Bill Gates was all over DC yesterday, talking about charter schools at every stop. He told the President-elect that investing in charters is a great example of how to think long-term while trying to rescue the economy, and repeated that thought in chatting with Wolf Blitzer at CNN. Then he stopped by George Washington U to talk to an invited audience about poverty, recession, and education – and delivered some remarkably forceful endorsements of charter schools and the charter model itself. Full text of this important speech here.
Here’s his central economic-strategy point. Note how he prioritizes charters:
“In a crisis, there is always a risk that you take your eyes off the future – and you sacrifice long-term investments for near-term gains…But I want us to have a bigger goal than getting the economy growing again. I want us to expand the number of people who are contributing to the economy and benefiting from it. The young woman who needs help paying for college, the young man whose charter school needs government support, the children whose parents need AIDS drugs, the poor family trying to farm in Ghana–if we don’t make these people part of our investments, when the economy comes back, they won’t be coming back with it.”