Opinion: Bill and Melinda Gates’s Learning Tour of U.S. Schools

Bill and Melinda Gates’s travels on behalf of their foundation’s multibillion-dollar campaign to overhaul American education are the subject of a column in The New York Times.

Columnist Bob Herbert, who accompanied the Gateses on classroom visits and meetings with school officials in Charlotte, N.C., said the couple is “traveling the country trying to see for themselves what really works and what has gone haywire” in American public education.

While the issues involved “can be maddeningly complex,” Mr. Herbert writes, the co-chairs of the world’s largest philanthropy “seem determined to master this issue and do what they can to help reverse the current dismal trends,” such as declining high-school graduation and college entry rates.

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