Schools That Lift Up Their Students
About ten years ago on a trip to Los Angeles, I was talking with nearly a hundred African American and Latino kids from tough backgrounds when one young woman asked me: “Do you ever feel like we’re just somebody else’s kids whose parents shirked their responsibilities, that we’re all just leftovers?”
That question shocked me. It made me want to embrace her and convince her that her life had infinite value, that she had the same rights and deserved the same opportunities as anyone. But on the same trip, I saw why she didn’t think that way. I talked to another young woman who was taking a course of studies that, even if she aced it, would not prepare her for college, or anything else. I looked at her curriculum. One lesson involved reading the back of a can of soup in a grocery store and knowing the contents. That was math class. And that wasn’t rare. I’ve seen the same thing in many school districts across the United States—one group of students studying Algebra II while others were taught how to balance a checkbook. The first group would head to college and careers; the second group would struggle to make a living.
Bill and I focus most of our US philanthropy on education. We believe a strong system of schools and colleges is the best idea our country has ever had for promoting equal opportunity. We focus on increasing the number of black, Latino, and low-income students who earn a high school diploma and also the number who continue their education after high school—both boys and girls. (I’m working to expand pathways into technology for girls, and girls of color specifically, through my office, Pivotal Ventures—a company I started to help spark social progress in the US.) The best schools lift up the students who never thought they could rise. And when you see that happen, it can make you cry with joy.
In 2015, Bill and I went to visit Betsy Layne High School in Floyd County, Kentucky, a rural community in the Appalachia region that has been devastated by the decline of the coal industry. The New York Times has called this area one of the toughest places in the country to live. Six counties in the region were ranked in the nation’s bottom ten in income, educational attainment, unemployment, obesity, disability, and life expectancy. Amazingly, though, over the previous ten years, when the region went into economic decline, student achievement in Floyd County had climbed from 145th in the state to 12th. We wanted to see how they were doing it.
We were joined on our trip by Vicki Phillips, then head of K–12 education at our foundation. Vicki knew about the challenges facing these students and teachers because she had lived them. As Vicki tells it, when she was a little girl, her mom and stepfather got married and paid the $500 owed in back taxes to buy a four-room house with dirt floors and broken windows that sat on a farm her family still owns in rural Kentucky. That’s where Vicki grew up, helping her family raise pigs, grow vegetables, and hunt for supper. They had a hand pump in the house and an outhouse in the back, and they didn’t think they were poor because none of their neighbors had any more than they did.
Vicki said her teachers were deeply devoted to their students, but looking back, she realized that the education she was getting wasn’t preparing her for college; it was preparing her to stay where she was. “Where I grew up,” she said, “a lot of people didn’t want excellence in schools. It scared people.
“My parents expected I would graduate high school, live in the community, get married, and have a family. The day I came home and told my parents, ‘I’m going to college,’ my stepfather said, ‘And you will not be my daughter. And if you do, don’t you ever come back. Don’t ever plan on coming back, because your values are not our values.’”
Vicki and her dad had fights about it till the day she left. He would say, “This is a safe community. You’re my daughter. Why would I feel comfortable about you doing that?”
Then, Vicki says, he drilled into the most sensitive issue. “Why do you want to leave home, anyway? Everything you might ever need is here. Is what we have not good enough? Are you saying we’re not good enough for you?”
These are common questions for families who fear that going to college means moving out and never coming back. As they see it, their culture doesn’t hold people back; it holds people together. In their eyes, pursuing excellence can look like disowning your people.
That’s how it was where she grew up, Vicki said. There was nothing in her culture to propel her to college. She made it there after meeting a girl from the rich end of the county who said to her one day, “What do you mean, you’re not going to college?!? You’re as smart as I am.” She began pushing Vicki to take tougher courses, take the college boards, and seek scholarships. That’s how Vicki overcame a culture that didn’t want her to go to college. She joined her friend’s culture. If you want to excel, Vicki says, you have to get support from the people around you. Very few people can do it alone.
Vicki was willing to face the conflict that came from challenging her culture. But she worked it out with her family, even with her dad. A year after she left, she got a call at college. The familiar masculine voice on the other end said, “Vicki, this isn’t working. Let me drive down and bring you home for a visit.” Her dad picked her up and took her home, and everybody reconnected. She and her dad got close again. They stayed honest about their differences, and he continued to tease her in an affectionate way for the rest of his life, calling her (in their family of staunch Republicans) “our little Democrat.”
Vicki went on to become a special education teacher, a school superintendent, and a state secretary of education who worked to change the norms and empower people who’d been pushed out. That’s the same drive that we found in the faculty at Betsy Layne.
The personalities there were exuberant and unforgettable—starting with Cassandra Akers, the principal. Cassandra has loved Betsy Layne for a long time; she was valedictorian of the class of 1984. She still lives in the house where she grew up, which her parents sold to her when she started teaching. She’s the oldest of seven children and the only member of her family to graduate from college, so she knows the community and the struggle the kids face.
“Our students have to know that we expect great things,” she said. “But they also know that whatever they need, we’re going to help them get it, whether it’s teaching, tutoring, extra help, food, clothes, a bed, whatever. You have to take care of all of them.”
One of the biggest challenges in changing the culture is lifting up the self-image of the kids. They’ve had self-doubt planted in their minds by society, the media, even members of their own families. Mothers and fathers who’ve never achieved their goals can easily plant their own doubts in the minds of their kids. When those doubts get into kids’ heads, they’re hard to change. People who are the victims of doubt often feel targeted, and the psychologist at Betsy Layne told me that many students felt that the world not only didn’t care about them but was rooting against them.
The harder people’s challenges have been, the more important it is to surround them with a new culture and a fresh set of expectations. One of the math teachers I met, Christina Crase, told me that she tells the students on the first day of school, “Give me two weeks!” She doesn’t want to hear about their failures, or how much they hate math, or how far behind they are. She says, “Give me a chance to show you what you can do!”
One of her projects is to help the kids build small-scale Ferris wheels. The first time she presented the idea to her class, the students thought she was nuts, but they were happy to do it. It was easier than learning math! So they poured themselves into their projects and built their Ferris wheels, and by the time Ms. Crase was explaining sine and cosine functions, all she had to do was link the idea back to the Ferris wheel, and they all got it.
The kids held this material so firmly in their minds that a few of them came running into class after visiting a local carnival and said, “Ms. Crase, we didn’t ride the Ferris wheel.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“We didn’t trust its structural integrity,” th
ey said. Then they began explaining in the language of calculus and trigonometry.
After visiting classrooms, Bill and I joined some students for lunchtime pizza in the cafeteria. A number of them admitted they’d been afraid to take AP classes because “APs are for the smart kids.” But they took AP courses anyway and learned a lot, and the most important thing they learned was “We are the smart kids.”
Great schools don’t just teach you; they change you.
Girls in Schools
Equal education moves people toward empowerment, but unequal education does the reverse. Of all the divisive tools that are used to push people to the margins, unequal education is the most damaging and enduring. Unless there is an explicit effort to include everyone, schools will never be a remedy for exclusion; they will be a cause of it.
Yet in spite of the astounding benefits that come when girls get an education, more than 130 million girls around the world are still not in school. This number is often cited as progress—but only because the barriers to girls going to school used to be worse. During my own school years, far more of the world’s boys went to school than girls. This disparity was common in countries that didn’t require kids to go to school.
In past decades, though, governments have made a major push to reverse that, and they’ve been largely successful. Most countries are enrolling equal numbers of boys and girls in primary school. But the goal, of course, is not to make sure girls are deprived of an education at the same rate as boys. The goal is to remove all the barriers that keep children from attending school, and in some places the barriers are still more significant for girls than for boys. This is particularly true in secondary school, generally considered to be school years seven through twelve. In Guinea, just one in four girls is enrolled in secondary school, while almost 40 percent of boys are. In Chad, fewer than a third of girls are enrolled in secondary school, but more than two out of three boys are. In Afghanistan, too, just over a third of girls are enrolled in secondary school, compared to nearly 70 percent of boys. These barriers continue in university. In low-income countries, for every hundred boys who continue their education after high school, only fifty-five girls do the same.
Why are there fewer girls than boys in secondary and postsecondary school? Economically, sending girls to school is a long-term investment, and for families in extreme poverty, the focus is on survival. Families can’t spare the labor, or they can’t come up with the school fees. Socially, women and girls don’t need an education to play the roles that traditional societies have prepared for them. In fact, women getting an education threatens traditional roles. Politically, it’s instructive to see that the most extremist forces in the world, like Boko Haram, which kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in northeast Nigeria in 2014, have been especially hostile to girls’ education. (Boko Haram’s name actually means “Western education is forbidden.”) The extremists are saying to women, “You don’t have to go to school to be who we want you to be.” So they burn down schools and kidnap girls, hoping that families will keep their girls home out of fear. Sending girls to school is a direct attack on their view that a woman’s duty is to serve a man. One young woman who challenged that view is Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani woman who was shot by the Taliban in 2012 when she was 15 years old. Malala was known in the world before then. She was inspired by her father, who ran a chain of schools, to write a blog talking about her life as a girl going to school under the Taliban. Her blog was widely read, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu nominated her for the International Children’s Peace Prize.
So when Malala was shot, it was not a random shooting of a girl who was going to school; it was a targeted hit on a well-known activist by people who wanted to silence her and frighten others who shared her views. But Malala wouldn’t keep quiet. Nine months after she was shot, she spoke at the United Nations. “Let’s pick up our books and our pens,” she said. “They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.”
A year later, in 2014, Malala became the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Peace Prize. (She learned she’d won the award when she was sitting in chemistry class!)
I had met Malala after she won the prize, and like everyone else, I was inspired by her story. But when I hosted her at an event in New York in 2017, I was even more inspired by how she told her story. Malala didn’t focus on herself. She said, “I believe we can see every girl in school in my lifetime, because I believe in local leaders.” Then she told us how she was supporting activists who were getting girls into school all around the world—and, in a surprise, she invited those activists present to come forward. They came to the stage and Malala turned the microphone over to the people who inspired her.
Today, Malala’s foundation is investing in activist-educators all over the world. One activist is educating teachers in Brazil about gender equality. Another is campaigning to end school fees in Nigeria. Another, in Malala’s home country of Pakistan, is hosting forums to persuade parents to send their daughters to school.
I’m going to follow Malala’s example. I’m going to tell you about some of the people and organizations who’ve inspired me. Governments from Kenya to Bangladesh have put massive financial resources behind making school free for girls. The UN and the World Bank have major girls’ education programs. And there are organizations, such as the Campaign for Female Education, that are making school possible for the poorest girls. Among all the great programs, I want to focus on three that especially impress me: one from a national government, one from a global organization, and one from a young Maasai woman who stood up and changed centuries of tradition.
“Agents of Development”
One of the most inspiring ideas on girls’ education comes from Mexico. Some of the best ideas in development are simple ideas—after you’ve heard them. But it takes a visionary to dream them up and make them work. In Mexico in the 1990s, many families still couldn’t send their kids to school because they needed the children’s labor to get by. So in 1997, a man named José Gómez de León and his colleagues put forward a new idea. They believed that women and girls were “agents of development,” and they put that belief into practice.
The government would treat education as if it were a job and pay families to send their kids to school. Payments would be based on what children could earn if they were working for pay—a third-grader might earn $10 a month, a high schooler $60. They called the program Oportunidades—“opportunities.”
They made sure the payments for the children were given directly to the mothers. And because girls were more likely than boys to drop out, girls got a bit more money than boys to stay in school.
After the program was phased in, girls who were in Oportunidades had a 20 percent greater chance of being in school than girls who weren’t. Not only did more girls go to school, but those who did stayed in school longer. The program helped nearly 6 million families.
Just twenty years after the program began, Mexico has achieved gender parity in education—not only at the primary school level but also in high school and college. And Mexico has the world’s highest percentage of computer science degrees awarded to women.
The World Bank called Mexico’s effort a model for the world and said it was the first to focus on extremely poor households. Fifty-two countries now have some form of the same program.
Breakthrough in Bangladesh
I had been aware of the work of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee since it won a Gates Global Health Award in 2004, and I visited the founder, Fazle Hasan Abed, in Bangladesh in 2005. In addition to its visionary work in health and microcredit, BRAC is the largest secular private educator in the world, and focuses on educating girls.
Back in the 1970s, when Bangladesh was recovering from its liberation war, most families were running small farms, struggling to get by and relying heavily on their children, especially their daughters. As a result, by the 1980s, less than 2 percent of Bangladeshi girls were in school by the fi
fth grade, and half as many girls as boys were in high school. That was when Fazle Hasan Abed, a Bangladeshi who’d become a successful businessman in Europe, decided to come home to found BRAC and start building schools.
When BRAC got started in 1985, every one of their schools had to have at least 70 percent girls. All of the teachers had to be female, and they all had to come from the community, so that parents wouldn’t be afraid for their daughters’ safety. Each BRAC school set its own schedule to accommodate the growing season, so that families who relied on girls’ farm labor could send their daughters to school. Also, BRAC schools provided books and materials free of charge, so that costs could never be an excuse for keeping a girl out of school.
As the number of BRAC schools grew, the country’s religious extremists—recognizing that schools lift women up—began to burn the schools down. Abed rebuilt them. He said BRAC’s goal was to challenge the culture that kept women down, and the arsonists proved that BRAC was getting results. Today, Bangladesh has more girls attending high school than boys, and BRAC runs 48,000 schools and learning centers around the world. It goes to the most dangerous places in the world for a girl to attend school and slowly helps those cultures change.
Challenging Centuries of Tradition
In many rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, young girls are expected to obey the customs of their culture, not challenge them, and certainly not change them.
Kakenya Ntaiya, like most other 13-year-old girls in Kenya’s Maasai community, had her future mapped out for her the second she was born. She would go to primary school until she reached puberty. Then she would submit to female genital cutting and drop out of school and be married to the boy she became engaged to at age 5. From that day on, she would fetch water, gather wood, clean house, cook food, and work the farm. It was all planned out, and when the life of a girl is planned out, the plan serves everyone but the girl.
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