When I was a kid, my parents took me to the World’s Fair in Seattle. It was amazing to see all these fantastic technologies that felt like something out of a science fiction novel. I asked them to take me back multiple times during the six months it was open here, and I remember walking away from the fairgrounds each time feeling that I had just caught a glimpse of the future.

That feeling came back to me recently as I walked out of a classroom in Newark, New Jersey.

In May, I had the chance to visit the First Avenue Elementary School, where they’re pioneering the use of AI education in the classroom. The Newark School District is piloting Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutor and teacher support tool, and I couldn’t wait to see it for myself.

I’ve written a lot about Khanmigo on this blog. It was developed by Khan Academy, a terrific partner of the Gates Foundation. And I think Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, is a visionary when it comes to harnessing the power of technology to help kids learn. (You can read my review of his new book, Brave New Words, here.)

We’re still in the early days of using AI in classrooms, but what I saw in Newark showed me the incredible potential of the technology.

I was blown away by how creatively the teachers were using the tools. Leticia Colon, an eighth-grade algebra teacher, explained how she used AI to create problem sets about hometown heroes the students might be interested in. In February, Khanmigo helped her develop equations that incorporated Newark boxer Shakur Stevenson’s workout routines, so her students could practice math skills while learning about a real-world role model.

Cheryl Drakeford, a third-grade math and science teacher, talked about how she uses Khanmigo to help create rubrics and lesson hooks for assignments. The technology gives her a first draft, which she then tailors for her students. For example, the AI once gave her a hook that used a generic story about a fruit stand, and she edited it to be about Pokémon cards and Roblox—two topics her students are passionate about. “Khanmigo gives me the blueprint, but I have to give the delivery,” she said.

Several of the teachers I met with showed me how they can access each student’s dashboard and get a summary of how they’re doing in a particular subject. They loved being able to easily and quickly track a student’s progress, because it’s saving them a lot of time. They were also excited about how their students are using Khanmigo as a personalized tutor.

This technology is far from perfect at this point. Although the students I met loved using Khanmigo overall, they also mentioned that it struggled to pronounce Hispanic names and complained that its only voice option is male—which makes it clear how much thought must still be put into making the technology inclusive and engaging for all students. In an ideal world, the AI would know what the students in Ms. Drakeford’s class are into, so she wouldn’t have to do any editing. And Ms. Colon told me it took her several tries to get Khanmigo to give her what she wanted.

In other words, my visit to Newark showed me where we are starting from with AI in the classroom, not where the technology will end up eventually. It reinforced my belief that AI will be a total game-changer for both teachers and students once the technology matures. Even today, when the teachers at First Avenue delegate routine tasks to AI assistants, they reclaim time for what matters most: connecting with students, sparking curiosity, and making sure every child feels seen and supported—especially those who need a little extra help.

Khanmigo is just one of many AI-powered education tools in the pipeline, and the Gates Foundation is focused on ensuring these tools reach and support all students, not just a few. Our goal is that they help level the playing field, not widen existing gaps. We’re currently working with educators across the country to get feedback and make the technology more responsive to their needs. Visits like the one I took to Newark are part of that process. It was fantastic to learn what teachers were enthused about and see how different students are engaging with AI.

The educators I met in Newark are true pioneers. Some were on the cutting edge, constantly looking for new ways to use AI in their classroom. Others were using it in a more limited fashion. I was impressed by how the school was able to support each teacher’s comfort level with the technology. They’re putting a lot of thought into change management and making sure that no educator is forced to try things that won’t work in their classroom.  

That’s because, at the end of the day, teachers know best. If you hand them the right tools, they will always find a way to support their students. My visit to Newark left me more optimistic than ever that AI will help teachers do what they do best and free them up to focus on what matters most.

Do you know how to calculate the volume of a prism? What about a pyramid? And what does either have to do with movie theater popcorn?

Back in April, I spent the day at Chula Vista Middle School in Southern California learning what these questions have to do with graduating from college. I was there to meet with school and district leaders and join an eighth-grade math class taught by a remarkable teacher named Amilcar Fernandez, who also runs the math department and develops its curriculum. Over the past few years, Mr. Fernandez has been trying to transform how Chula Vista teaches what is widely cited as American students’ “least favorite subject”—and has been since at least the year I was born.

While my love of math is no secret, I know many people don’t feel similarly. To them, the subject often feels abstract, even irrelevant. And with the rise of calculators, then computers, and now AI chatbots, it’s getting harder and harder to explain to students why they should learn how to do long division or find the area of a trapezoid by hand.

The truth is that math is more than just a bunch of numbers—much more. Not only are math skills relevant to our everyday lives in ways we might not realize, they’re also a powerful indicator of how successful those lives will be. As I’ve written in the past, research shows that students who pass Algebra 1 by ninth grade are more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree (in any major) and go on to a well-paid career. If they fail the course, they only have a one-in-five chance of graduating from high school.

So it’s critical that students build the foundation in math they need to take on that tough course, which is the most frequently failed high school course in the country. But so many don’t. Earlier this year, the National Assessment Governing Board released its Long-Term Trend Report, which showed that math scores for 13-year-old students in seventh and eighth grade fell nine points compared to 2020 and 14 points compared to a decade ago—dropping to levels not seen since the 1990s.

But even prior to the pandemic, students were struggling. In 2019, the last year of data we have before it upended education around the world, just 34 percent of U.S. eighth graders were proficient in math. For too many, the subject is a barrier to success instead of a gateway.

That’s not because students can’t keep up with what is being taught in math class; it’s because what is being taught in math class hasn’t kept up with them. Over the past several decades, the way that algebra, geometry, and calculus are taught has barely changed—despite tremendous transformation in the labor market, and despite polling that shows parents and teachers believe math education should be more applicable to the real world (and evidence that suggests students’ engagement and understanding in math increase when it is). 

That is why the Gates Foundation’s K-12 education strategy is focused on improving student outcomes by modernizing math education. To us, that means three things. First, it should be personalized to students and their respective interests, abilities, needs, and goals, with feedback tailored to them and opportunities to work on some topics or problems of their choosing. Second, it should prioritize interaction and communication by encouraging students to talk through their problem-solving approaches out loud and collaborate to find the answers, which can build their confidence and allow them to learn from each other. Third, it should be applicable (and applied) to complex, real-world problems that students know exist outside the classroom—from designing a budget to estimating population growth.

I got to see these three key concepts in action during the day I spent in Chula Vista. The school is part of one of the foundation’s two Networks for School Improvement run by the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. They’re focused on helping more eighth graders get on track by supporting teachers like Mr. Fernandez as they work to improve the way math, specifically, is taught and learned—and how students are engaged in the process.

The lesson for the day was one that most middle-schoolers learn at some point: how to calculate the volume of a pyramid. But Mr. Fernandez’s approach to teaching it was different. Rather than give students the formula and have them practice it over and over again, he put the pyramid in their hands—literally, with a pyramid-shaped popcorn container—and asked them to take the lead in their own learning. The question he asked to start the lesson off wasn’t “What is the volume?” but “Which of these two popcorn containers—one a rectangular prism, and one a pyramid—would you buy at the movie theater to get the best deal?”

By approaching the lesson this way, Mr. Fernandez gave his students a real-world application that they’ve likely already encountered—and an incentive to learn the answer. After all, who doesn’t want to get the most bang for their buck? Then he had his students talk through what they already knew about volume, and about how the area of four-sided 2D shapes relates to the area of three-sided ones.

I loved watching the students answer each other’s questions, and I was impressed by how Mr. Fernandez empowered all of them to speak up. As he explained to me afterward, one of the reasons he’s able to do that is because of the feedback he receives and then implements from frequent student surveys. While he certainly wants and solicits student input on his performance as a teacher, the specific surveys he gives do more than that: They also measure engagement and relevance by allowing students to give feedback on how they are experiencing the classroom.

Studies have shown that students are more than twice as likely to earn As and Bs in math when they rate classroom learning conditions highly, which happens when they feel a sense of agency and belonging there. Mr. Fernandez knows firsthand how critical those factors are. Chula Vista is under ten miles from the border with Mexico, and most of his students are either the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. Fernandez is a first-generation American, too. From the surveys, he knows that many of his students bring that part of their identity into the classroom—either insecure about English as a second language, or unsure about college because no one in their family has gone, or simply unconvinced that math is relevant to their lives in the grand scheme of things.

But because Mr. Fernandez understands and relates to his students’ experiences, he can make them feel seen, and like they belong, in the classroom. That, coupled with his applications of math to real-world contexts that pique his students' interest, ends up increasing their engagement. At Chula Vista, math proficiency rates have increased 18 percentage points in the last three years—a sign that these efforts are making an impact.  

Sometimes, the math problem in this country feels impossible to solve. But when more teachers have the tools they need to reach their students—and teach math in a way that resonates—I’m confident that more of their students will graduate with a love of math just like mine.

When I was a senior in high school, I spent part of the year living in Vancouver, Washington. I thought I got to know the town, which is just across the state border from Portland, pretty well while I was doing some programming for the local power company. But I recently found out Vancouver is home to one of the state’s most remarkable schools—and 17-year-old me had no idea.

The Washington School for the Deaf is the state’s only fully bilingual K-12 school in American Sign Language, or ASL, and English. Deaf and hard-of-hearing students come from across the state—many staying overnight during the week to attend classes—to learn in both languages. The school has had a lot to be proud of since its founding more than 135 years ago, but it recently added a new feather to its cap: WSD is home to Dana Miles, the 2023 Washington State Teacher of the Year.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dana. I was blown away by her thoughtful, compassionate, and practical approach to teaching. As a graduate of WSD herself, she understands how her kids feel when they first step into her classroom. Many of them grew up in hearing families where they don’t sign, so they learned how to communicate later than most children. Some even join Dana’s classes with virtually no language at all.

“My students often feel insecure because maybe their English or ASL isn’t good enough,” she told me through an interpreter. “So I first want them to know that whatever they share during class is important. Once they realize what they say has importance, they feel like, ‘Okay, I matter.’ And that’s when they start learning.”

Dana teaches three classes to high school students that she describes broadly as “Adulting 101.” The first is a consumer math class, where students learn how to double recipes, calculate paycheck deductions, and more. The Gates Foundation supports many partners working to make math more engaging to students, and I think Dana’s focus on how math is used in the real world is super compelling.

Her favorite class to teach is Work Experience, because it’s all about helping her students imagine their future after school. As they work in a campus coffee shop, the school’s office, or off-campus at a local store, Dana helps them learn the hard and soft skills necessary for a successful career.

Many of Dana’s students will choose not to go to college, because there are other paths to a career that are more appealing to them. “A lot of my students really enjoy vocational fields because they’re hands-on,” she told me. “They don’t require as many linguistic requirements. Vocational fields can provide them with the potential to pursue a dream job.”

I was especially interested to hear about the third class Dana teaches, Applied Bilingual Language Arts. Just like in any bilingual class, her students study vocabulary and grammar in both languages at the same time. What makes Dana’s class unusual, though, is that all of the lessons they learn are directly connected to a real-world scenario they’re likely to encounter.

As an example, Dana told me about a transportation unit she does every year. If you’re a hearing person, chances are you learned a lot of what you know about transportation passively. You grew up overhearing your parents talk about what time a plane arrives or how the bus schedule just changed. If you’re deaf or hard-of-hearing, that might not have been the case. So, Dana teaches her students not only the vocabulary needed but how to read maps, navigate the city bus system, or even purchase car insurance. It’s a deeply practical approach to education that I believe every kid could benefit from.

I asked Dana if she could teach me a couple of signs, and she was kind enough to oblige me. I have a long way to go before I’m fluent, but I’m glad that I now know a couple key phrases. You can watch a video of Dana teaching me here:

I also asked Dana what hurdles she faces as a teacher. “For me, the challenge with bilingual education is the lack of resources,” she said. “We tend to create materials from scratch, because it’s not easy to find Bilingual Language Arts materials.” For example, if she’s teaching her students about job applications, she will film a video of her filling one out. She also records herself explaining what she’s doing in ASL, which she overlays on the corner of the screen. Videos are an effective tool, but they’re time consuming for Dana to create.

Fortunately, technology is improving a lot for the Deaf community. When Dana was in school, she had to ask a hearing family member to help her if she wanted to call someone. Now, her students have a huge array of communication tools at their disposal. She showed me two of them: an app called Cardzilla that transcribes spoken language super quickly and displays typed responses in a large font, and a video relay service, or VRS, on her phone that instantly connects her with an interpreter when she needs to call someone. (I was surprised, however, to learn no one has made an app that translates ASL to spoken English yet. I think it’s doable.)

Dana believes that introducing her students to all the tools available to them is one of her most important jobs. She says, "It is so critical for Deaf people to learn how to self-advocate, because often we are oppressed by so many barriers in our lives that we need to figure out how to overcome. Teachers have a responsibility to teach how to overcome those barriers.”

I am always amazed by the passion and commitment our Washington State Teachers of the Year bring to their work. Dana brings that dedication to an area of incredible need, and I left our meeting more inspired by our state’s remarkable teachers than ever. Educators like Dana make me proud to be a Washingtonian.

When Chat GPT 4.0 launched last week, people across the internet (and the world) were blown away. Talking to AI has always felt a bit surreal—but OpenAI’s latest model feels like talking to a real person. You can actually speak to it, and have it talk back to you, without lags. It’s as lifelike as any AI we’ve seen so far, and the use cases are limitless. One of the first that came to my mind was how big a game-changer it will be in the classroom. Imagine every student having a personal tutor powered by this technology.

I recently read a terrific book on this topic called Brave New Words. It’s written by my friend (and podcast guest) Sal Khan, a longtime pioneer of innovation in education. Back in 2006, Sal founded Khan Academy to share the tutoring content he’d created for younger family members with a wider audience. Since then, his online educational platform has helped teach over 150 million people worldwide—including me and my kids.

Well before this recent AI boom, I considered him a visionary. When I learned he was writing this book, I couldn’t wait to read it. Like I expected, Brave New Words is a masterclass.

Chapter by chapter, Sal takes readers through his predictions—some have already come true since the book was written—for AI’s many applications in education. His main argument: AI will radically improve both student outcomes and teacher experiences, and help usher in a future where everyone has access to a world-class education.

You might be skeptical, especially if you—like me—have been following the EdTech movement for a while. For decades, exciting technologies and innovations have made headlines, accompanied by similarly bold promises to revolutionize learning and teaching as we know it—only to make a marginal impact in the classroom.

But drawing on his experience creating Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutor, Sal makes a compelling case that AI-powered technologies will be different. That’s because we finally have a way to give every student the kind of personalized learning, support, and guidance that’s historically been out of reach for most kids in most classrooms. As Sal puts it, “Getting every student a dedicated on-call human tutor is cost prohibitive.” AI tutors, on the other hand, aren’t.

Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to keep up in math. But now, you have an AI tutor like the one Sal describes by your side. As you work through a challenging set of fraction problems, it won’t just give you the answer—it breaks each problem down into digestible steps. When you get stuck, it gives you easy-to-understand explanations and a gentle nudge in the right direction. When you finally get the answer, it generates targeted practice questions that help build your understanding and confidence.

And with the help of an AI tutor, the past comes to life in remarkable ways. While learning about Abraham Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War, you can have a “conversation” with the 16^th president himself. (As Sal demonstrates in the book, conversations with one of my favorite literary figures, Jay Gatsby, are also an option.)

When the time comes to write your essay, don’t worry about the dreaded blank page. Instead, your AI tutor asks you thought-starters to help brainstorm. You get feedback on your outline in seconds, with tips to improve the logic or areas where you need more research. As you draft, the tutor evaluates your writing in real-time—almost impossible without this technology—and shows where you might clarify your ideas, provide more evidence, or address a counterargument. Before you submit, it gives detailed suggestions to refine your language and sharpen your points.

Is this cheating?

It’s a complicated question, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Sal notes that bouncing ideas off friends, asking family members to critique work, and using spellcheckers and tools like Grammarly—which can rephrase entire sentences—aren’t considered cheating today by most measures. Similarly, when used right, AI doesn’t work for students but with them to move something forward that they might otherwise get stuck on. That’s why, according to Sal, a lot of educators who first banned AI from class are now encouraging students to use it.

After all, mastery of AI won’t just be nice to have in a few years—for many professions, it’ll be necessary. Employees who can use AI effectively will be far more valuable than those who can’t. By incorporating this technology into education, we're both improving students’ experiences and outcomes and preparing them for the jobs of the future—which will become more enjoyable and fulfilling with AI in the mix.

That includes teaching. With every transformative innovation, there are fears of machines taking jobs. But when it comes to education, I agree with Sal: AI tools and tutors never can and never should replace teachers. What AI can do, though, is support and empower them.

Until now, most EdTech solutions, as great as they may be, haven’t meaningfully made teachers’ lives easier. But with AI, they can have a superhuman teaching assistant to handle routine tasks like lesson planning and grading—which take up almost half of a typical teacher's day. In seconds, an AI assistant can grade spelling tests or create a lesson plan connecting the Industrial Revolution to current events. It can even monitor each student's progress and give teachers instant feedback, allowing for a new era of personalized learning.

With AI assistants handling the mundane stuff, teachers can focus on what they do best: inspiring students, building relationships, and making sure everyone feels seen and supported—especially kids who need a little extra help.

Of course, there are challenges involved in bringing AI into schools at scale, and Sal is candid about them. We need systems that protect student privacy and mitigate biases. And there’s still a lot to do so that every kid has access to the devices and connectivity they need to use AI in the first place. No technology is a silver bullet for education. But I believe AI can be a game-changer and great equalizer in the classroom, the workforce, and beyond.

I recently visited First Avenue School in Newark, New Jersey, where Khanmigo is currently being piloted. We’re still in the early days, but it was amazing to see firsthand how AI can be used in the classroom—and to speak with students and teachers who are already reaping the benefits. It felt like catching a glimpse of the future. No one understands where education is headed better than Sal Khan, and I can't recommend Brave New Words enough.

I still love software as much today as I did when Paul Allen and I started Microsoft. But—even though it has improved a lot in the decades since then—in many ways, software is still pretty dumb.

To do any task on a computer, you have to tell your device which app to use. You can use Microsoft Word and Google Docs to draft a business proposal, but they can’t help you send an email, share a selfie, analyze data, schedule a party, or buy movie tickets. And even the best sites have an incomplete understanding of your work, personal life, interests, and relationships and a limited ability to use this information to do things for you. That’s the kind of thing that is only possible today with another human being, like a close friend or personal assistant.

In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.

This type of software—something that responds to natural language and can accomplish many different tasks based on its knowledge of the user—is called an agent. I’ve been thinking about agents for nearly 30 years and wrote about them in my 1995 book The Road Ahead, but they’ve only recently become practical because of advances in AI.

Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons.

A personal assistant for everyone

Some critics have pointed out that software companies have offered this kind of thing before, and users didn’t exactly embrace them. (People still joke about Clippy, the digital assistant that we included in Microsoft Office and later dropped.) Why will people use agents?

The answer is that they’ll be dramatically better. You’ll be able to have nuanced conversations with them. They will be much more personalized, and they won’t be limited to relatively simple tasks like writing a letter. Clippy has as much in common with agents as a rotary phone has with a mobile device.

An agent will be able to help you with all your activities if you want it to. With permission to follow your online interactions and real-world locations, it will develop a powerful understanding of the people, places, and activities you engage in. It will get your personal and work relationships, hobbies, preferences, and schedule. You’ll choose how and when it steps in to help with something or ask you to make a decision.

To see the dramatic change that agents will bring, let’s compare them to the AI tools available today. Most of these are bots. They’re limited to one app and generally only step in when you write a particular word or ask for help. Because they don’t remember how you use them from one time to the next, they don’t get better or learn any of your preferences. Clippy was a bot, not an agent.

Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions.

Imagine that you want to plan a trip. A travel bot will identify hotels that fit your budget. An agent will know what time of year you’ll be traveling and, based on its knowledge about whether you always try a new destination or like to return to the same place repeatedly, it will be able to suggest locations. When asked, it will recommend things to do based on your interests and propensity for adventure, and it will book reservations at the types of restaurants you would enjoy. If you want this kind of deeply personalized planning today, you need to pay a travel agent and spend time telling them what you want.

The most exciting impact of AI agents is the way they will democratize services that today are too expensive for most people. They’ll have an especially big influence in four areas: health care, education, productivity, and entertainment and shopping.

Health care

Today, AI’s main role in healthcare is to help with administrative tasks. Abridge, Nuance DAX, and Nabla Copilot, for example, can capture audio during an appointment and then write up notes for the doctor to review.

The real shift will come when agents can help patients do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment. These agents will also help healthcare workers make decisions and be more productive. (Already, apps like Glass Health can analyze a patient summary and suggest diagnoses for the doctor to consider.) Helping patients and healthcare workers will be especially beneficial for people in poor countries, where many never get to see a doctor at all.

These clinician-agents will be slower than others to roll out because getting things right is a matter of life and death. People will need to see evidence that health agents are beneficial overall, even though they won’t be perfect and will make mistakes. Of course, humans make mistakes too, and having no access to medical care is also a problem.

Mental health care is another example of a service that agents will make available to virtually everyone. Today, weekly therapy sessions seem like a luxury. But there is a lot of unmet need, and many people who could benefit from therapy don’t have access to it. For example, RAND found that half of all U.S. military veterans who need mental health care don’t get it.

AI agents that are well trained in mental health will make therapy much more affordable and easier to get. Wysa and Youper are two of the early chatbots here. But agents will go much deeper. If you choose to share enough information with a mental health agent, it will understand your life history and your relationships. It’ll be available when you need it, and it will never get impatient. It could even, with your permission, monitor your physical responses to therapy through your smart watch—like if your heart starts to race when you’re talking about a problem with your boss—and suggest when you should see a human therapist.

Education

For decades, I’ve been excited about all the ways that software would make teachers’ jobs easier and help students learn. It won’t replace teachers, but it will supplement their work—personalizing the work for students and liberating teachers from paperwork and other tasks so they can spend more time on the most important parts of the job. These changes are finally starting to happen in a dramatic way.

The current state of the art is Khanmigo, a text-based bot created by Khan Academy. It can tutor students in math, science, and the humanities—for example, it can explain the quadratic formula and create math problems to practice on. It can also help teachers do things like write lesson plans. I’ve been a fan and supporter of Sal Khan’s work for a long time and recently had him on my podcast to talk about education and AI.

But text-based bots are just the first wave—agents will open up many more learning opportunities.

For example, few families can pay for a tutor who works one-on-one with a student to supplement their classroom work. If agents can capture what makes a tutor effective, they’ll unlock this supplemental instruction for everyone who wants it. If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer—with graphics and sound, for example—and more personalized than today’s text-based tutors.

Productivity

There’s already a lot of competition in this field. Microsoft is making its Copilot part of Word, Excel, Outlook, and other services. Google is doing similar things with Assistant with Bard and its productivity tools. These copilots can do a lot—such as turn a written document into a slide deck, answer questions about a spreadsheet using natural language, and summarize email threads while representing each person’s point of view.

Agents will do even more. Having one will be like having a person dedicated to helping you with various tasks and doing them independently if you want. If you have an idea for a business, an agent will help you write up a business plan, create a presentation for it, and even generate images of what your product might look like. Companies will be able to make agents available for their employees to consult directly and be part of every meeting so they can answer questions.

Whether you work in an office or not, your agent will be able to help you in the same way that personal assistants support executives today. If your friend just had surgery, your agent will offer to send flowers and be able to order them for you. If you tell it you’d like to catch up with your old college roommate, it will work with their agent to find a time to get together, and just before you arrive, it will remind you that their oldest child just started college at the local university.

Entertainment and shopping

Already, AI can help you pick out a new TV and recommend movies, books, shows, and podcasts. Likewise, a company I’ve invested in, recently launched Pix, which lets you ask questions (“Which Robert Redford movies would I like and where can I watch them?”) and then makes recommendations based on what you’ve liked in the past. Spotify has an AI-powered DJ that not only plays songs based on your preferences but talks to you and can even call you by name.

Agents won’t simply make recommendations; they’ll help you act on them. If you want to buy a camera, you’ll have your agent read all the reviews for you, summarize them, make a recommendation, and place an order for it once you’ve made a decision. If you tell your agent that you want to watch Star Wars, it will know whether you’re subscribed to the right streaming service, and if you aren’t, it will offer to sign you up. And if you don’t know what you’re in the mood for, it will make customized suggestions and then figure out how to play the movie or show you choose.

You’ll also be able to get news and entertainment that’s been tailored to your interests. CurioAI, which creates a custom podcast on any subject you ask about, is a glimpse of what’s coming.

A shock wave in the tech industry

In short, agents will be able to help with virtually any activity and any area of life. The ramifications for the software business and for society will be profound.

In the computing industry, we talk about platforms—the technologies that apps and services are built on. Android, iOS, and Windows are all platforms. Agents will be the next platform.

To create a new app or service, you won’t need to know how to write code or do graphic design. You’ll just tell your agent what you want. It will be able to write the code, design the look and feel of the app, create a logo, and publish the app to an online store. OpenAI’s launch of GPTs this week offers a glimpse into the future where non-developers can easily create and share their own assistants.

Agents will affect how we use software as well as how it’s written. They’ll replace search sites because they’ll be better at finding information and summarizing it for you. They’ll replace many e-commerce sites because they’ll find the best price for you and won’t be restricted to just a few vendors. They’ll replace word processors, spreadsheets, and other productivity apps. Businesses that are separate today—search advertising, social networking with advertising, shopping, productivity software—will become one business.

I don’t think any single company will dominate the agents business--there will be many different AI engines available. Today, agents are embedded in other software like word processors and spreadsheets, but eventually they’ll operate on their own. Although some agents will be free to use (and supported by ads), I think you’ll pay for most of them, which means companies will have an incentive to make agents work on your behalf and not an advertiser’s. If the number of companies that have started working on AI just this year is any indication, there will be an exceptional amount of competition, which will make agents very inexpensive.

But before the sophisticated agents I’m describing become a reality, we need to confront a number of questions about the technology and how we’ll use it. I’ve written before about the issues that AI raises, so I’ll focus specifically on agents here.

The technical challenges

Nobody has figured out yet what the data structure for an agent will look like. To create personal agents, we need a new type of database that can capture all the nuances of your interests and relationships and quickly recall the information while maintaining your privacy. We are already seeing new ways of storing information, such as vector databases, that may be better for storing data generated by machine learning models.

Another open question is about how many agents people will interact with. Will your personal agent be separate from your therapist agent and your math tutor? If so, when will you want them to work with each other and when should they stay in their lanes?

How will you interact with your agent? Companies are exploring various options including apps, glasses, pendants, pins, and even holograms. All of these are possibilities, but I think the first big breakthrough in human-agent interaction will be earbuds. If your agent needs to check in with you, it will speak to you or show up on your phone. (“Your flight is delayed. Do you want to wait, or can I help rebook it?”) If you want, it will monitor sound coming into your ear and enhance it by blocking out background noise, amplifying speech that’s hard to hear, or making it easier to understand someone who’s speaking with a heavy accent.

There are other challenges too. There isn’t yet a standard protocol that will allow agents to talk to each other. The cost needs to come down so agents are affordable for everyone. It needs to be easier to prompt the agent in a way that will give you the right answer. We need to prevent hallucinations, especially in areas like health where accuracy is super-important, and make sure that agents don’t harm people as a result of their biases. And we don’t want agents to be able to do things they’re not supposed to. (Although I worry less about rogue agents than about human criminals using agents for malign purposes.)

Privacy and other big questions

As all of this comes together, the issues of online privacy and security will become even more urgent than they already are. You’ll want to be able to decide what information the agent has access to, so you’re confident that your data is shared with only people and companies you choose.

But who owns the data you share with your agent, and how do you ensure that it’s being used appropriately? No one wants to start getting ads related to something they told their therapist agent. Can law enforcement use your agent as evidence against you? When will your agent refuse to do something that could be harmful to you or someone else? Who picks the values that are built into agents?

There’s also the question of how much information your agent should share. Suppose you want to see a friend: If your agent talks to theirs, you don’t want it to say, "Oh, she’s seeing other friends on Tuesday and doesn’t want to include you.” And if your agent helps you write emails for work, it will need to know that it shouldn’t use personal information about you or proprietary data from a previous job.

Many of these questions are already top-of-mind for the tech industry and legislators. I recently participated in a forum on AI with other technology leaders that was organized by Sen. Chuck Schumer and attended by many U.S. senators. We shared ideas about these and other issues and talked about the need for lawmakers to adopt strong legislation.

But other issues won’t be decided by companies and governments. For example, agents could affect how we interact with friends and family. Today, you can show someone that you care about them by remembering details about their life—say, their birthday. But when they know your agent likely reminded you about it and took care of sending flowers, will it be as meaningful for them?

In the distant future, agents may even force humans to face profound questions about purpose. Imagine that agents become so good that everyone can have a high quality of life without working nearly as much. In a future like that, what would people do with their time? Would anyone still want to get an education when an agent has all the answers? Can you have a safe and thriving society when most people have a lot of free time on their hands?

But we’re a long way from that point. In the meantime, agents are coming. In the next few years, they will utterly change how we live our lives, online and off.

The risks created by artificial intelligence can seem overwhelming. What happens to people who lose their jobs to an intelligent machine? Could AI affect the results of an election? What if a future AI decides it doesn’t need humans anymore and wants to get rid of us?

These are all fair questions, and the concerns they raise need to be taken seriously. But there’s a good reason to think that we can deal with them: This is not the first time a major innovation has introduced new threats that had to be controlled. We’ve done it before.

Whether it was the introduction of cars or the rise of personal computers and the Internet, people have managed through other transformative moments and, despite a lot of turbulence, come out better off in the end. Soon after the first automobiles were on the road, there was the first car crash. But we didn’t ban cars—we adopted speed limits, safety standards, licensing requirements, drunk-driving laws, and other rules of the road.

We’re now in the earliest stage of another profound change, the Age of AI. It’s analogous to those uncertain times before speed limits and seat belts. AI is changing so quickly that it isn’t clear exactly what will happen next. We’re facing big questions raised by the way the current technology works, the ways people will use it for ill intent, and the ways AI will change us as a society and as individuals.

In a moment like this, it’s natural to feel unsettled. But history shows that it’s possible to solve the challenges created by new technologies.

I have written before about how AI is going to revolutionize our lives. It will help solve problems—in health, education, climate change, and more—that used to seem intractable. The Gates Foundation is making it a priority, and our CEO, Mark Suzman, recently shared how he’s thinking about its role in reducing inequity.

I’ll have more to say in the future about the benefits of AI, but in this post, I want to acknowledge the concerns I hear and read most often, many of which I share, and explain how I think about them.

One thing that’s clear from everything that has been written so far about the risks of AI—and a lot has been written—is that no one has all the answers. Another thing that’s clear to me is that the future of AI is not as grim as some people think or as rosy as others think. The risks are real, but I am optimistic that they can be managed. As I go through each concern, I’ll return to a few themes:

• Many of the problems caused by AI have a historical precedent. For example, it will have a big impact on education, but so did handheld calculators a few decades ago and, more recently, allowing computers in the classroom. We can learn from what’s worked in the past.
• Many of the problems caused by AI can also be managed with the help of AI.
• We’ll need to adapt old laws and adopt new ones—just as existing laws against fraud had to be tailored to the online world.

In this post, I’m going to focus on the risks that are already present, or soon will be. I’m not dealing with what happens when we develop an AI that can learn any subject or task, as opposed to today’s purpose-built AIs. Whether we reach that point in a decade or a century, society will need to reckon with profound questions. What if a super AI establishes its own goals? What if they conflict with humanity’s? Should we even make a super AI at all?

But thinking about these longer-term risks should not come at the expense of the more immediate ones. I’ll turn to them now.

Deepfakes and misinformation generated by AI could undermine elections and democracy.

The idea that technology can be used to spread lies and untruths is not new. People have been doing it with books and leaflets for centuries. It became much easier with the advent of word processors, laser printers, email, and social networks.

AI takes this problem of fake text and extends it, allowing virtually anyone to create fake audio and video, known as deepfakes. If you get a voice message that sounds like your child saying “I’ve been kidnapped, please send $1,000 to this bank account within the next 10 minutes, and don’t call the police,” it’s going to have a horrific emotional impact far beyond the effect of an email that says the same thing.

On a bigger scale, AI-generated deepfakes could be used to try to tilt an election. Of course, it doesn’t take sophisticated technology to sow doubt about the legitimate winner of an election, but AI will make it easier.

There are already phony videos that feature fabricated footage of well-known politicians. Imagine that on the morning of a major election, a video showing one of the candidates robbing a bank goes viral. It’s fake, but it takes news outlets and the campaign several hours to prove it. How many people will see it and change their votes at the last minute? It could tip the scales, especially in a close election.

When OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman testified before a U.S. Senate committee recently, Senators from both parties zeroed in on AI’s impact on elections and democracy. I hope this subject continues to move up everyone’s agenda.

We certainly have not solved the problem of misinformation and deepfakes. But two things make me guardedly optimistic. One is that people are capable of learning not to take everything at face value. For years, email users fell for scams where someone posing as a Nigeran prince promised a big payoff in return for sharing your credit card number. But eventually, most people learned to look twice at those emails. As the scams got more sophisticated, so did many of their targets. We’ll need to build the same muscle for deepfakes.

The other thing that makes me hopeful is that AI can help identify deepfakes as well as create them. Intel, for example, has developed a deepfake detector, and the government agency DARPA is working on technology to identify whether video or audio has been manipulated.

This will be a cyclical process: Someone finds a way to detect fakery, someone else figures out how to counter it, someone else develops counter-countermeasures, and so on. It won’t be a perfect success, but we won’t be helpless either.

AI makes it easier to launch attacks on people and governments.

Today, when hackers want to find exploitable flaws in software, they do it by brute force—writing code that bangs away at potential weaknesses until they discover a way in. It involves going down a lot of blind alleys, which means it takes time and patience.

Security experts who want to counter hackers have to do the same thing. Every software patch you install on your phone or laptop represents many hours of searching, by people with good and bad intentions alike.

AI models will accelerate this process by helping hackers write more effective code. They’ll also be able to use public information about individuals, like where they work and who their friends are, to develop phishing attacks that are more advanced than the ones we see today.

The good news is that AI can be used for good purposes as well as bad ones. Government and private-sector security teams need to have the latest tools for finding and fixing security flaws before criminals can take advantage of them. I hope the software security industry will expand the work they’re already doing on this front—it ought to be a top concern for them.

This is also why we should not try to temporarily keep people from implementing new developments in AI, as some have proposed. Cyber-criminals won’t stop making new tools. Nor will people who want to use AI to design nuclear weapons and bioterror attacks. The effort to stop them needs to continue at the same pace.

There’s a related risk at the global level: an arms race for AI that can be used to design and launch cyberattacks against other countries. Every government wants to have the most powerful technology so it can deter attacks from its adversaries. This incentive to not let anyone get ahead could spark a race to create increasingly dangerous cyber weapons. Everyone would be worse off.

That’s a scary thought, but we have history to guide us. Although the world’s nuclear nonproliferation regime has its faults, it has prevented the all-out nuclear war that my generation was so afraid of when we were growing up. Governments should consider creating a global body for AI similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

AI will take away people’s jobs.

In the next few years, the main impact of AI on work will be to help people do their jobs more efficiently. That will be true whether they work in a factory or in an office handling sales calls and accounts payable. Eventually, AI will be good enough at expressing ideas that it will be able to write your emails and manage your inbox for you. You’ll be able to write a request in plain English, or any other language, and generate a rich presentation on your work.

As I argued in my February post, it’s good for society when productivity goes up. It gives people more time to do other things, at work and at home. And the demand for people who help others—teaching, caring for patients, and supporting the elderly, for example—will never go away. But it is true that some workers will need support and retraining as we make this transition into an AI-powered workplace. That’s a role for governments and businesses, and they’ll need to manage it well so that workers aren’t left behind—to avoid the kind of disruption in people’s lives that has happened during the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States.

Also, keep in mind that this is not the first time a new technology has caused a big shift in the labor market. I don’t think AI’s impact will be as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution, but it certainly will be as big as the introduction of the PC. Word processing applications didn’t do away with office work, but they changed it forever. Employers and employees had to adapt, and they did. The shift caused by AI will be a bumpy transition, but there is every reason to think we can reduce the disruption to people’s lives and livelihoods.

AI inherits our biases and makes things up.

Hallucinations—the term for when an AI confidently makes some claim that simply is not true—usually happen because the machine doesn’t understand the context for your request. Ask an AI to write a short story about taking a vacation to the moon and it might give you a very imaginative answer. But ask it to help you plan a trip to Tanzania, and it might try to send you to a hotel that doesn’t exist.

Another risk with artificial intelligence is that it reflects or even worsens existing biases against people of certain gender identities, races, ethnicities, and so on.

To understand why hallucinations and biases happen, it’s important to know how the most common AI models work today. They are essentially very sophisticated versions of the code that allows your email app to predict the next word you’re going to type: They scan enormous amounts of text—just about everything available online, in some cases—and analyze it to find patterns in human language.

When you pose a question to an AI, it looks at the words you used and then searches for chunks of text that are often associated with those words. If you write “list the ingredients for pancakes,” it might notice that the words “flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, milk, and eggs” often appear with that phrase. Then, based on what it knows about the order in which those words usually appear, it generates an answer. (AI models that work this way are using what's called a transformer. GPT-4 is one such model.)

This process explains why an AI might experience hallucinations or appear to be biased. It has no context for the questions you ask or the things you tell it. If you tell one that it made a mistake, it might say, “Sorry, I mistyped that.” But that’s a hallucination—it didn’t type anything. It only says that because it has scanned enough text to know that “Sorry, I mistyped that” is a sentence people often write after someone corrects them.

Similarly, AI models inherit whatever prejudices are baked into the text they’re trained on. If one reads a lot about, say, physicians, and the text mostly mentions male doctors, then its answers will assume that most doctors are men.

Although some researchers think hallucinations are an inherent problem, I don’t agree. I’m optimistic that, over time, AI models can be taught to distinguish fact from fiction. OpenAI, for example, is doing promising work on this front.

Other organizations, including the Alan Turing Institute and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, are working on the bias problem. One approach is to build human values and higher-level reasoning into AI. It’s analogous to the way a self-aware human works: Maybe you assume that most doctors are men, but you’re conscious enough of this assumption to know that you have to intentionally fight it. AI can operate in a similar way, especially if the models are designed by people from diverse backgrounds.

Finally, everyone who uses AI needs to be aware of the bias problem and become an informed user. The essay you ask an AI to draft could be as riddled with prejudices as it is with factual errors. You’ll need to check your AI’s biases as well as your own.

Students won’t learn to write because AI will do the work for them.

Many teachers are worried about the ways in which AI will undermine their work with students. In a time when anyone with Internet access can use AI to write a respectable first draft of an essay, what’s to keep students from turning it in as their own work?

There are already AI tools that are learning to tell whether something was written by a person or by a computer, so teachers can tell when their students aren’t doing their own work. But some teachers aren’t trying to stop their students from using AI in their writing—they’re actually encouraging it.

In January, a veteran English teacher named Cherie Shields wrote an article in Education Week about how she uses ChatGPT in her classroom. It has helped her students with everything from getting started on an essay to writing outlines and even giving them feedback on their work.

“Teachers will have to embrace AI technology as another tool students have access to,” she wrote. “Just like we once taught students how to do a proper Google search, teachers should design clear lessons around how the ChatGPT bot can assist with essay writing. Acknowledging AI’s existence and helping students work with it could revolutionize how we teach.” Not every teacher has the time to learn and use a new tool, but educators like Cherie Shields make a good argument that those who do will benefit a lot.

It reminds me of the time when electronic calculators became widespread in the 1970s and 1980s. Some math teachers worried that students would stop learning how to do basic arithmetic, but others embraced the new technology and focused on the thinking skills behind the arithmetic.

There’s another way that AI can help with writing and critical thinking. Especially in these early days, when hallucinations and biases are still a problem, educators can have AI generate articles and then work with their students to check the facts. Education nonprofits like Khan Academy and OER Project, which I fund, offer teachers and students free online tools that put a big emphasis on testing assertions. Few skills are more important than knowing how to distinguish what’s true from what’s false.

We do need to make sure that education software helps close the achievement gap, rather than making it worse. Today’s software is mostly geared toward empowering students who are already motivated. It can develop a study plan for you, point you toward good resources, and test your knowledge. But it doesn’t yet know how to draw you into a subject you’re not already interested in. That’s a problem that developers will need to solve so that students of all types can benefit from AI.

What’s next?

I believe there are more reasons than not to be optimistic that we can manage the risks of AI while maximizing their benefits. But we need to move fast.

Governments need to build up expertise in artificial intelligence so they can make informed laws and regulations that respond to this new technology. They’ll need to grapple with misinformation and deepfakes, security threats, changes to the job market, and the impact on education. To cite just one example: The law needs to be clear about which uses of deepfakes are legal and about how deepfakes should be labeled so everyone understands when something they’re seeing or hearing is not genuine

Political leaders will need to be equipped to have informed, thoughtful dialogue with their constituents. They’ll also need to decide how much to collaborate with other countries on these issues versus going it alone.

In the private sector, AI companies need to pursue their work safely and responsibly. That includes protecting people’s privacy, making sure their AI models reflect basic human values, minimizing bias, spreading the benefits to as many people as possible, and preventing the technology from being used by criminals or terrorists. Companies in many sectors of the economy will need to help their employees make the transition to an AI-centric workplace so that no one gets left behind. And customers should always know when they’re interacting with an AI and not a human.

Finally, I encourage everyone to follow developments in AI as much as possible. It’s the most transformative innovation any of us will see in our lifetimes, and a healthy public debate will depend on everyone being knowledgeable about the technology, its benefits, and its risks. The benefits will be massive, and the best reason to believe that we can manage the risks is that we have done it before.

Sal Khan is a true pioneer of harnessing the power of technology to help kids learn. So, when I wanted to learn more about how artificial intelligence will transform education, I knew I had to talk to the founder of Khan Academy. I loved chatting with Sal about why tutoring is so important, how his new service Khanmigo is making the most of ChatGPT, and how we can keep teachers at the center of the classroom in the age of AI. We even found time to talk about our favorite teachers and the subject we wish we’d studied in school.

It’s a wonderful time of the year: commencement season. While I never finished college myself, I’ve been fortunate enough to watch two of my kids graduate already. I know the hard work and late, caffeine-fueled nights that go into making a moment like this a reality. So, class of 2023, congratulations.

Later this week, I’ll be heading to Northern Arizona University to commend the graduates of the College of Engineering, Informatics, and Applied Sciences and the College of the Environment, Forestry, and Natural Sciences—and share a few other words of advice—in person. I don’t give commencement speeches often, but I’m excited to be giving one at NAU because something remarkable and all too rare is happening in Flagstaff: The school is redefining the value of a college degree.

In America, the value of a degree from any given school is traditionally thought about in terms of how prestigious and exclusive the school is. Of course, things like alumni network, course offerings, campus life, and professor quality are factored in, too. But in general, conversations about higher education tend to focus more on the students’ input than the school’s output: more on the scores and extracurriculars required for admission than the skills and credentials acquired by graduation—and whether those skills and credentials translate into well-paying jobs for large numbers of students. Ironically, the more students a school accepts and the easier it is to attend and graduate from, the lower that school has traditionally been ranked.

That’s an inverted incentive if ever one existed. America’s world-class schools are one of our greatest strengths, yet we rank 14^th among G20 countries in our percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a higher education. That’s bad for the country, and for students themselves: Studies have shown that college graduates live longer, earn more on the job, and are more civically engaged, among a host of other benefits. But any old degree doesn’t cut it. A piece of paper doesn’t qualify someone for work or improve their life; the education it’s meant to represent does. So we don’t just need more degrees—we need more valuable ones.

Back in 2019, the Gates Foundation helped form a commission to tackle this issue. The goal was to improve returns on higher education for students and families, and to help policymakers and college leaders understand which institutions were providing positive returns, which ones were falling short, and why. To start, the commission landed on a new way to define the value of a college education—by the payoff it provides to students and society—and a better way to measure it: by putting aside exclusivity, and putting accessibility, affordability, and economic mobility at the center instead.

By that definition and those metrics, NAU is an emerging leader.

Initially named the Northern Arizona Normal School when it was founded in 1899, NAU has always been anything but normal. Its first graduating class, just two years later, was made up of four women. During the Great Depression, the school created jobs for students—at an affiliated farm, in kitchens around campus, as newspaper deliverers—so they could afford tuition and stay enrolled. Even the first Hopi student to get a college degree, Ida Mae Hoonmona Fredericks, got hers here.

Today, almost half of NAU’s nearly 30,000 students are people of color, many of them Hispanic or Native American. Most come from in-state, half are first-generation college students, and many come from low-income families. The school has long been an engine of mobility for such students—but in 2021, NAU President José Luis Cruz Rivera helped revitalize the school’s charter to make delivering equitable postsecondary value to students the top priority and goal. Then NAU made a number of changes to accelerate that progress.

For example, as a longtime partner to the state’s community colleges, NAU recently launched a universal admissions program, which redirects applicants who would have been denied entry to instead apply to community college. From there, students are guaranteed subsequent admission to NAU as a transfer—no additional application needed. NAU has also secured millions in scholarships and advising services for community college students who intend to transfer to NAU and helped identify academic pathways that prepare those students for Arizona’s high-skills, high-demand, and high-wage jobs.

And beginning this fall, NAU’s Access2Excellence program is making tuition free for students with family incomes below the state’s median of $65,000, as well as for all Native American students from one of Arizona’s 22 federally recognized tribes. This is just one way the school goes above and beyond to serve its Native American students and respect the university’s connection to tribal land. For example, the Forestry School incorporates knowledge from local tribes into how it teaches land management. The university is also expanding who qualifies for guaranteed admission: any Arizona high school graduate with a 3.0 GPA or higher—including the 50,000 students attending schools that don’t offer all of NAU’s required courses, many of them from low-income communities, who had been ineligible for admission due to something out of their control. 

That’s just the start of NAU’s impressive reforms. I can’t wait to be in Flagstaff and take it all in up close. Although I will be there to share whatever wisdom I can with the graduates, I imagine that with an NAU degree in hand—and the value of an NAU education behind them—they’ll have a lot to teach me, too.

Growing up in Seattle in the 1960s, I learned very little about the area’s indigenous people. Aside from camping trips my Boy Scout troop would take to a lodge in Chehalis, Washington, where it was at least acknowledged that a tribe had lived on the land, I heard a lot more about the arrival of the first white people in 1851 than about the people who had been here for centuries.

Today the Seattle area and Washington state do a better job of recognizing the role that Native people play in the community and helping them deal with the unique challenges they face. But there is a long way to go.

I recently got to learn more about these challenges and how things can get better when I met this year’s Washington State Teacher of the Year. His name is Jerad Koepp, and he runs the Native Student Program in the North Thurston Public Schools, located northeast of Olympia. Remarkably, he’s the first Native educator to receive the award.

Jerad, who is part of the Wukchumni tribe, doesn’t work in just one school. He sees around 200 Native students in 24 different schools across the district, which sits on traditional Nisqually land. In addition to teaching classes on Native history and culture, he travels around the district to meet with Native students. And he offers professional development for teachers and administrators to help them serve the students he works with. “We’re looking at what impacts our student engagement, student retention, and how Native people being represented makes a big difference,” he told me.

It was sobering to hear how badly the typical curriculum underrepresents Native people. “Over 80 percent of school textbooks don’t mention us after 1900,” Jerad told me. And that has a real impact on young people: “If you see yourself being made invisible or misrepresented to other students, that wears you down.” So sometimes his work is as basic as creating opportunities for Native students and their families to come together “and just be who we are for a little bit. Sometimes we talk about culture. Sometimes we just do homework, go over essays, or look at college applications.”

One of the first projects he does with his students is to show them how to make their own deerskin medicine bag, which is used to carry items of cultural importance like cedar, sage, and sweetgrass. The tradition of making them goes back thousands of years. Jerad helped me out as I tried making one myself:

While his students are sewing their bags, Jerad takes the opportunity to explore the deeper meaning behind them. “When we think about medicine,” he said, “we’re thinking conceptually about what we need for our social and emotional wellbeing, and how connecting to culture can help us get through tough times.”

Incredibly, for decades, many states including Washington banned medicine bags in their schools. Although Washington now allows them, Jerad told me that in some other states, items like sacred feathers and beadwork are still confiscated at high school graduation ceremonies. “Just doing something like this,” he said as we sewed up our deerskins, “is pretty revolutionary.”

I asked Jerad about the challenges that Native students face, and I appreciated the nuances in his answer. He acknowledged that traditional risk factors like poverty affect Native students disproportionately—but then he added, “It’s really easy to look at the data with a deficit mindset, rather than seeing all of our Native children as phenomenally asset-based. Because our students participate in incredible things: internships with their tribal governments, canoe journeys, and language programs. All of this comes with knowledge and history that isn’t measured within the Western education system.”

By helping students develop confidence in their identity, he aims to help them do better in school and in life after school, whether that means going to college or joining the workforce. He is also thinking about how to train the next generation of leaders in Native communities. For example, next year he will start teaching a Native Civics class for students who might want to get into tribal government.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many of Washington state’s Teachers of the Year, and every time, I think, “I wish we had more teachers like this person.” That is definitely the case with Jerad. I learned a lot from him. He’s a thoughtful leader, and I’m inspired by his commitment to helping Native students embrace their culture and make the most of their talents.

In April, I sat inside a computer lab at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California and talked with students—some too young to drive—about cybersecurity. Many seemed as fascinated by technology as I’ve always been. One even taught himself to build computers during the pandemic. Despite their different backgrounds and ambitions, they were all there for the same reason: They’re part of the cybersecurity track, or pathway, at Chaffey.

If you spend time working on education in the United States, there’s a decent chance you’ll hear the word “pathways” tossed around. Most likely, you’ll hear it in discussions about the journey from high school to higher education to fulfilling career—a journey that, for many Black and Latino students and those from low-income backgrounds, is often anything but smooth. For a disproportionate percentage of them, it’s never completed. There are too many speed bumps, roadblocks, and detours along the way and not enough direction to guide them.

But integrated, intentionally-designed programs and structures that span K-12, college, and work can help, by creating high-quality pathways for students—from education to employment—that are seamless, structured, and commonsensical. That’s why pathways are the core of our education work at the Gates Foundation. We don’t just want students to graduate from high school. We don’t even just want them to complete college. We want to make sure they have paths to follow—and finish—from classroom to commencement to career that align with their interests, and to feel supported at every step along the way. That means addressing the transition points in the educational journey that often turn into those speed bumps, roadblocks, and detours.

At the Foundation, we believe there are four key components to creating these pathways. The first is providing quality advising to students that helps them identify the right college and career plan. The second is giving them access to (and credit for) college-level coursework—so they can see themselves as successful college students and save time and money getting that degree. The third is ensuring those credits are transferable between institutions and count toward their degrees. And the fourth is helping them have career-connected learning experiences, like project-based assignments, internships, and job shadows; that way, they can understand what it’s like to actually do the work they’re interested in, gain relevant skills and experience, and make connections in the field.

There are other organizations and initiatives that approach pathways differently. But the goal—for students to graduate with valuable credentials and transition successfully to the workforce—is the same.

And it’s becoming increasingly urgent. As I’ve written about before, by 2025 two thirds of all jobs in the United States will require some education beyond high school. The COVID-19 pandemic caused a lot of students to put off that postsecondary education; many had no other choice. But the data tells us that people who don’t start college within two years of getting their high school diplomas are less likely to persist and eventually get that postsecondary degree or credential. So the best way to get people graduating from college, so they can get the best jobs for themselves and make the most out of their careers, is to reach them early and ensure they have what they need to stay on the path.

That brings me back to my day in Rancho Cucamonga, where Chaffey has established pathways that align with the Foundation’s approach to providing the structure and support students need for the education they need to build a great career.

As a community college, Chaffey has an incredibly diverse student population that comes from largely underserved communities. Sixty-seven percent are Hispanic or Latino, eight percent are Black, and many are parents, veterans, and returning students. As one of Chaffey’s leaders, Dr. Laura Hope, put it, none of them are in the position to take an extended “vow of poverty” for the sake of education. While community colleges often emphasize exploration above all else, endless exploration that doesn’t result in skills, degrees, and jobs for students doesn’t actually serve students.

So Chaffey’s job is to help students first understand and then attain the credentials and degrees required, either to land a certain job or to transfer to a four-year college, as efficiently as possible.

As I saw firsthand, Chaffey’s pathways are increasingly focusing on just that. Rather than ask what people want to do with their careers—a mammoth question for both 18-year-olds and older students alike, and one that limits them only to professions they already know about—Chaffey’s advising program asks what they’re interested in, what their strengths are, what they care about, and, critically, how much time they have.

As a result, a student interested in technology who feels called to helping others might discover, for instance, that it’s cybersecurity—and not medicine—she wants to pursue. Then, Chaffey provides the student with a “map” that guides them and supplies them with all the information they need to succeed: the exact coursework they have to complete, the degree they need and can expect to attain (including both career-related certificates and associates degrees), the credits they can bring with them if they choose to transfer to a four-year university, the universities Chaffey has those matriculation agreements with, the jobs they’ll be qualified for upon completion, even the salary they can expect to earn. The school shows them there’s a path, and then helps shorten it.

But Chaffey doesn’t just show that path to “traditional” community college students. Through its dual enrollment program, which has grown from around 20 people to around 3,500 in the past four years, Chaffey is also reaching high school students and helping them find a path to post-secondary and professional success. I met some of them in the cybersecurity class I sat in on, and I was impressed by them, and by what Chaffey is doing for them. While dual enrollment programs that allow high school students to earn college credits exist throughout the United States, not enough schools encourage them to take courses that are intentionally designed to relate to their interests and expose them to potential future careers. Instead, students often end up attaining a random assortment of unrelated credits that are irrelevant to them later on. Chaffey’s pathways approach is one way to address this problem.

This benefits students at every age and stage of their educational journey in obvious ways, helping them avoid wasted credits—and wasted time and money. But it also benefits the economy, both locally in the Inland Empire region where Chaffey is located and statewide. When the school decided to become a leader in cybersecurity, one impetus was the region’s emerging cyber and tech industries, which were growing so fast that they couldn’t find enough qualified people to hire. With its cybersecurity pathway, Chaffey is filling a local need, serving as a regional economic engine, and preparing students for success in a field with around 72,000 job openings—many of them six-figure—in California alone. Thanks to internship opportunities with regional partners, also part of the pathways approach, some of the students I met already have jobs waiting for them once they graduate.

According to Dr. Hope, the number one thing colleges like Chaffey have to teach students is belief: belief in themselves, and belief that their education is really supporting them and setting them up for success. That’s easier said than done. But with a pathway to follow, students are less likely to feel lost and more likely to find their way—through school and to a fulfilling career. The more high-quality pathways we can create for them, the better.

If you haven’t directly experienced the pandemic’s impact on education—the months of learning that students have tragically lost, and the disproportionate impact on low-income students—you almost certainly have heard about it. What gets less attention, but is just as important, is COVID’s impact on teachers. Because of the strains created by the pandemic, more educators than ever are thinking about leaving the profession, and the rates are especially high among the most-experienced ones. As veteran teachers leave, more responsibility will fall on ones who have spent less time in the classroom. In short, there has never been a more important time to support teachers.

Even before the pandemic, supporting teachers was a core part of the Gates Foundation’s work in U.S. education. And this year marks the tenth anniversary of a project I fund personally, separately from the foundation, that has also learned a lot about that subject. It’s called the OER Project (OER is short for Open Educational Resources), and for the past decade, the team there has been creating free online courses and professional development for educators. Although OER courses won’t solve every problem that the pandemic has caused for schools, they’re an important part of making sure teachers get the support they deserve—and students get the high-quality curriculum they need—in such difficult times.

Broadly speaking, there’s nothing new about the concept of OER. Educators have always curated their own classroom materials. Every teacher who has ever downloaded a worksheet from Pinterest has used an open educational resource.

What makes the OER Project different is that it is far more than worksheets and videos. It offers complete courses, including the equivalent of online textbooks for students, coupled with instructional support and professional development for teachers. Every course is available free, online, for any educator who wants it. All of the content is aligned to state standards and created by well-known subject-matter experts and master teachers. (Here’s a list of the OER Project’s creators and advisory board of scholars and historians. Although I fund the project, I am not involved in creating the content.)  

In the past decade, the OER Project’s first two courses, Big History and World History, have reached more than 1 million students and 20,000 teachers around the world. And the team has just launched two new courses: a yearlong Advanced Placement World History class and a three-week course on climate change.

This video, which ties the war on Ukraine to the history of agricultural productivity, gives you a glimpse of how Big History helps students connect the present to the past:

(Other examples from the OER Project include a video about climate change and one about smallpox, featuring the eminent epidemiologist Larry Brilliant.)

To see how effective these courses can be, look at Big History’s impact on students’ writing skills, and particularly how it helps close the gap between high- and low-income students. At the beginning and end of the school year, teachers who use the course get a measure of how well each of their students is writing. According to the OER Project’s internal data, on average, only 26 percent of the students taking Big History in low-income schools start the academic year rated “proficient” or better in writing. By the end of the school year, that number has jumped to 62 percent—which is roughly on par with Big History students at private schools.

What’s more, teachers say they like the material. It’s being used in more than 2,200 schools, and last year, 95 percent of teachers who taught a course from the OER Project said they would recommend it to their students. And more states are encouraging school districts and teachers to use online educational resources, including those from the OER Project.

Given the success we’ve seen, I’m quite optimistic about the broad impact that OER materials can have in education. The project reached 1 million students in its first decade; a decade from now, I hope it can be reaching 1 million students every year. But our goal is not for the OER Project to be the only source of open educational resources, or even the biggest. We would love for many others to get involved and keep raising the quality of the digital tools that teachers can use. A great goal for the entire field would be to create courses and professional development for every subject and every grade. The potential here is enormous.

As more people create open educational resources, there are a few lessons from the OER Project that are worth keeping in mind. For one thing, regardless of what course or grade you’re talking about, the content needs to be developed by experts in the field and in classroom education.

In addition, teachers need supports that help them do their best work. New teachers might need assistance with, for example, teaching reading, while veterans might appreciate hearing from university faculty discussing the latest research. And the need for support became painfully obvious when COVID-19 struck, as teachers had to figure out how to use new digital systems, keep their students engaged while online, and deliver hybrid instruction. High-quality materials that can be delivered digitally and safely weren’t a luxury; they were a necessity. But they were in short supply.

The OER Project was able to offer on-demand professional development, virtual training sessions, and an online community where teachers can share ideas and resources. If a new teacher posts about trying out a new lesson from the OER Project, a veteran will follow up in a few weeks and ask how it went. It’s a simple but powerful way for educators to spread best practices.

The last and possibly most important lesson is that content needs to be revised according to feedback from the teachers who are using it. After all, they are the ones who know the most about what works for their students and what doesn’t. And the more invested they are in the course, the more effectively they’ll teach it.

This is one of the big advantages of working with digital content: It can be updated more frequently than print publications can. Many textbooks are notoriously out of date. One teacher told the OER Project team that her textbooks on current events still refer to the Soviet Union! The difference between print and digital is like updating your software using floppy disks that come in the mail versus simply updating an app on your phone.

I know that choosing a curriculum and textbooks can be a complicated process. But it is hard to argue with the core insights of the OER Project’s work. Courses should be created by educators and subject-matter experts, supplemented with professional development, and regularly improved with feedback from the teachers who use them. In the growing field of open educational resources, the curriculum publishers who keep these principles in mind will be in the best position to succeed.

All of the OER Project’s materials are available free on its website.

I never really learned how to cook. Other than scrambling eggs over a fire during Boy Scout camping trips, it just wasn’t something I was taught growing up. Because I never learned how to make a healthy meal for myself, I ended up eating a lot more fast food than I should’ve—especially when I was young and early in my career.

That’s not the case for Robert Hand’s students.

Robert works at Mount Vernon High School, which is about an hour north of Seattle. He teaches family and consumer science—what we would’ve called “home economics” when I was in school. In other words, he helps his students learn how to take care of themselves after high school, including how to make a nutritious and delicious homemade meal.

In just six years of teaching, Robert has had such a big impact on his school that he was named the 2019 Teacher of the Year for my home state of Washington. He was nice enough to visit my office earlier this year and show me how to make one of his students’ favorite dishes: barbecue chicken.

My lesson in butchering a whole chicken comes from Robert’s Beginning Foods class, which is open to every student at any grade level. I was surprised to learn that his cooking classes are some of the most popular at his school, but maybe I shouldn’t have been: the kids get to eat what they cook in class.

His students love the opportunity to make something by hand and enjoy the immediate results. Learning to cook not only gives kids a skill they’ll use the rest of their lives but can also help build confidence.

“There is a pride in having done it yourself,” Robert told me. “I see it in my kids when we do this: the pride that they have of knowing that they put the time and effort and work into this. [Cooking] is something that seemed intimidating or hard, but it’s really not that difficult to do.”

Although Beginning Foods probably would’ve been more beneficial to me, I was most interested to hear about Robert’s “Life After High School” class for seniors. Students learn practical life skills to prepare them to enter the real world, like how to write resumes and cover letters, put together a personal budget, and get a car loan.

Robert even sends them on a mock job interview (usually with another teacher at the school). Each student in the class has to dress professionally and create a portfolio to take with them. Afterwards, he helps them write and mail a thank you card to the person they met with, just like a real job interview. The whole process gets the kids comfortable with interviewing and sets them up for success.

The real secret sauce, though, is how much of himself Robert puts into the class. Every morning, he greets each person with a fist bump and a “How are you?” If students can’t afford to buy a new suit for a job interview, he takes them to a local thrift store and helps them find a professional outfit on a budget. Around 60% of the students at Mount Vernon High School come from low-income families, so he always keeps a pantry stocked with free food in case someone comes to school hungry.

He also talks to his students often about his own professional journey. When Robert was in high school, he had no idea he wanted to be a teacher. After graduating from college, he still didn’t know what exactly he wanted to do with his life. It was only after a few years of working other jobs—and a pivotal conversation with his wife—that Robert decided to become a teacher.

A lot of his students are in the same boat. They haven’t decided what they want to do after graduation, and Robert uses his own story to help them feel okay about that. “There’s a lot of pressure right now to figure out early on what are you going to do,” he says. “We don’t always know, so the best we can do is prepare kids for every aspect of life and what the next steps are.”

Some of his students do know what they want to be when they grow up, though. And for the ones who want to become teachers, Robert is there to help. He leads the school’s teacher prep program.

It’s just one way that he’s advancing one of his personal goals: to help diversify education in Washington. The student body at his school is majority non-white, and Robert hopes that one day its teacher workforce looks less like him and more like the kids they’re teaching.

The students at Mount Vernon High School are lucky to have a teacher as passionate, engaging, and creative as Robert. It takes a special kind of educator to get kids excited about filing their taxes! The skills he teaches are essential for any student, whether they plan on going to college, vocational school, or straight into the workforce. If we want to give our kids the best chance possible to succeed after high school, we need more amazing teachers like Robert.

Mandy is the 2018 Washington state Teacher of the Year, and she also has the honor of being the 2018 National Teacher of the Year. She came by my office earlier this year so I could learn about her work. She has been using her platform as Teacher of the Year to spread some of the lessons she has learned in her 19-year career. In this post she expands on one of them. – Bill Gates

When I started my career as a teacher, looking out at my classroom of eager teenagers, I never imagined how far beyond my classroom I would have to reach in order to have a deeper impact on my students and my profession. I certainly never imagined that taking a position as a theatre and communications teacher in rural Texas would eventually lead me to teaching recent immigrant and refugee students in Spokane, Washington, and being named the National Teacher of the Year.

As a new teacher, I worried over what I would teach each day, whether it would be engaging for my students, whether they would learn something in my class, and whether I could build their confidence and impact them enough to propel them toward success. It wasn’t until I started teaching in Bronx, New York, that I witnessed many of the negative impacts that our schools, courts, and health-care systems have on students of color, and I began to see the need to expand beyond my classroom.

Those early years in my career, when I only focused on my classroom, were a luxury, one we should afford all new teachers. However, once that foundation is built, we must open our doors and inform policies at the local, state, and federal level. This is how we make a more lasting impact on our profession, our school systems, and the students we serve.

In my tenure as the Washington State Teacher of the Year and now the National Teacher of the Year, I have had the chance to explore education in my state and across the nation. I’ve taken a leave from my classroom in order to learn from my colleagues and to see how different states and districts are serving students. I’ve met with teachers, administrators, state and federal lawmakers, education advocates, and others. I have seen dedicated educators who put students first.

Unfortunately, I have also seen rigid educational systems that have forgotten their paramount purpose—to serve the individual needs of the students. This often takes the form of standardized instruction, pacing guides, and the push to follow scripted curriculum with fidelity.

As a 19-year veteran educator, I can attest that teaching looks different year-to-year and classroom-to-classroom. No two teachers have the same students, so they should be able to serve their students in different ways. That means having the time and latitude to get to know their students and plan instruction to reach the goals we have set.

The same can be said for the system in general. Each school district and each school within that district should have flexibility within their systems to meet the specific needs of their communities.

That’s why educators need to be engaged in making policy—not just at the federal and state level, but at the local level too. Local rules generally dictate what actually occurs in our classrooms, and in my experience, it’s also where educators are most often left out.

Policies about recess are a good example. In 2010, in response to a new federal law intended to fight childhood obesity, Washington state issued a set of guidelines on wellness—how much physical education students should get, what might constitute “active” recess, and so on. But each school interpreted the guidelines differently. Some had up to 60 minutes of recess a day, while others had virtually none. The variation depended a lot on the socio-economic level of the neighborhood. The more affluent the neighborhood, the more time their students spent in recess.

Educators in the Seattle school district saw the disparity and came together to fix it. They helped develop a new policy: all neighborhood schools, whether they’re in a wealthy neighborhood or a low-income one, must allow for 30 minutes of unstructured recess every day. This is a prime example of how educators can use their experience to impact local policy. 

I encourage my fellow educators to follow education policy. Know how federal and state policies impact your classroom, school, and community, and take an active role in implementing those policies. Policymakers, please invite teachers in. Seek their input. As the people who interact with students every day, we know what is best for them in the classroom, and we must lead not only in carrying out policies, but in developing them in the first place.

Every year, I get the opportunity to meet the Washington Teacher of the Year. And every time, I’m blown away by the brilliant, thoughtful educators that my home state picks. Still, I went into my meeting this year with higher expectations than normal. 2020 was the most challenging year ever for teachers, and I knew that anyone who earned this honor while teaching through a pandemic must be truly exceptional.

My meeting with Brooke Brown did not disappoint. She is an extraordinary teacher who has helped her students adapt to extraordinary times.

Brooke teaches ethnic studies and English to high school seniors at Washington High School, which is located just outside of Tacoma. Nearly two-thirds of the kids at her school are students of color, and over half are eligible for free lunch. Her ethnic studies class counts as a social studies credit and has been a popular choice since the school started offering it two years ago. More students sign up to take it every semester than her classroom can accommodate.

My school didn’t have ethnic studies when I was growing up, so I was curious to learn more about how Brooke approaches the subject. “We’re really looking at things like identity and race,” she says. “We’re historicizing where we are today by looking at the past and helping our students have a lens to understand what’s going on. It’s a lot about my students learning how to love themselves and their own past as we work to build a more beautiful future that includes all people.”

Brooke creates what she calls “learning communities” in her classroom where she is not the only one who responsible for educating. She invites her students to share their experiences and knowledge with the class. She teaches them about the connection between the past and present using mixers, role play exercises, and collaborative group projects to teach current events and help students apply critical thinking to issues involving gender, race, class, ethnicity, ability, climate change, and more. The goal is to encourage students to take action that makes an impact on the world.

She was kind enough to show me one of her favorite lessons to do with her students. The exercise we did together is all about understanding how other people see the world—and how their identity shapes that view.

It starts with a blank piece of paper that has the outline of sunglasses on it. Brooke asked me to draw things inside the glasses that form my identity, like a little stick figure that represents being a dad and a quote that means a lot to me. (You can see my finished sunglasses in the video above.)

I had a lot of fun doing the lesson with her, and I can see how the exercise helps create deeper understanding of the ways each of us approach the world. Brooke has her students share their lenses with one another to learn how they have more in common with one another than they originally thought. She hangs her students’ finished glasses on a bulletin board so students feel represented in the classroom.

Brooke’s lessons are designed to be super collaborative. Her classroom doesn’t even have desks, just big tables where all the students sit together. So, the pivot to online learning over the eighteen months was a big challenge. She’s had to find creative ways to make everything work over Zoom. For example, her lesson on Rosa Parks usually relies on printed handouts that take her about 15 minutes to put together. During the pandemic, she managed to make the lesson more interactive by recording a bunch of prompts instead of just sending students a document—something that required hours of Brooke’s time to prepare.

Her struggle with the time demands created by the pandemic mirrored those of her students. All of Brooke’s students are seniors, so many were essential workers who had to help provide for their families on top of their schoolwork. Brooke told me that her focus has been on helping them get through this difficult time and giving them the flexibility they need to keep up with school.

I am so impressed by Brooke’s ability to adapt to the realities of the pandemic. I know that this period has not been easy for her—or for any teacher. Teachers already deserved more support than many were getting, and that's even more evident after the last year and a half.

Although her school is planning a return to full-time in-person instruction this fall, Brooke has more change in store for her. She’ll be transitioning to a new role as an instructional equity specialist, working with schools across her district to implement ethnic studies and restorative practices to help make the classroom a more welcoming place for all students. Brooke is also implementing a tool that teachers across the country can use to impact change to create a more inclusive, multicultural classroom.

“The goal is really about how we can help students show up for one another in areas that don’t directly impact them,” says Brooke. “How can we cultivate that sense of compassion and not just empathy? Empathy is a feeling, but compassion is an action. I’m willing to take action to support you, even if it doesn’t directly impact me.”

Every year, I look forward to meeting the Teacher of the Year for my home state of Washington. It’s always fascinating to hear educators at the top of their field talk about their classrooms.

This year’s conversation was different from the rest, though. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I couldn’t sit down with Amy Campbell, this year’s recipient, in person. Like so many other meetings this year, this one had to happen over video chat. (The shots of Amy with her students in this video were filmed pre-pandemic.)

It's fitting that our meeting was unlike any other, because Amy is unique—and so are her students. Amy teaches special education at Helen Baller Elementary School in Camas, a small town just across the state border from Portland. All of her students have severe disabilities, so she has to come up with creative ways to draw them into their schoolwork.

I was impressed by how Amy customizes learning. She told me about one of her students, who is completely non-verbal, visually impaired, and can’t move his arms or legs. Rather than focus on what this student couldn’t do, Amy instead identified something he could do: nod and shake his head. She came up with a writing system based on yes-or-no questions, so that he could journal about what he did over the weekend with family just like all of his classmates.

Amy’s goal is to create an inclusive environment where her kids learn alongside their peers. Instead of the traditional model where special needs students are siloed into their own program, her students are integrated into the broader school. Each one learns and socializes in homeroom, eats in the cafeteria, and participates in recess and gym class.

The result is a school where students with special needs are treated as valuable and important members of the community. In addition to making sure her kids are integrated into the broader student body, Amy also works with the general population students to help them understand their differently-abled peers. They start learning and talking about disabilities in the classroom as early as kindergarten.

Of course, all of this has changed over the past few months. Like all teachers, she had to completely rethink the way her classroom works. In the spring, Amy, her teaching partner, and a group of paraprofessionals did one-on-one video sessions with each of her students most days. They also got the whole group together on Fridays. In between virtual classes, Amy worked with the parents to make sure they had all of the activities and materials they needed to keep their child’s education going.

Amy told me this close collaboration with parents has changed the way she’ll work with them moving forward. Over the last couple months, Amy has had to empower her students’ parents to use the techniques she employs in the classroom. “I will never teach the same,” she says. “Teachers shouldn't be the secret holder of the strategies that help students be successful.”

The pandemic has also helped Amy find new ways to use technology to break down barriers. Many of her students’ parents are finding it much easier to participate in school board meetings these days. Now that those meetings happen over Zoom, there is no need to arrange for childcare in order to attend.

Digital tools are doing the same for teacher collaboration. As Washington’s Teacher of the Year, Amy would normally take a half-year sabbatical from teaching and use this time to share her knowledge with other teachers around the state and country. Since the conferences and convenings where this knowledge-sharing happens are now digital, more people are able to join—including teachers from low-income schools who may not have had the resources to attend in person.

I admire Amy for finding some good in these circumstances. Still, on the whole, the pandemic has put teachers and parents in an impossible situation.

I asked her the question that’s top-of-mind for many of us: what will school look like in the fall? She told me many of her students are medically vulnerable, so returning to the classroom might not be an option for them even if their school opens. “School is so foundational to our communities and so important for vulnerable people,” she said. “My parents are exhausted. And yet, here they are facing the decision of ‘how do I protect my most valuable thing?’” (Amy’s school plans to start the school year remotely and gradually reintroduce in-person learning.)

Fortunately for those of us with kids in Washington, Amy is part of our state’s re-opening workgroup. She’s working with other educators and state officials to develop guidelines for the fall and help each district come up with a plan that makes sense for the community. She also helped create guidance for special education to make sure students with disabilities aren’t left behind.

In order to safely navigate this coming school year, we need teachers like Amy Campbell at the table making decisions. She’s a remarkable advocate for her students. Teaching special education takes an amazing person to figure out exactly what works for each child, and talking to her gave me an even greater appreciation for these educators. Amy’s students are lucky to have her in their corner.

I envy people who are good at working with their hands. As much as I love computers, I never got into putting them together or taking them apart the way a lot of hobbyists do. Writing code was one thing—I had fun doing that—but soldering circuit boards was something else.

A lot of that was just my personal aptitude. But maybe things would have been different if I’d had a teacher like Camille Jones, the 2017 Teacher of the Year in my home state of Washington. Camille teaches STEAM—Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math—and as I saw when she stopped by my office earlier this year, she has a real gift for sparking your imagination with hands-on projects.

Here’s a video from our meeting. Don’t miss the story at the end about the boy with a hidden talent for making bridges:

Camille teaches at Pioneer Elementary in Quincy, a small farming town in Central Washington. She sees every child in school, which means some of her students are just 5 years old. I was surprised that she talks to such young kids about STEAM. I think it’s great, but apparently not everyone agrees: Camille has heard the argument that it is only appropriate for older students.

“It breaks my heart to hear that,” she told me. “By the time students get to fifth grade, a lot of time they have their ideas about what they’re good at and what they like to do. I say, bring STEAM in from kindergarten. Let’s show them all the opportunities in the world today.”

So how exactly do you talk to a 5-year-old about engineering? Camille showed me a clever lesson using a few index cards and a handful of pennies.

I also wondered how Camille reaches every kid at a school with more than 400 students. She approaches her job a bit like a librarian or gym teacher, but with a twist. She sees each class about 15 times a year, and from those classes she and her colleagues identify promising students who would benefit from spending extra enrichment time with her. And from that group, they choose a few students for even more focused attention. This model is unusual enough that even some of the educators on the Teacher of the Year selection committee hadn’t heard of it.

“I’m looking for kids who would benefit from being pushed a little harder,” she told me. “I see kids who are struggling buy into the idea that they should try things that are hard. And kids who are succeeding become better advocates for challenging work. When you do something difficult and new, your brain grows. It changes your attitude and your perspective on the rest of your education.”

It is a fantastic approach for any school and especially a high-needs one like Pioneer, where a lot of students are English language learners and a number are undocumented. In the three years Camille has had this role, enrollment in her enrichment classes has skyrocketed, and it’s still growing.

For Camille, it’s all about giving children the opportunity to make the most of their talents. “I want students to see many different futures for themselves,” she says. After meeting Camille, I have no doubt that she’s helping all her students dream big.

See my posts about meeting previous Washington Teachers of the Year Katie Brown, Lyon Terry, and Nate Bowling.

Here’s a neat (and short) lesson from Washington state’s latest Teacher of the Year, Camille Jones. Camille teaches science and engineering to students as young as 5 years old. When she visited my office earlier this year, I asked her how she talks to such young kids about engineering. Take a look at what she showed me:

One thing I love about this is that it takes ideas that can seem very abstract, like pressure and tension, and makes them concrete. Camille told me the lesson was designed by the Museum of Science in Boston—a great example of how putting great lessons and other tools in the hands of talented teachers can lead to magical moments in the classroom. Technology is making it easier for teachers to find these tools, which is one of the things that makes me hopeful about the future of education.

You can read more about my visit with Camille here.

A year ago, Stephanie Galaviz and Victoria Whitaker, seniors at Western Hills High School in Fort Worth, Texas, had no plans to go to college.

Stephanie worried about going into debt to pay for school.

Victoria was intimidated by the application process and feared getting rejected.

Like thousands of other high school students, they also found that the barriers they faced in applying to college were made even worse by school closures, virtual classes, and other disruptions to their studies because of COVID-19.

Then they met Valerie Gonzalez from the College Advising Corps.

The College Advising Corps places recent college graduates into high schools where they work, in partnership with school counseling programs, to provide guidance and support to students during the difficult transition from high school to college.

I’ve written before about how a college degree is critical for success in today’s job market. (And I’m using “college” here as shorthand for any kind of postsecondary degree or professional certificate.) But not enough students from low-income backgrounds, the majority of whom are students of color, are completing them. Only 22 percent of students from low-income communities earn a postsecondary degree, compared to 67 percent of their peers from high-income areas, according to OneGoal, an organization focused on helping students overcome the barriers they face on the path to college. The impact of this disparity is far reaching. Hundreds of thousands of young people are entering adulthood without the skills, experiences, and credentials needed to build careers.

I met Valerie, Stephanie, and Victoria earlier this year as part of a learning session about how the CAC, which our foundation supports, was helping students stay on the path to a college degree. 

There are many reasons why students don’t go to college or pursue a postsecondary degree. But one common obstacle is the need for more counseling and advising supports to help students navigate the complex application process. Currently, the average ratio of students-to-counselors in public high schools is 424 to 1.

These support services are critical, especially for students who are the first in their family to go to college, like Stephanie and Victoria. They need help choosing schools, filling out application forms, writing essays, and taking advantage of the financial aid that’s available.

This is the incredibly important work that CAC advisers like Valerie do. Valerie, the daughter of migrant farm workers, is a first-generation college graduate herself. Her own struggles to apply to college now drive her passion for helping other first generation college students achieve their own dreams.

A large part of her job, she says, is to help students see themselves as college students. Many students don’t think they’re college material. She encourages them to think again and dream about the many careers a degree could help them pursue.

At Western Hills High School, Valerie and her team of advisers make it a goal to meet with all seniors at least once to discuss their plans after graduation. Finding time to talk with hundreds of students can be difficult enough in normal times. During the pandemic lockdowns, when schools shifted to virtual classes and lost contact with many students, it became an even bigger challenge.

Valerie, for example, told me that she tried to meet with Stephanie and Victoria in every way she could. She emailed, texted, and called. When the lockdowns ended, she went to their homes.

Both Victoria and Stephanie ignored Valerie. But eventually they decided they should meet with her—in part to get her to stop bothering them.

Those first meetings changed everything.

Stephanie was surprised to learn that there were scholarships, grants, and other financial aid options available for her to help pay for college. She suddenly realized that college could be an option for her.

Victoria was relieved to hear that Valerie was ready to help her fill out application forms and assured her that with her good grades there were many colleges that would be eager to have her as a student.

Within weeks of that first meeting, Stephanie and Victoria submitted their college applications. And they soon learned they got accepted.

Stephanie just started at Tarleton University in Stephenville, Texas. Victoria is now in her first year at Tarrant County College, with plans to transfer to University of North Texas in Denton, Texas.

I’m thrilled by what Stephanie and Victoria have achieved, especially during COVID.  I’m also encouraged by the impact CAC is having nationwide. Advisers like Valerie are serving 246,000 students at nearly 850 high schools across 19 states in 2021-22. Students they met with were 18 percent more likely to apply to a college or university and 19 percent more likely to get in.

To help students navigate COVID-19 roadblocks, our foundation has also expanded our partnerships with two other organizations. City Year places what they call “student success coaches” into high schools to provide role models, offer encouragement, and help students make decisions that keep them on track for college.Saga Education supports math tutors in high schools, where they work with students who need help with algebra, and gives the students access to an online learning platform.

We’re also supporting statewide efforts to improve enrollment in college and postsecondary programs. In Texas, for example, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board partners with the College Advising Corps, TCU, Trinity, Texas A&M, and UT Austin to implement a program called Advise TX.  It is seeking to scale up advising services throughout the state with the goal of increasing the number of low-income students who complete college degrees.

These initiatives are part of a larger effort at our foundation to ensure that young people have the tools, resources, and services they need to not only make it to college, but also to help them succeed in a career, achieve financial stability, and make meaningful contributions to their community. You can learn more about this program, called Pathways, here.

This program is already making it possible for students like Stephanie and Victoria to realize their dreams. And I hope it will do the same for millions of students to come in the years ahead.

Can you name the most frequently failed high school course?

It’s a subject that students have called “difficult,” “challenging,” and, at times, “torture.”

Yes. It’s a math class.

And if you guessed Algebra, you’re right.

The fact that so many students struggle with Algebra is a real problem because it’s a class that has far-reaching impacts on their lives. Here’s why.

Algebra is one of the most important indicators of a student’s future success. Students who pass Algebra 1 by the end of 9th grade open the door to advanced STEM courses and AP classes, and are more likely to enroll in college, graduate with a Bachelor’s degree, and go on to well-paid, in-demand careers.

Conversely, for students who fail Algebra 1, the door to opportunity often closes. Students who don’t complete Algebra 1 have just a one in five chance of graduating from high school. This is a statistic that particularly affects students who are Black, Latino, English learners, or experiencing poverty, putting them at a disadvantage for future careers and higher earnings. And during COVID-19, these students are facing greater uncertainty and challenges academically because of widespread disruptions to schooling.

This is tragic. Algebra shouldn’t act as a gatekeeper, limiting a student’s dreams. It should be a gateway, helping students realize them.

That’s why the Gates Foundation sought the brightest minds around the world to help solve what may be the hardest math problem in the world: How can we help more students succeed in Algebra—and maybe get them to like it?

Last year, we issued a global call—through our foundation’s Grand Challenges program—for new ideas to make Algebra more engaging, accessible, and relevant for all students. Until now, Grand Challenges has been used to spur new thinking to solve the toughest problems in global health and development, helping to save millions of lives. Given what’s at stake for our students, however, we decided this Algebra problem deserved a Grand Challenge of its own that would shake up traditional ways of thinking and find new breakthroughs in teaching this math class.

The world responded with lots of exciting ideas—more than 400 proposals from 26 countries. Earlier this year, we selected 11 of the most promising ones to receive funding to develop their solutions.

Algebra is overwhelming for many students because it’s the first math class they take where they must wrestle with variables, abstract concepts, and creative problem solving. And there’s often not enough done in the classroom to connect Algebra to their everyday lives and explain why it’s worth understanding.

Each of the organizations with a promising proposal found creative ways to tackle these Algebra challenges. I encourage you to read about all the grantees. But I want to highlight three of them to illustrate the range of innovative solutions that are in development.

Zearn is the nonprofit educational organization behind the top-rated Zearn Math curriculum that is used by about 25 percent of elementary school students in the U.S. Zearn is proposing to build a new curriculum for middle school students that will help prepare them for success in Algebra 1 in high school. Like its existing platform, this course will strive to make Algebra preparation engaging and fun with videos, math problems with interactive digital experiences, and digital exercises that help students visualize and make sense of math. Zearn is creating these materials and activities in collaboration with students, especially Black, Latino, and students experiencing poverty, to ensure they motivate learning and promote inclusivity.

Mastory is a German-Hungarian startup that is developing interactive storyline games to help students understand why Algebra is relevant for solving real world problems. Using a mobile phone app, students will be immersed in a real-time sci-fi adventure involving a professor, a research vessel in search of whales, and aliens. Along the way, students will use the Algebraic concepts they are learning in their classroom to find solutions to the challenges experienced in the story. The goal is to keep students engaged and motivated by helping them grasp math at an emotional level.

The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) is creating an Algebra Readiness Course to prepare multilingual learners in Providence for Algebra 1. RIDE has already successfully piloted a summer Algebra course that was developed in partnership with students to strengthen their math skills using real world examples. Kids who enrolled in the summer course saw significant increases in their math readiness scores. Now, this course is being expanded to a full semester in six middle schools in Providence. Work is underway this year to continue to improve the curriculum and provide more professional development and coaching for teachers so they can better support multilingual learners.

I was thrilled to learn about the many new innovations sparked by the Algebra Grand Challenge. By changing students’ Algebra experience, maybe even making it a class they enjoy instead of dread, we can help all students develop critical thinking, abstract reasoning, and other problem-solving skills that use their math skills to understand the world. In the years ahead, I look forward to learning how these efforts to improve this critical math course will open doors for many more students in school and beyond.

Every day I’m reminded of how my dad’s wisdom, generosity, and compassion live on in the many people he influenced and inspired around the world.

One of the most significant ways my dad’s spirit continues is through the Gates Cambridge Scholarship Program. Of all the grants he was involved in at our foundation, this one was always his favorite.

When we started the Gates Cambridge Scholarship in 2000, we wanted to help exceptional students from all over the world experience the university’s 800-year legacy of higher education, learn from each other, and prepare to be global leaders.

Each year, Gates Cambridge offers about 80 full-cost scholarships for students to pursue a full-time postgraduate degree in any subject available at the university. Scholars are selected on their intellectual ability, their leadership potential, and perhaps most importantly for my dad, their commitment to improving the lives of others.

More than two decades later, this scholarship has reached more than 2,000 students from 111 different countries. The alumni of the program have gone on to remarkable careers, in fields ranging from public health to international relations, chemistry to information technology, and oceanography to neuroscience.

Former Gates Cambridge scholars are now venturing into space, fighting for human rights, working to defeat COVID, and creating sustainable solutions to avoid climate change in their communities. And we couldn’t be prouder of the difference they’re making, and the leaders they have become.

My dad’s parents never finished high school and he went to college thanks to the GI Bill, so he always saw education as the way he was given access to opportunity. My dad was always very passionate about the power of learning, the importance of engaging people with diverse interests and giving back to those in need. I think that’s why this scholarship, which has given opportunities to many students who might otherwise not have them, was so near and dear to him. When someone once asked my dad if anything ever made him speechless, he said “my trips to Cambridge to meet Gates Cambridge scholars.”

Even though my dad is no longer with us, this scholarship program is the embodiment of his most cherished beliefs—that, given the opportunity, people will come together, solve the biggest challenges we face, and make the world a better and more humane place for everyone.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to join 500 social studies teachers in watching a talk by Bryan Stevenson.

Bryan founded and runs the Equal Justice Initiative, an amazing organization based in Alabama that works to fix our country’s draconian criminal justice system. EJI provides legal representation for people who have been unfairly sucked into that system. The organization also does inspiring work to educate the public about the horrors of slavery and racism through its Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It’s hard to imagine a better person to kick off a conference for social studies teachers than Bryan. (If you aren’t familiar with him, I recommend watching the movie or reading the book Just Mercy.)

His speech was part of a conference hosted by an effort that I created called the OER Project. They support social studies teachers by providing them with new curricula, content, and a community to share ideas (OER stands for “open educational resources”). I think most people are familiar with the work of the OER Project because of Big History, but they now offer multiple high-quality courses for educators. Attendance for this year’s conference is—like everything that OER offers—free to all teachers.

Bryan was one of several speakers over the course of three days. His remarks focused on the role teachers can play in examining the American experience and helping young people find a new way forward. He spoke at length about the parts of U.S. history that are often left out of the classroom, including the historical racism experienced by Black Americans.

I was moved by his description of EJI’s work to document lynching in the American South. Their researchers have identified at least 800 new victims of lynching so far, people whose names were lost to history until now. Bryan described how EJI collects soil samples from lynching sites and uses them to create memorials for the victims.

Bryan believes that “no innovation will take place if we don’t intimately understand the problem” we’re trying to fix. I agree. Today’s students have the power to create a better future for all people, and teachers are helping them build their framework for understanding the world. I’m glad that many schools are starting to teach a more comprehensive look at our country’s past. If you want to see the progress that humanity has made, you have to know where we came from—even if that past is ugly at points.

I hope the teachers who attended the conference feel inspired as they get ready to go back to school this fall. This is an incredibly challenging time to be an educator, but Bryan’s talk was a terrific reminder of just how important the work of educating people is. If you’re a social studies teacher, you can access all of the conference’s materials online for free by registering here.

One of the best parts of my job is getting to meet with smart people who are thinking about big problems. I haven’t had as many opportunities to meet with big groups over the last year because of the pandemic, but I recently hosted a cohort of graduate students for a virtual discussion that helped make up for lost time. Our conversation served as the inaugural session of what I’m calling Gates Notes Deep Dive—a new series that brings together diverse groups of people from around the country to explore one topic in depth. 

Our subject this time was how data can help improve educational outcomes for Black and Latino students and students from low-income backgrounds. All of the participants are studying either education or public policy, and each one was hand-picked by their university to take part in our discussion. We were also joined by a couple of experts who are already working on education data initiatives.

Our foundation—like most organizations—relies on data to make decisions. In global health, we helped create a group called the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to make data easier to access and study. (You might have seen their COVID-19 models in the news over the last year.) For example, researchers are able to look at the causes of childhood deaths around the world and see which specific pathogens are responsible in which areas. That information is incredibly useful when you’re deciding where to invest funding.

Unfortunately, that level of granularity doesn’t exist when it comes to studying education. We know more about why young children die than why older ones drop out of school. Part of the problem is that the objectives are somewhat less clear when it comes to education. With global health, the goal is obvious: you want kids to survive and thrive into adulthood. With education, there isn’t broad consensus on what the targets should be. Is the goal for all students to graduate? To get a good job after college? To be thoughtful, well-rounded adults?

As a result, education data here in the United States is often incomplete, incompatible, or difficult to use. It doesn’t always focus on the most important outcomes or the students who are most likely to be left behind (like Black and Latino students and students from low-income backgrounds).

In an ideal world, students and parents could use data to make decisions about their future. Educators would be able to look at each student individually, see where they’re falling behind, and connect them with resources to help them catch up. Policymakers—especially state governments—could identify which areas need more investment while protecting students’ privacy, and organizations like our foundation could bring everyone together to learn from the highest performing schools.

The good news is that there are a number of promising new efforts to collect and organize better data. Deep Dive participants got to hear from four of them. Each of the new tools and systems we looked at was really impressive, giving a much clearer view of opportunities to make the education system work better for everyone. Each of the presenters is doing an amazing job making more data available to more people, and our foundation looks forward to continuing to support them.

One of those tools is SeekUT, a database created by the University of Texas system. SeekUT is all about helping students understand the value of a degree and make decisions about what to study. It uses census data to show not only what you can expect to earn with a particular degree but how that changes over time and how much loan debt you might owe. For example, five years after graduation, a biology major at UT El Paso can expect to make an annual salary of $48,000 and pay $175 a month in loans.

Choosing what to study in college is, of course, about more than just how much money you’ll make. You also want to pick something you’re interested in. Initiatives like SeekUT are simply trying to empower students to make more informed choices. You can’t make the best decision for you and your economic situation without all the information.

It was thrilling to not only see a demonstration of some of the early tools emerging to help students, teachers, and policymakers, but also to engage in a dialogue with the young people who are moving this work forward. Some of the Deep Dive participants were teachers themselves, which was great to see. Teachers need to be at the forefront of this movement to shape the data in a way that’s actually useful for them.

The graduate students I met with will lead the way in designing and deploying new tools. They asked great questions—including how we combat bias in data collection and how the role of education will evolve in the decades to come—and I know all of them have brilliant ideas for how to address inequities in our country’s education system. Future leaders like them make me optimistic that brighter days are ahead for America’s students and teachers. I’m looking forward to hosting more Deep Dive sessions on other topics.

There’s one set of questions on the mind of everyone in the education world right now: What should schools do in the fall? Should they let students come to class in person? If they do, can they ensure that teachers, staff, and students will be safe from COVID-19?

Of course these questions deserve to be discussed at length, and they are. But there’s another crucial issue that we can’t afford to overlook: What does the future look like for the high school classes of 2020 and beyond? As much as we’re rightly focused on what happens this fall, we also need to look ahead to next spring and beyond. If we don’t, COVID-19 could—on top of the horrific toll it has already taken—permanently derail the dreams of hundreds of thousands of young people.

As I have written before, by 2025 two thirds of all jobs in the United States will require some education beyond 12th grade. That can involve a wide range of credentials—including a certificate from professional training, an associate’s degree from a two-year college, or a bachelor’s degree from a four-year university—but for simplicity’s sake, I will call it graduating from college.

Our foundation has been working for years to help more students finish college. Through that work, we’ve learned it’s impossible to raise college graduation numbers unless more young people make it to college to begin with—and that requires helping them navigate the difficult transition from high school to postsecondary work. If you don’t start college within two years of getting your diploma, the statistics show that it gets harder and harder to come back for your degree as an adult.

Unfortunately, 30 percent of white students and 35 to 40 percent of Black and Latinx students don’t enroll in college within two years of finishing high school—and these numbers are poised to skyrocket with the impact of COVID-19.

There are many reasons why students don’t start college. Some aren’t academically prepared, a situation made worse now by the fact that Black and Latinx high school students from low-income homes are significantly less likely than their white peers to be taking classes online while schools are closed.

Another reason is that many students don’t get the counseling and advising they need in high school to understand their college options, write strong applications, and figure out how to maximize their financial aid. This is an even bigger problem now, since closing schools has also meant closing counseling offices.

Applying for college is especially difficult for students who are the first in their family to go. It’s hard enough to pick schools that match your interests, aspirations, and abilities, navigate the admissions process, apply for financial aid, and make sure you enroll in the right classes, all while possibly holding a job as well. It’s even harder if you don’t know anyone who has done it before. And the stakes are high, when making just one wrong decision can throw you off the degree path forever.

In short, because of long-standing barriers that are made worse by COVID-19, hundreds of thousands of students with promise—most of them Black, Latinx, or from low-income households—may never start college. This would be disastrous for these young people and for the country.

So our foundation is expanding our partnerships with three organizations that work to give students the support they need to get, and stay, on a path to a college degree.

College Advising Corps places college graduates into high schools where they serve as full-time college advisors, helping students find schools, apply, and get ready to attend. CAC currently works in 782 high schools across the country, with impressive results. In 2018, the students they met with were 18 percent more likely to apply to a college or university and 19 percent more likely to get in. Since the pandemic started, College Advising Corps and its partners have identified more than 170,000 students who were partway through applying for college and financial aid, and with support from our foundation, they’ve enabled advisors to connect with these students virtually to help them finish the process.

Another grantee, City Year, places what they call “student success coaches” into high schools to provide role models, offer encouragement, and help students make decisions that keep them on track for college. By developing strong personal relationships with students and working on both academic and social and emotional skills, they help make sure each student feels connected to school. They also watch for early warning indicators that can predict when a student might be disconnecting from school and, if necessary, they’ll step in with one-on one support and small group meetings.

Finally, Saga Education embeds math tutors in high schools, where they work with students who need help with algebra, and also gives the students access to an online learning platform. The goal is to help them pass algebra and move to higher levels of math, and the results speak for themselves: Saga students pick up an extra 2.5 years’ worth of math in one academic year and are 60 percent less likely to fail a math class. The impact even ripples out to other courses; students who work with Saga’s tutors are also significantly less likely to fail classes in other subjects. Our foundation recently funded 28 Saga tutors for six high schools in New York City; they’ll work with 2,000 9th graders over the next two years.

Even though they work on different aspects of the problem, CAC, City Year, and Saga have a lot in common. They work with the AmeriCorps national service program to find talented young adults to serve in these roles. That approach not only lets them keep their costs low; it also allows them to use a “near peer” approach employing recent college graduates, so that students can see themselves in their coaches and tutors. And they’re using digital platforms to reach students whose schools have shut down, and to make their work more effective.

Our foundation has committed more than $23 million to these three organizations. But additional funding from other groups would allow them to expand even more. College Advising Corps aims to reach an additional 300,000 students and help 69,000 more students get into college. City Year could triple the number of coaches serving students in school districts with especially high dropout rates. And Saga could double the number of students who get tutoring help, ultimately connecting with 10,000 to 15,000 young people.

All young people should get the advising, tutoring, and coaching they need to get on the college pathway that’s right for them. And because of COVID-19, this work is especially urgent for the next few classes of graduating seniors. As the country focuses on the needs of these young people, supporting College Advising Corps, City Year, and Saga would be a great start.

If you’re a recent college graduate, I hope you’ll consider serving with one of these organizations. They’re always in need of talented people to inspire young students.

It’s impossible to list all the ways that COVID-19 has upended America’s education system. And tutoring, mentoring, and advising aren’t silver bullets that will solve every problem. But they will be an essential part of keeping young people on the track to a brighter future.

Melinda and I often say that of all the issues our foundation works on, education may be the hardest. It also may be the most inspiring.

During my visit to The Howard School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I had a powerful reminder of why this is.

Howard faces some very tough challenges: It ranks among the bottom 5 percent of high schools in Tennessee, with test scores and graduation rates well below state averages. More than 90 percent of its students, most of them African American and Latino, live in poverty. Less than 15 percent of Howard’s graduates go on to earn a college degree or post-secondary certificate.

Even so, I came away from my visit as excited about Howard as any school I’ve ever seen. What I experienced that was so inspiring is a community that’s come together to help turn around their school’s fortunes. Local businesses, community leaders, parents, teachers, and students are all determined to make Howard one of the best schools in the state. And they are starting to make progress.

To be sure, Howard has a long way to go on that journey. But the community is putting the pieces into place and doing the hard work necessary to improve student achievement, so all its students graduate ready for college or a career.

At the center of this effort is Howard’s principal, Dr. LeAndrea Ware, now in her second year leading the school. A proud graduate of Howard, Dr. Ware is passionate about her school’s long history—it recently celebrated its 150^th anniversary—and understands the critical role it plays in shaping Chattanooga’s future. She is also one of the most energetic school leaders I’ve ever met. Her positivity is infectious. (This month, Dr. Ware was named principal of the year by the Tennessee Department of Education.)

When Dr. Ware arrived as principal, the school was struggling with a rapidly growing student body that doubled in size to more than 1,000 students in recent years. Many of the new students were non-English speaking and required language instruction. Absenteeism was a common problem, especially for students who were holding down full-time jobs to support their families. Few students were graduating prepared for college or a career.

One of the first actions Dr. Ware took as principal was to tap into the Chattanooga community for support. She hung a large banner in the school entrance and invited people to come sign it as a pledge to play a role in making Howard one of the fastest-improving schools in the state.

This was no publicity stunt. Dr. Ware understood that in Tennessee there was growing awareness among politicians, business leaders, educators, and local communities that improving schools is critical for the future of the state’s economy. In Chattanooga alone, there were thousands of skilled jobs in auto manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, insurance and technology. And the school system was not producing enough graduates prepared to fill them.

In 2015, the community created the Chattanooga 2.0 coalition, which aims to double the number of degrees and certificates awarded to high school graduates. Chattanooga 2.0, which our foundation supports, brought together 150 local organizations that are working to bridge the gap between Chattanooga’s classrooms and workforce needs of employers. (During my trip to Tennessee, I visited a local auto parts maker that joined in this effort by starting an apprenticeship program. You can read more about what I learned here.)

At Howard, Dr. Ware launched a series of new initiatives to boost student achievement. After realizing that many students were falling behind in their classes, she opened a Saturday school. Supported by parents and a local foundation, the Saturday school became an extra day for students to come in to get the help they need to catch up in their classes. Getting students to roll out of bed on a Saturday to come to school might sound impossible, but the program has been a success at Howard. Hundreds of students have turned out to take advantage of this opportunity.

Dr. Ware also wanted to motivate students by showing them the connections between their schoolwork and career opportunities. So, Howard launched Future Ready Institutes, small learning academies within the school that give students exposure to local industries, including health care and tourism. For the students, it’s a chance to explore possible careers. For local businesses, it’s a great way to recruit young talent to fill job openings.

I was also impressed by how Howard is using data to guide its advising system. Working with Chattanooga 2.0, the school keeps a laser-like focus on the performance of incoming ninth graders, sharing test scores, attendance, and grades with parents as well as students. This allows the school to understand key points when students might struggle, identify learning gaps, and address these challenges before students start falling behind.

While these efforts are still new, they have already helped improve attendance rates and academic progress at Howard. And Dr. Ware is only getting started. She continues to explore other efforts that will help Howard reach new levels of achievement.

At our foundation, we believe that thinking about education through the eyes of students, as Dr. Ware has, is critical for their success. We need to better understand the students’ journey from kindergarten to high school and onto college or a career. Where can we improve their experience? How can we prevent dropouts? What will keep students on a path to a good job and economic mobility?

Before I left Howard, Dr. Ware showed me the giant banner where community members had signed their names, committing to support Howard. The banner was filled with hundreds of signatures. I found a place to add my name. I also included a note. “I love your energy!” I wrote. I have no doubt that energy—from the community, students, and Dr. Ware—will fuel Howard’s continued improvement.

I put on safety glasses and ear plugs before stepping onto the factory floor. Forklifts sped by with flashing lights. Sparks flew from welding robots. Giant machines stamped out metal panels for passenger cars and SUVs.

I was visiting Gestamp, an international auto parts maker in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

My tour of the factory was very, very noisy. But one thing I had no trouble hearing during my visit was that this factory is not just manufacturing auto parts. It’s also putting high school students on a path to opportunity.

I had come to Gestamp, a leading employer in East Tennessee, to learn about their student apprenticeship program. Launched in 2016, the program is a partnership with the local school system that offers students hands-on training in manufacturing while also helping them complete their high school diplomas.

Apprenticeship programs like this are a win-win both for the school system and for the local business community. For the school system, it helps students make important connections between their coursework and careers. What was exciting to see is how the experience working for Gestamp often gave students a new sense of purpose. This might be the program’s greatest achievement. All the students I met told me they had much bigger dreams for themselves and what they might achieve in life than they might have otherwise. Some are eager to work their way up at Gestamp and become managers. Others now have an interest in going to college or pursuing other post-secondary training.

For local businesses, the program is an important model for how partnering with local schools can help support the local economy. Tennessee has experienced strong economic growth in recent years, thanks in part to the auto manufacturing sector. General Motors, Volkswagen, Nissan, and more than 900 auto suppliers all call Tennessee home, employing more than 130,000 people.

But the economy faces a skills gap. Many businesses struggle to find skilled workers to fill jobs. According to one study, in the years ahead over 80 percent of jobs paying a living wage in the Chattanooga area will require a post-secondary certificate or degree, but currently only 35 percent of students in the region are likely to obtain this level of education.

Gestamp is one of many companies in the Chattanooga region joining forces with the school system and community leaders to support Chattanooga 2.0, an organization working to double the number of college degrees and certificates awarded to high school graduates.

During my trip to Chattanooga, I also visited The Howard School where I learned about the Future Ready Institutes, which expose students to career pathways in health care, tourism, and other local industries. Students visit local businesses for training, get some work experience, and meet with professionals in their field.

Gestamp’s program, by comparison, is much more intensive. Instead of going to their school classrooms each day, students come to the factory, where they take online classes in a computer lab and then get paid on-the-job training on the factory floor.

This kind of high school experience is not for everyone. But for the students I met who are participating in Gestamp’s program, it has been life-changing. Some of the students told me that before joining the program they had thought about dropping out of high school altogether. They struggled with poor grades, weren’t interested in going to college, and had trouble seeing a career path for themselves. The apprenticeship program gave them direction, skills, and helped motivate them to complete their studies.

I came away from my visit impressed by the tremendous impact Gestamp’s program is having on students and the community. I hope other industries in Tennessee and other parts of the country will learn from their success.

Chicago was once called the worst school district in the United States. Today, though, high school graduation rates there are rising, as are ACT scores, GPAs, and the number of students enrolled in AP courses. And gains in elementary test scores outpace national averages.

I recently visited Chicago—and a high school that has gone from one of its worst to one of its best—to see what was behind the city’s turnaround.

I heard many theories to explain Chicago’s progress, including teacher training, better accountability, a longer school day, and demographic changes. What impressed me most is how the city’s schools have worked together to use evidence-based research to measure and improve their performance.

Let me share an example of what I’m talking about.

Back in the early 2000s, University of Chicago researchers discovered how critical the first year of high school is in a student’s academic career. A freshman who fails no more than one course and earns at least five credits by the end of the year is four times more likely to graduate than a student who is off-track.  If their grades are a B+ or better, they are more likely to succeed in their first year of college. Being “on-track” is more predictive of graduation from high school than race, socioeconomic status, and even test scores.

After this research was released, school leaders in Chicago started closely monitoring whether freshmen were on-track. They created an early warning system that helped them identify students who were at risk by checking grades, attendance, and course completions. They also looked for ways to help struggling students get back on-track. The results were impressive. In 2000, the on-track rate for Chicago high school freshmen was just 56 percent. In 2017, it topped 85 percent. The graduation rate followed this trend, increasing from 51 percent in 2002 to 74 percent in 2015.

But that’s not the end of the story. What made the difference in Chicago—and what other school districts can learn from Chicago—was how the schools acted on the data. School leaders and teachers worked hand in hand with researchers to apply it in ways that would help improve student achievement.

University of Chicago researchers partnered with an organization called the Network for College Success (NCS) to translate their findings and work directly with school leaders and teachers on practical interventions to classroom challenges.  

I visited one Chicago high school to see how a partnership like this works.

North-Grand High School serves the city’s Humboldt Park community. Most of its 970 students come from neighborhoods that struggle with violence, hunger, abuse, and other challenges. Most students will be the first people in their families to go to college.

In 2012, North-Grand and NCS began working together to increase the number of freshmen who finish the year on-track. At the time, 76 percent of North-Grand’s freshmen were on-track. 

Using data that showed how the transition from middle school to high school can be especially tough—students often grapple with making friends, battling depression, and a new school— North-Grand put new approaches in place to help freshmen find their footing. They identified incoming 9th graders who were most at risk so they could offer them support right away. They designed a freshman seminar that guides students through their transition to high school.

If you’re an at-risk freshman starting at North-Grand, on your first day of school a teacher starts helping you with your organizational skills, college planning, and how to use your school laptop for assignments. Every five weeks, you get a progress report about how you’re doing, and you sit down with a counselor to understand what’s going well, what’s not, where to go for help, and how you are making progress toward graduation. An online portal lets you check your grades daily if you wish.

This intervention—designed in partnership with NCS—is surprisingly simple. But the returns have been tremendous. The students I met at North-Grand during my visit liked the fact that there was no mystery about their standing in their classes. As one senior, Yusef, told me, thanks to this data he is “seeing himself clearly” in ways he couldn’t before.

Just seven years ago, North-Grand High School was ranked among the worst schools in Chicago. Today, it’s among the best. Ninety-five percent of its freshmen are on-track to graduate.

NCS connects a network of 17 high schools in Chicago. Many of them have adopted similar programs and experienced similar progress. I hope more schools around the country can learn from this success. Our foundation is supporting more than 20 networks of schools that are working with organizations like NCS to improve student achievement.

By embracing data, research, and the collective knowledge of their local community, schools have an opportunity to help students succeed in high school, college, and beyond. It’s an approach that empowers schools to identify their most pressing challenges and the tools to design the right solutions.

I was 13 years old when I fell in love with programming. My school had just become one of the first in the country to get a computer terminal. The machine was huge and slow, and it didn’t even have a screen—but I was hooked. My friends and I would spend hours creating new programs and plugging away in BASIC.

That introduction to computer science changed the course of my life. I recently visited a high school that hopes to do the same for young people in New York.

The Academy for Software Engineering—or AFSE—is a public high school located in Manhattan. Opened in 2012, it has a pretty amazing curriculum that uses computer science concepts to help students get ready for college. All students learn the basics of computer science during their first two years. When they become juniors, they choose to specialize in either programming or design. Not every student that graduates from AFSE will become a programmer or a software engineer, though, so they also take a full course load of non-specialized classes (like English and social studies).

Unlike some specialized schools, there are no criteria for admission. Rising freshmen in New York City get assigned to public schools through a lottery system. Any student can apply to attend AFSE, and their grades and attendance record have no bearing on their chances of getting picked. The result is an incredibly diverse student body from all over the city (although they’re trying to get more girls to apply).

I had the opportunity to sit in one of the design classes offered to upperclassmen. The teacher divided the students into small groups and asked them to create a holder for their headphones. Using modeling software and a 3D printer, they had to design a project that considered function, durability, and user friendliness.

Each team had a different approach. Some were working on a clamp that attached their headphones to the edge of the table, and others opted for a stand that would sit on the desk. I was blown away by how well thought out each design was. (You can see several of their projects in the video above.)

The school’s unique curriculum is particularly beneficial to some students who may have struggled in middle school. English language learners and students with disabilities seem to thrive at AFSE, since computer science focuses more on numbers and less on language skills. These students benefit from the way even non-specialized classes weave in computer science concepts—for example, a history teacher might ask a student to design a webpage about the War of 1812 instead of preparing an oral presentation.

The school enrolls fewer than 500 kids, so class sizes are small, and students get lots of personal attention. Everyone receives a tailored graduation plan. Teachers can log in to a shared data portal to track how a particular student is progressing. When that student becomes a senior, the school uses the portal to identify gaps and finish off areas that aren’t quite complete. This data portal is used not only at AFSE but across a network of schools in New York called New Visions for Public Schools. Our foundation recently announced that we would help fund New Visions’ efforts to expand this data portal, among other things.

As freshmen, students are also assigned an advisor who can help them adjust to high school and eventually start thinking about post-graduation plans. These advisors act as liaisons with family and make sure that every single student is known well by an adult at the school. It’s an impressive system that helps ensure no one falls through the cracks. This sort of personalized attention is exactly what people have in mind when they talk about smaller high schools.

I think everyone can benefit from learning the basics of computer science. The questions it teaches you to ask—How do you accomplish a task? Can you find a pattern? What data do you need?—are useful no matter where you go in life. Computer science helped shape the way I think about the world. I hope it does the same for the students I met at the Academy for Software Engineering.

“Overwhelming,” “confusing,” “scary,” “intimidating,” “nerve-wracking,” “embarrassing,” and “miserable.” The college students I met recently sounded like they were describing a horror film or a tough final exam. Instead, they were recounting their struggles navigating America’s financial aid system.

Each year, the U.S. government offers more than $120 billion in federal grants, loans, and work-study funds to help students pay for college. But the overly complex and confusing financial aid system is failing the students most in need of assistance, preventing them from pursuing their dreams of attending college.

Only about half of low-income high school seniors who would qualify for federal student loans or grants apply for them. And just under one-third of low-income high school seniors who would be eligible for Pell Grants, a federal subsidy for the neediest students that does not need to be paid back, take advantage of them when they start college. Without financial aid, many students drop out of school or decide not to go to college at all. At a time when our country needs more college graduates, the financial aid application process has become an unnecessary roadblock on the path to a higher education degree.

The group of first-generation college students I sat down with recently in Washington, DC told me that one of the biggest challenges they face is the application form itself. Any student who wants a federal grant or loan needs to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, better known as FAFSA. With 108 detailed questions, the FAFSA is more than three times longer than a standard federal income tax form. It quizzes prospective students on “untaxed portions of IRA distributions from IRS Form 1040—Lines (16a minus 15 b)” and uses confusing terms like “emancipated minor” and “dislocated worker.”

“I called up my parents to ask, ‘Hey, what does this question mean about welfare,’ and they didn’t even know how to answer it,” Kevion Ellis, a first-generation student attending the University of Northern Colorado said. “It really frustrated me.”

Kyle Brodnick, a student at Governors State University, described how even after filling out his application successfully his grant was delayed because of a confusing verification process. As a result, the university dropped him from his classes. “The teacher is like, ‘I don’t have you on my list anymore,’” he said. “It was embarrassing.” 

Much of the information students are asked to provide is redundant. They must give it once to the federal government and again to the university. And many of the questions are irrelevant for most applicants, making it longer and more complicated than necessary. According to one study, about one-third of the questions on the FAFSA need to be answered by just 1 percent of applicants.

These challenges hit low-income and first-generation students the hardest. Without financial aid, many of the neediest students cannot afford tuition and they give up on their dreams of going to college. This is tragic. Not just for students and their families, but our country’s efforts to fight inequity. A high-income student is five times more likely than a low-income student to have a college degree by age 24.

Our foundation, along with many university officials, political leaders, and researchers, has been working on several proposals to address these challenges:

Simplify the FAFSA form: Because of their financial situations, three-quarters of all FAFSA applicants do not need to answer the long list of questions on the form. One proposal is to shorten the form for these applicants, particularly low-income filers. For some applicants, more information may be needed to consider their aid application, but the number of questions can still be reduced. Some minor changes to the form to make it simpler have already increased the number of students applying for aid.

Encourage data sharing: Some FAFSA filers can use existing tax information already reported to the IRS to pre-populate the FAFSA application form using the IRS’s data retrieval tool. We should expand access to this data for more filers in the future.

Go mobile: A new mobile app for FAFSA is expected to be released by the U.S. Department of Education this year. Given that more students have mobile devices than computers, this change should lead to higher application rates.

At the heart of all these proposals to simplify the financial aid process is an even simpler idea. If we want to give more students the opportunity to go to college, we should meet them where they are. We need to understand the challenges of higher education from their perspective, and that starts by listening to what they have to say. Thanks to the students sharing their stories, I now have a better appreciation of the challenges they face in getting financial aid. Our foundation looks forward to continuing to work with students, universities, government, and other partners on solutions that make a path to a college degree more efficient, more affordable, and more accessible to everyone.

One of my fondest memories of college is attending classes I hadn’t even signed up for (and not attending the ones I had!). So, when I was asked if I wanted to sit in on an anthropology course during my recent visit to University of Central Florida, how could I refuse?

I took a seat in the back of Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster’s Anthropology 3610 course, “Language and Culture,” and was immediately swept up in a lively discussion about French philosopher Michel Foucault’s social theory of panopticism. It’s always thrilling to be back in a classroom—and it makes me wish I could be a college student all over again.

If that wish were ever to come true, the college experience would look very different—and better—at an innovative institution like UCF. I’m not talking about changes like amazing science labs, better dorm food, or skateboard racks for students who cruise to classes. What’s most impressive about UCF is how it’s found a way to better serve its growing population of students, without compromising on quality or cost.

Historically, that’s been an impossible feat. Conventional wisdom in higher education dictates that bigger is not better. If an institution wants to boost academic achievement, it needs to be more selective and admit fewer students. Likewise, institutions that accept more students expect to experience an inevitable decline in graduation rates and academic achievement.

UCF is challenging this storyline by proving that a university can have it all: a large, diverse student population, high standards, and affordable tuition. Since 1992, UCF has managed to triple the size of its student body to 66,000 students while at the same time reducing costs, boosting its graduation rate, and expanding access for low-income and first-generation students. At a time of spiraling higher education costs, UCF is one of the most affordable public four-year institutions in the country at $6,368 per year for in-state residents. The national average for in-state tuition at public universities is $8,804.

A key reason for UCF’s success is its focus on digital learning, which has allowed the university to meet the needs of its expanding student population and keep tuition costs low. About 80 percent of UCF students take at least one online course—compared with the national average of about 30 percent.

Online learning is popular at UCF, just as it is on other campuses, because it offers students more flexibility versus traditional face-to-face classes. With more and more college students working full-time and having families, online courses give students a way to balance their studies with work and life demands. From the university’s perspective, online courses allow the institution to increase the size of its student population without the expense of constructing more classrooms. Because of the widespread popularity of digital learning, UCF can serve its 66,000 students on a campus designed for just 40,000 students, saving the university $200 million in capital costs for buildings that would be needed to support those additional students.

What sets UCF apart from other institutions, however, is how it’s invested in online learning, making it a central part of academic life. UCF’s Center for Distributed Learning has a 90-person team that provides compulsory training for faculty on how to design and teach online courses. After completing the training, faculty team up with the center’s instructional designers to convert their face-to-face courses into effective online learning experiences.

The online learning tools the university has developed have helped make teaching and learning smarter. One of UCF’s most successful approaches, for example, allows faculty to combine the best of traditional learning with online classes. These mixed-mode classes are some of the most popular classes on campus among students and faculty.

Dr. Reyes-Foster’s anthropology course, for example, meets three times per week—twice in a traditional face-to-face class setting, like the one I attended—and once online. “Some students learn better in online settings. Some students learn better in face to face settings. And having more options available to them really gives them the best opportunity to do well in college,” Dr. Reyes-Foster said.

A growing body of evidence suggests that students who take mixed-mode classes perform better than those learning in face-to-face settings and are less likely to drop the courses. UCF students who take at least 40 percent of their courses online complete their degrees an average of four months faster than other students, saving the students both time and money.

While my visit to UCF left me a little nostalgic about my college years, I left even more excited about what the innovations in digital learning could mean for today’s college students and our country. As higher education costs rise, the education gap is growing between those from low-income backgrounds and the rest of the population. This trend means that the poorest Americans won’t experience the economic benefits of a college degree. It also leaves our country with fewer college graduates at a time when our economy needs more college-educated workers than ever before. Solving this challenge will require our higher education institutions to expand access to students of all economic backgrounds and provide them a high-quality, affordable education. In other words, our colleges and universities need to be bigger and better. UCF has been a pioneer in showing how that can be done. I hope other colleges and universities will learn from its success.

He had me at “nerd farmer.”

Nate Bowling was sitting in my office, talking about teaching. I consider myself a nerd, so when the Washington State Teacher of the Year used the word early in our meeting—and meant it as a compliment—I sat up a little in my chair.

“I joke about being a nerd farmer,” Nate said. “I’m trying to cultivate a kind of scholarship in students, and a passion for learning. So I bring passion to the classroom, and they see that and rise to the occasion.”

I asked Nate why he’s so passionate about teaching. “It is a matter of life and death,” he said. “If my students are not successful in school, they end up in the prison-industrial complex.”

Nate teaches at Lincoln High School in Tacoma, about 30 miles south of Seattle. Half its students are African-American or Hispanic.More than 70 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, which makes Lincoln a textbook example of what educators call the New Majority, reflecting the fact that more than half the students in American public schools today live in poverty.

Most of the New Majority do not graduate from high school ready for college or a high-paying job. So what happens at diverse, high-poverty schools like Lincoln matters a lot for the future of the country.

Fortunately, what is happening at Lincoln is quite positive. It has a graduation rate of 80 percent, above the average for Washington schools with similar demographics, and 40 percent of its students are taking Advanced Placement (AP) classes.

Nate is quick to give credit to his principal and his fellow teachers. If his colleagues are anything like him, it’s no surprise that Lincoln’s students are doing well. Not only was Nate our state’s Teacher of the Year, he was also a finalist for National Teacher of the Year. He told me that all the students he advised in 2015–16 were accepted to college or vocational school.

“All kids can learn if they have the support,” he said. He teaches AP Government to 12th graders and—to my surprise—AP Human Geography to 9^th graders. I wondered if it was risky, holding students who often can’t read at their grade level to the high standards of an AP class. But Nate doesn’t see it that way.

“I can't teach the class like I would to a group of kids who were all on grade level, but those kids can achieve,” he said. “My principal and I have an understanding. We’re not concerned about kids passing the AP exam. We just want them to learn. I would rather have 100 percent of the kids in the most difficult class and have 25 pass the AP test, than have 25 kids in it and 100 percent pass.”

Early this year, Nate got national attention when he wrote a provocative blog post titled “The Conversation I’m Tired of Not Having.” The post—a blunt look at the racial divide in America’s public schools—generated more than a million views and was reprinted in major newspapers. I read it before our meeting and agreed with a lot of it. I asked Nate about the reaction he got.

Much of the feedback was positive, he said. But not all of it. “The blog post revealed to me what people actually believe about my students,” he said.

As a case in point, Nate showed me a letter he received from a lawyer in New York state who had read his post. He keeps it as a reminder of the challenge that remains. “It’s basically laying out all the reasons why white Americans don’t want their students attending school with black Americans,” Nate said. “People respond to this letter angrily, but if I turned it into a set of policy recommendations, it would mirror exactly what we have in society today. It’s making the case for segregated schools.”

I certainly agree that those of us who live in the suburbs by and large don’t see what’s going on in inner-city schools. It’s like two different worlds. This is one reason why Melinda and I get out and visit different schools around the country as part of our foundation’s education work, which is all about supporting the New Majority.

But even if the country improves integration and makes funding more equitable—which are important goals—we will still need to make sure every student has an effective teacher, and every teacher gets the tools and support to be phenomenal. I asked Nate how he thinks we can do that.

Part of the solution, he said, is to create incentives for outstanding teachers to stay in high-need schools. And that starts with recognizing that the demands of teaching in a high-poverty school are different from the demands of teaching in a wealthy one. It also means giving effective teachers autonomy. As long as they’re achieving results and teaching to the appropriate standards, he argued, they deserve leeway in choosing the curriculum that works for them and their students.

Of course, not all teachers start out equally effective. Nate knows that from experience. On his first day in the classroom 10 years ago, “I was terrified, and the students were bored. I look back at lesson plans I did five years ago and think, Man, they should have walked out!”

That’s why he’s a big believer in professional development. “I believe in my heart that we can take average teachers and make them more effective and we can take effective teachers and make them outstanding,” Nate said. “One of the mistakes we make is that we think teaching is all about aptitude. You need a base level of aptitude to teach, but just because you have a Ph.D. in something doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at delivering content. Teaching is part content, part parlor tricks, and it can be taught.”

Another thing that would help teachers, Nate said, is to “treat them like the treasures they are.” He co-founded an organization, Teachers United, to help teachers inform district- and state-level policies.

“Schools are the building blocks of our democracy,” he told me. “If we’re going to create a better society, it has to happen through schools. And if we’re going to build a better society through our schools, it has to happen through better teaching.”

It was a powerful conversation. Nate is talking about some difficult subjects, but they are subjects we need to be discussing. Ultimately I left feeling hopeful about what’s possible for the New Majority. I’m glad that Nate the Nerd Farmer will be cultivating students—and more teachers like him—for many years to come.  

(See my earlier TGN posts about meeting Katie Brown, Washington state’s Teacher of the Year in 2014, and last year’s winner, Lyon Terry.)

I’m a big Star Wars fan, but I have to admit, I never thought about how it might relate to civil rights in the United States.

This came up when I was meeting with Nate Bowling, the 2016 Teacher of the Year in Washington state. We were talking about how really effective teachers manage to make the subject matter relevant for their students. “If you hit kids the right way, you can get them super passionate about anything,” he says. “It’s about how you sell it.”

It turns out that Nate loves Star Wars too, and he went on to show me how he uses the original trilogy of movies to help his students understand three landmark moments in the history of America’s civil rights movement. It’s pretty amazing. Take a look:

I wondered how many of Nate’s high-school students have seen the original Star Wars. He said it’s usually about half, and they can explain it to the other kids pretty easily. He’s proud to call himself a nerd, and wants his students to think of themselves the same way. Which brought us back to Star Wars. As Nate reminded me: “Never underestimate the power of nerddom.”

We all want to be young again, but I’ve rarely been as envious of young people as I was during my recent visit to Caltech.

Touring the campus, I was struck by what an amazing time it is to be a student at an institution like Caltech. In every field—from engineering and biology to chemistry and computer science—I learned about phenomenal research underway to improve our health, find new energy sources, and make the world a better place.

What’s exciting about this research is that if you’re a U.S. citizen you can thank yourself for many of the incredible projects on campus. That’s because much of the work is made possible by U.S. government investments. It’s your tax dollars at work and they can reap huge returns.

People often think that the U.S. spends a huge amount of money—perhaps too much—on R&D. In fact, all U.S. R&D spending accounts for less than 1 percent of national income.

I’ve written before about the importance of government investment to jumpstart innovation. Government-backed research in universities and labs leads to new ideas and technology that build new businesses, create jobs, and strengthen our overall economy.

But those big, life-changing discoveries and innovations—from the cancer cures to moonshots to solar cells– often get their start as an experiment in a university lab, an equation sketched on a professor’s blackboard, or a student asking, “What if?”

A new idea is a fragile thing. It needs allies to nurture it. Government R&D investments provide that important support. Without it, we would have fewer scientific breakthroughs.

Let me give a couple examples of why this is so important.

Some of the most exciting research I learned about during my visit was from Caltech scientists working on identifying possible treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. All of the researchers received government R&D funding.

Today, about 5.2 million Americans aged 65 have Alzheimer’s, but the number is expected to grow dramatically in the decades ahead. According to some estimates, by 2050, there will be a million new cases every year and the economic burden to the nation to care for those with Alzheimer’s will likely quadruple to $735 billion.

These are projections based on what we know about the disease today. Currently, there is no cure or effective treatment available.

But two of the researchers I met at Caltech are experimenting with innovative approaches to fight Alzheimer’s.

Bruce Hay, a professor of biology, shared his research on how he hopes to turn back the aging clock, delaying the impact of Alzheimer’s. 

Bruce’s research focuses on the role of mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA in the aging process. Mitochondria are the cell’s powerhouses, converting the chemical energy from the food we eat into a form our cells can use called adenosine triphosphate or ATP.

As we get older the mitochondrial DNA mutate, leading to cell dysfunction, and eventually cell death. Bruce’s goal is to prevent the process by cleaning out the mutated mitochondrial DNA, allowing us to feel younger.

Our bodies have a natural quality control process for removing mutated mitochondrial DNA, but it’s very inefficient. Bruce is researching ways to stimulate the removal of mutated mitochondrial DNA. He envisions a day when people would go to a spa for a mitochondrial cleanse to rid their bodies of the mutated mitochondria, helping to keep them feeling younger. I think all of us would want to sign up for a treatment like this.

I also met with Viviana Gradinaru, an assistant professor of biology and biological engineering. Viviana is working on developing new tools and methods for understanding how the brain works and how that knowledge could be used to treat people suffering from neurodegenerative diseases.

Much brain research, she told me, focuses on cellular and molecular pathways of neurodegenerative diseases. This is important research but it ignores the role of electrical signals in brain function.

Viviana has dedicated her career to exploring this area. She’s currently investigating deep brain stimulation, which is the use of electrical stimulation to treat the most debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. While it’s effective, there is not a lot of understanding about exactly how it works or how it might be applied to treat other diseases such as Alzheimer’s. She’s also exploring the use of light to stimulate the brain, a field called optogenetics.

Maybe the most amazing research is her work to create see-through tissue to visualize neural circuits. This innovative technique will help with our understanding of the brain and how various diseases might impact it.

Finally, I had a great conversation with Dianne Newman, a microbiologist who is working on a better understanding of cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that impacts the lungs. Dianne has a unique background in environmental engineering, Earth science, and geobiology. She’s using her diverse interests to carve out a unique area of research into the Earth’s ancient bacteria and how it might help our knowledge of bacterial communities living in low-oxygen environments. These studies are helping us understand multidrug resistant pathogens that infect cystic fibrosis patients. Our foundation is interested in exploring whether any of her research might also apply to our understanding of tuberculosis.

I ended my visit to Caltech with a Q&A session with students. You can watch the video here. One student, a computer science and chemistry major, asked me which areas in science and technology are going to impact society and the world.

It was a great question but I found it hard to give him an answer. From what I saw at Caltech, there is incredible new research underway in every field. Any one of these disciplines would be enough to keep me excited for a lifetime. As I told the students, “The amount of innovation and the pace of innovation—contrary to what some observers say—I believe is faster today than ever.”

With continued government support, the number of amazing new discoveries at our universities will grow, as will their benefits.

It’s amazing how little the typical classroom has changed over the years. Picture a teacher standing at a chalkboard, lecturing to 25 or 30 students. The kids all learn at different paces and in different ways, so some are bored while others feel hopelessly behind. This system was designed decades ago, and it doesn’t reflect what educators have learned about helping students and teachers do their best work. It’s what I had in mind when I said years ago that America’s high schools are obsolete. And it’s one reason why so many students show up for college unprepared for rigorous work.

Fortunately, a growing number of teachers and schools around the country are breaking the mold by finding different ways to connect with students. (I wrote about three especially impressive teachers I’ve met here, here, and here.) One approach that I’m excited about is called personalized learning: combining digital tools, project-based learning, and traditional classroom work to let students move at their own pace, which frees up teachers to spend more time with whoever needs more personal attention.

Back in May, I spent two hours at Summit Sierra, a personalized-learning school in Seattle’s International District. I had seen this approach in action before and been impressed. But I left Summit Sierra feeling even more hopeful about what personalized learning might do for students and teachers.

At its best, personalized learning doesn’t just let students work at their own pace. It puts them in charge of their own academic growth. Summit, the network of charter schools that Summit Sierra belongs to, worked with Facebook to develop software that guides the students’ learning. For example, you might set a goal like “I want to get into the University of Washington.” Working with their teachers, the students develop a personalized learning plan in the software. They can see all the courses they need to meet their goal, how they’re doing in each class, and what it will take to get a given grade. They set weekly objectives and note their progress in the software.

I wish I’d had a system like that when I was in school. I was good at math, but when it came to writing, I felt less sure of myself. I’d be working on an essay and start wondering, “Am I going to get an A or a C on this thing? What skills do I need to improve?” There were times when I was surprised by my grade—for better and for worse.

A personalized learning plan like the one I saw at Sierra would’ve taken the mystery out of things. After my visit, I emailed Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook to tell him how great it is that their engineers are working on this project. (Summit is making the platform available to other schools for free.)

Personalized learning represents a big shift for teachers too. As most will tell you, it’s rare to find a school that gives them the opportunity to connect one-on-one with their students. But in personalized learning, that’s not the exception, it’s the rule.

For example, Summit teachers are matched with students whom they will mentor for all four years in school. During my visit, teacher Aubree Gomez showed me how it works. First she took out her laptop, pulled up a list of the 17 students she’s mentoring, and explained how the software showed her what each student was doing, down to the level of which lessons they had looked at and which tests they had taken.

Then I sat in on her mentoring session with Jerald, a 9^th-grader. Aubree knew that Jerald hadn’t taken any assessments that week—he was working on a big science project, which he had just turned in—and she asked him how it had gone. Then they talked about Jerald’s bigger goal of getting straight A’s. He knew exactly what he had to do: which lessons he needed to finish, which tests he needed to take, and how high he needed to score.

I love that approach, and more importantly, so did Jerald and Aubree. Jerald wasn’t passively sitting there while his teacher talked. He was deeply engaged in his own learning. When students get out in the world, they have to organize their own time, have goals, and realize what they’re behind on. It’s fantastic to see them getting a head start on those skills in school.

We still need more data about the strengths and weaknesses of personalized learning, but the results so far are promising. One study found that among 62 schools using personalized learning, students made more progress in two years than their peers at other schools. They started below the national average in reading and math; two years later, they were above it.

To be fair, we don’t know yet how much of this improvement is due to personalized learning, versus other good things these schools are doing. And in any case, personalized learning won’t be a cure-all. It won’t work for all kids at all ages, and it’s just one model among many promising ones. But I’m hopeful that this approach could help many more young people make the most of their talents. 

Congratulations! You’ve just accomplished something I never managed to do—earn a college degree.

Between your commencement speaker and every aunt and uncle at your graduation party, I am sure you are getting a lot of advice. At the risk of piling on, I thought I would share a few thoughts.

New college graduates often ask me for career advice. I was lucky to be in my early 20s when the digital revolution was just getting under way, and Paul Allen and I had the chance to help shape it. (Which explains my lack of a college degree—I left school because we were afraid the revolution would happen without us.) If I were starting out today and looking for the same kind of opportunity to make a big impact in the world, I would consider three fields.

One is artificial intelligence. We have only begun to tap into all the ways it will make people’s lives more productive and creative. The second is energy, because making it clean, affordable, and reliable will be essential for fighting poverty and climate change. The third is the biosciences, which are ripe with opportunities to help people live longer, healthier lives.

But some things in life are true no matter what career you choose. I wish I had understood these things better when I left school. For one thing, intelligence is not quite as important as I thought it was, and it takes many different forms. In the early days of Microsoft, I believed that if you could write great code, you could also manage people well or run a marketing team or take on any other task. I was wrong about that. I had to learn to recognize and appreciate people’s different talents. The sooner you can do this, if you don’t already, the richer your life will be.

Another thing I wish I had understood much earlier is what true inequity looks like. I did not see it up close until my late 30s, when Melinda and I took our first trip to Africa. We were shocked by what we saw. When we came back, we began learning more. It blew our minds that millions of children there were dying from diseases that no one in rich countries even worried about. We thought it was the most unjust thing in the world. We realized we couldn’t wait to get involved—we had to start giving back right away.

You know much more than I did when I was your age. Technology lets you see problems in ways my friends and I never could, and it empowers you to help in ways we never could. You can start fighting inequity sooner, whether it is in your own community or in a country halfway around the world.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to surround yourself with people who challenge you, teach you, and push you to be your best self. Melinda does that for me, and I am a better person for it. Like our good friend Warren Buffett, I measure my happiness by whether people close to me are happy and love me, and by the difference I make in other people’s lives.

If I could give each of you a graduation present, it would be a copy of The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker. After several years of studying, you may not exactly be itching to read a 700-page book. But please put this one on your reading list to get to someday. It is the most inspiring book I have ever read.

Pinker makes a persuasive argument that the world is getting better—that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. This can be a hard case to make, especially now. When you tell people the world is improving, they often look at you like you’re either naïve or crazy.

But it’s true. And once you understand it, you start to see the world differently. If you think things are getting better, then you want to know what’s working, so you can accelerate the progress and spread it to more people and places.

It doesn’t mean you ignore the serious problems we face. It just means you believe they can be solved, and you’re moved to act on that belief.

This is the core of my worldview. It sustains me in tough times and is the reason I still love my philanthropic work after more than 17 years. I think it can do the same for you.

Good luck to all of you. This is an amazing time to be alive. I hope you make the most of it. 

This post originally appeared on Mic.  

Melinda and I got involved in U.S. education in 2000. A lot has changed since then, but our goal has not: We still want all children in America to get a great education. It’s key to realizing the vision of America as a country where all people have a chance to make the most of their talents.

Based on everything we have learned in the past 17 years, we are evolving our education strategy. I explained what’s changing in a speech today at the Council of the Great City Schools. Here’s the text of my speech:

When our foundation began working in education in 2000, we started with a few guiding principles.

Our #1 priority was – and still is – ensuring that all students get a great public education and graduate with the skills to succeed in the workplace.

We wanted to work with educators to better understand their needs and the needs of their students and communities.

And, taking their best ideas, we wanted to pilot potentially transformative solutions and understand what worked well and what didn’t.

Today, I’d like to share what we have learned over the last 17 years and how those insights will change what we focus on over the next five years.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about the state of public education in the U.S. By and large, schools are still falling short on the key metrics of a quality education – math scores, English scores, international comparisons, and college completion.

While much has rightly been made of the OECD data that shows lagging performance of American students overall, the national averages mask a bigger story.

When disaggregated by race, we see two Americas. One where white students perform along the lines of the best in the world—with achievement comparable to countries like Finland and Korea. And another America, where Black and Latino students perform comparably to the students in the lowest performing OECD countries, such as Chile and Greece.

And for all students in U.S. public schools, the percentage of high school graduates who enroll in postsecondary institutions has remained essentially flat.

Without success in college or career preparation programs, students will have limited economic mobility and fewer opportunities throughout their lives. This threatens not only their economic future but the economic future and competitiveness of the United States.

There are some signs of progress. Over the past decade, in cities like Charlotte, Austin, and Fresno, high school graduation rates have gone up rapidly.

Fourth-grade reading and math scores in large city schools increased at almost double the rate of public schools nationally. And the 8th grade scores are even better.

But like many of you, we want to see faster and lasting change in student achievement – and our commitment to that goal is steadfast. In fact, given the constraints and other demands on state and local budgets, it’s more important than ever that we continue to explore the best ideas for improving student achievement.

Melinda and I made public education our top priority in the U.S. because we wanted to do something about the disparity in achievement and postsecondary success for students of color and low-income students. That inequity persists today, and we are just as determined now to eliminate it as we were when we started.

When we first got involved in U.S. education, we thought smaller schools were the way to increase high school graduation and college-readiness rates. In some places and in some ways, small schools worked.

In New York City, graduation rates of students attending small schools was more than 30 percentage points higher than the schools they replaced. And almost half of the students attending small schools enrolled in postsecondary education – a more than 20 percent difference from schools with similar demographics.

Results in other places – like Los Angeles and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas –were also encouraging. Yet, over time, we saw that the overall impact of this strategy was limited—the financial and political costs of closing existing schools and replacing them with new schools was too high.

Over time, we realized that what made the most successful schools successful – large or small – was their teachers, their relationships with students, and their high expectations of student achievement.

Understanding this, we saw an opportunity to move our work closer to the classroom – to systemically support schools across the country to improve the quality of teaching and raise academic standards.

In 2007, we began investing in the Measures of Effective Teaching project. Over the last decade, it has contributed important knowledge to the field about how to gather feedback from students on their engagement and classroom learning experiences . . . and about observing teachers at their craft, assessing their performance fairly, and providing actionable feedback.

This work has helped states across the country build comprehensive evaluation systems based on multiple measures. We’ve seen promising results in places like Cincinnati, Chicago, New York City, and Washington DC, where research shows these systems can help identify teachers who need to improve and those who are underperforming . . . and in places like Tennessee, where three out of four teachers say the evaluation process improves their teaching.

But districts and states have varied in how they have implemented these systems because they each operate in their local context.

In addition, it became clear that teacher evaluation is one important piece of several critical elements to drive student achievement. School leadership, teacher professional development, climate, and curriculum also play critical roles in improving student achievement.

As you know, we also backed the Common Core because we believed, and still believe, that all students – no matter where they go to school – should graduate with the skills and knowledge to succeed after high school. It’s exciting to see how the standards are being brought to life in schools and classrooms. But more needs to be done to fully realize their potential.

As we have reflected on our work and spoken with educators over the last few years, we have identified a few key insights that will shape our work and investments going forward.

Teachers need better curricula and professional development aligned with the Common Core. And we see that they benefit the most from professional development when they are working with colleagues to tackle the real problems confronting their students.

Schools that track indicators of student progress — like test scores, attendance, suspensions, and grades and credit accumulation – improved high school graduation and college success rates.

And last, schools are the unit of change in the effort to increase student achievement and they face common challenges – like inadequate curricular systems and insufficient support for students as they move between middle school, high school and college. And they need better strategies to develop students’ social and emotional skills. But solutions to these problems will only endure if they are aligned with the unique needs of each student and the district’s broader strategy for change.

So, what does this mean for our work with you and others?

First, although we will no longer invest directly in new initiatives based on teacher evaluations and ratings, we will continue to gather data on the impact of these systems and encourage the use of these systems to improve instruction at the local level.

Second, we will focus on locally-driven solutions identified by networks of schools, and support their efforts to use data-driven continuous learning and evidence-based interventions to improve student achievement.

Third, we are increasing our commitment to develop curricula and professional development aligned to state standards.

Fourth, we will continue to support the development of high-quality charter schools.

There is some great learning coming from charters, but because there is other philanthropic money going to them, we will focus more of our work with charters on developing new tools and strategies for students with special needs.

Finally, we will expand investments in innovative research to accelerate progress for underserved students.

Overall, we expect to invest close to $1.7 billion in U.S. public education over the next five years.

We anticipate that about 60 percent of this will eventually support the development of new curricula and networks of schools that work together to identify local problems and solutions . . . and use data to drive continuous improvement.

Many states, districts, and schools now have the data they need to track student progress and achievement, and some are using it to great effect.

In Fresno, a new data system revealed that students weren’t aware of their college options. So, the district created individualized college information packets for every senior who met the state’s college requirements. The result was a 50 percent increase in the number of students applying to California public universities.

Summit Public Schools, which operates 11 charter schools in California and Washington, analyzed data and determined that English Learners entered school significantly behind and never caught up.

So, it identified the teachers whose EL students were doing the best, talked to them and curated their materials, and applied those best practices across all Summit schools. In less than a year, the performance gap between English Learners and others decreased by 25 percent.

In Chicago, researchers also found powerful insights in their data that are predictive of student progress and success. They determined, for example, that 9th graders who succeed on four key indicators – high attendance, course completion rates, credit accumulation, and grades – are more than four times as likely to graduate. And if their grades are a B+ or higher, they are much more likely to succeed in their first year of college.

Excited by insights like these, school leaders in Chicago partnered with the University of Chicago to create the Network for College Success.

This network of schools is using data to identify strategies that educators can use to solve specific problems. From 2007 to 2015, the percentage of students on track to graduate from Chicago high schools rose from 61 to 85 percent. And four-year college enrollment rates in Chicago went from 36 to 44 percent.

We believe this kind of approach – where groups of schools have the flexibility to propose the set of approaches they want – will lead to more impactful and durable systemic change that is attractive enough to be widely adopted by other schools.

We are seeing more examples of this popping up all the time. Like the CORE Districts in California – comprised of eight of the largest school districts in the state. And the LIFT Network in Tennessee, which includes educators from 12 rural and urban districts across the state.

Over the next several years, we will support about 30 of these networks, and will start initially with high needs schools and districts in 6 to 8 states. Each network will be backed by a team of education experts skilled in continuous improvement, coaching, and data collection and analysis.

There are two things these networks will share in common. A commitment to continuous improvement. And a focus on addressing common problems that are identified by using proven indicators predictive of students’ learning, progress, and postsecondary success.

But we will leave it up to each network to decide what approaches they believe will work best to address their biggest challenges. They might decide, for example, to focus on student interventions in middle school . . . or adapting new and more rigorous curricula . . . or improving support for certain groups of students in the transition from high school to college.

We will work with partners to document these change efforts in schools and networks and ask them to share the lessons learned with others.

We’ll also work with teacher and leader prep providers to ensure that these lessons and best practices are incorporated into local programs to further enrich and sustain this work.

We also know that high-quality curricula can improve student learning more than many costlier solutions, and it has the greatest impact with students of novice and lower performing teachers. We also know it has the greatest impact when accompanied by professional learning and coaching.

Our goal is to work with the field to ensure that five years from now, teachers at every grade level in secondary schools have access to high-quality, aligned curriculum choices in English and math, as well as science curricula based on the Next Generation Science Standards. In a few places, we also will support pilots of scalable professional development supports anchored in high quality curriculum.

Louisiana is a great example of where aligned curricula and professional development is helping teachers. 80 percent of districts have adopted fully aligned curricula in grades 3 through 8. And the state has created a marketplace of preferred professional development service providers to help schools implement these curricula effectively. Teachers report that they feel more equipped to help students meet the standards—for example, by closely reading texts for meaning.

In Washington DC, the school district has developed an innovative professional development program that is discipline-specific, curricula-aligned, and focused on improving teachers’ instructional skills at the school level. Teachers meet weekly with a coach who is an expert in the subjects they teach. They also meet in small groups with colleagues who teach the same subject to talk through lesson plans, what’s working, and how to adjust their instruction accordingly. While still early, 87 percent of teachers say the collaboration and feedback is improving their practice and knowledge.

We expect that about 25 percent of our funding in the next five years will focus on big bets – innovations with the potential to change the trajectory of public education over the next 10 to 15 years.

The conditions for developing and spreading new approaches in education, particularly technology-enabled ones, are better than ever. Broadband access in schools is reaching 90 percent. Students and teachers have access to more affordable and more powerful tools for learning. Educators are seeking each other out and sharing ideas in digital communities. And there are promising developments in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics.

But the PreK-12 research, development and translation ecosystem is underfunded and fragmented, with less than 1 percent of total government spending in public education focused on R&D.

Math is one area where we want to generate stronger evidence about what works. What would it take, for example, to get all kids to mastery of Algebra I? What kinds of intelligent tools do teachers and students need to get there? And how might we design these in partnership with the best math teachers in the country?

We are also interested in what role we can play to prepare students for the dramatic changes underway in the workforce. We have to make work-related experiences a consistent part of high schools in ways that build student engagement and relevant skills, and that put young people on a path to credentials with labor market value in our future economy.

We anticipate that the final 15 percent of our funding in the next five years will go to the charter sector.

We will continue to help high-performing charters expand to serve more students. But our emphasis will be on efforts that improve outcomes for special needs students – especially kids with mild-to-moderate learning and behavioral disabilities. This is a critical problem across the education sector, and we believe that charters have the flexibility to help the field solve this problem.

Over the last 17 years, we have invested $1 billion in the cities represented in the room in support of school improvement and redesign efforts. We are proud of that work and have seen some good things come out of it that make me optimistic about the future.

Education is, without a doubt, one of the most challenging areas we invest in as a foundation. But I’m excited about the shift in our work and the focus on partnering with networks of schools.

Giving schools and districts more flexibility is more likely to lead to solutions that fit the needs of local communities and are potentially replicable elsewhere.

I’m also hopeful this will attract other funders focused on particular approaches or who work in one state or community.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others the field.

Our role is to serve as a catalyst of good ideas, driven by the same guiding principle we started with: all students – but especially low-income students and students of color – must have equal access to a great public education that prepares them for adulthood. We will not stop until this has been achieved, and we look forward to continued partnership with you in this work in the years to come.

Thank you.

This fall more than 2 million students will flock to U.S. universities and colleges to begin their first year of higher education. They’ll arrive on campus with the goal of obtaining a degree, a proven ticket to a life of higher income and better opportunity.

But here’s a sobering statistic that should concern us all: Based on the latest college completion trends, only about half of all those students (54.8 percent) will leave college with a diploma. The rest—most of them low-income, first-generation, and minority students—will not finish a degree. They’ll drop out.  

This is tragic. Not just for the students and their families, but for our nation. Without more graduates, our country will face a shortage of skilled workers and fewer low-income families will get the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.

That’s why I’m constantly on the lookout for colleges and universities that somehow defy these odds—places where students are more likely to graduate than not, regardless of race or income.

Georgia State University is one of the institutions that has achieved this goal.

I visited Georgia State University (GSU) earlier this year and was amazed by what I learned. An urban university serving low-income and minority students, GSU struggled with dismal graduation rates. Just over a decade ago, GSU’s overall graduation rate was 32 percent. Among Hispanic students, it was 22 percent. Among African Americans, 29 percent.

Today, the university’s graduation rate tops 54 percent, a 22-point improvement, among the highest increases in the nation during this period. What’s more, there is no achievement gap at GSU. African-American, Hispanic, and low-income students all graduate at rates at or above those of the student body overall. GSU is one of the only public universities in the country to achieve this goal. And over the last four years, GSU has conferred more degrees to African Americans than any other college or university in the U.S.

How did GSU do it? It didn’t take the easy route by shutting out at-risk students and cherry picking the brightest applicants. In fact, the university accepted more “at-risk” students—low-income, minority, and academically struggling—than ever.

Instead, GSU worked to understand the challenges of college from a student’s perspective. What obstacles prevent students from getting a degree? And how could GSU help students overcome them?

GSU’s key insight was that there isn’t a single, big reason that leads to students dropping out. It’s dozens of smaller things that disrupt their journey to graduation. For the GSU administration, digging into these challenges was a humbling experience. They realized that there were many things that they could be doing better to serve all their students.

“Students come to school with their hopes and their dreams and their families are investing heavily. We want to make sure that Georgia State is not the cause of them not finishing—that we have done everything that we can to create the kind of environment where they can be retained, where they can progress, and where they can ultimately graduate,” says Allison Calhoun-Brown, associate vice president for student success at GSU.

So GSU redesigned the entire student experience from admissions to graduation, clearing a path for them to fulfill their goal of obtaining a degree.

One of the most remarkable changes is how they have reimagined student advising. The university realized it was sitting on a mountain of data about its students—data that could be used to better serve them. Poring over 140,000 student records, 2.5 million grades, and other data, the university identified 800 different behaviors that correlated with dropping out. For example, if a political science major gets a “C” in an introductory political science course, their chances of graduating fall to 25 percent. Using this information, advisers are now able to identify the students who need assistance—often before the students know it themselves. Now, when that political science major gets a “C”, an academic adviser receives an alert to meet with the student. As part of this effort, the university hired more advisers to reach out to students on a one-to-one basis. It wasn’t simply a technology fix. The human element has been critical to its success.

Here are some of the other obstacles students were running into, and how GSU removed them:

Summer Melt: Every year, high school graduates across the country who have taken the SATs, applied to college, and accepted offers of admission don’t show up for classes in the fall. This phenomenon is so common that educators have dubbed it “the summer melt.” GSU found that prospective students got confused about completing financial aid forms, signing up for classes, and navigating other requirements to enroll.

Unprepared Students: Half of incoming students with the weakest academic records were dropping out of GSU their first year.

Financial Need: Many of the students who stopped for a semester because of unmet financial need—often a shortfall of a few hundred dollars—would never return to college.

Too Many Choices: Look through any course list at a major university and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the choices offered for classes and majors.

Other colleges and universities have a lot to learn from Georgia State University. It’s no surprise that the university has received dozens of visits by administrators from other institutions wanting to understand GSU’s innovations and adopt them on their own campuses.

If the data and examples don’t convince visitors that what GSU is doing is special, meeting its students will. Sitting down with a group of undergraduates and recent graduates was the most inspiring part of my visit.

Fortune Onwuzuzruike, for example, who graduated from GSU earlier this year, told me how he entered the Summer Success Academy as a first-year student. It was an experience that gave him the opportunity to get a jumpstart on his college career and encouraged him to take full advantage of everything on campus. He is now working in health care information systems, but plans to go to graduate school in business and health administration.

“They do a really good job of connecting the dots for you and actually helping you move forward so you can find out what you want to do in this life,” he said.

I also met Austin Birchell, who just completed his freshmen year. A first-generation student whose family has struggled financially, Austin was worried about being successful in college, especially with no family or relative who had ever been to college to help guide him. But thanks to the meta-major program and other supports, he says he easily transitioned from the “small pond” of high school to the “ocean” of college. This fall he is signed up to be a tour guide to introduce prospective students to his university.

“I’ll be selling them the college and telling them why they should come here. And I’ll truly do it with a passion, because I love this college,” he says.

Three very strong women—my mother, my maternal grandmother, and Melinda—deserve big credit (or blame, I suppose) for helping me become the man I am today. But Blanche Caffiere, a very kindly librarian and teacher I’ve never written about publicly before, also had a huge influence on me.  

Mrs. Caffiere (pronounced “kaff-ee-AIR”) died in 2006, shortly after reaching her 100^th birthday. Before she passed, I had an opportunity to thank her for the important role she played in my life, stoking my passion for learning at a time when I easily could have gotten turned off by school.

When I first met Mrs. Caffiere, she was the elegant and engaging school librarian at Seattle’s View Ridge Elementary, and I was a timid fourth grader. I was desperately trying to go unnoticed, because I had some big deficits, like atrocious handwriting (experts now call it dysgraphia) and a comically messy desk. And I was trying to hide the fact that I liked to read—something that was cool for girls but not for boys. 

Mrs. Caffiere took me under her wing and helped make it okay for me to be a messy, nerdy boy who was reading lots of books.

She pulled me out of my shell by sharing her love of books. She started by asking questions like, “What do you like to read?” and “What are you interested in?” Then she found me a lot of books—ones that were more complex and challenging than the Tom Swift Jr. science fiction books I was reading at the time. For example, she gave me great biographies she had read. Once I’d read them, she would make the time to discuss them with me. “Did you like it?” she would ask. “Why? What did you learn?” She genuinely listened to what I had to say. Through those book conversations in the library and in the classroom we became good friends.

Teachers generally don’t want to burden their students with extra reading beyond the homework they’ve assigned. But I learned from Mrs. Caffiere that my teachers had so much more knowledge to share. I just needed to ask. Up through high school and beyond, I would often ask my teachers about the books they liked, read those books when I had some free time, and offer my thoughts.

Looking back on it now, there’s no question that my time with Mrs. Caffiere helped spark my interest in libraries (Melinda’s and my first large-scale effort in philanthropy) and my focus on helping every child in America get the benefit of great teachers. I often trace the beginning of our foundation to an article about children in poor countries dying from diseases eliminated long ago in the U.S. But I should give some credit as well to the dedicated librarian and teacher who helped me find my strengths when I was nine years old. It’s remarkable how much power one good person can have in shaping the life of a child. 

When Hajira Attah graduated from high school in 2013, she wanted to be the first one in her family to go to college. But no school considered her college material. She had a 1.7 GPA and low SAT scores. All eight colleges she applied to rejected her.

Her college ambitions might have ended there. But then she heard about Johnson C. Smith University. It was the one school willing to “take a risk” on her, she says. Even though she didn’t meet the school’s GPA or test score requirements, Johnson C. Smith saw a potential in Hajira that others did not.

They accepted her into a special first-year program to help low-income, first-generation colleges students get a chance to obtain a college degree. Their bet on Hajira paid off. She’s now a junior majoring in history with over a 3.6 GPA and her eyes on graduate school. 

I had a chance to meet Hajira last month in Seattle along with a group of other students from both Johnson C. Smith and Delaware State Universities.  It was inspiring to hear their stories. According to higher education statistics, the majority of low-income students like themselves will not finish their degrees. But the students I met are committed to beating those odds.

While each student had a unique story of the struggles they had to overcome to get an education, they all shared one thing in common. At a critical point in their lives, their schools believed in them when others did not.

There are plenty of reasons to get a college degree. More career options. Higher incomes. A chance to learn more about the world and leave your mark on it. Meeting Hajira and the other students, I was reminded that the most important reason to go to college is not just a diploma, but a greater sense of self-worth and purpose in your life.

Hajira, Kyle, Selena, Edgar, Katherine, Earlee, and Austin, thanks for the great conversation.

Good luck in college and in your careers!

When I was applying to college, I wanted to go to one of the best schools. At the time, I thought of “the best,” as the colleges that were the most selective. I applied to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—schools whose reputations are burnished as much by the huge numbers of applicants who are denied admission, as the privileged few who are let in.

But over the years I’ve learned that there are many other ways to measure what makes a school great.

Institutions like Harvard (where I ended up going) have an important role to play in higher education. They do amazing research (which is something I support, enthusiastically) and can have their pick of the top students from around the world.

But equally impressive to me are the universities that take on the students who haven’t had a great high school experience. The students who graduate with low GPAs and poor SAT scores and might have trouble getting accepted to college. These students, many of them first-generation college students from low-income backgrounds, know a college degree is the surest path to the middle class. But they are also the ones who are at the highest risk of dropping out.

Our foundation is always looking for universities that have learned how to give these students the support they need to graduate. They are not just opening the door to college for a new generation of students. They are also helping to redefine the future of higher education in the U.S.

Last month, I had the chance to sit down in Seattle with administrators from two outstanding institutions–Johnson C. Smith University and Delaware State University—who are experimenting with exciting new ways to serve these at-risk students.

“We take pride in the fact that we do not cherry-pick our students. You can come to us as you are,” Dr. Harry Williams, president of Delaware State University, located in Dover, Delaware, told me.

Encouraging more low-income and first-generation college students to get college degrees is critical—not just for the students themselves, but for the health of America’s economy. By 2025, two-thirds of all jobs in the US will require education beyond high school. At the current rate the US is producing college graduates, however, the country is expected to face a shortfall of 11 millionskilled workers to fill those roles over the next 10 years.

The problem isn’t that not enough students want to go to college. More students are enrolling in higher education programs than ever before. The problem is that too many drop out before completing their degrees, especially students from low-income families. In fact, a student from a wealthy family in the U.S. is eight times more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than a student from a low-income family.

I met one student, Earlee Corbin, from Johnson C. Smith University who is an example of that statistic. He went to college a decade ago on a baseball scholarship, but then dropped out after his freshman year to take care of his father, who was ill, and to work to help support his family. Now 29, he’s back in a night school program to finish his degree while still working full time. The hours are long, but the personal support from his university—from both his professors and other students—is making the difference, he told me.

“They treat us like family. They put us in a position to succeed and the only option we have is to succeed,” he said.

Giving at-risk students a shot to beat the odds is central to the missions of Johnson C. Smith and Delaware State Universities. That commitment is rooted in their histories. Both institutions are historically black universities, founded after the Civil War to provide African-Americans an opportunity for higher education. While the legal barriers that once blocked black students from attending other institutions are now removed, America’s historically black colleges and universities still play an outsized role in providing education to underprivileged students. More than 60 percent of the students they enroll come from low-income backgrounds or are the first in their family to attend college.

Among historically black colleges, Johnson C. Smith University and Delaware State University are two of the most innovative when it comes to recruiting at-risk students, keeping them in school, and giving them the support they need to graduate.

Johnson C. Smith University offers students who don’t meet the GPA or SAT requirements for regular admission the opportunity to apply for an intensive first-year program to help them be successful in college. In addition to looking at the grades and test scores of applicants, the school examines their non-cognitive and meta-cognitive skills—like their problem-solving abilities and perseverance—to determine if they have what it takes to get a degree. The school prides itself on seeing the potential in students other schools may not.

“We put them into a very rigorous program of study and we watch them get to that ‘Aha!” moment. That’s when we know we have them on the right track.” said Dr. Ronald Carter, president of Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Delaware State University created a personalized guidance program which provides first-year students with mentoring, tutoring, and other resources to help them navigate the often difficult transition to college life.

Both institutions collect and analyze huge amounts of data to track students throughout their college careers. If a student taking a psychology quiz gets a failing grade, it triggers an email or phone call from a counselor to find out what went wrong and how to get that student back on track.

During one point in our conversation, Dr. Williams and his staff shared a chart showing how many students were expected to drop out between their freshman and sophomore years. Using predictive analytics, they have been able to target students who are considered the most likely to drop out—based on SAT scores, financial background, and other factors—and give them the support they need before they encounter a problem.

“The data shows that if we can keep you in college after your first year you have a higher percentage chance of graduating,” Dr. Williams said.

Providing so much personal coaching to students can be expensive, placing increased pressure on already strained higher education budgets. Both schools have made difficult budget cuts, eliminating unpopular majors and thinning administration and staff to help support these programs.

Why not just let the students who can’t make it drop out? Delaware State University staff told me this surprising fact: It actually costs a university more—in lost tuition—to allow a student to drop out than it does to pay for the support needed to help retain that student.

If it makes more financial sense to retain a student than let them drop out, other colleges may soon have a lot to learn from Johnson C. Smith and Delaware State about how to help more students complete their degrees.

For now, both schools are still learning themselves. The graduation rate at Delaware State is 37%, and 42% at Johnson C. Smith. While those rates are up over previous years, and remain higher than other institutions serving underprivileged students, both schools are working hard to boost them further.

I look forward to hearing more about the progress these schools are making in the years ahead. What’s already clear is that their innovative efforts to give more students the opportunity to obtain a college degree have yielded impressive results. They’re not just transforming how colleges operate. They are transforming lives. 

I always enjoy meeting with students. They are curious, energetic, and aren’t afraid to ask tough and sometimes unusual questions like, “What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?”

During our recent visit to Betsy Layne High School in Eastern Kentucky, Melinda and I were interviewed by the school’s student news program. We both get interviewed dozens of times every year, but this was the most memorable one we’ve done in a long time.

You can watch the broadcast here. I think you’ll be surprised by what you’ll learn about us.

Thirty years ago I went on vacation and fell for Richard Feynman.

A friend and I were planning a trip together and wanted to mix a little learning in with our relaxation. We looked at a local university’s film collection, saw that they had one of his lectures on physics, and checked it out. We loved it so much that we ended up watching it twice. Feynman had this amazing knack for making physics clear and fun at the same time. I immediately went looking for more of his talks, and I’ve been a big fan ever since. Years later I bought the rights to those lectures and worked with Microsoft to get them posted online for free.

In 1965, Feynman shared a Nobel Prize for work on particle physics. To celebrate the 50^th anniversary of that honor, the California Institute of Technology—where he taught for many years before his death in 1988—asked for some thoughts about what made him so special. Here’s the video I sent:

In that video, I especially love the way Feynman explains how fire works. He takes such obvious delight in knowledge—you can see his face light up. And he makes it so clear that anyone can understand it.

In that sense, Feynman has a lot in common with all the amazing teachers I’ve met in schools across the country. You walk into their classroom and immediately feel the energy—the way they engage their students—and their passion for whatever subject they’re teaching. These teachers aren’t famous, but they deserve just as much respect and admiration as someone like Feynman. If there were a Nobel for making high school algebra exciting and fun, I know a few teachers I would nominate.

Incidentally, Feynman wasn’t famous just for being a great teacher and a world-class scientist; he was also quite a character. He translated Mayan hieroglyphics. He loved to play the bongos. While helping develop the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, he entertained himself by figuring out how to break into the safes that contained top-secret research. (Feynman cultivated this image as a colorful guy. His colleague Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize–winner in his own right, once remarked, “Feynman was a great scientist, but he spent a great deal of his effort generating anecdotes about himself.”)

Here are some suggestions if you’d like to know more about Feynman or his work:

• The Messenger Lectures on Physics. These are the talks that first captivated me back in the 1980s and that you see briefly in the video above. The site is a few years old, but you can watch for free along with some helpful commentary.
• Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher is a collection of the most accessible parts of Feynman’s famous Caltech lectures on physics.
• He recounted his adventures in two very good books, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? You won’t learn a lot about physics, but you’ll have a great time hearing his stories.

During our recent visit to Kentucky, Melinda and I had lunch with a group of students from Betsy Layne High School. It was a highlight of our trip.

Over pepperoni pizza and soda, we talked about what it’s like to grow up in Eastern Kentucky and what their plans are for the future. One of the students we met was Lakeisha Crum. She’s a senior at the high school. A stellar student and volleyball player, Lakeisha will be the first person in her family to go to college.

Being a teenager is an exciting time in everyone’s life. It can also be quite hard. (I know. I’m the father of three of them, and a former teenager myself.) You’re just starting to figure out who you are and what you want to do with your life.

For decades in Eastern Kentucky, the coal mines provided young people with answers to those questions. The pay was good. Work was steady. You could stay close to home, raise a family, and build a career.

But the collapse of the coal industry left behind a giant void.

Now, many students are filling it with education. Instead of going to the mines, they are going to college.

Stories like Lakeisha’s are always inspiring. Still, being the first one to go to college can be tough, especially coming from an isolated part of the country like Appalachia. Students told us that it’s hard to find role models. People who can tell them what college will be like and how to prepare for life away from home.

What was most moving was to hear how dedicated all the students are to Eastern Kentucky. With the coal mining jobs gone and nothing yet to take their place, some people think that this part of Kentucky doesn’t have a future. But many of the students I met are committed to coming home after college to start making one.

If they’re as successful in their careers as they have been in high school, I have no doubt they will. 

When I first stepped into Ricky Thacker’s classroom, I was surprised by how unusual it looks. There are no desks. White boards hang from every wall. The entire room is painted bright orange and yellow, like candy corn.

Ricky stood in the middle of the room, calling out coordinates on a giant x-y axis he had taped to the floor as students rushed around him from quadrant to quadrant. Ricky’s enthusiasm inspired everyone else in the room. No one was sitting down. Everyone was engaged, including me.

Melinda and I visited Ricky’s classroom at Betsy Layne High School during our trip in November to Kentucky, where schools have been making some amazing progress. Since 2011, ACT scores have been going up. The graduation rate has risen from 80 percent to 86 percent since 2010, well above the national average of 81 percent.

We wanted to see what was driving all of these improvements. What we discovered is that one of the biggest reasons is great teachers—like Ricky Thacker. 

The son of a coal miner, Ricky grew up in the Appalachian region of Eastern Kentucky. It’s a breathtaking region of mountains, rivers, and hidden valleys, but also deep poverty. In 2014, The New York Times ranked this region as one of the toughest places to live in America. Six counties in the region ranked among the bottom 10 in the U.S. in terms of income, educational attainment, unemployment, obesity, disability, and life expectancy. Over the last two decades, with the collapse of the coal industry, about half of the region’s population has moved away.

Ricky chose to stay. He went to college and became a teacher. He thought it would be the best way to make a difference in his community. And for the last nine years, he’s done just that.

Sitting in his classroom it was immediately clear that Ricky is passionate about his job, always pushing his students and himself to do better. His uniquely designed classroom is one example of what makes Ricky such a great teacher. Last summer, Ricky attended an education conference where a presenter displayed two photos: one of a classroom in 1915, and one from 2015.

Ricky was immediately struck, as you probably are, that the setup of American classrooms has not really changed in the last 100 years. Sure, new classroom technologies are available, but most students still sit in straight rows with a teacher at the front of the class.

When he returned to Betsy Layne, Ricky decided it was time to bring his classroom into the 21^st century. He wanted to create a space that put students at the center. So he tossed out the desks and installed the white boards, where students can work together on algebra problems. As a final touch, his wife offered to repaint the classroom’s walls. She picked orange and yellow. “A math classroom should be full of energy,” she told him.

And it is. But Ricky’s was not the only classroom we saw like that.

During our visit, Melinda and I never spotted a teacher just standing in front of the class lecturing while the students just sat and listened. Instead, students were the ones doing the most work. They were actively engaged, sharing their ideas, solving problems, and, as a result, learning.  Weeks after my visit, I still remember all the lessons vividly.

In a language arts class, the teacher sparked a lively debate about William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” drawing everyone into the discussion, even finding clever ways to get the quiet kids engaged. Melinda visited a biology class where the teacher taught a lesson about how cells transport molecules across their membranes. As part of the lesson, she challenged students to put a piece of candy inside a paper bag without opening it. (It stumped nearly everyone—Melinda too!—but I’d bet that no one in the class will ever forget how a cell membrane works.)

Great teaching adds up to impressive achievements. Over the last 10 years, students from Floyd County, where Betsy Layne High School is located, have outperformed many of their peers across the state and the country. The county is ranked 12^thth among the state’s 173 public school districts based on academic performance, up from 145 in 2005. ACT scores continue to improve. And the high school graduation rate now tops 91 percent, 10 points higher than the national average.

What’s happening at Betsy Layne and other Kentucky schools show what’s possible when students are held to high standards and good teachers have the opportunity to become great.  A longtime partner of our foundation’s education work, Kentucky is reaping the rewards of many years of investment in education reform. It set a high bar for what all students should know so they can be prepared for college or enter the workforce.  Later, the state introduced a system which gives teachers the tools and support they need to sharpen their skills and become more effective in the classroom.

None of these changes have been easy. But in Kentucky, teachers, parents, and politicians have worked together to stay focused on the goal of giving students the best education possible. As one teacher told Melinda and me, “I want to create a school where I’d want to send my own kids.”

Teachers at Betsy Layne told me that their school’s focus on student-centered, hands-on learning has made their jobs easier. Instead of lecturing for hours every day, they now organize activities that leave them and their students more energized. It’s a win-win, they said.

Likewise, teachers say the professional development system is an opportunity for improvement, not a tool for punishment as some had feared. They observe each other’s classes to provide feedback and learn new techniques.  Sometimes an approach used in a biology class might work well in a social studies class. They also survey their students to get input on their performance. Many teachers said they look beyond their schools for ways to get better at their craft. Through Twitter and other social media, they connect with other teachers in the state and across the country to exchange lesson ideas and discuss shared challenges.

What impressed me most is that no one at Betsy Layne is content standing still. They believe the best way to improve their school is to continue to improve themselves.

Still, they remain humble about what they’ve achieved. “We’re a diamond in the rough,” Ricky likes to say of his school. Maybe at one time that was true. But no longer. As an example for other schools to follow, it shines brightly. 

This summer I got to meet Lyon Terry, my state’s teacher of the year for 2015. Lyon told me about something clever he does in his classroom at the beginning of each school year: He takes a big piece of paper and draws an arrow on it, pointing up and to the right, and labels it the Learning Line. He puts a dot at the bottom of the arrow and labels it “Birth.” He puts another dot a little farther up, for 4^th graders. Then another one for high school graduates, and one farther up—but not at the top—for himself.

I love Lyon’s idea of a learning line for lots of reasons, most of all because he doesn’t put himself at the top. He leaves himself room to keep growing.

I realized that the learning line is a great metaphor for the work we’re doing with teachers.

Just about every teacher I have ever met is dying to get useful feedback and tools that help them improve their work in the classroom. Unfortunately, they rarely get either one. In a survey (pdf) of more than 1,300 educators, large majorities said the professional development they do isn’t related to their work in the classroom and doesn’t help them become better teachers. In some places, the teacher-evaluation system isn’t even tied to helping teachers improve their skills—it’s mainly used to decide who gets hired and who gets fired.

In other words, most teachers have to move up the learning line on their own. So they proceed slowly. That’s frustrating for the teachers. And it’s a big loss for their students, because the evidence shows that having an effective teacher is the single most important in-school factor in student achievement.

This is an urgent problem. Right now, only 25 percent of Hispanic students and 10 percent of African-American students graduate from high school ready for college. We need to be at 80 percent for all minority and low-income students.

If we’re going to solve this problem, we have to create outstanding feedback and improvement systems for teachers. We need to help all teachers move up the learning line faster, and together with their colleagues, so they can help far more students graduate ready for college.

The good news is that we have learned a lot in the past seven years about what great teaching looks like and how to spread it. At a time when nationwide scores on the ACT and other tests are flat or going down, students in several school districts (such as Denver and Memphis) and states (such as Kentucky) are making impressive gains in learning. So are students in some charter schools.

What all these places have in common is that they excel at supporting teachers. For example, they train and certify classroom observers. They combine various ways to measure a teacher’s effectiveness, including classroom observations, feedback from their classes, and students’ improvement on test scores. They provide teachers with classroom tools aligned to the Common Core standards. And—this is crucial—they focus the teachers’ job evaluations on activities that help them improve their skills.

Now we need these best practices to be adopted in lots more districts and states. I just wish I could be more confident that will happen.

The progress so far is fragile. In places where feedback and improvement systems are well designed, they’re generating excitement, and teachers are embracing them. But in places where the system holds teachers accountable without giving them the support they need to improve, teachers are pushing back, and students are losing out on the opportunity to make big gains in achievement.

So we have to find ways to take what’s working in a few places and spread it much more widely. In my speech last week I encouraged teachers to demand excellent feedback and improvement systems, and I urged state and local leaders to deliver them.

I believe we can do this, if we stay focused on the goal of promoting effective teaching everywhere.

I got my first big comeuppance as a computer programmer when I was a senior in high school. I had a job debugging software for a company called TRW, and I felt pretty cocky about my skills. But when the project I was on hit a rough patch, TRW brought in a more experienced programmer named John Norton to review my work. John was amazing. He showed me all the mistakes I was making, how I wasn’t thinking about data structure and algorithms and modules and the way they connected. It was a mind-blowing experience—he was that much better.

It would not be the last time. Throughout my career as a programmer, just when I was feeling self-satisfied, someone would come along and show me a better way to do something. I would look at their code and think, “I am so bad at this.” And then I would get to work on sharpening my skills.

I started thinking about that boom-and-bust cycle last month after I met with Lyon Terry, the 2015 Teacher of the Year in my home state of Washington. Lyon, who teaches fourth grade at Lawton Elementary in Seattle, took time from his summer break to visit my office so we could talk about what he has learned in 17 years as an educator.

We spent a lot of time discussing social and emotional learning, including the idea that kids should learn to learn from their mistakes, as I did at TRW. Students who fear failure need to learn how to turn it into an opportunity. That takes a certain mindset, to borrow the title of an excellent book that both Lyon and I had read. Of course, it is easy to say “celebrate your mistakes.” It is hard to do, and even harder to teach.

So Lyon starts each school year by doing something that really resonated with me. He draws an arrow on a big piece of paper, pointing up and to the right. “I label it the Learning Line,” he said. “I put a little dot down at the bottom that says Birth. I put a dot where a 4th grader is, and then I put a dot for a high school graduate and a dot for myself, which is a little farther up the line but not at the top. I say, ‘This is your life trajectory. You’ll be traveling up this line every day of your life.’ ”

He also sets an example by being willing to admit his own missteps. Last year, while working with a student on math, Lyon got stumped by a particularly tough problem. The student said, “Mr. Terry, you’re the Teacher of the Year. You shouldn’t make mistakes!” Lyon told him: “The fact that I can admit to my students that I make mistakes is probably one of the things that makes me the Teacher of the Year.”

Lyon is just as passionate about his fellow teachers as he is about his students. We talked about how, in a lot of districts, the only way for a teacher to advance in her career is to become a principal. That’s a shame, because it often means that the most talented teachers stop teaching.

“People will say to me, ‘So when are you going to be a principal?’ because that’s kind of the next thing,” Lyon said. “But that’s not really my skill set.”

Seattle is trying to solve this problem by allowing the best teachers to keep teaching, but also set aside some time in their schedule for other projects. Lyon is part of that program. He told me that, ideally, great teachers would have time to teach and also coach their colleagues, as he does, or help shape education policy.

“I think we need to have more teachers leading from the classroom. When an idea comes from the classroom, it’s going to be much stronger than anything that’s imposed on teachers from a principal or a superintendent or somewhere else. Imagine if experienced teachers could teach for half time and then work on curriculum half time, or teach for four days while writing a book. There are all sorts of different things that teachers should be part of, but it’s really difficult to balance those things with your classroom work.”

Lyon’s comments echoed a problem that many teachers have told me about. They feel isolated. They do not get nearly enough time to sit with their colleagues discussing techniques or specific students. It’s great that Seattle schools are making this a priority. And they’re not alone; a few years ago Melinda and I visited a high school in Eagle County, Colorado, where they were carving out time for teachers to talk to each other. But this problem deserves even more attention nationwide.

I asked Lyon how the Common Core State Standards are affecting his work. “The Common Core is really just a set of skills,” he said. “It says a 4th grader should be able to determine the theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text. Well, that seems like a reasonable expectation, and that’s what I’ve always taught. The big change is designing the curriculum to meet those skills, which means providing supports for teachers.” He and other educators from around Seattle have been doing just that, writing a curriculum to support the Common Core standards.

If you ever start feeling glum about the possibility of improving America’s schools, spend a little time with an amazing teacher. It is deeply inspiring. My conversation with Lyon reaffirmed my belief that we should be listening to educators like him, and acting on their ideas. It will make life better for thousands of teachers, and even more importantly, it will make schools better for millions of children.

Forty years ago, Paul Allen and I started Microsoft because we wanted to help everybody get as much out of computers as we did. Back then, only big business had access, and we thought millions of people would benefit from having that kind of power at their fingertips. Since then, the personal computer, software, and the Internet have revolutionized every aspect of life in the United States—almost.

It is still surprising to me how little technology has affected education. These days, I spend a lot of time thinking about what teachers can do if they get new tools in their hands, especially if they have a say in what those tools look like. A year ago, I wrote about six websites for teachers that had caught my eye, though I noted that it was “too early to say which ones are going to break through.” It's still too early, but we're starting to be able to identify patterns in the ways that teachers are using computers and the Internet to give their students a more dynamic education.

Here are three trends that teachers have been telling me about.

Newly available data is revolutionizing the way teachers and students collaborate. Right now, most teachers spend hours grading homework and tests and then copying everything down into spreadsheets they made themselves. And after all that, teachers often only have a partial sense of how each student is doing—based on rows and rows of numbers and whatever qualitative insights they can keep in their head. But online systems can give teachers pinpoint diagnostics for each student at the touch of a button. At Summit Public Schools—a charter school network that started in California—students and teachers collaborate on the Personalized Learning Platform, which generates troves of data. Teachers not only get to see how each student did on the days' assignments; they can use predictive analytical tools and sophisticated visualizations to determine whether students are on track, so they are continually adjusting in real time to target the areas where students are having trouble.

Game-changing educational software is rising to the top. It takes a while for teachers to sort through all the options and find the technology that works best. Then it takes a while longer for developers to incorporate teachers' feedback and improve their products. But there are more and more successful examples. A piece of software called Newsela, for example, translates the news of the day into articles pitched at different reading levels. That way, no matter how varied the skill levels are in a single class, teachers can lead a group discussion on the same reading, which is a strategy proven to benefit everyone's learning. Another example is ThinkCERCA, software for essay-writing. It's easier to conceive of doing a math problem online than writing an essay online, but ThinkCERCA helps teachers and students collaborate through every part of the process, from gathering notes to creating an outline to iterating on drafts. It doesn't generate the feedback or grade the essays—the teacher is still working one on one with each student—but the online environment gives students more structure and enables them to get more input every step of the way.

Teachers are using online aggregators in huge numbers to share great ideas with colleagues around the country. For years, students got a textbook and teachers got a manual, and if they didn't like it, well, tough. But the Internet is helping teachers put all sorts of lesson plans into the public domain. Not only that, but teachers can communicate with each other about how to teach the lessons, and they can share feedback so that the lessons get better over time. As a result, teachers enjoy a level of choice and collaboration that simply didn't exist before. A few years ago, New York state assembled a collection of high-quality lesson plans called EngageNY. They were rigorous about including only the best material, and teachers loved it. So far, teachers from all over the country—not just New York—have downloaded material from EngageNY more than 20 million times. Other sites, including Better Lesson and LearnZillion, have developed equally faithful followings. Teachers can use the content exactly how they want to: teaching it whole, picking and choosing from here and there, or adapting and improvising in their own way.

Two common denominators connect these trends. First, they give teachers more resources we know that they want. Teachers have more time, better information, and more options for how to act on that information. Second, teachers have been instrumental in developing and implementing these technologies. ThinkCERCA’s CEO is a teacher. The teachers at Summit have been working with developers to refine their online system for years. And teachers are voting with their feet on which software and lesson aggregators they prefer.

For me, technology has always been about what people can accomplish when they use it. We are starting to see teachers using it to improve the quality of the interactions they have with their students every day. It will still take time to find out which ideas will have the biggest impact, but it's exciting to see the changes that are already happening.

What makes a great teacher great? It’s a good question at any time of year, but as teachers return to their classrooms in the weeks ahead, postering their walls and preparing their lesson plans, it’s a great time to focus on great teachers and great teaching, since there’s lots of evidence that it makes all the difference to student success. We’re focused on “back to school” in my own house, and it excites me to hear my kids talk about their year ahead—their classes, their classmates, and what teachers they’ll have for the coming year.

I enjoy talking to my kids’ teachers; in fact, I enjoy talking to teachers, period.  It’s a lot of fun for me. I find their enthusiasm infectious. My role at the Gates Foundation allows me to talk to teachers from all over the country, and to seek their advice and insight on how to best achieve our goal of making sure all students in this country graduate from high school prepared for college or other forms of postsecondary education.  By listening to what teachers have to say about what they see in their classrooms every single day, I learn how our foundation can support them in the most effective and efficient ways.

This summer, I spent time asking teachers for their feedback. The conversations were so enlightening that I wanted to share some of the themes that kept jumping out at me.

Great teachers are passionate.

My favorite moment in these conversations came when I asked these teachers why they’d gone into teaching. They all had an answer right away; their eyes lit up when they shared it, and their stories were powerful. A couple of teachers I spoke with went into teaching because their own teachers had inspired them and they wanted to pass that inspiration on. One woman said she started teaching just to pass time before starting law school, but once she’d started she loved it too much to stop. She never did manage to get to law school. Others talked about their subjects, and how their love of English, or chemistry, or history was something they just needed to ignite in others, or try.  Whatever the source of their passion, passion was a common denominator, and a driver for great teachers.

Great teachers are true experts.

A lot of people believe that teaching math, for example, just involves knowing a little bit about math and then standing up in front of a bunch of kids and explaining it to them. In fact, teachers spend years honing both subject expertise and a unique set of teaching skills, figuring out how to structure their classrooms and their lessons to produce authentic learning rather than just the rote instruction. Holly Phillips, who teaches math in Kentucky, talked to me about what she called Monkey Syndrome: she can drill equations into her students’ brains, and they can mimic them to get good enough grades on tests, but they still don’t really know math. She’s spent a lot of time thinking about how to teach in new ways that let students see the underlying reasons for learning quadratic equations, cosines, and factoring. “They come up with so much more,” she said, “than I could think to put in a lesson.”  Her story really struck me: great teachers are experts in not only WHAT they teach, but HOW to teach it in ways that will catch fire with their students.

Great teachers are committed to their students’ success.

There’s a common myth about teachers—that they know right away which students are going to succeed and which are going to fail, and they concentrate on the “good” students. But the teachers who talked to me blow that misconception out of the water. They spoke about their commitment to reaching all of their students, and many of them spent most of our time together talking about reaching the kids who didn’t get the material as easily. William Anderson, who teaches social science in Denver, put it this way: “There are very few teachers who wake up and say to themselves, I want this kid to be a failure. We wake up with success on our minds, and we work hard to instill that into kids.”

Great teachers want in on the conversation.

One last thing came through in my discussions with the teachers: they want to be part of the debate about school improvement in this country. “A lot of teachers feel like their voice isn’t heard,” said William, “and that regardless of what we say, people are just going to do things to us rather than with us.” Teachers may wake up with success for their students on their minds, but they can’t do it alone. They need support from parents, administrators, and legislators. One of the things we’re trying to do at our foundation is to help teachers get that support they’re looking for. Because if more of us entered into conversation with teachers and got w to hear them talk about what’s possible for our kids and our classrooms, we’d be a lot more optimistic about education. I know I am.

Once in a while you meet someone whose work is so extraordinary you want to share their story so others can learn from their experience. That’s how I feel about Cheryl Hyman.

Cheryl is the chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago, one of the largest two-year community college systems in the US. When she was appointed chancellor in 2010, she was handed a daunting task: Fix a college that was failing to educate the community it served. More than 90 percent of her students, most of them from low-income backgrounds, arrived unprepared for the rigors of college. Most of them dropped out.

Cheryl’s challenge was an extreme version of the problem facing America’s higher education system. College enrollment has increased dramatically in the last few decades, but graduation rates have not. Nationally, about 50 percent of college students complete degrees. At City Colleges of Chicago, just 7 percent were graduating.

You can listen to Cheryl explain more about the challenges she faced in this short video:

It was not the first time the odds were against Cheryl. Raised in the housing projects in the West Side of Chicago, Cheryl dealt with hardship at an early age. Her parents struggled with substance abuse. When she was 17, looking to escape the chaos of her home life, Cheryl moved out, quit high school, and got a job working at a fast food restaurant. For a time, while trying to make ends meet on her own, she was homeless.

She quickly realized that working at a fast food restaurant was not a path to better life. But a quality education would be. She went back to high school, graduated, and then eventually spent two years at the City Colleges of Chicago before transferring to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she earned a degree in computer science.

After graduation she got her first job at ComEd, Illinois’s largest electric company, working her way up to become a corporate vice president. In 2010, she got a call from then-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley asking her to lead the city’s network of seven community colleges and help more of the city’s youth succeed like she had. She was later reappointed by current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Cheryl’s appointment wasn’t without controversy. She didn’t have a formal background in education and her business-minded passion for measurement often shook up long-held traditions in higher education.

Chery didn’t give up. Instead, she instituted sweeping reforms to help more students graduate. I was impressed by three critical changes she made:

1. A focus on careers: Cheryl formed partnerships between City Colleges and industry leaders to make sure the schools were teaching students the skills they needed for jobs in Chicago area’s fastest-growing sectors, including healthcare, advanced manufacturing, and transportation and logistics. City Colleges’ partnership with industry gives students access to internships where they can get real world experience and a first pass at job openings in their fields of study.
2. More student support: After hearing about the struggles that dropouts experience, she poured more resources into advising support so students get the assistance they need before they decide to quit. She also overhauled the college course guide and made class schedules more flexible so students could fit their coursework in with their personal lives.
3. A catch-up plan: An easy way for City Colleges to raise graduation rates would have been to accept fewer students and choose the ones with the best academic records. Cheryl didn’t take the easy route. She wanted to offer all students, even those who lagged behind in math and writing skills, to make progress toward a degree. So she worked to streamline the system for students who needed remedial coursework. Instead of forcing them to repeat entire high school math or writing courses—a path that often led students to become discouraged and quit—she asked instructors to design remedial coursework focused on the math and writing skills needed for their majors. Nursing students with weak math skills, for example, only need to concentrate on the handful of lessons that are necessary for a nursing career.

There are many stories of the students who have benefitted from these improvements. One of them is Lidia Sanchez, who moved to Chicago from Mexico and is the first person in her family to hold a degree. It wasn’t always easy, she says, but thanks to advising support she received she was able to graduate with a culinary arts degree last month. She now works in the kitchens of two of Chicago’s top restaurants and has ambitions of managing her own restaurant someday.

One by one these individual stories of success are adding up to positive changes at City College of Chicago. The graduation rate has doubled since 2010 to 14 percent, and for the last three years the school has awarded the highest number of degrees in its history.

Much more work, of course, needs to be done. As Cheryl told me, she won’t be satisfied until her graduation rate is 100 percent. Still, the progress made by Cheryl already a reminder that change is possible in higher education.

Picking leaders like Chancellor Hyman is a big part of that change. She’s setting a fantastic example that more people need to hear about.

Now that I’ve shared it, I hope you will too.

This spring more than 2 million students across the US are doing something I’ve never done. They’re graduating from college.

That’s an achievement we should all celebrate. Although I dropped out of college and got lucky pursuing a career in software, getting a degree is a much surer path to success.

College graduates are more likely to find a rewarding job, earn higher income, and even, evidence shows, live healthier lives than if they didn’t have degrees. They also bring training and skills into America’s workforce, helping our economy grow and stay competitive. That benefits everyone.

It’s just too bad that we’re not producing more of them.

As the class of 2015 prepares to join the workforce, what many people may not realize is that America is facing a shortage of college graduates.

That may not seem possible, especially for any graduate who is unemployed or underemployed. But here are the numbers: By 2025, two thirds of all jobs in the US will require education beyond high school. (That includes two-year and four-year college degrees as well as postsecondary certificates.) At the current rate the US is producing college graduates, however, the country is expected to face a shortfall of 11 million skilled workers to fill those roles over the next 10 years, according to a new study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

I’ve had a couple chances to talk about this skills gap with Cheryl Hyman, the chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago. We first met over dinner with a number of education leaders last year, and I was really impressed with her accomplishments. Raised in poverty in Chicago’s housing projects, she got a college degree in computer science, worked her way to the top of a Fortune 500 company, and is now one of the most innovative leaders in higher education. Since taking the job in 2010, she’s doubled City Colleges’s graduation rate.

After our initial dinner, Cheryl kindly agreed to come out to my office so we could continue the conversation:

One thing Cheryl and I talked a lot about is the key source of the skills gap. The problem isn’t that not enough people are going to college. (Enrollment in postsecondary programs has grown by over 50 percent during the last 25 years.) The problem is that not enough people are finishing. More than 36 million Americans—a fifth of the working age population—have gone off to college and left without a degree.

It’s always moving to sit down with students and hear the stories of why they decided to drop out. Many of them are poor and often the first person in their families to go to college. They arrive on campus with big aspirations to get a degree and start a career that would earn a good salary. Then their dreams unravel.

Many quit when they realize that their high schools didn’t prepare them academically for college. Some don’t make it because they can’t afford tuition. Others leave after getting overwhelmed trying to navigate the college system without enough personal guidance from their college. All leave school with a lot of debt and, even worse, a diminished sense of themselves. Their entire sense of what they can achieve in life is damaged.

The fact that a high percentage of people who don’t finish college are from low-income backgrounds should be a concern for all of us. Without degrees, they are more likely to stay trapped in poverty. At the same time, the scarcity of skilled workers in the labor market drives up wages for those with a college education, worsening income inequality in America.

At our foundation, we are working with college leaders, including Chancellor Hyman, to transform the college experience to make it easier for students—especially low income and first-generation students—to stay in school and complete degrees at an affordable price.

Cheryl and I discussed the need for colleges to create a less confusing course selection process. Students often waste time and valuable credit hours taking classes that don’t help them progress toward graduation because they don’t understand the degree requirements. New personalized online guidance tools provide students with clear, semester-by-semester maps to graduation and a career.

I’ve written before about how online courses are helping reduce tuition costs for college students and give them the flexibility to learn on their own schedule. While I’m enthusiastic about the future of online courses, I also agree with Cheryl that they’re not, as she put it, a “magic bullet” that works for all students. Some of her students, she told me, still need face to face time with instructors and classmates to help them learn how to interact with other people and work as part of a team. Critical skills nearly all employers look for in new hires.

While all of these efforts are important to close the skills gap, Cheryl says the biggest issue is changing the culture of higher education. For many years colleges measured success by how many students enrolled in their institutions and not whether they were training students for jobs that were in demand in the marketplace. “We’ve taken our eye off the goal. I think we’ve been divorced from the real world for far too long,” she said.

It’s time for higher education and the “real world” of employers to start working together to meet the demand for 11 million skilled workers in the US. If we’re successful over the next decade, we’ll do more than close the skills gap. We’ll also make progress reducing the large and growing gap between America’s rich and poor.

I went to Arizona earlier this month to see what the college of the future might look like. What I found taking shape is an exciting new era of higher education that will help more students get a great, personalized education at an affordable price.

This future may not always include the lecture halls, dormitories, football teams and other features of the traditional college experience. Instead, the colleges I visited are experimenting with ways for students to get their degrees online, allowing them to take courses anyplace and at any time.

These “colleges without walls,” as they are sometimes called, are at the forefront of the effort to broaden access to higher education, especially for low-income students juggling their studies with full-time jobs and families. During my visit, I heard inspiring stories of students who are taking advantage of these flexible learning models to pursue degrees that can put them on paths to new careers. 

One of those students is Shawn Lee, a student at Rio Salado College in Tempe. He has a compelling story: After dropping out of college decades ago, he found himself in a series of low-paying, often back-breaking jobs. He recently decided to get his degree—and I’ve found this is a pretty common refrain at community colleges—when he had his first child and wanted to start building a better life.

Tucked away in an industrial park in Tempe, Rio Salado doesn’t look much like a traditional institute of higher education. There were no students running to class. No ivy-covered walls. Just a couple of glass-faced office buildings.

As we walked inside for a tour, there was an even bigger surprise.

The college has just 22 full-time faculty serving 60,000 students, with more than half of them attending their classes online. (The full-time faculty depend on 1,400 part-time teachers who manage individual class sections, review/grade assignments, and consult with students.) Students can start any of the school’s 1,000 courses almost any Monday of the year. Classes cost $84 per credit hour, far less than what other colleges charge.

I also visited the University of Phoenix, a for-profit institution with more than 300,000 students, where teachers and staff are working to make online learning even more flexible. One of the most popular innovations is a mobile app that gives students the freedom to study virtually anywhere. With the app they can keep track of their grades and assignments, participate in class discussions, and receive alerts from their teachers about their courses.

If your idea of college is a professor lecturing in front of a classroom full of students, some of these innovations may be surprising, even a little unsettling. But this kind of out-of-the-box thinking is needed to address the challenge facing higher education. College tuition is rising faster than any other cost in the U.S.—pricing many students out of a degree. More than 40 percent of college students drop out, depriving them of the chance to earn more money and leaving the U.S. without the highly-trained workers we need for economic growth. The fact is, we face a real dilemma. We need to educate people in a better way without increasing cost.

Most mornings I listen to online courses while walking on my treadmill. In my experience, what separates the great courses from the mediocre ones is the quality of the professors, whose passion and expertise bring their subjects to life, as much online as in-person.  That’s why it’s critical that during this time of transition we keep our focus on the instructors. They are the ones who inspire and guide students. The best online learning technologies expand the reach of the most inspiring professors by allowing more students to be part of their classes.

The risk of this mass approach to education, of course, is that students might get lost in such an impersonal setting. That’s why Rio Salado and other institutions are researching new approaches to student advising.  Using the growing body of data available about online students’ learning habits—for example, are they completing assignments and logging onto their courses regularly?—the institution can intervene to help students at risk of falling behind or dropping out. “Students don’t get lost because no one can just sit in the back corner. Everyone is in the front row,” a Rio Salado faculty member told me.

Several students I met during my visit said they liked learning online better than in a classroom. “I’ve taken college classes in a big auditorium with herds of people. There was no personal connection,” one University of Phoenix student said. “Now I can reach my teacher with the click of a mouse.”

Other students said they liked the fact that they can learn at their own pace and fit school into their busy schedules. What still needed improvement, however, was a connection with other students. They said they struggled to complete team assignments online because it was too difficult to coordinate schedules. Lab work for science classes and other hands-on learning can also be problematic, although Rio Salado is addressing this issue by giving chemistry students a lab kit to use at home. Marine biology students get a frozen squid to dissect.

The biggest challenge facing all higher education institutions is how to ensure more students stay in college or university and complete their degrees. They are looking everywhere for solutions. Arizona State University, for instance, discovered that the college catalogue overwhelmed students with too many class choices and gave them too little guidance. So the university redesigned the entire experience. The new, personalized online catalogue features “major maps,” which outline a major’s key requirements, optimal course sequence, and career options to help keep students on the path to graduation. 

I left Arizona feeling quite optimistic about what the future holds for higher education. It also reminded me how much work still needs to be done. What’s most exciting is that the institutions I visited are not standing still. They are taking risks and using their creative and intellectual powers to reinvent themselves for the future. In doing so, they will give many more students the opportunity to do the same with their own lives.

From the minute you meet Katie Brown, you get the feeling she’s an amazing teacher. Her intelligence and passion jump out. You immediately think: I would love for my kids to be in her classroom. It’s no surprise to learn she was named the 2014 Washington State Teacher of the Year.

Katie has had a busy summer meeting with policymakers, connecting with colleagues across the country, and even attending Space Camp with the top teachers from other states. So I really appreciated her taking the time to stop by my office last week.

Katie teaches at Shuksan Middle School in Bellingham, a couple hours north of Seattle. Shuksan is a low-income school where two thirds of the students get free or reduced-price lunches. It used to be the kind of school that parents tried to keep their kids from going to, she told me. But in the past few years, things have really turned around. There’s now a waiting list for students to get in. Katie said they have kids who cry on the last day of school—they just don’t want to leave.

A turnaround like that doesn’t happen overnight, of course, and there’s no one factor that causes it. Katie said it started when a strong new superintendent and principal came in and started changing the culture. It’s more collaborative now, and the school has created “a culture of high expectations, balanced with high affection.” There’s also a new focus on data. Shuksan’s teachers start every school year with a “data walk-through,” where they get together and pore over every bit of information about their classes that they can find—from test scores to attendance records and student perception reports—so they can see which areas they need to work on. “You can’t argue with a graph,” she told me. (For a data person like me, that was music to my ears.)

In addition to working with ELL students—kids who are learning to speak English—Katie spends a lot of time coaching her fellow teachers. I was curious about that work, because I think one of the keys to improving education is to help more teachers learn from the very best. Katie had an insight that really struck me: She said we’ve known for a long time that most students won’t learn if you just stick them in a classroom and make them listen to a lecture. They have to put the learning to use and make it relevant to their own lives. And yet most teachers still get their professional development at seminars and conferences, where they sit listening to lectures. “We would never do that with kids,” Katie said, “but we still do it with teachers.”

So she has taken a different approach to coaching teachers at Shuksan. It breaks down into four key areas, as Katie explains in this video:

The approach she describes requires a lot of collaboration, which is easier said than done. For example, opportunities for teachers to work together have to be embedded in the school day: As Katie said, “We can’t expect teachers to seek out other teachers at night, from home.”

We also had a great discussion about the use of standardized test scores. Katie said she’s not opposed to testing students to see whether they’ve mastered the material—in fact, it provides important data that guides her work as a teacher. But we have to be careful how we communicate those results to the kids and their parents.

Katie told me about one recent student of hers, a boy whose family had just moved here from another country. He started the year speaking no English at all—not even “hello”—but by the end of the year, he had moved up four grade levels. That’s amazing progress and it must have taken heroic work from him and his teachers. But according to his scores on the standardized test, he still wasn’t proficient in English. His family got a letter with a dispiriting message: He was failing. “That’s the part that eats at me,” Katie said. “We’re always trying to improve the relationship between the school and the community. Yet because of a policy, we’re expected to say we’re failing. How do we solve that?”

I also asked Katie about the Common Core State Standards, the academic milestones that have been the center of some controversy lately. She started by echoing something I’ve heard in every school I’ve visited: No teacher is opposed to high standards. As Katie said, “Everyone who has read the Common Core standards says, ‘I want my students to be able to do those things.’ ”

The problem is that too few teachers get the support they need to implement the standards. Whether teachers are adopting the Common Core or something else, if they don’t get help implementing the change and the time to do it right, then they’re more likely to turn against it.

At Shuksan, Katie said, putting the standards into practice was hard but manageable, thanks to that support system she describes in the video. “We can take it on together as a staff,” she said. “We have time built into our day to help each other learn and tackle it as a team.” Their system is not the only way, of course, but it’s proof that teachers can and will adopt higher standards when given the right support and enough time to adjust.

In the end, it’s impossible to spend time with a mind-blowing teacher like Katie and not come away with a renewed admiration for the art of teaching. As she put it, “It’s amazing how sophisticated instruction is. A teacher has to think through each student’s moves, predict what their brains will do with everything you say. It’s like you’re conducting an orchestra. When you get kids working in concert with each other, there’s no better feeling in the world.”

I’ve posted several times about the Big History Project, which David Christian and I launched a few years ago. This year we launched the school version, which was limited to teachers and students. Somewhat unexpectedly, we’ve also been getting a lot of requests from people who aren’t in school anymore but are still eager to try the course.

So today we’re launching a new version of Big History: one that’s open and free for everyone.

Like the school course, this version covers the history of the universe and how everything ties together—the basic approach that makes Big History my favorite course of all time. But in this version, there are no writing assignments or lesson plans. You watch lectures and experiment with interactive features. You’ll see some clips from the History Channel’s new show Big History, which we helped produce. There are a few optional quizzes along the way, and if you pass them, we will send you a “Certified Big Historian” sticker.

It’s hard to boil down 13.7 billion years of history into something manageable. But I think the writers, developers and producers who worked on this made an entertaining and informative course. You should be able to finish it in four or five hours. I encourage everyone to take a look.

In America, we take a lot of pride in the idea that every person deserves an equal shot at making the most of their talents. Over the years, I’ve learned that equal opportunity relies on equal access to all kinds of things—including the chance to complete some kind of degree after high school.

The United States is actually pretty good at getting students into higher-ed programs. But our completion rates are shockingly low. The United States has the highest dropout rate of any developed country for kids who start a higher-ed program. And that has a huge impact on their ability to build a career and earn a good living.

Fortunately, there are things we can do to turn the situation around. I recently had a chance to speak about the problem and the opportunities to solve it at a meeting of business officers from colleges and universities around the country. I talked with them about what I hope they will do to ensure that students complete a college degree that they can build a career with. Here is the speech I gave.

Remarks as delivered
National Association of College and University Business Officers Annual Meeting
July 21, 2014

BILL GATES:

Well, good morning. I’m excited to be here. I appreciate this chance to talk with you about the future of one of America’s greatest assets. Our higher education system. A lot of people don’t know that our Foundation invests in higher education. They may know more about our work in global health and development. Or, may even more about our work in the K-12 system in the United States. But, in fact, we have a significant program in this area because of its incredible importance.

And, our motivation for all of our work, to eradicate disease, to alleviate poverty, the health of education here in our country, all stems from a single core principle, which is that all lives have equal value.

The United States really stands for the proposition of equal opportunity. And, we’re striving in our work to have the US maintain and strengthen that, where access to great education is the key element. And, when we ask about the strength of our country in the decades to come, renewing this strength, helping it stay on top, I’d say, is one of the most important things that we need to do.

Looking at the individual level of opportunity, do people have equal opportunity? The data we see shows that, unless you’re given the preparation and access to higher education, and unless you have a successful completion of that higher education, your economic opportunity is greatly, greatly reduced. There’s a lot of data recently talking about the premium in salaries for people with four-year college degrees. In 2013, people with four-year college degrees earned 98 percent more per hour, on average, than people without degrees. That differential has gone up a lot. A generation ago, it was only 64 percent.

If you look at the numbers more closely, you will also see that unemployment, partial employment, is primarily in people without four-year degrees. Our economy already is near full employment for people with full year degrees. And, so, the uncertainty, the difficulty, the challenges, faced, if you haven’t been able to get a higher education degree, are very difficult already today. And, with changes coming in the economy, with more automation, more globalization, that divide will become even more stark in the years ahead.

So, if we’re really serious about all lives having equal value, we need to make sure that the higher education system, both access, completion, and excellence, are getting the attention they need.

It is unfortunate that, although the US does quite well in the percentage of kids going into higher education, we’ve actually dropped, quite dramatically, in the percentage who complete higher education. We have, amongst developed countries, the highest dropout rate of kids who start. And, understanding why that happens is very, very important. For many of those kids, that experience is not only financially debilitating, being left with loans that are hard to pay off, but, also, psychologically, very debilitating, that they expected to complete, they tried to complete. And, whether it was math or getting the right courses, or the scheduling, somehow, they weren’t able to do that, which is a huge setback.

So, we had to deliver value. We’ve got to measure that value. And, really, adjusting the resources, so that we’re doing that well, is a mission for you, the business officers of the colleges and universities.  You’re the ones charged with fiscal management. And, that has huge impact on every aspect of the student’s experience. The quality of instruction, the ability of financial aid, the physical plant, the support systems, all of that are tradeoffs that the financial model drives.

And, what my key message is today is that that model will be under challenge. And, so, instead of tuning it to find 3% here or 4% there, which has been the story in the past, there would be dramatic changes, in terms of deciding what scale you can operate, and what kinds of students you’re going to go after, and do you price differentiate, do you change your cost structure. And, so, the role of the business officer won’t be just finding that last little tuning or getting the reports done, it will be to get in the center of the strategy, working with the education leaders and the effectiveness measures, and figuring out how those goals and the financial numbers come together.

Everything that counts requires resources. Scholarships for low-income students, student supports, and I’ll talk about how critical that is, libraries, labs, things that attract good professors. And, balancing those things to deliver value, and, measuring that value will be more challenging.

And, we think about revenue sources for higher education, we can see that a number of them are challenged. A number of them will not grow as costs go up. At the state level, total state funding is not going up substantially. And, a higher portion of state budgets, over time, are going to health and retiree type areas. Health costs hit the states in many different ways. Current employees, retired employees, their Medicare programs. And, those costs go up substantially faster than the rate of inflation or the rate of state revenues. And, so, the second biggest pot of money, which is the education pot, both K-12 and higher ed, gets raided. And, so, on a per student basis, that money has gone down, and there’s no likely prospect that it will go back up. Some people have thought of it as cyclical, but, in fact, if you look at the last several cycles, it goes down in the cycle and then, during the good years, it stays at that level, and then, as the next cycle is hit, it’s gone down again.

Federal funding, you know, the Pell grant program, other federal loan programs, expanded dramatically over the last decade. And, now, there’s not, actually, enough funding to have those increased. Particularly, the Pell grant, where they’re actually behind and they’ve got to make up, just to stay at the current level, even ignoring educational cost inflation.

Tiering of students, where you make sure that the ones who can afford high tuitions are paying those, so that you can subsidize more, that’s been pushed, which is a fantastic thing. But, the amount that that can be done is now probably reaching a limit, where, even middle class, middle upper class, has a hard time with that top tuition rate. And, so revenues are going to be tough. It’s not as though we can raise student loan levels dramatically up from the level they are today.

And, those sources of revenue, as they look at outcomes, are probably going to be more demanding. They will be talking about measurements. And, although, in a certain sense, measurements can be a very, very good thing, this is a challenge that we have to get out in front of, because inappropriate measures can be worse than no measures at all. They can incent exactly the wrong behavior.

Now, in this fiscal environment, we also have innovation. Innovation in, of course, delivery, and innovation in how support systems can work. For course delivery, of course, we talk about massively online courses. And, how we can take the lecture component of an education and deliver that in a more flexible, higher quality form, over the Internet. And, the MOOC work really is just at the beginning. Those courses, there are thousands of them today. Some are pretty good. Most are mediocre. But, the competition for excellence between the MOOC’s is heating up very dramatically. So, you will see emerge, over the next five years, some fantastic courses for remedial math, remedial writing, statistics, all the entry level courses.  Slowly, but surely, three or four will get more budgeting, more feedback, and more improvement. And, all the elements, the lecture element, the quiz element, the online collaboration elements of those, will improve very substantially. And, the net result of that will be that the lecture piece will no longer be competitive. And, so, the real question won’t be about lectures. It will be about how you take those online content pieces and combine it with study groups, labs, discussion sessions, to deal with the kind of motivation, the supports, that students need.

The MOOC, by itself, doesn’t really change things, except for the very most motivated student. It’s just an element to be mixed in to get all the steps to get through an entire degree program. And, so, most of these systems will be hybrid systems. After all, a student who could deal with just the MOOC by itself, without any face-to-face contact and counseling, they’re the type of student who, when we had text books, were also capable of getting by and learning the material.  The MOOC is not based on new educational knowledge. It’s simply presented in an easier to understand, more interactive way that can be fantastic. So, that’s an opportunity.

Now, by taking that lecture piece and changing it and making it not a professor from the institution itself, but, rather, somebody like who is more like the text book, where they competed in a broad market to be the very best, it’s going to raise questions about what is the role of the professor. How do they fit into this new world?

Many institutions will use this capacity, some moving too fast, certainly. But, they will use it to increase their scale. And, so, at the same time as you all have constrained revenues, you will have people doing a good job or not doing a good job, who are offering to enroll a larger number of students. And, so, in a sense, there will be more competition. The affordability question, the innovation question, all of those lead to saying that, instead of supply and demand being in this balance, there will become an imbalance. And, some institutions will make progress into this new world and some will not.

We have seen some great reforms, some leaders taking best practices. We work with the National Center for Academic Transformation. And, there, course by course, in terms of particular areas like remedial math, the redesigns have been very dramatic, in terms of raising completion rates, reducing class time. And, that’s very exciting.

I’d say another piece that gets less attention but I’m equally excited about is student advising. By creating a digital system that knows everything about a student, including all their discussions with adults about scheduling and financing and goals, the challenges they face, and a system that tracks when have they been online, when have they been attending courses, and is analyzing when they might need some support intervention, and identifies what kind of intervention is best, somebody who can help with their financial package, or help with their motivation or scheduling, and having support resources that, by going to that digital record, have the entire context and can help them in the most efficient, least costly way.

So, those support systems will have to be very connected to administrative systems that will require investments, that will require thoughts about privacy, and, again, the job categories for the support people, specialization, abilities, these technical tools, will be extremely important.

Ironically, as we raise completion rates and we get more students into their third and fourth year, the cost structures of delivering courses in the third or fourth year is much higher. And, so, this idea of really understanding your cost by year, your cost by student type, that’s very important.

It is interesting to look at the for-profit sector. And, one can have a very simplistic view of the for profit sector. One can say, you know, maybe they’ve overmarketed in some cases. Maybe they’ve over-promised in some cases. You know, people are now looking at Corinthian, which is going out of business, having to sell off its campuses. Saying, okay, that sector had some bad practices and, so, maybe this is just.

But, in fact, if you look into the particulars of what data they were asked to provide, that’s a standard that they weren’t able to live up to. Their money was cut off. And, in fact, that same type of data, I believe, will be demanded of all institutions. And, the state really needs to think about is that realistic, how do they contribute? What are these longitudinal databases that look at student success from an economic point of view or achieving the goals that they had in mind?

I do think, as we look at the for-profit sector, there are a lot of best practices there. The support systems they’ve had, the student tracking. The way they use capital assets. The way they take a much tougher cohort of students, on average, than most institutions. And, so, while there are certain practices that are not good to adopt there, seeing the challenges they face and seeing the things the way they have done well, bringing that into all of education, will be important.  I don’t believe that a measurement system should simply apply to them and not apply to the broader universe. And, getting those things right is very, very difficult.

So, it’s time for the higher ed community to develop and adhere to reporting standards that you shape that really get at these cost and performance issues. And, the sooner you drive this, it’s better than having it brought down from on high in a way that’s really not appropriate. I see no world in which these metrics are not coming along and are not more significant in shaping all the policies.

It is legitimate, for the state funders to the federal funders, to try and make sure that best practices are identified. We can look at similar institutions in this space and say, why are their cost structures different? Where is the money going? Is it that the one that’s spending less is missing value opportunity, or is it that the one that’s spending more is missing some efficiency opportunity? The time where questions could be put off has certainly come to an end. And, so, I think that’s an opportunity for all of you to rise to the occasion.

We need to make sure that we’re really talking about the goals and the outcomes. And, yes, it’s oversimplistic to say it’s just getting a job with a certain salary. There are things about citizenship, broad knowledge, and deep understanding of the world, that we should have in mind. And, those are very difficult to measure. But, simply saying that we won’t measure the other things, the job attainment, the completion rates, the salaries that people get. And, the satisfaction. What were their expectations coming in, and what happened to them, and why did they think they fell short or the institution fell short? That should be well understood.

There’s a certain irony that academic institutions are good at studying other parts of society, you know, bringing numbers and understanding to the work that they do. Looking at the health care system, looking at for-profit business. That’s a phenomenal role that the world of academics plays. But, I’d say, in terms of turning that lens on yourself and saying are certain degree programs subsidizing others, is that appropriate? Are there certain degree areas that some universities should get out of and specialize more, go for scale and things that you’re particularly strong in, those questions simply haven’t been asked, and this new environment will force them to be done.

Department by department, year by year, one thing we will have to be careful of in all of this is that we don’t want to get into cherry picking. That is, there could be a tendency, for example, if just looking at completion, to tell institutions to not take the more difficult students. Whereas, in fact, if we can appropriately measure that, we should reward colleges that take students that are tough and help them out.

Many of the measures today, for example, these ranking systems, work the opposite way. The basic idea is that, if you can admit geniuses that are fine the day they get in, that’s okay. Then, high SAT scores, high spending, that’s really good. So, it’s purely an input measure and not an output measure.

But, I do see this really as an opportunity. We can identify the best ways to deliver a postsecondary education, and we can share that. There are so many different decisions where there must be thousands of best practices that we can learn from. There will be a digital infrastructure. Not just for the courses, but for the analytics. All the things that are going on. And, so you, it’s going to be a challenge for you and an opportunity.

I know that university presidents and academic deans have often been reluctant to bring CFO’s and business officers into the strategic discussion. But, that reluctance reflects the fact that the number of moving pieces, the number of things that had to be reconsidered in the past, was very different than what they’ll face. And, so, it’s an environment where there will no longer be a perception of unlimited resources. And, your advice to presidents and deans will be critical.

So, I think this is very exciting. The role of education is more critical than ever. The role for equality, the role for our country, the role to lead the way, create the jobs of the future, using technology. It can all be done in an amazing way. It will be a period of turmoil and challenge, and I think you will rise to the occasion. We certainly need you to do so. Thank you.

Even today, I can remember the name of pretty much every teacher I’ve ever had. In high school I had a fantastic chemistry teacher named Daniel Morris. He gave me a hard time and told me that I was just getting by. I always did well in analytical chemistry, but I hated all those pipettes and test tubes in the lab. He knew that, and he still managed to get me into the lab to do experiments—and I had a much better understanding because of it. I can trace a lot of my love of science to the demands he put on me.

I thought about Mr. Morris while I was watching a preview of TEACH, the excellent documentary airing tomorrow night on CBS that follows four teachers over the course of a school year. (Melinda and I gave some money to help get it produced.)

Both Melinda and I feel lucky to have had amazing teachers who inspired us. We think every child deserves the same thing, because every child deserves a great education. A great teacher can change a student’s life, and that’s not just some saying on a bumper sticker. There's ample evidence that teaching is the single biggest in-school factor in a student’s achievement. It’s more important than class size, curriculum, or any other element at the school.

Through the foundation’s work on education over the past 13 years, I’ve come to appreciate what a tough job teachers have.  Their classrooms are often crowded. There’s almost never enough money. Some of their students are already behind at the start of the year. So it is amazing to visit a classroom and watch a really effective teacher overcome all the challenges and reach every student, whether they’re far behind or way ahead of the class or right in the middle. It makes you want to know what makes that teacher so good and how we can help more teachers be as effective.

That question is especially urgent now. In the coming decade, about half of today’s teachers will retire. Losing all that expertise and experience is obviously tough. But it’s also a great opportunity to bring in a new generation of bright, talented young people and give them the support they want and deserve. That includes creating a system where they get useful feedback on their practice. It also means listening to their ideas about what works in the classroom (and what doesn’t). For example, teachers increasingly want to incorporate apps and Web sites into their work with students, but they say they’re overwhelmed by all the options. So we recently launched Graphite, a site that helps them connect with the best educational technology.

TEACH gives you a good idea of how hard teachers work and the challenges they’re up against. You see each teacher trying out new ideas and getting coached. You get to know some of their students too. Some of them face pretty long odds. It’s very moving, and by the end, I was really pulling for each of the teachers and their kids. I couldn’t wait to see how things turned out for them.

I hope lots of people watch the documentary and gain some appreciation for what it takes to be a great teacher. Maybe it will even inspire a few young people to become teachers. If they do, they will be signing up for one of the most important jobs in the world. They will deserve our support, gratitude, and admiration.

Suppose a math teacher is looking for a web site that will help her class learn about fractions. Where should she start her search? How would she know whether to use Quizlet or the Khan Academy? She can ask her colleagues, but their recommendations might not fit her teaching style or her students’ needs. She will waste a lot of time sorting through the options.

This isn’t a theoretical problem. I’ve heard from teachers who described just this kind of situation. When it comes to finding high-quality education technology, most teachers are on their own.

That’s not fair to teachers or students, and it’s holding back progress in our schools.

I’m very optimistic about the potential of technology to transform education and help every teacher and student excel. Melinda and I meet regularly with a team of experts to review the latest exciting innovations in educational technology, everything from video games that help students learn algebra to lectures they can watch online. There’s a lot of amazing work going on, but teachers need more support to understand what’s out there, what works, and how to use it.

I’m excited to launch a new free product called Graphite in collaboration with Common Sense Media. Graphite will focus initially on ratings and reviews for educational web sites, apps, and services. A staff of experienced educators will offer their own editorial reviews. We’re also building an active community of teachers who are using these products and sharing their own opinions. The video above explains more about how Graphite will work.

Common Sense Media is an incredible partner that is leading this effort. They have a lot of experience in ratings and reviews and are already a trusted source for parents who want information about movies, video games, and TV shows. Now they are using their expertise to make Graphite a comprehensive, unbiased advisor for education technology.

I hope a lot of teachers will join in by going to Graphite and signing up. Although the site is still a work in progress (or in beta, as we say in the software business), it’s now open to teachers who want to read the reviews or submit their own comments.

In addition to benefiting teachers and students, Graphite can help strengthen the market for educational technology. Right now, a lot of developers have a hard time getting feedback on their products from teachers and students. If we get this right, Graphite will make it easier for these developers to tailor their products to their customers’ needs.

Of course, no technology can substitute for the work that teachers and students do together in the classroom. The computers I used in school changed my life, but they couldn’t replace the great teachers I had. I hope that by making it easier for educators to find the tools they want, Graphite will help teachers and students go out and do great things.  

I spend a lot of my time working to help improve America’s schools. I’m also a big fan of TED talks. So when TED’s Chris Anderson asked me to give a talk as part of a special TED session on education, I jumped at the chance. You can watch my talk above, and you can .

John Legend hosted the show and did a fantastic job. John cares a lot about improving education and is investing a lot of his own time on the issue. I first met him when we were both involved with the documentary Waiting for Superman, and I could tell right away that he was an impressive and well informed guy, in addition to being a super-talented musician. It’s great that he’s using his fame to draw attention to the need to improve our schools.

We taped the TED show last month in a beautiful hall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City. I was very impressed with the lineup of speakers. One of the great things about the TED format is that it can accommodate lots of different kinds of speakers, from energetic storytellers to more analytical people like me who are hardcore about numbers and systems. That helps the audience look at the topic from lots of different angles.

In this case, they had education experts like Geoffrey Canada, who runs a terrific program called the Harlem Children’s Zone, and Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth, whom I’ve met with a few times as part of my own learning about education. They also had several passionate teachers from around the country. One of them, a chemistry teacher named Ramsey Musallam, startled everyone with video of himself blowing stuff up in class. John brought the house down with a beautiful cover of “True Colors.”

For my part, I talked about what I think is the most powerful idea in education today: getting teachers the feedback they deserve so they can improve their practice.

It’s amazing to think about how much coaching is given to, say, professional athletes. I have a coach who gives me feedback too. (You’ll have to watch the show if you want to know why.) But most teachers get almost no feedback at all. And the vast majority of countries that outperform us in education have some formal way to give their teachers feedback. So this is an area where innovation and investment can make a big difference for teachers and students in this country.

As always, the TED team put together a great show, and I’m happy to have been a part of it.

In the meantime, here’s a short video where I talk about what drives the foundation’s education work. The statistics on how U.S. schools rank internationally are really mind-blowing. In this video, I’m rehearsing a presentation about some of the most striking numbers.

This op-ed was originally published in The New York Times on February 22, 2012.

Last week, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that teachers’ individual performance assessments could be made public. I have no opinion on the ruling as a matter of law, but as a harbinger of education policy in the United States, it is a big mistake.

I am a strong proponent of measuring teachers’ effectiveness, and my foundation works with many schools to help make sure that such evaluations improve the overall quality of teaching. But publicly ranking teachers by name will not help them get better at their jobs or improve student learning. On the contrary, it will make it a lot harder to implement teacher evaluation systems that work.

In most public schools today, teachers are simply rated “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” and evaluations consist of having the principal observe a class for a few minutes a couple of times each year. Because we are just beginning to understand what makes a teacher effective, the vast majority of teachers are rated “satisfactory.” Few get specific feedback or training to help them improve.

Many districts and states are trying to move toward better personnel systems for evaluation and improvement. Unfortunately, some education advocates in New York, Los Angeles and other cities are claiming that a good personnel system can be based on ranking teachers according to their “value-added rating” — a measurement of their impact on students’ test scores — and publicizing the names and rankings online and in the media. But shaming poorly performing teachers doesn’t fix the problem because it doesn’t give them specific feedback.

Value-added ratings are one important piece of a complete personnel system. But student test scores alone aren’t a sensitive enough measure to gauge effective teaching, nor are they diagnostic enough to identify areas of improvement. Teaching is multifaceted, complex work. A reliable evaluation system must incorporate other measures of effectiveness, like students’ feedback about their teachers and classroom observations by highly trained peer evaluators and principals.

Putting sophisticated personnel systems in place is going to take a serious commitment. Those who believe we can do it on the cheap — by doing things like making individual teachers’ performance reports public — are underestimating the level of resources needed to spur real improvement.

At Microsoft, we created a rigorous personnel system, but we would never have thought about using employee evaluations to embarrass people, much less publish them in a newspaper. A good personnel system encourages employees and managers to work together to set clear, achievable goals. Annual reviews are a diagnostic tool to help employees reflect on their performance, get honest feedback and create a plan for improvement. Many other businesses and public sector employers embrace this approach, and that’s where the focus should be in education: school leaders and teachers working together to get better.

Fortunately, there are a few places where teachers and school leaders are collaborating on the hard work of building robust personnel systems. My wife, Melinda, and I recently visited one of those communities, in Tampa, Fla. Teachers in Hillsborough County Public Schools receive in-depth feedback from their principal and from a peer evaluator, both of whom have been trained to analyze classroom teaching.

We were blown away by how much energy people were putting into the new system — and by the results they were already seeing in the classroom. Teachers told us that they appreciated getting feedback from a peer who understood the challenges of their job and from their principal, who had a vision of success for the entire school. Principals said the new system was encouraging them to spend more time in classrooms, which was making the culture in Tampa’s schools more collaborative. For their part, the students we spoke to said they’d seen a difference, too, and liked the fact that peer observers asked for their input as part of the evaluation process.

Developing a systematic way to help teachers get better is the most powerful idea in education today. The surest way to weaken it is to twist it into a capricious exercise in public shaming. Let’s focus on creating a personnel system that truly helps teachers improve.

I had a lot of good teachers when I was growing up. Through the sixth grade, I attended public school, where a lot of the teachers would find me additional books to read on subjects that interested me. They encouraged me to spend time in the library. My handwriting wasn’t good, it was a little bit sloppy, but my elementary teachers encouraged me to improve. (It's still not anything a penmanship teacher would be too proud of.)

When I went on to Lakeside School, the teachers encouraged me in math and physics especially. They also allowed me to go and work in the room that had the computer, which some of them found a little daunting. This combination of good luck and good timing would change my life forever.

Today, a lot of research has shown that teacher effectiveness is one of the most important factors in determining how well students learn and whether they succeed in school. But we don’t really know very much about what makes some teachers great, or how to help other teachers be like them. Our foundation is helping support research to help figure this out, so that high-quality teaching will become more of the norm.

We’re also trying to help schools develop tools to evaluate teachers, so that highly effective teachers can be recognized and rewarded and others can be helped to improve or encouraged to do other things. We think it’s important for schools to retain teachers based on their effectiveness, not just their seniority.

Student test scores alone are not a good enough measure of effective teaching. In a recent New York Times op-ed, I expressed my concern that publicizing individual teachers’ scores, as some schools are beginning to do, will just embarrass people and make it harder to get everyone on board with effective evaluation systems.

To actually improve learning, evaluation should take a bunch of measures into account besides test scores, like students’ opinions of their teachers and classroom observations by principals and other experts. Evaluation also should give teachers specific feedback that helps them improve. These recommendations are explained in a new report ‘MET’ Made Simple: Building Research-Based Teacher Evaluations that summarizes some interesting research on how to measure effective teaching.

A few schools are showing how to do it well. Last fall, Melinda and I visited public schools in Hillsborough County, Florida, where teachers receive in-depth feedback from their principal and from specially trained peers. We were blown away by the success they’re having in the classroom and by the enthusiasm of teachers, principals and students we talked with.

I think that developing a systematic way to help teachers get better is the most powerful idea in education today.

Our work in U.S. education focuses on two related goals: making sure that all students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college and that young adults who want to get a postsecondary degree have a way to do so.

On the K-12 side, our top priority is helping schools implement a personnel system that improves the effectiveness of teaching, because research shows that effective teaching is the most important in-school factor in student achievement. There are a lot of great teachers in public schools, and a lot of teachers who want to be great but don’t have the tools they need. If we could make the average teacher as good as the best teachers, the benefit to students would be phenomenal.

A personnel system includes hiring; giving specific feedback; helping employees improve; and creating pay schedules, benefit plans, and termination procedures. There is consensus that the current personnel system in public schools doesn’t work. Every element of today’s system is criticized. However, there isn’t a strong consensus on what to change. Many states are moving away from guaranteed tenure with pay based solely on seniority and what degrees you have. But most of the alternative measures do not include much investment in teacher evaluation, which makes them very dependent on how good the principal is and how well student test scores measure teaching effectiveness.

I still find it hard to believe that 95 percent of teachers are not given specific feedback about how to improve. Even more important than a pay schedule that rewards excellence is identifying and understanding excellence so that teachers know how they can improve. In all the meetings I have had with teachers around the country, and in the surveys we have done, it is clear that most teachers want more feedback and will use it to improve, even if the financial rewards for performance are comparatively modest.

The most compelling example I have seen that this concept can work in a way that is great for both teachers and students is the school district of Tampa, Florida that Melinda and I visited this past fall. A key element of the agreement between the teachers’ union and the superintendent was to assign 2 percent of the teachers to become peer evaluators. These teachers were trained to observe classroom teaching and provide feedback on 22 different components. The principals have also been trained in this approach. Every teacher gets in-depth feedback from both the principal and the peer evaluator.

Tampa has been doing this for three years now, and it is already making a big difference. Teachers told us they value having feedback from two different sources—the principal who knows the school the best and the peer who knows the challenges of their specific job. The first round of evaluation revealed that many teachers need help engaging the students to prompt critical thinking and problem solving. The district started to organize its professional development around these findings, and the teachers have seized that opportunity to become more effective in the classroom.

When Melinda and I met with students, they told us that they had seen a big change during their time at the school. The success here required great work by Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia, Classroom Teachers Association President Jean Clements, and all of the teachers. I was particularly impressed with the peer evaluators. They all said they understood great teaching far better, having done the peer evaluation job. Some of the peer evaluators will go back to teaching and others will go into schools of education to help make sure new teachers have better preparation.

After seeing how valuable peer evaluation is, I think it should be part of every public school personnel system. Dedicating 2 percent of teachers to do this work is a large investment. It can mean raising the average class size by 2 percent or spending 2 percent more money. With budgets as tight as they are, most states will not add extra money for evaluation so we will have to make the case that it is worth the small increase in class size (of fewer than one student per class on average). Without this investment I don’t think an evaluation system will get enough credibility with the teachers or provide enough specific feedback to help teachers improve. Looking at test scores is also valuable for most subjects, but test score data mostly just identifies who is succeeding—it doesn’t show a teacher what needs to change. I see the willingness to make this investment as a test of whether people are serious about an evaluation system that really works.

Accelerating the development, discovery, and use of innovative educational technologies is another high priority for us. We have seen a tremendous amount of progress in this area recently, but it is really just the beginning. More needs to be done to equip teachers with the tools and information they need to make learning more personalized and engaging.

Social networking is one of the most promising areas, because it helps teachers and students connect in ways that naturally augment what’s going on in the classroom. Services that use social networking, like Edmodo, are really starting to take off because teachers can manage all aspects of the classroom using a platform with which most people are comfortable.

I’m also excited to see more and more schools “flip” the classroom so that passive activities like lectures are done outside of class and in-class time is used for more collaborative and personal interactions between students and teachers. Khan Academy is a great example of a free resource that any teacher can use to take full advantage of class time and make sure all students advance at their own pace.

Great work is also being done by companies that are thinking beyond simply digitizing textbooks. CK-12 Foundation, Udemy, and Ednovo have great teacher- and community–generated content. A simple example of how powerful the community can be in this area is TeachersPayTeachers, a marketplace that facilitates the sharing and exchanging of lesson plans and other materials developed by teachers themselves.

We’re also just starting to see how impactful gaming can be in an educational context. MangaHigh and Grockit are successfully delivering fun, competitive, game-based lessons that drive greater engagement and understanding. Zoran Popović, at University of Washington’s Center for Game Science, is taking this even further through some amazing work creating games that automatically adapt to each student’s unique needs based on their interactions with the computer.

Many of these new tools and services have the added benefit of providing amazing visibility into how each individual student is progressing, and generating lots of useful data that teachers can use to improve their own effectiveness.

But how do most teachers figure out what’s available and right for them? There’s not yet a good answer to this question. Good technologies remain unused, and teachers spend too much of their own time and money. That’s why I’m launching a project this year to build an online service that helps educators easily discover and learn how to use these new tools and resources. I think there’s no limit to what a teacher with the right tools and information can do.

People need to investigate their state's budget and get involved in helping to make the right choices. My TED talk is sort of a call to action for citizens, taxpayers, parents, everyone.

In the United States, the foundation’s biggest investments are in education. Only a third of students are graduating from high school prepared to succeed at college-level work, and even fewer are going on to get a degree that will help them compete for a good job. No one should feel comfortable with those results.

Davis Guggenheim’s amazing and popular movie “Waiting for Superman” made a powerful argument against the status quo. It showed a broad audience that schools with the right approach can succeed, even with inner city students that typical schools do not educate well. As more people understand the gap between what is possible and what is actually happening in most schools, I believe the momentum for reform will grow.

Since 1980 U.S. government spending per K-12 student increased by 73 percent, which is 20 percent faster than the rest of the economy. Over that time our achievement levels were basically flat, while other countries caught up. A recent analysis by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed the United States is about average (compared to 35 developed countries) in science and reading and below average in math. Many Americans have a hard time believing this data, since we are so used to being the global leader in educational achievement and since we spend a lot more money on education than many other countries.

PISA measured educational achievement in the Shanghai area of China, and even allowing for the fact that Shanghai is one of the most advanced parts of China, the scores relative to the United States and other countries were quite stunning. China did better in math, science, and reading than any of the 65 countries it was compared to, and it achieved these results with an average class size of more than 35 students. One of the impressive things about the Chinese system is how teachers are measured according to their ability. There are four levels of proficiency in the Chinese system, and to move up a level, teachers have to demonstrate their excellence in front of a panel of reviewers.

According to the PISA analysis, two key things differentiate the U.S. education system from most other countries’ systems. The first is that non-U.S. students are in school for more hours, and the second is that U.S. school systems do very little to measure, invest in, and reward teacher excellence.

Most people who become teachers do so because they’re passionate about kids. It’s astonishing what great teachers can do for their students. But the remarkable thing about great teachers today is that in most cases nobody taught them how to be great. They figured it out on their own. That’s why our foundation is investing to help devise measurement and support systems to help good teachers become great teachers.

Our project to learn what the best teachers do—and how to share this information with other teachers—is making significant progress. With the help of local union affiliates, we have learned a lot already. We’re learning that listening to students can be an important element in the feedback system. In classes where students agree that “Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time” or that “In this class, we learn a lot almost every day,” there tend to be bigger achievement gains.

Another great tool is taking a video showing both the teacher and the students and asking evaluators to provide feedback. Melinda and I spent several days visiting schools in Tennessee this fall and sat with teachers who were watching videos of themselves teaching. We heard from a number of them how they had already improved by seeing when students were losing interest and analyzing the reasons.

Ultimately, the goal is to gather high-quality feedback from multiple sources—test scores, student surveys, videos, principals, and fellow teachers—so that teachers know how to improve. I think it is clear that a system can be designed that teachers agree is fair, has modest overhead, and rewards the teachers who are doing the most for their students.

State budgets, the biggest part of K-12 funding, will be challenged in the years ahead because of the economic downturn, the liabilities from early retirement and pension commitments, and increasing medical costs. I recently gave a speech to the chief state school officers about how they might need to find money to reward excellent teaching by shifting some away from things like payment for seniority or advanced degrees that do not correlate with improved teaching.

I am very enthusiastic about the potential of innovation to help solve many of the problems with our education system. Melinda and I were impressed when we visited the Tennessee Technology Center in Nashville, an institution that provides young adults with technical training and certificates. It gets significantly better results than its peer institutions—graduating 71 percent of its students—because it focuses on teaching job skills that are in high demand and is oriented around meeting the needs of students who are juggling school with work and family. Sometimes something as simple as rethinking the times when classes are scheduled makes a huge difference for students.

The foundation is funding the development of online tools to help both K-12 and college students learn. Pioneers like Sal Khan are already showing how effective online tools can be. His website www.khanacademy.org continues to grow its library of 2,000 short instructional videos on topics from basic arithmetic to complicated subjects like biology and physics. The videos are a tremendous resource for students of any age.

Sal’s vision for how technology can improve learning is broader than just videos. With support from the foundation, he’s been able to expand his site to include online exercises that diagnose weak spots, pointing you to additional material to fill the gaps in your knowledge. Also, Khan Academy is creating an online “dashboard” to help teachers use the site as part of their curriculum. The dashboard tells the teacher how each student is doing, pinpoints where they’re having trouble, and suggests explanations and exercises to help.

Although it is clear that online learning works for strongly motivated students, we need to learn how to blend classroom learning and online learning, particularly for younger and less-prepared students. As these projects develop and we start to answer many of these questions, I believe technology will let us dramatically improve education despite the budget constraints.

Many educators are excited about the role of technology in education. Billions of dollars have been spent putting computers into classrooms, yet the kind of technological revolution that has transformed business, government, healthcare, and many other areas has not occurred in our schools.

It’s important, but no longer sufficient, simply to make PCs available at school for research and writing. What’s needed now are creative, smart new solutions. What if the best lectures in the world were available to everyone? Technology also should help students assess where they are in a particular subject area, and then help that student proceed at his or her own pace.

I’m excited about an initiative announced this week—Next Generation Learning Challenges—that will accelerate the integration of technology in ways that substantially improve learning. The foundation joined with several education organizations and other funders to establish Next Generation Learning Challenges. Its objective is to identify the most promising uses of technology in education and expand them to reach more students, teachers, and schools.

There is growing evidence that technology can improve education by providing more engaging curriculum. It allows students and teachers to see in real-time how they’re doing, and can help educators sharpen their teaching skills. Technology also has the potential to deliver education at lower cost, which is especially important as schools face increasing competition for scarce government dollars.

Improving college readiness and completion for students in the U.S. is imperative—for young people, for our society, and for the country’s economic future.

I’m appearing today on The Oprah Winfrey Show to talk about an important new film that I think everyone should see. It’s called “Waiting for Superman.” The film’s depiction of the state of America’s public education system is something people won’t quickly forget. In fact, I think it’s the kind of movie that is powerful enough to influence—and hopefully even change—the public consciousness about our approach to education.

There’s no question that the quality of our education system helped to make America great. But today, many of our public schools are failing. Only one-third of high school students are prepared for college when they graduate. And half of minority students drop out of high school altogether.

It’s a tragedy that so many families have no real alternative for their children than a failing local public school. We need dramatic change, but it’s a difficult story to tell.

Director Davis Guggenheim tells the story brilliantly, and with great urgency. As an Academy-award winning director of An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim introduces us to several students and lets us get to know them, their families, and their desire to get a great education. He is a great storyteller, and conveys the story of these students with powerful emotional impact.

Guggenheim also breaks down complex but critically important policy matters such as inconsistent state standards, teacher effectiveness, and educational data in a way that is compelling and convincing.

The film focuses on charter schools, which we know are only one aspect of the solution. The foundation supports high-performing charter schools as labs for education innovation. But charter schools reach only about 3 percent of our public school students, so they are only one part of a multi-faceted, system-wide set of solutions.

Great teaching remains at the center of the solution. Improving schools will require that we figure out how to improve the way we train, measure and reward effective teachers. Achieving that will be hard and it will take a great deal of effort. The foundation is working with several partners who are actively engaged with us in groundbreaking efforts to improve teacher effectiveness.

I was pleased to have a small part in the film. I agreed to be interviewed because I believe we are at a unique moment for education reform and I want to do everything I can to support this change.

I encourage others to get involved too. You can start by seeing the film and visiting web sites associated with the film, such as getschooled.com.

As a young person I was very lucky to get a great education. The teachers I had were just fantastic. I got interested in science and math, and at age 13 I got a chance to use a computer. That was kind of unusual then. My high school didn’t actually have a computer; only a teletype connected over a phone line to a very expensive machine, a million-dollar computer, of which there were less than 1,000 in the world at that time. We used a tiny piece of it, so-called timesharing, and played around with programs.

It was strange because the teachers were supposed to teach us how to program, but you had to spend money for computer time, and if you made a mistake in your program, you could spend a lot of money. A few teachers found it daunting. So they asked me and some friends to teach the programming class. That was fun. And then we were asked to schedule the school’s classes using software, and that was also fun, deciding who would be in my classes, and scheduling meetings according to when I had free time.

About then, the miracle of the microchip was happening. My school friend Paul Allen and I thought, well, this is unbelievable; these chips are going to get more powerful. Paul kept showing me the progress, and when I was in ninth grade, I said, well, I don’t want to start a company until the microcomputer is better than what was called the minicomputer, which cost about $100,000. I said, “As soon as that chip is as good as a minicomputer, we should drop out.” It didn’t happen until I was actually in college, but finally Intel came out with this chip that was really phenomenal, and Paul said, “Is this as good as we need?” And I said, yes, it is. And that’s when Microsoft got started.

In this country, if you get a great education, particularly in the sciences, you get a chance to have a job that’s fun, that pays well and that has impact. I wonder why it’s not easier to explain to kids, back in fifth or sixth grade, the phenomenal payoff from learning and pursuing your curiosity. But it’s hard. In our foundation work, we’re trying to improve education, so that more young people will have these opportunities.

The other big thing our Foundation does is try to improve things in poor countries. Of the 6 billion people in the world, 2 billion live in very tough conditions, where a lot of children die before the age of five, and people don’t have enough food to eat. Applying scientific advances to the needs of the poor, we could eliminate almost all of those childhood deaths, and we could increase agricultural productivity to make those people self-sufficient.

There’s been some progress. But we need new vaccines, we need seeds, we need people who understand science and are devoted to these causes. I’m hopeful that many of you will go into these fields, which are so cool, so interesting. I love my new job at the foundation, because I get to learn new things all the time, meet with scientists, back the people doing good work, and I think it’s the most fun job in the world.

Taylor Valentine: What are some of your tactics and techniques for getting average Americans aware and involved in problems in developing countries?

Bill Gates: The number one thing is to invest in yourself. Get a great education. That’s the foundation for everything else. If you have that, then you can make incredible contributions. Second, start in your own community, whether by giving your time or your money, or speaking out for change. Mentor other kids. Volunteer. Today about 4 percent of people contribute to their communities in this way. If that went up to 30 percent it would make a dramatic difference. I didn’t really get involved much until I was in my 40s. I was so maniacal about Microsoft that I did very little. We ran United Way campaigns. We did a few things. I hope more people will get involved earlier than I did, even in high school.

Jarmell Hurtt: What did you read as a child and what do you read now?

When I was young, I read a ton of science fiction and biographies. I was interested in what it was like to be General Douglas MacArthur, President Eisenhower or President Roosevelt, or a great scientist like Newton or Einstein. I read a lot about the sciences, although the material available back then was not nearly as good as it is now. Now it’s mind-blowing, because online you have more and more great courses and other free material. My favorite physicist, Richard Feynman, recorded some lectures back in the 1960s that are really great at explaining physics and why it’s fun. I arranged to put them online so that anybody can just type into a search box, hopefully Bing, and watch them. They’re called the Feynman Messenger Lectures. I used to ask my dad a lot of questions that he couldn’t answer. Now, my son asks me questions like, “Why don’t we fall through the floor?” and “Why are some materials strong and some materials not strong?” We go online and satisfy our curiosity. I still read a lot of books too, and I write about some of them on my website. Recently I’ve read some important books about energy by Vaclav Smil and also by David McKay.

Emma Hohenstein: How do you feel about magnet schools and special admission schools like Science and Leadership Academy? Do you feel they’re beneficial?

Our foundation supports charter schools, which are not necessarily magnet schools, but similar in providing places where different approaches can be tried out. My interest is more on teaching. We need to understand better what makes a great teacher, and make it easier for other teachers who want to improve to learn from them. It’s mind blowing how little research has been done on great teachers and on helping others learn to do what they do.

We need to improve education a lot, and there just hasn’t been enough invested in that. This is why education is our foundation’s big cause for the United States. If the education system doesn’t change, it’s not pretty to think where the country will be in 20 years. But historically, we’ve been willing to fix the things we need to fix. This one’s maybe the toughest ever.

Nicholas Herrera: We want to change the world and stuff, but if we try, what can we do to protect ourselves from people who criticize?

If you’re successful, you will get criticism. Most innovations are controversial. For example, our foundation tries to make sure there’s enough food for everyone, and so we’re involved in biological techniques to make better seeds. That’s very controversial. We’re involved in distributing supplies that help women control their family size. That’s very controversial. In education, the very idea that outcomes should be measured is surprisingly controversial.

Sometimes the criticisms are perfectly valid. Maybe sometimes we’ve been naive about delivering aid to poor countries, or haven’t fully appreciated how tough a teacher’s job is. You can’t be thin-skinned.

At Microsoft, I think I remember some criticism, too. It comes with the territory. If you’re not being criticized, you have to wonder if you’re relevant at all. Part of the strength of a person or an organization is to live through that controversy, come out of it and come up with new things. You need some toughness. You need to listen and understand why you’re being criticized, but still persevere.

Alex List (a high school student who participates in the Partnerships for Achieving Careers in Technology and Science program): As a person who balances many different things, what is your goal as a parent, and what is your biggest difficulty as a parent or as a family man?

Well, I have three kids and they're a lot of fun. We get to travel together quite a bit, and we use that as an opportunity to learn things. They’ve visited a lot of slums and orphanages, which are maybe not their favorite parts of their trips, but I think they’ve gained a different perspective. We also do science trips. We’ve gone to the toilet paper factory, the sanitation plant, the steel mill. Those are kind of neat things, because we spend a day and we’re talking about what this is, who invented it and why.

I feel good that I do get time. I travel, and when I leave, my kids joke, “Well, are you coming back this time? Oh, four days, it’s a short trip, why are you coming back so soon?” My youngest knows that’s a fun thing to say when I'm leaving.

I have read a lot of books aloud for each of the kids. It’s important to spend time doing things either with the kids as a group or one-on-one. I have to allocate the time to do that, but it’s not like a chore or anything, it’s just a matter of planning ahead, and making sure it’s a priority. It’s a real privilege.

Elona Myftaraj: If I was someday in a position to help a Third World country, where should I start?

All the countries that have grown to wealth did it by having infrastructure, stability, and education. But first they had to get population growth down to a reasonable level and get health up to a reasonable level. So, the things that are most catalytic depend on their level of wealth.

If they’re really poor, which is about a billion of the 6 billion, health conditions alone are a poverty trap. There’s just too much malaria, too much stunting, too much childhood death, too much AIDS. Until health improves, there is no way to move up to the next level.

Once health improves, when life spans reach, say, 60 years, then the big things are education, particularly female literacy, and the quality of the government.

With the basic elements in place, miracles like China can happen. Many countries that used to need aid—China, Mexico, Brazil, Korea, Thailand—are now completely self-sufficient and actually donating aid. So it can be done, and you can make a difference.

Education In This Region

Science Leadership Academy is an innovative public high school in Philadelphia with a focus on science, technology, mathematics and entrepreneurship. As in other large U.S. cities, Philadelphia’s public schools face many challenges, but the district has made significant strides with innovative programs such as the Science Leadership Academy, a partnership with the Franklin Institute. The SLA opened four years ago to provide a rigorous, college-preparatory curriculum focused on 21st-century learning. Students learn in a project-based environment that emphasizes inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection. The SLA graduated its first class in 2010. Of the students who started as freshmen four years ago, more than 90 percent graduated, and more than 99 percent of the seniors are going to college—having earned more than $5 million in scholarships.

When I was a student tinkering with the first personal computers, I thought I had a pretty good idea of how PCs could be used. But in the 35 years since, I’ve never ceased to be amazed at the power of computing to make a difference in so many parts of our lives.

What excites me about the Imagine Cup is the combination of the huge potential of technology and the passion and idealism of the hundreds of thousands of high school and college students who participate around the world. Last year, more than 300,000 students participated from 142 countries, which makes this contest that Microsoft sponsors one of the most important science competitions in the world.

I’m especially enthusiastic about the challenge of this year’s competition, which is to imagine how technology can help meet the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals and solve some of the world’s toughest problems—including eliminating poverty, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria, and providing universal primary education.

The U.S. Imagine Cup Finals happened over the weekend in Washington, D.C. and culminate today in the announcement of the winning teams—in software design and game development—that will advance to the worldwide finals in Poland in July. The projects the teams have developed over the course of the year are impressive. It might seem surprising, but no U.S. team has ever won the Imagine Cup. Perhaps that will change this year or sometime soon. In the meantime, it’s a reminder of the importance of exposing young people to technology in the classroom early on and encouraging them to develop the technology skills needed in so many different careers.

To continue to be competitive in the global economy, America needs to ignite a lifelong passion for math and science in more of our students, and encourage more of our young people to pursue careers in technology.