Bill Gates: It's the quality of teaching, stupid Pt. 2

Gates is also adamant that reformers need to confront the default assumption that the injection of more money into the system aimed at raising salaries across the board will spur improvement:

"The same advances haven't been made in teaching because we haven't built a system to measure and promote excellence. Instead, we have poured money into proxies, things we hoped would have an impact on student achievement. The United States spends $50 billion a year on automatic salary increases based on teacher seniority. It's reasonable to suppose that teachers who have served longer are more effective, but the evidence says that's not true. After the first few years, seniority seems to have no effect on student achievement".

He is even more radical about the need for US policymakers and educators to show the courage to break with another of the central post-war drivers of education policy and funding:

“Perhaps the most expensive assumption embedded in school budgets - and one of the most unchallenged - is the view that reducing class size is the best way to improve student achievement. This belief has driven school budget increases for more than 50 years. U.S. schools have almost twice as many teachers per student as they did in 1960, yet achievement is roughly the same”.

His solution would be to bring in a major initiative to identify the top 25% of teachers and encourage each to take on 4-5 more students in their class in return for improved pay, with the rest of the savings from a reduced teaching workforce being invested into the development of teacher training and CPD support.

Gates believes that now more than ever there is a strategic opportunity to break with the past:

“Compared with other countries, America has spent more and achieved less. If there’s any good news in that, it’s that we’ve had a chance to see what works and what doesn’t. That sets the stage for a big change that everyone knows we need: building exceptional teacher personnel systems that identify great teaching, reward it and help every teacher get better”.