know, the american system needs to be one which encouraging people to be curious, adventurous, taking risks, not the sort of system where everyone s hurtling towards a desk and they often cite you as an example. they say, well, look, bill gates dropped out of college, spent hours and hours in computer labs just dreaming up stuff. this was not working methodically toward a test. well, certainly if my example is meaningful, it s just one data point. being good at math and having that knowledge was critical to my being able to understand computers, to write code. yes, i memorized the tables and how things work. do you think that the kind of tests that so much of education reform uses as a metric is a good measurer of intelligence or achievement or future success?
do about maximizing money. right, right. and you re trying to influence them by offering them a little bit more money or a little bit less money. mm-hmm. is it really going to work? the merit pay proposal that we put in place in washington, d.c., allowed the most highly effective teachers who were teaching in the lowest performing schools to make twice as much money as they were in the old system. so when you re talking about the potential of doubling someone s salary, that s not a little bit of money. what the gates foundation is trying to do is to come up with the perfect combination of carrots and sticks to improve teacher performance. the hillsborough county, florida, school district, covering the tampa area, got a $100 million gates grant to be one of the foundation s new guinea pigs. after some tough negotiating, here s the system that the union and administrators came up with. let s continue as we normally do, okay? new teachers are given lots of training and on
it s the so-called last-in, first-out policy. this is a policy that makes absolutely no sense for children. because what it results in is one, you end up firing some of your best teachers. two, you end up disproportionately negatively impacting the lowest performing schools in the system because they are the ones that have the largest number of new teachers. and, three, you actually end up having to lay off or fire more teachers because the junior teachers are the lowest paid. after she left d.c., rhee started her own organization, students first, to push her agenda all over the country. she s lobbied state governments to pass laws, reforming teacher tenure, and paying teachers according to their performance. merit pay. people look at one of your proposals, merit pay mm-hmm. and say the whole rationale behind this is wrong. you re looking at teachers who have gone into this profession for reasons that don t have to
a country. indeed our democracy depends on an educated citizenry. let s take a look. 100 american kids entering high school, what does fate have in store for them? 25 out of that hundred won t graduate from high school, a total of 50 won t go to college. that s half the class that won t go on to higher education. 50 will attends college, but only 22 will graduate within six years. meanwhile other countries are outsmarting us. on a recent international test, u.s. students ranked only 15th in the world in reading, 15 in science and 31st in math. what s odd is that we have been outstanding most developed countries by a long shot. in 2007, we spent over 10,000 per student versus the $7,400 average for rich countries. highway can we spend so much money and have so little to show for it. we ll have a special ending of time essay, we ll examine the roles of teachers, testing and testing. and we ll ask the man who spent millions of dollars trying to fix education about how he s spend
take a rough look. 100 representative american kids entering high school. what does fate have in store for them? 28 of that 500 won t graduate. a total of 50 won t go to college, so that is half of the class that won t go on to higher education. 50 will at the end college, but only 22 will graduate within six years. meanwhile, other countries are outsmarting us. on a recent international test, u.s. students ranked only 15th in the world in reading and 23rd in science and 31st in math. overall, the world economic forum ranks the quality of our education at 26th. what s odd is that we have been out spending most of the developed countries by a long shot n. 2007, we spent over $10,000 per student versus the $7,400 average for rich countries. how can we spend so much money and have so little to show for it? we will ask that question and others to some of the leading figures in american education here on this special and time essay, and we will talk to the man who spent billions