No, I'm not going to give up my Mac and buy a Dell or drop my iPhone for a Zune and a Blackberry, but there is one thing on which Bill Gates and I agree. Too many high school graduates are unprepared for college and work. In his 2009 letter to his foundation America's richest geek called for a new national education goal.

Our goal as a nation should be to ensure that 80 percent of our students graduate from high school fully ready to attend college by 2025. This goal will probably be more difficult to achieve than anything else the foundation works on, because change comes so slowly and is so hard to measure. Unlike scientists developing a vaccine, it is hard to test with scientific certainty what works in schools. If one school’s students do better than another school’s, how do you determine the exact cause? But the difficulty of the problem does not make it any less important to solve.

I couldn't agree more Bill. Universities and businesses are spending hundreds of millions of dollars (if not billions) every year to remediate their students and employees who have arrived lacking the basic skills in language arts and math that are required to be successful. Just as one example, the California State University system spends over $30M a year to remediate students who are supposed to be in the top 33.3% of California's high school graduates. Even community colleges report increased demands for remediation in recent years. Business also report spending increasing amounts to remediate and purchase technology for new employees who lack basic skills.

Everyone knows that we're not adequately preparing our students. I think the first thing that we need to do is start changing the incentives that we give teachers and schools. As it stands now, the only financial incentive a teacher has is to hang around since the longer they stick around the greater their paycheck. If we started rewarding teachers based on their ability to improve student achievement and close achievement gaps, effective teachers would start to feel valued for their hard work. Those who were coasting would see a tangible reward for increasing their effort.

Currently, school districts get extra funding for low-performing schools and once those schools start to raise student achievement that extra funding disappears, thus school districts have an incentive towards low performance. I remember hearing about a principal who said, "We're not low performing this year, but we hope to be next year." School districts also have financial incentives to designate students as English learners, special education, etc., so it is likely there are students with these designations who don't belong in those programs. When we have second and third generations of students still being designated as English learners, we have a serious problem.

There are schools who are being successful at raising achievement and closing achievement gaps today. Those schools are doing it with the same level of funding, parental involvement, teacher pay, community mores, etc., as the schools who are not being successful. While improving those external factors would make the job easier, they aren't reasons to stop trying.

I applaud Bill and Melinda for their efforts to set such an ambitious and important goal and then to put their money where their mouth is to fund efforts to replicate successful school models and increase teacher quality. Now, comes the hard part... making it happen.