

The ideals that led to the invention of public schools have been reaffirmed repeatedly throughout our history. I can think of no more inspiring example than Brown v. the Board of Education. Chief Justice Earl Warren restated the case very clearly: “It is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”

But you know better than I do that the reality is less triumphant than the theory. Educational opportunities are not yet made available to all, despite more than two centuries of striving. I would submit that we deserve high marks for our principles, but not for our performance.

I still think often of the famous quotation from the 1983 report, Nation at Risk: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Indeed, it has been 25 years since Nation at Risk came out, and our schools are still in crisis. Our ideals have not changed. Our laws have not changed. The wisdom



contained in that report and in a mountain of education research has not changed. Still, as a country, we do not at this moment have the public will to act on our ideals, our laws, and our wisdom.

Some people make the argument that education is an economic issue. Our students need to compete with students from other countries. And that’s all right with me. If we have to make that argument to get the public funds we need to rebuild our schools, we should do it. But to me, education is more fundamental than a question of American competitiveness or security. It is based on our shared social responsibility to make sure that every young person has an equal opportunity to be successful in life. That, in my mind, ought to be enough for us to make the changes our present conditions require.

The young people languishing in failing schools are human beings. They are human beings who have infinite worth in their own right without any reference to us. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and help them.

Thank you again.

To get us started today and to frame the day’s discussion, it’s my pleasure to introduce Allan Golston, the president of the foundation’s U.S. Program.



A Forum on Education in America: Vicki Phillips

November 11, 2008

Prepared Remarks by Vicki Phillips, Director, Education, United States Program

Good morning. I am deeply honored to be in the room with so many people whose work has been an inspiration to my own. Thank you for coming to Seattle to talk with us about the next wave of our work together in schools.

Like all of you, I take this work personally. I’ve worked as a teacher, a superintendent, a state secretary of education, and now as education director at the Gates Foundation. But the greatest inspiration for my work comes from my time as a student.

I grew up in a small, poor, but well-named rural Kentucky town called: Falls of Rough. And rough it could be. But I didn’t feel any sense of disprivilege–our outhouse was just as nice as anybody’s. No one expected me to amount to much because no one expected anybody to amount to much.

So I wasn't pushed very hard in school–because that would have been cruel. After all, I was too poor to succeed. But I did well enough. And by the time I was in high school, I became friends with a girl in my business class who pushed me to think about college.

In the curious ways of my family, going off to college was almost an act of disloyalty. My family pretty nearly disowned me when I left, though I was going only 90 minutes away. They were worried I wasn’t ready, but mostly they worried that I was abandoning their values–and college for their daughter was not one of them.

Nevertheless, I went. My life was changed by a chance friendship with a young woman who wanted me to go to college and who was unwilling to accept the inequities between us. To this day, it infuriates me when people write off students who grew up in circumstances similar to mine. They make the education of our young people a matter of luck–dependent on the income and education of their parents, the zip code they live in, the passion and energy of their teachers. Our young people deserve the opportunity to succeed by design, not by luck.

The goal of our education work here at the Gates Foundation is to dramatically increase by design the number of low-income and minority students who get postsecondary degrees that let them earn a living wage. This requires a big jump in the number of students who graduate from high school ready for college.

Bill just described for you the gains in graduation rates that were achieved in schools we helped to fund in New York City and the college-ready gains achieved in schools



we helped to fund in New York City and the college-ready gains achieved in schools like YES in Houston. As he explained, our work in cities and states across the country taught us some valuable lessons about what we need to do in combination. When we relied on changes in structure alone–and we didn’t work directly on what happens between kids and teachers–we fell short. But when we worked with superintendents and school leaders to change what happens in the classroom, we got much more dramatic results. While the gains we achieved did not spread beyond the schools we worked in, the results gave us confidence that we can take great results to scale–if we can fill the schools with effective teachers and put good tools in effective teachers’ hands.

Fill the schools with effective teachers and put good tools in their hands–nothing that sounds so straightforward could be more complex.

Let’s say you were trying to increase our access to alternative energy–working to do a little good in the world. What if you were one of thousands of scientists and engineers working to make solar electricity or some other alternative cheaper than coal-fired electricity, but you couldn’t get any information from the others. They all were testing different hypotheses, so you couldn’t apply their findings to your experiments. And their systems of measurement were different, so even if you found something comparable, you couldn’t make sense of it. You were all on your own.

That’s how our teachers often feel–all on their own. Thousands of people all speaking a different language would make it impossible to learn what works in science. Not surprisingly, millions of people all speaking a different language makes it impossible to learn what works in schools.

It’s time to develop a common language in public education.

Teachers everywhere are eager for clearer, more compelling standards that take the mystery out of what they’re supposed to be teaching. They’re eager for assessments that more accurately reflect what students are supposed to be learning–and the kinds of curriculum tools, coaching, and professional development that gives them the best possible results. All of these advances build on each other. We at the foundation haven’t pushed for them all at once before–but that’s what we’re going to do now. This morning, I want to describe our upcoming work:

Building common standards and better assessments.

Making great curriculum and other core supports more accessible to teachers and students and rewarding excellence and improvement in the classroom.

Using data and research to understand and more rapidly spread what works.

And creating next-generation models of learning and schools that meet kids where they are and how they learn in this century.



Standards are the starting point for serious education reform. When I became superintendent in Portland, I did a transcript analysis of the last four years of graduating seniors. I found that nearly all of them had the required number of credits to graduate, but only half of them had the kinds of courses that it took to go on with postsecondary education. It was obvious that we had to have higher standards.

But it’s not going to help if we have higher standards that are unclear or too numerous. Here is one of my all-time favorite standard –this one for high school math:

"Students use a variety of representations (concrete, pictorial, numerical, symbolic, graphical, and verbal), tools, and technology (including, but not limited to, calculators with graphing capabilities, data collection devices, and computers) to model functions and equations and solve real-life problems."

If you can imagine 150 passages like this one strung end to end, then you have imagined the “Essential Knowledge and Skills for Mathematics” for high schools in one of our 50 states. I can assure you–more people wrote these standards than have ever read them.

We all know that when standards become too disparate and numerous, assessments become shallow, textbooks get too big, teachers run out of time, and students suffer.

Since it is Veterans Day, let me give you a prime example. One of our partners, the Military Child Education Coalition, is an organization that promotes quality educational opportunities for children in military families. There are more than 2 million children of U.S. military service members. On average, these children will move six to nine times as they go from kindergarten to 12th grade. And mobility is a not just a problem for military children; it is also a problem for poor and migrant children throughout this country. Inconsistencies in state standards and assessments can make the path to college and career readiness even more challenging for these students. Common standards can play a role in their success. The Military Child Education Coalition is in a special position to shine a light on a very real problem with an attainable solution.

We need fewer, clearer, higher standards that are internationally benchmarked and really driving toward college readiness.

We will support our partners in building these standards, and fortunately, we won’t have to start from scratch. A series of groups–including teachers–are calling for fewer, more focused standards and we think it is time they were heard.

Powerful common standards also will let us confront the crisis testing faces on the ground today. Let’s admit that we have given testing a bad name in this country among many teachers and parents, but the answer can’t be to fly blind. As a country we have spent far too much time and money having each state and district design their own assessments from scratch-rather than in investing in high quality



assessment that teachers and parents can trust and that give them real insight into what students know. We can’t dispense with assessment, nor can we keep adding more tests of a low quality that don’t align with college readiness.

This is why–with core standards in hand–we will support the development of high quality assessments that test those standards. Ultimately, the tough decisions about which standards are indispensable and which can be left out should be made on the basis of empirical evidence: so we will sponsor research, administering the assessments to large samples of college students and young workers and test which standards predict college and career success. We will then make the corresponding standards and assessment items available for states to use at no cost.

Supporting What Works

The development of common standards will give us the power to do phenomenal new research into what works. They will enable us to follow the evidence across state lines and compare how similar groups of students fare on different curricular materials. We can really get at the question that teachers, administrators, and policy makers have been struggling with for a long time: What works best?

Among other things, we will support the creation of a “National Teacher Corps,” asking great teachers in traditional and charter schools across the country to help identify what works. We will ask these teachers to use a common set of interim assessments and to report on the curricula they’re using, the professional development they’re receiving, the learning gains they are achieving using different methods and materials. The result–a sort of Consumer Reports for the education sector–created by and for teachers.

We will focus as well on what best helps students to acquire the habits of academic work that are essential to college success, such as the ability to study independently, to sustain concentration on a task, to use evidence to defend a point of view, and to self-correct in response to feedback. We will invest in the development of high-quality high school assignments and other supports that demonstrably enhance and extend students' capacity to work independently and productively. In particular, we will focus this support at the periods of transition that make such an impact on student performance and their willingness to persist in school–such as the transition from 8th to 9th grade.

Data

Improving our ability to design and evaluate curriculum is just one step in creating the larger-scale system we need for evaluating what works. It is time to insist on fact-based decision-making in education and to invest our resources accordingly.

Everyone talks about using research to measure what works. But very few districts have the data they need to evaluate how they’re doing. This hit home with me again recently when Melinda, Allan, and I asked our education group to summarize lessons



learned from our past work. Ironically, one lesson we learned is that school districts could not provide us with the full picture we needed to have a stronger story about what worked and what did not. If we at the foundation are having trouble fleshing out a more nuanced picture, it should hardly be surprising that school superintendents and principals have been unable to generate the rapid gains in achievement we need. Schools can’t learn without better feedback loops.

And, what data we do have, we often misuse. Let’s be honest, one of the main things we do with data is make ourselves look good. Didn’t I hear at some point that clothes designers for women changed the numbering system so the same dresses looked smaller? (I hope that is just an ugly rumor.)

Is that so different from states lowering their standards so that their student performance looks better? We have a big problem when kids are looking great on state tests and then can’t get into college. Over the next five years we will invest up to $500 million in research and data.

Among other things, we will continue to support the Data Quality Campaign, a project of the National Center for Educational Achievement, to get the 50 states and the District of Columbia to implement a longitudinal data system. This would let educators and policy makers track individual student progress and begin gathering facts about college readiness and practices that make a significant difference in student achievement.

We also recently approved a grant to the National Student Clearinghouse—a nonprofit whose database contains enrollment records for more than 90 percent of college students in the United States. Those data are used primarily to verify college enrollment for banks participating in the guaranteed student loan programs. We will enable them to provide that data to high schools and school districts so they know which of their students are attending college and whether or not they are completing degrees.

We also will work with a number of states beginning with our long-time partner, the State of Texas, as it makes ambitious changes to its statewide data system. Their system was cutting edge when they established it 20 years ago. It allowed Texas to run a statewide, standard-based accountability system. But Texas leaders want a system that will inform not just state policy, but improve classroom practice. We will to work with educators to take stock of the most advanced data systems and uses, bring higher education to the table, and craft a system that can answer crucial questions like: How do our students perform in college? What specific core math and reading knowledge is most required for college readiness? What middle school courses best prepare students for high school?

Evidence-based decision making is essential in business–as a matter of survival. It’s long past time that we start making evidence-based decisions when it comes to the business of educating our kids.



Effective Teaching

Common standards, strong curricula and assessments, and sophisticated data systems all combine to give us a game-changing ability we’ve never really had before: the ability to identify effective teaching based on what really matters–student performance.

This will allow us to establish policies to keep the most effective teachers in our classrooms and to set a clear standard for teaching excellence. Even though teachers differ enormously in their impact on students, our compensation systems pretend that teachers are all the same. We do far too little to honor our best teachers and to retain them in our poorest schools, where they’re needed most. The combination of changes we are working on will give us the opportunity to fix this–not just in a cluster of schools in one or two regions, but in school districts across the country.

The foundation plans to commit more than $7 million to an unprecedented collaboration between three national research groups—the Educational Testing Service, the RAND Corporation, and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. This coalition will examine common approaches for evaluating teachers and compare the results to student learning gains.

Our goal is to create a next generation of fairer, more powerful, and more reliable means for measuring teacher effectiveness that can be agreed to by both teachers and researchers.

Most of our research into identifying and rewarding effective teachers will take place in what we’re calling “deep dive” sites. These are the sites where we’ll be able to test (and study the effects of) a large number of these strategies at the same time in the same place. Over the next five years, we will work with a handful of urban districts and their unions–as well as networks of charter schools–that are willing to try to define what it means to be an effective teacher; to figure out how to identify, develop, evaluate, and reward those teachers; and, yes, how to get ineffective teachers out of the classroom. We will work with the deep dive sites to find ways to reward teachers who meet more rigorous standards for tenure, and ensure that there are incentives for effective teachers who choose to work in high-need schools. We will fund intermediaries to work with the deep dive sites to ensure an adequate supply of new teachers. And we will work with those partners to see if increasing the number of highly effective teachers in a school district produces comparable changes in student learning.

Helping Teachers Improve–Teacher Supports

We will invest $500 million in these “deep dive” sites and what really excites me about them is not just the chance to identify and reward great teachers, but the chance to give all teachers the support they need to improve. Some people may oversell the idea that we’re somehow going to get millions of great new teachers in



the system to replace ineffective teachers. There will certainly be some of that, and the right compensation system can draw talented people into the profession. But the real, game-changing results will come from standards, assessments, data, and teacher supports that help every teacher get better.

One reason I was eager to come to the foundation is that I realized that after traveling from Kentucky to Pennsylvania to Portland, it was just insane how much energy my team and I spent assembling core instructional tools for teachers. We can change that. Overworked teachers and department heads ought to have at their fingertips phenomenal tools and evidence-based instructional supports that will help them become better teachers. We haven’t even begun to unlock the gains for our students that will come from helping C teachers become A teachers.

In the 1990s, the United Kingdom used teacher effectiveness as a centerpiece of reform. They implemented a national curriculum; they developed assessments aligned to those standards; they recruited new teachers and provided national training programs focused on best practices. In just one measure–reading–by 2000, the lowest-performing schools were beating the 1997 average.

This is what can happen when you give teachers the means to get better. I saw it myself in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where better teacher supports drove better student performance. Lancaster is a high needs district, where 67% of students live in poverty. In 1998, we instituted mandatory professional development for teachers and focused everyone around the same core math curriculum. Interim assessments were aligned with that curriculum, and we were relentless in making sure that the work students did every day was aligned with the math they needed to learn. Three years later, the results in Lancaster schools were dramatic. The number of kids who were “below basic” in one school had gone from 72 percent to 16 percent –and other schools had similar gains. At the same time, the percentage of advanced students increase–by a factor of 10! It shows we can move some students to proficiency and move other students to advanced levels at the same time. The dilemma of serving one group of students at the expense of another is a false choice. If we combine the pressure for results with the supports to deliver, we can raise overall achievement for everyone.

I smile every time I think of a recent conversation I had with a teacher at a Green Dot school in Los Angeles. She was overjoyed with her job. She felt she was finally part of a great partnership. She was getting more data about her students, stronger curriculum supports, and more time to focus on her work in the classroom and collaborate with other teachers. She was working harder and loving it more. Now that she can see the data and the impact she’s having, she’s more motivated to improve her performance. You shouldn’t have to work at a Green Dot school to feel that thrill; every teacher in the country ought to have that same solid support–and it’s our long-range goal, with your help, to give it to them.



Innovation: Next Generation Models of Learning

When schools and districts around the country align standards and curriculum and assessments, and we expand our data systems, we will have the evidence we need to improve our practice. But there is another huge advantage to this alignmen –it will throw open the doors to innovation.

Aligning standards and assessments will help us tap the power of market forces to create breakthrough tools, and next generation models of teaching and learning. Common technology standards led to the explosion of the Internet. The Internet moved us away from private networks with their own standards to a public network with shared standards that allow innovations to be shared very quickly.

Fragmented standards make it hard for business to sell into the education market. Let’s say a software genius with a passion for education develops an amazing tool that teaches kids advanced math concepts while they barely notice–because the software is so entertaining. So he tries to sell it–but everyone has different standards, different assessments; every potential buyer is a small buyer, and has to check with someone else. So he has to repeat the process a thousand times because there’s no wide scale market and pretty soon it becomes more advantageous to just sell to another industry. We have to make sure our schools and our students get the benefits of the innovative genius in this country. There is an entire sector of innovators and inventors that doesn’t even study the challenges of education because–to drive innovation, you need some kind of functioning market. We will advocate for a new level of federal involvement in research and development. We will create incentive funds for products that can develop college-ready competencies based on proficiency, not just seat-time. We will work to pool the demand among districts to support promising new approaches. Imagine the competition we could create if all states demanded materials aligned to common standards: we would get better tests, better textbooks, better teaching tools, and ultimately, better student performance. And isn’t it time that we meet kids where and how they learn and in places and spaces they could more comfortably call “school” so we will incubate a next generation of school designs with the potential to get step-change outcomes for kids.

Conclusion

We are excited to share our thinking with you today and in the coming months with our grantees at three regional convenings in D.C., Chicago, and Seattle.

As I close out my remarks, I want to introduce you to the College Ready Leadership Team:

Many of you know Steve Seleznow, Jim Shelton, and Stefanie Sanford. They have worked tirelessly to bring us to where we are today and have been your good partners. Steve will continue to lead our state and district work and our



work with the school networks we have scaled; Jim is taking on our work in Innovation, helping to create next generation schools and new models for accelerating learning, and Stefanie continues to lead our advocacy work from her position in U.S. Advocacy.

And of course many of you know Margot Rogers who has often led our work on the ground (e.g., Chicago and North Carolina). Margot now serves as my Special Assistant and most recently co-led our work on the strategy you have just heard described.

Please meet three new members of the Team: Carina Wong, who will lead our standards, assessment, curriculum, and student support initiatives; John Deasy, who is here today in his capacity as superintendent of Prince George’s County Public Schools, but come January will lead our work on teacher effectiveness; and Michael Allio, who is our strategy and management lead.

And finally I want you to meet Tom Kane, who is on contract with us from Harvard and is shaping our research and data agenda.

The last three decades of school reforms have generated many insights and success stories, but not nearly the gains the country has been hoping for. According to the McKinsey Report on the world’s best schools: “Between 1980 and 2005, public spending per student increased by 73 percent in the U.S. after allowing for inflation. Over the same period, the U.S. employed more teachers, the student-to-teacher ratio fell by 18 percent and by 2005, class sizes in the nation’s public schools were the smallest they had ever been...

Our most innovative and creative school and district leaders are clear about what they need to ensure that every student is successful. The evidence points pretty clearly to what is required. The question is whether we, as a collective, can deliver. It will take bold and courageous action by all of us, but we turned an important historical page last week in this country, and working together we can turn another for our children.

As I indicated earlier, nothing could sound more straightforward, yet be so complex. To get to the heart of education–effective teachers and powerful learning–we have to change all these things, and we have to do it together, district by district, state by state, across the country, by design: fewer, clearer, higher standards, aligned curriculum, strong assessments, proven teacher and student supports, better data systems, and incentives for high performance and for teaching at low-income schools. This is the path we’re on, building on the path we’ve traveled. And we are going where the evidence leads, as quickly as we can, because we don’t have one minute–or one child–to lose.



A Forum on Education in America

November 11, 2008

Prepared Remarks by Hilary Pennington, Director, Special Initiatives, United States Program

Good afternoon. Thank you, Juan, for that introduction. And thank you all for that welcome. So many of you have been partners and inspiration to me over the years; it is great to have you here with us. In this last hour of a long day, I want to build on Melinda’s remarks this morning to give you more detail about the new strategy we are launching.

Vicki has already shared with you one extraordinarily important way that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working to reduce inequity and increase opportunity in the U.S.—ensuring that high school students graduate with the skills they need to succeed in college.

But when I was hired as Director of U.S. Special Initiatives 20 months ago, it was to answer a simple but daunting question Bill and Melinda asked: “What else?”

What else should we be doing beyond our work in high school to increase opportunity in this country?

As many of you know, I approached this work after many years in the field—two years working with John Podesta as a senior fellow at The Center for American Progress and more than 20 years leading Jobs for the Future (JFF). John and JFF’s new leader, Marlene Seltzer, are here today and I’d like to recognize them and thank them for the great job they are doing.

But you should also know that my passion increasing access to opportunity comes from my life experience.

I was born in South Africa eight years after the apartheid regime came to power. My father was South African, my mother American. We came back to St. Louis when I was 3 because my father was sick. He died shortly afterwards, leaving my mother with three children under the age of 3.

She started the first program in continuing education for women at Washington University. She also fought to find decent educational opportunities for my sister, the youngest of us, who was born with significant learning disabilities. In the days before the Individuals with Disabilities Act, there wasn’t much available. My sister was in an abysmal special ed high school. My mother worked to get her out and created a work-based learning program for her at Children’s Hospital, where she trained to become a nurses’ aide.



So, very early in my life, I experienced what we all experience—losses I didn’t deserve and privilege I didn’t deserve—just by virtue of the accident of birth. Between my sister’s struggles and regular trips back to South Africa, I began to understand that when a society does not treat all lives as having equal value, we all suffer. Systemic, gross inequities damage both those with privilege and those without it.

These experiences led me to ask the very same question: “What else?”

What else can I do? What else can we do?

When Bill and Melinda asked that question, I viewed it not only as a great challenge, but as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

So we went to work, asking a lot of other questions to a lot of other people on the way.

We didn’t start out with education as a goal; our only commitment was to follow the evidence and focus on the approaches that would yield the greatest return.

But after tons of research and meeting with policy experts, practitioners, and other foundations, we came back to what has been the foundation’s domestic focus for the past eight years...because the evidence spoke clearly.

The highest leverage investment we can make—education.

This time, postsecondary education. And even more specifically, postsecondary success.

We are making a long-term commitment to this issue and we have set a goal that is ambitious and necessary: to double the number of young people who earn a postsecondary degree or credential with value in the workplace by the time they reach age 26.

The first part of that goal is a hard number. It means an increase of more than 250,000 graduates each year.

If you asked most Americans, they certainly believe that most people who enroll in college get the credential they came there to get. Yet, only slightly more than half of Americans earn some degree or credential after high school—and that drops to about 20 percent for low-income, black and Hispanic students.

As Melinda said earlier today, we have created a system that rewards getting students into college, but not out the other side with a degree. Today, more than half of all dollars spent on postsecondary education in this country is spent on students.



who never finish.

To turn that around, we will have to create a new set of incentives¬¬—one that rewards individuals and institutions not just for access but for completion.

The second part of the goal—making sure young adults get their credential by the age of 26, at or before the time they start families of their own—requires even more fundamental change.

We learned through our research that if young people don’t complete a credential by age 26, their chances of ever doing so go way down.

What would it take to re-orient our system so that it made degree completion likely for young adults?

Over the next three years, we are going to test approaches to answer that question. Our strategy has three parts, and I want to tell you a little about each of them before opening up to questions:

Support young adult success.

Build commitment to the goal of credential completion.

Improve system performance.

Our strategy begins first and foremost with supporting young adults and their success. The young adults Jane Buckingham talked about in her presentation.

According to a Rockefeller Foundation study taken before the September financial crisis, they see the American Dream becoming out of reach. They are more concerned about their economic future than previous generations; it’s hardly a surprise when you consider that they leave college with twice the debt load of earlier generations.

But despite this, they are also committed to doing the work that’s necessary to get ahead.

Recently, we met with a group of community college students who really reinforced this. Some talked about studying until 2 or 3 in the morning, and how they then had to wake up just a couple of hours later to go to work and to school.

Others simply can’t sleep at all. They worry too much. About tests and tuition. About gas prices and getting a job. In these times, about credit and debt.



The stress in these young adults is palpable.

But so is their pride in succeeding. One woman spoke of the day she’ll become an occupational therapist and her family can relax because she’ll be able to support them. As my friend, Wick Sloane, at Bunker Hill Community College says, “These are the individuals who, against the odds, choose education over extra food in the kitchen, and who, often on top of 50- or 60-hour work schedules, choose to come to school and learn.”

They have an incredible will to make the most of their lives. What they lack is the way to make their dreams a reality. That’s a tragic waste, and it’s one we cannot allow to continue.

That’s why we will make investments to figure out how to give young adults access to the tools they need to make good decisions about their future.

Before they sacrifice their time and money, they should be able to find out whether or not they are buying an education that is worth something. Which programs lead to the greatest opportunities? Which institutions have the best track record for getting their students through school and into careers?

We also plan to push the envelope on incentives that reinforce the motivation to succeed that exists among most young adults.

One great example of this is the success of performance-based incentives in places like Louisiana that encourage—and in many cases enable—students to enroll full-time so they can devote more hours to their studies.

You may be familiar with this program. In exchange for enrolling more than part-time, students get incentive payments: $250 when they register; $250 when they get their midcourse grades; and the rest at the end of the semester. So far, they have achieved significant increases in student retention by putting resources in the hands of young people themselves—not by adding more faculty or student support services, or resources to the institution.

If we are to double the numbers who complete a credential by the time they are 26, young adults will need a network of support for their success. They and we need partners.

One of those key partners is employers, especially employers of low-income, young adults. More than two-thirds of young postsecondary students work, and they have to struggle to balance work and school. Too often they are left with a no-win choice: drop out or keep a job. We need to build models of college that work for people that work and that add value for employers as well.



Sandy Weil, founder of the National Academy Foundation, is here today. We’re inspired by their success and how they’ve shown that participating in career academies results in an extra $4,000 a year in earnings eight years after students have graduated from high school. That’s the equivalent of two years of community colleges. And the results are greatest for African-American males.

The factor most associated with this success is students’ participation in work-based internships and their relationships with employer mentors.

Another great example is ArcelorMittal’s Steel Worker for the Future initiative. Students start off with several months of classes in a specifically designed two-year degree program, then alternate between paid on the job training and their community college courses. After three years, graduates earn an associate degree and the possibility of a full-time, well-paying steelworker’s job.

We want to support the development of many more models like this in jobs that promise good futures and help grow our economy.

If employers are one key support network, communities are another. We want to build communities of support around all young people.

We will work to build “on-ramps” to postsecondary success for young people who are not on a path straight from high school to college. We will forge partnerships with programs like YouthBuild and Gateway to College. In these programs, with a mix of academic coursework and strong support, young people who had little chance of graduating from high school are completing two- and sometimes four-year degrees.

So, supporting young adults—listening to them, connecting them. That’s first.

Second, we will encourage leaders and public policies to support postsecondary success.

Through a combination of federal, state, and philanthropic initiatives, college enrollment rates increased by more than 34 percent over the last 40 years.

Now we must exact the same pressure and strategies to get students to and through college.

We will use our voice—and encourage others to do the same—to raise awareness about the urgency of our goal and building support for the policy and financial commitments needed to achieve it.

Under our current system, the short-term “reward” for more education is generally more debt. And most existing aid programs don’t use their funding to encourage students to complete degrees.



students to complete degrees. We want to encourage financial aid policies that not only increase affordability but also give incentives for completion.

We are intrigued by bold ideas like forgiving a percentage of a young person’s student loan for each year they complete, thereby ensuring young people finish and are not saddled with massive debt upon graduation.

We will also help create better information. We want to build on research like Pat Callan’s National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education Measuring Up report, the College Board’s Education Pays study and Kati Haycock and the Ed Trust’s report card on colleges that excel at enrolling and graduating low-income and minority students.

We will support research to identify the best policy approaches and the best institutional practices to accelerate completion, and we will leverage that information, sharing what we learn with key decision makers throughout the nation.

Our foundation has a strong and persuasive voice, and we will join you in advocating for policy changes and investments proven to get results.

Third, we must strengthen performance—improving existing institutions and experimenting with new approaches designed for the purpose of accelerating completion for low-income, young adults.

Simply put, young adults must be able to get further, faster. If they don’t, if they can’t...it is not their failing—it is ours.

We will partner with colleges and other postsecondary providers eager to consider new and innovative institutional designs that reduce the time and cost required to complete a credential.

Clayton Christensen, a leading expert on innovation, says that innovation is driven by companies who begin with the customer in mind.

Today’s postsecondary customer is pressed financially … and impatient with slow progress. I don’t think anyone would conclude that today’s postsecondary system was built with their needs in mind.

So we will invest in two key areas for improving performance in existing institutions—expanding the use of technology and improving remedial education.

The Texas community college students we visited with last month told us how technology can accelerate their learning. It’s the same thing we’re hearing all over the country.



That’s why we will explore options for integrating technology into the postsecondary experience, both inside and outside the classroom. We will look to leaders in using technology like Rio Salado College in Arizona, which has a rich online course catalog that is complemented by online tutoring and support services.

We will also support the development of information systems that colleges can use to increase student success, like the ones at ITT and other for-profit colleges. They track when students are absent from class and simultaneously ping the student, the professor, and student support services to make sure the student gets the help they need to stay on course.

Finally, we will take a long hard look at one of the most important barriers to postsecondary completion today– remedial education.

Imagine arriving at college thinking you’re prepared and being mentally and financially ready for two to three years of long hours, hard work, and constant penny-pinching. Then you take a placement test, and learn that it will take twice as long.

That’s not only demoralizing … too often, it’s defeating.

That’s why a particular focus of our early investments will be supporting efforts to dramatically accelerate academic catch-up and improving the first year experience for all students.

Rather than placing academically underprepared students and remedial education at the margins of our institutions, we need to put them at the center of institutional innovation.

We know we can do better. Look at the for-profit colleges that allow core credits to be accumulated while students catch up on high school material.

Other public colleges, with support from the Lumina Foundation, are piloting approaches that keep the same students together in learning communities and place them in linked courses. The results are very encouraging, not only in better retention and performance but in increased student engagement and self-esteem.

We are partnering with Lumina to determine which approaches are the most effective and help rapidly scale them so that they reach most, not handfuls, of students in developmental education.

But to strengthen performance, we will look also at creating new institutions to show what is possible when a college is designed from the start with completion as the focus.



We are intrigued by Seattle’s plans to design a college specifically around the needs of working adults: the course offerings are tailored to high-demand degree programs, classes are scheduled at convenient times, and students can accumulate credits quickly. Or the City University of New York’s plan to build a new community college for young adults aimed at increasing completion rates in part by eliminating distinct developmental education courses.

We see these next three years as a time to test and learn what works best and to recalibrate our efforts in light of what we learn as we get ready for the next phase of our investments.

We will aim our grants to create rapid feedback loops and learning communities. Keeping scale in mind from the beginning, we will invest in networks of colleges, employers, and youth-serving organizations, rather than individual programs.

We will invest in a handful of states and communities based on their concentration of our target population and their political commitment and capacity to move this agenda and reach our goal:

Doubling the numbers of low-income, young adults who complete a postsecondary credential by age 26.

Everything I’ve talked about–all the examples –what you are doing in the field … are learning laboratories, and we will use the knowledge gained to inform our efforts and those of others. And really, that is the point I want to leave you with today.

I come to this challenge not only with 20 months at the foundation, but 20 years in the field of education and workforce reform. Now, I’m a grant maker … one who has seen how together we can strengthen a grantee’s impact by paying more attention to results and coherent “theories of action.” But I was also a grant seeker. So I understand that foundations must do a better job at building organizational capacity and sticking to what we start–that we must pay more attention to scale and sustainability and public policy.

Today is Veteran’s Day.

It is fitting then that we remember that almost 65 years ago, as World War II was beginning to wind down, President Roosevelt and the American people looked at the sacrifice of our armed services and said we are grateful. But they also asked that same profound and enduring question: “What else?”

What else can we do honor our veterans? What else must we do for them to ensure the great country they risked their lives for offers the freedom and opportunity it promises?



The answer to that question was what President Roosevelt said “gives emphatic notice to the men and women in our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down.” The answer was that education would literally open the door to middle class for millions of young men and women and their children. The answer was one of most significant pieces of legislation in our nation’s history: the G.I. Bill.

Today, our challenge is not that different.

We, too, can ensure the opportunity America promises. And we, too, know the key to that is education.

That’s why we must have the same clear sense of purpose and resolve. We must be as big and bold as we were at the end of World War II. And we must do everything we can to make certain that postsecondary education is not just about access but success.

Together, let’s give emphatic notice that doubling the number of young people who earn a postsecondary degree or credential with value in the workplace by the time they reach age 26 is goal we can realize.

I know that you share this goal. And it is your work, your commitment, and your expertise that inspire us to believe we can reach it.

We’re grateful for all that you do. And we’re honored to be your partner, and we look forward to working with you. Thank you for being here with us today.

