Recent news headlines have announced that Bill Gates has embarked upon a new crusade: to “fix” our community colleges. According to Gates, our country is suffering from poor education largely because we have been “pampering the elite 20%” and providing the best educational opportunities to only those who attend the best public high schools, costly private academies and top colleges.

After taking a closer look at the situation, Gates has apparently decided to help spark a change within the educational system by placing a renewed interest on community colleges. By doing so, Gates hopes to help bring a quality education to everyone, not just to the “elite.” And, with global competition continuing to rise and low-skill jobs becoming less common, there is no better time than now to start making these changes for the better of the individuals as well as for the betterment of the country.

This isn’t the first time Gates took action in an attempt to improve American education. In fact, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pumped more than $2 billion into public education and another $2 billion in scholarships since 2000. Most of these funds went toward making improvements on high schools that serve minority students as well as poor students. Primarily, the funds were used to break up large, urban schools and to create smaller schools that could help provide more academic focus. Unfortunately, the initiative does not seem to have worked.

“We had a high hope that just by changing the structure, we’d do something dramatic,” said Gates in a CNN article. “But it’s nowhere near enough.”

After facing defeat, the foundation decided to take a step back in order to analyze why the initiative wasn’t successful. The foundation also made some changes, including hiring new leaders for their initiative. Gates also stepped down from his role with Microsoft in order to focus full time on his philanthropic efforts. Most importantly, the foundation decided to take a whole new approach toward improving education. Rather than focusing on the structure of high schools, the new initiative will focus on the relevance of the curriculum as well as the quality of the teaching.

In order to help make this new initiative a success, the foundation is once again committing a very hefty investment. This time, the foundation will spend $3 billion over the next five years as it attempts to improve teacher performance in order to improve student performance. In addition, the new initiative looks beyond high school and attempts to make a change in the post-secondary area as well.

“Our goal, with your help, is to double the number of low-income students who earn post-secondary degrees or credentials that let them earn a living wage,” said Melinda Gates at a recent gathering in Seattle.

Currently, about 70% of those who graduate from high school are enrolling in some form of higher educational program. Unfortunately, only about half of them manage to complete the degree. Even worse, only about 20% of minority and poor students complete their programs. The foundation hopes to double these numbers by 2025 in an effort to improve education as well as to help combat poverty in the United States.

Although some have argued that Gates should focus more attention on early childhood education or middle school education in order to help the students before it is “too late,” Gates seems to be passionate about placing his focus at the high school and college levels. In particular, he appears to be quite upset with the lack of assistance students receive for transitioning to college and then to the workplace.

“You think you’ve got a high school degree, you think you’re ready to go, and then you get into a system that’s totally unclear,” Gates is quoted as saying in the CNN article. “How much money is spent on that and how little comes out of it!”

Gates’s outrage seems to be supported by data, which shows that more than half o the money students spend on higher education does not actually go toward helping them earn a degree or credential. It is for this reason and more that Gates has decided to focus on community colleges, which are more widespread and affordable than universities. Among the ideas the foundation plans to test in an effort to improve education include:

· Offering Performance-Based Scholarships – these scholarships would reward students who complete the courses they have registered to take
· Forging Business-College Partnerships – these partnerships would involve combining college coursework with on-the-job training that will help students earn their degree and be prepared to take over a position within the industry of study
· Completing Remediation More Quickly – remediation would include taking advantage of tutoring and online courses that will prepare students rather than taking remedial classes in college.

The foundation also plans to put together a set of standards that it can recommend to high schools around the country. These standards are intended to be those that students need to meet in order to be successful in college. In this way, the foundation hopes to bring some consistency to high schools around the country. The foundation also intends to spend $500 million in order to conduct research regarding how to best measure teacher performance.

“We need to give all teachers the benefit of clear standards, sound curriculum, good training, and top instructional tools,” said Gates at the Seattle convention. “But if their students still keep falling behind, [the teachers] are in the wrong line of work, and they need to find another job.”