January 26, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
Efforts to revamp American high schools are gaining increasing attention, in part due to the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, says Fast Company magazine (January). The article cites Bill Gates as saying that “our high schools — even when they’re working exactly as designed — cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.”
The foundation, according to the magazine, hopes its work will help ensure that 80 percent of all students graduating high school in the next two decades are fully prepared to attend college. Today, the magazine says, just one-third of students are ready for higher education.
The magazine writes that the Gates Foundation has helped finance approximately 50 “early college” high schools offering small classes and personalized, intensive instruction, with another 120 such schools set to open by 2008.
However, the first results of the experiment are mixed, says Fast Company. Independent evaluators hired by the Gates Foundation have found “positive cultures” at the schools. But they question how well the schools are dealing with such issues as teacher burnout, student-attendance rates, and math instruction.
In the same issue, Fast Company names the recipients of its third annual Social Capitalist Awards, selected by the magazine with help from the Monitor Group, a Boston management-consulting company.
The 25 winners — nonprofit groups that are “solving the world’s toughest problems with creativity, ingenuity, and passion” — include such well-known groups as City Year and Teach for America, as well as relative newcomers such as Raising a Reader, in Menlo Park, Calif., which encourages parents, including those learning English themselves, to read with their young children.
Additional information about the award recipients is available at http://www.fastcompany.com.
