US billionaire Bill Gates announced on Thursday that The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will invest more than $1.7 billion in public education, fund which will go to support schools interested in improving and testing new approaches to teaching.
The foundation plans to issue a “request for information” on Monday, requesting schools and other education institutions to submit ideas for how they might spend the fund. The official request for proposals will start early next year.
“Every student should get a great public education and graduate with skills to succeed in the marketplace, The role of philanthropy here is not to be the primary funder, but rather to fund pilots, to fund new ideas, to let people — it’s always the educators coming up with the ideas — to let them try them out and see what really works super well and get those to scale.” said Gates, during the keynote address at the Council of the Great City Schools conference in Cleveland.
He said that 60 percent would go to traditional public schools and that he wants to let schools and educators drive the process.
“The actual tactics about great teaching, about how to reform the schedule, how to get students who are off track on track — those will be driven by the schools themselves,We will let people come to us with the set of approaches they think will work for them in their local context.” He continued
The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation will serve as a catalyst for change, Gates said, 15 percent of the whole fund will go to help charter schools better support the needs of students with disabilities. After all the remaining amount of the money “will be focused on big bets,” Gates said — research and development in education.
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