Near the sign-in desk of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations Seattle office, an old proverb is written across a long hallway. It reads: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Its fitting that these words are so prominently displayed, because they perfectly capture how we work and think at the foundation. Partnership and collaboration are, and always have been, central to our work whether thats working with other organizations to address global health and development challenges, or to improve public education here in the United States.

I walk past the proverb almost every day, but seeing it again after the holiday break felt particularly timely. Thats because this week our K-12 team is taking the next step in our strategy releasing a Request for Proposal to form and our foundation to support the first cohort of secondary Networks for School improvement , a key element of our K-12 work that Bill Gates announced last fall in a speech to urban district leaders .

As Bill described in his speech, we think of networks as a group of schools working both individually and collectively to use a continuous improvement process to improve student outcomes by tackling problems that are common across the network.

We envision networks in our strategy coming together through the leadership of intermediary organizations which could include districts, non-profits, for-profits, universities, or community-based organizations that join schools together to help them identify problems, collaborate on a locally-driven strategies to tackle those problems, set targets for improvement, and then work together and learn together to make the approach effective and improve student achievement.