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Concerned or spending more money to fix education than the bill and melinda gates foundation. in total, its bankroll, $5 billion worth of initiatives for students and schools. i visited bill gates at his foundation s new headquarters in seattle to talk about his latest plans. if you were the secretary of education, i d say you are even more powerful than the secretary of education. suppose you could change something about the structure of american education, the system. what would it be? if i was in charge of a school district, it d be about hiring the best teachers. and how do you get them to learn from each other and how do you make sure you re bringing the really good ones in? so the basic research about great teaching, that s now become our biggest investment. it s okay. it s good. it could be a very smart investment. one study says that if students had a top teacher for four years straight, the achievement gap between blacks and whites would disappear. ....
For high school dropouts, it is 14%. part of the reason we re in this crisis is that we have slacked off and allowed our education system to get rigid and sclerotic. but part of it is that other countries have focused intensely on education in recent decades. the result? we have a population of adults now that face real competition in a global economy. as bill gross, the head of the world s largest bond firm, pimco, puts it, american workers are too expensive and too poorly educated to compete globally. there are two variables here. our education level, which is too low, and our wages, which are too high. either we raise education or markets will lower our wages. it s already happening. our decline in education achievements over the last 20 years has been accompanied by a stagnation in wages for the median american worker. ....
Thanks to a militant drive for success, this nation s students have outperformed the rest of the world for the better part of a decade. on the most recent visa exam, the benchmark international test, south korea ranked first in reading and second in math among all nations. in south korea, teachers are known as nation builders. president obama has noticed, singing korea s praises on a regular basis. on a visit to seoul in 2009 he asked south korean president lee myung-bak what his biggest challenge was in education. the president s reply? korean parents care too much about their children s success. we visited the cho family on a typical day for their son, sung-do. he gets up every day at 6:00 a.m. ....
We ve circled the globe to learn lessons on education from other countries and sought answers from advocates for change here at home. but there are some who say that incremental reform of the current education system would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. they argue for a complete overhaul of the education system. most of the time kids spend their days at school doing low-grade clerical work. human intelligence is much more exciting and diverse than that. sir ken robinson is a professor ameritus at the university of warwick and the author of several books on creativity. you have three children, yes? mm-hmm. i ll make you a bet and i m confident i ll win it. though i haven t met them. my bet is that they re completely different from each other. aren t they? yes. you win. ....
South korea s very own law to prevent students from studying too hard. citizens can actually report misbehaving cram schools to the government for a cash reward. the tipsters have become known as the hagparazzi. we followed a team one night as they made their rounds in a district in seoul. there s a hagwon in this neighborhood on almost every corner. the team looked for suspiciously lit schools where students might be receiving an illicit algebra lesson. one school was opened. and the inspector issued a penalty. they ve exposed 75 schools this year alone. sahlberg hopes south korea can reach a happy medium between its enthusiasm for education and its students well-being. ....