Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Bill Gates says the American Education System is Screwed Up

Check out this speech that Bill Gates made at the TED con­fer­ence in 2009.  Check it out from the 9:00 minute mark to the end. It’s only 10 min­utes of your time, but it’s quite eye-opening.

• Over 30% of kids never fin­ish high­school; over 50% for minor­ity kids.
• Less than 25% of kids from low income will fin­ish a post­sec­ondary degree.
• Teacher qual­ity is the most crit­i­cal fac­tor, and there’s a huge vari­a­tion between top-quartile & bottom-quartile teachers.
• Some peo­ple are just good at teach­ing, but the sys­tem does not encour­age them to stay and does not encour­age oth­ers to learn and ben­e­fit from the good teachers.

Gates talks about what some suc­cess­ful schools are doing dif­fer­ently.  They aren’t the ones that are screwed up.  They’re tak­ing data and using it to improve teach­ing.  They’re work­ing with teach­ers to make teach­ing better.

Want to learn more?  Lis­ten to Gates.  He’s pas­sion­ate about this, he really is!