2010 Annual Letter from Bill Gates:
Helping Teachers Improve

We believe the best way to improve lives is to improve public education. Our education system has been fundamental to its success as a nation. But the way we prepare students has barely changed in 100 years. If we don’t start innovating in education to make it better and more accessible, we won’t fulfill our commitment to equal opportunity.



In last year’s letter I wrote about the evidence that helping teachers teach more effectively is the best way to improve high schools. It is incredible how much the top quartile of teachers can improve the skills of even students who are quite far behind. This was a new effort for us at the time, so in 2009 I spent a lot of time trying to understand more about teaching: How do you identify the best teachers? How can they help other teachers be as good as they are? What investments are made to raise the average quality of teaching?

Students get more feedback on their work than people in most jobs. One job where the worker is provided almost no feedback is the teacher at the front of the class. In a teacher’s personnel file there is rarely anything specific about where the teacher is strong or weak. It doesn’t help identify best practices and drive improvement. A new system needs to be predictable and help teachers identify weaknesses and give them ways to improve.

A key point of contention about an evaluation system is how much it will identify teachers who are not good and don’t improve. A better system should certainly identify the small minority who don’t belong in teaching, but its key benefit is that it will help most teachers improve. It involves things like feedback from students, parents, and peer teachers and an investment of time in reviewing actual teaching.

Melinda and I visited a number of schools in North Carolina during the fall and had a chance to see some amazing principals and teachers. In one inner-city Charlotte school, teachers look at test results each week to understand who is teaching which concepts the best way so they can learn from each other. In Durham, we visited a special high school called the Performance Learning Center, which is for kids who have dropped out of a typical public school but want to get their high school degree. One reason we visited them was to see how they use online learning. There are no lectures, and kids can move ahead at their own pace. A lot of the kids start out making progress more slowly than they would in a traditional class, but with the support of the teachers in the school, and as they get used to the online approach, almost all of them move through the courses a lot faster than normal classes would let them. This is very motivational to the kids because they can do more than a year’s worth of schoolwork in a single year.

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laker_faker, ideme na to? (=
pozeram ze nielen ja som sa v 2009 zacal vyrazne zaujimat o education, ale aj bill gates :)
kaslime na pseudobuduce negativne ucitelky, ktore nam uz desatrocia kazia skolstvo..
a skoly-obhajujucich geniov, co sa nepozeraju spat na inak sa uciacich, a so skolami su spokojni..
podme to riesit, sak gates ani nema skolu! takze ked moze on, mozme aj my, rolf ;)
navyse on pouziva cheaty: "To help improve teacher effectiveness, we committed $335 million" :)
(ja na takych cheatoch budem zatial pracovat, ale chvilu to potrva)

Hriema pyšný cár, hriema zo stolca zlatého,
lenže Slovän nejde sa ľakať pýchy jeho.
Hoj, rozovrela tá krv slovänská divoko,
a junák ti cárovi pozrel okom v oko;