In my piece, The Next Chapter of Our U.S. Education Work, I share how we are sharpening our focus in US education around four milestones that research shows are highly predictive of long-term student success and economic opportunity.
Today, we are also announcing a new organizational structure for our U.S. Program designed to align our people, investments, partnerships, and implementation efforts around those milestones and goals that will guide our education work through 2045.
To support that work, we are adopting a new organizational structure to create greater coherence across our portfolio, strengthen collaboration, and better connect learning, navigation, technology, policy, communications, and implementation to advance opportunity in America.
Alongside these structural changes, I will step down as President of U.S. Program effective August 31. I have never had more confidence in the direction of our work or in the team carrying it forward, and after 27 years at the Gates Foundation, the time feels right for new leadership to carry us into the next phase of our work.
Patrick Methvin will serve as Interim President of U.S. Program beginning September 1. Patrick’s work in leading our Postsecondary and Pathways strategies in recent years, coupled with his integral role in developing our new strategy alongside other members of the U.S. Leadership Team, uniquely position him in this moment to provide both continuity and vision for our team.
In this interim period, Dale Whittaker will serve as Interim Director of Postsecondary Learning and Navigation and Lewis Leiboh as Interim Director of K-12 Teaching and Learning. Both bring tremendous expertise to these roles and have my every confidence.
The foundation will undertake a thoughtful process in the coming months to identify the permanent leaders for these roles. We look forward to sharing those decisions with you at a future date.
I am deeply grateful for the privilege of leading the U.S. Program for the past 20 years, and I am excited about what this team will accomplish in the years ahead.
A New Structure for the Next Chapter of Our Work
Our new structure includes four major areas of work: K–12 Teaching and Learning, Postsecondary Learning and Navigation, AI and Data Infrastructure, and Advocacy and System Improvement. These teams will be supported by the Office of the President, which helps ensure collaboration and alignment across the division.
Together, they create a more integrated approach to advancing our education work, and this new structure builds on decades of learning, partnership, and progress across our U.S. Program.
K–12 Teaching and Learning
This team will be focused on helping more students build a strong foundation in math and successfully complete Algebra I by 9th grade, which is a critical step that opens doors to advanced math in high school and beyond – giving learners more opportunity and agency about their future.
Today, more than 6.7 million students in grades 3–8 are more than one grade level behind in math, making this one of the most important challenges in our work.
Building on years of investment in high-quality instructional materials, tutoring, professional learning, and aligned supports, this team will bring together curriculum, implementation, and emerging technologies to help teachers accelerate learning and keep more students on track for success.
Following Bob Hughes' transition from the foundation earlier this year, we began conducting a national search for our next K-12 leader and are grateful for Lewis’s leadership as that process continues.
Building strong math foundations is often the first milestone toward long-term education success. The next challenge is helping learners successfully navigate the transition from high school into postsecondary education and complete a credential of value.
Postsecondary Learning and Navigation
For many learners, this is where aspirations meet the realities of complex systems, critical first-year courses, and decisions that can shape long-term outcomes.
More than 40 million Americans have some college but no credentials. Many lose momentum because they struggle with first-year courses, lack timely advising, or encounter barriers as they move between institutions.
This team will bring together learning and navigation support, advising, college and career readiness, and learning mobility to help students stay on track. As a former college president who has led institutional transformation efforts, Dale Whittaker brings significant experience and expertise to this work as the Interim Director for Postsecondary Learning and Navigation.
AI and Data Infrastructure
Supporting learners at scale will increasingly require stronger data systems, responsible technology, and infrastructure that help students, educators, institutions, and employers access better information and make data-informed decisions.
Students, educators, and institutions often navigate disconnected data systems and tools, making it harder to access information and support when it is needed most.
As AI becomes increasingly embedded in education, this team will focus on advancing the data infrastructure, responsible AI capabilities, and strategic partnerships needed to improve learning, advising, and navigation outcomes while ensuring privacy, safety, transparency, and strong data stewardship remain central to our approach.
This work will include partnerships with technology leaders and Frontier Lab AI companies to help advance the capabilities, effectiveness, and accessibility of tools that support learners, educators, and institutions. Matt Gee is the leader of this work and team.
But even the strongest tools and solutions cannot achieve lasting impact on their own.
Advocacy and System Improvement
Helping more learners succeed requires not only strong solutions but the conditions that allow those solutions to spread and endure.
Research consistently shows that even effective innovations struggle to scale when institutions lack the policy, implementation, measurement, and improvement supports needed to sustain them over time.
Advocacy & System Improvement is a newly created team that brings this work together for the first time. These functions have historically sat in separate parts of the foundation’s structure; going forward, a single team will be responsible for each of the conditions institutions need to turn promising practice into lasting change.
This team unites three areas of work: policy and field engagement (policy and advocacy, field-building, and external communications); implementation and delivery (implementation support for postsecondary transformation and our place-based pathways work, as well as our work to expand access to quality K-12 charter public schools); and measurement and public goods (quality assessment, measurement, and public goods work).
Together, these efforts help identify, implement, refine, and scale approaches that improve learner outcomes – working alongside institutions, systems, and communities as they implement, refine, and sustain the changes that help more learners succeed, and identifying innovative approaches, including from our charter school work, that can be used to inform improvement strategies across the education system.
Responsibility for this work will rest with Jamie McKee, who will also continue to oversee the wind-down of our Early Learning strategy.
Office of the President
The Office of the President will help ensure that our teams, priorities, investments, and goals remain aligned across the division. Under Carrie Douglass' leadership, this work will support strategy integration, leadership collaboration, governance, change management, internal communications, learning, and talent development.
Integrating Existing Strategies into the Work Ahead
I am deeply grateful to the many colleagues, partners, and leaders whose work helped bring us to this moment. Their expertise, commitment, and collaboration expanded opportunities for learners, strengthened the field, and generated insights that continue to shape our direction today.
Several existing bodies of work will be integrated into this structure over time. Our Education Pathways work will no longer operate as a standalone strategy. Instead, its learning, partnerships, and priorities will be embedded across multiple parts of the division, particularly advising, navigation, and learning mobility, as well the place-based work on the Advocacy & System Improvement team.
As part of this transition, Cheryl Hyman will move into a Principal Officer role focused on advancing the foundation's long-term approach to learning mobility within the Postsecondary Learning and Navigation team.
Similarly, as we shared earlier this year, by 2030, the Washington State Initiative will no longer operate as a standalone strategy, with portions of the work being integrated into other teams over time.
Angela Jones will be stepping into a new role as Director for Leadership Advising, where she will advise on the plans to integrate and wind down the Washington State work and harmonize complementary portfolios across the division.
These organizational changes are about positioning our work for the years ahead while building on the contributions of the teams and leaders who helped shape it.
Many of these transitions are deeply personal to me because they involve colleagues whose leadership, expertise, and commitment have expanded opportunity for learners across the country. I am profoundly grateful for their contributions and confident that their impact will continue to be felt for years to come.
That legacy gives me confidence that, together with our partners, we can help many more learners successfully navigate the pathways that lead to opportunity.
Why I Am Optimistic About the Work Ahead
This new structure is ultimately about ensuring that our organization is aligned around the moments that matter most in a learner’s journey.
My optimism comes from the people doing this work every day, colleagues, partners, educators, institutional leaders, policymakers, and innovators who share a commitment to helping more learners reach their goals.
By aligning our leadership, teams, and investments around a common set of priorities, we have an opportunity to build on what we have learned and increase our impact in the years ahead.
That is the work before us. It has been the honor of my career to help build and lead this team, and I have never been more confident in what we will accomplish together.