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Bill Gates Reflects On $5 Billion He’s Spent On Education

More than a decade into his record-breaking education philanthropy, Bill Gates talks to the WSJ about teachers, charters, and regrets

Jason L. Riley, writing in The Wall Street Journal, interviews Microsoft founder and current philanthropist Bill Gates regarding his decade-long foray into the national education discussion.

"It’s hard to improve public education—that’s clear. As Warren Buffett would say, if you’re picking stocks, you wouldn’t pick this one.” Ten years into his record-breaking philanthropic push for school reform, Bill Gates is sober—and willing to admit some missteps.

“It’s been about a decade of learning,” says the Microsoft co-founder whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now the nation’s richest charity. Its $34 billion in assets is more than the next three largest foundations (Ford, Getty and Robert Wood Johnson) combined, and in 2009 it handed out $3 billion, or $2 billion more than any other donor. Since 2000, the foundation has poured some $5 billion into education grants and scholarships.

The Gates Foundation initially interested in schools around the country with smaller student populations. In 2004 the foundation announced that it would spend $100 million to open 20 small high schools in San Diego, Denver, New York City and elsewhere. Gates said that these schools were designed to promote better behavior in the classroom, better attendance and closer interaction with adults.

“But the overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about—whether you go to college—it didn’t move the needle much,” he says. “Maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn’t dramatic. . . . We didn’t see a path to having a big impact, so we did a mea culpa on that.” Still, he adds, “we think small schools were a better deal for the kids who went to them.”

The Gates Foundation met the same resistance that other large, well-known organizations have encountered while trying to transform dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider. In the 1970s, the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, among others, pushed education “equity” lawsuits in California, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere that led to enormous increases in state expenditures for low-income students. In 1993, the publishing mogul Walter Annenberg, hoping to “startle” educators and policy makers into action, gave a record $500 million to nine large city school systems. Such efforts made headlines but not much of a difference in closing the achievement gap.