Get articles like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
Keeping an eye on the clock, the Gates Foundation on Wednesday morning updated its vision for America’s schools and announced a set of five-year goals aimed at easing students’ transition to college graduation and career success.
The Foundation is committed to promoting higher levels of mathematics achievement by 2030. An increase in the number of first-generation students attending college. The acceptance rate for new university students has significantly improved. And the number of college credits successfully transferred between institutions increased by 25%. The campaign’s overarching mission is to help 10 million people earn valuable academic and professional credentials over the next few decades.
The reset comes just over a year after the global education, development and public health corporation and major charity announced a 20-year countdown to its dissolution in 2045. By a still-distant deadline, some $200 billion in assets must be distributed across the organization’s portfolio, ending a half-century of giving.
Central to the organization’s vision is integrating artificial intelligence into education and university advising. The recent flood of AI tools, such as tutor chatbots, offers the promise of dramatically improving academic performance. However, the increasing number of teachers relying on the technology and the relative lack of safety or effectiveness standards suggest that results may be inconsistent in the coming years.
Alan Gholston, the foundation’s US program chair, told The 74 that his goal is to bring together educators and innovators to produce guidance on how best to use AI, moving the field closer to something like quality control.
“We are concerned about the prevalence of tools that teachers, school leaders and district leaders do not have the information they need to decide which ones to use and which ones not to use,” Gholston said.
As of spring 2024, nearly one-third of teachers said they had employed AI in their work at least once. One year later, that rate had nearly doubled. However, the same Gallup poll that reported the latter figure found that 68 percent of respondents said they received no training for their education, and only 19 percent were employed by schools with formal AI policies. Last July, the U.S. Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” outlining the responsible use of AI, including the development of tutoring applications.
While much of the public attention surrounding AI has focused on the products that students access (which in most cases depends on their willingness to actually participate), Gates’ announcement specifically mentioned features for teachers aimed at helping them personalize instruction to learners at different levels of understanding.
Gholston cited the Atlas dashboard developed by Kiddom and piloted with about 180 teachers in New York City. Atlas provided regular status reports on each student’s understanding of various math concepts using short quizzes administered at the end of each school day. Compared to demographically similar peers studying the same curriculum, middle school students who used the program performed significantly better on tests over time.
While timely data is important, Golston argued that simplifying teachers’ jobs has added value. Instead of switching between core curriculum, supplemental learning materials, and separate assessment interfaces, teachers can access everything from one source.
“The burden now falls on teachers to make sense of all this input, which is essential to providing quality education,” he says. “We think it’s possible to have AI do that behind the scenes and give teachers the information they need to be better teachers for each student.”
AI advisor
Improving math performance has been at the center of K-12 strategies since Gates Foundation leaders invested $1.1 billion in curriculum development and teacher training in 2022. That priority was reiterated in the foundation’s announcement Wednesday, proposing to significantly increase the number of students completing Algebra 1 by ninth grade.
Algebra has been a hot topic in the world of mathematics education for over a decade, and is seen as a gateway to the advanced skills needed for careers in STEM fields. Gates’ other efforts also focused on what the organization characterized as key points where students are often at risk of falling behind.
One is the introduction of AI assistance to college advisors, especially high school advisors who are tasked with advising more than 400 kids each year, which have a relatively small number of staff. High school students who do not have access to an advisor or career guidance counselor are more likely to have difficulty with some of the steps required to enroll in college.
The new AI agent will help track which students have completed applications and filled out FAFSA forms, allowing humans to provide a more personal service and perspective, Golston said. That might mean encouraging admitted students to buy textbooks or encouraging high-achieving applicants to take dual enrollment courses for college credit.
Carly Robinson, a Stanford University researcher whose research involves both AI and student-educator bonds, agreed that reducing administrative burdens could allow advisors to focus on “the parts of the job that actually benefit from relationships.”
“The majority of their time is spent on paperwork rather than actually working with children,” Robinson wrote in an email. “If AI can absorb that logistical load, it won’t replace counselors. It will direct counselors to do more important work with students.”
Robinson continued that the foundation’s other goals, such as redesigning first-year college classes to reduce the number of freshmen dropping out of STEM courses and measures to promote the interchangeability of college credits, also clearly reflect “high-leverage areas where effective interventions have the potential to ripple to millions of students.”
In a notable development, the updated blueprint puts a firmer institutional focus on secondary and post-secondary success, with the ultimate goal of doubling the growth rate of 18- to 34-year-olds earning “valuable qualifications” such as university degrees and professional qualifications. Although the foundation has invested extensively since the late 1990s, its most widely known education interventions have tended to focus on the K-12 sector, from its early push into small high schools to its later work on teacher evaluation systems and the Common Core Standards.
Mr. Gholston, who plans to leave his position at the end of August, said the organization’s strategic shift does not portend a setback for younger students, and that developing a rigorous, complementary math curriculum starting in kindergarten is needed to prepare middle school and high school students for algebra.
If there is a role that artificial intelligence can play in that effort, it is unknown. Recognizing the incredible pace at which frontier technologies are evolving, Golston said it is likely that entirely new applications of AI will be discovered in and out of the classroom in the coming years.
“If a student is studying at 10 p.m. and needs help when the teacher or teaching assistant is not available, it might be tutoring for Calculus 1,” he says. “It also helps students who are earning credits from multiple systems understand how those credits fit together on the path to a degree.”
Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides financial support to: 74.
Have you used this article at work?
We want to hear how The 74’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policy makers. Please tell me how
