Even to close followers of the school choice debate, it was a pleasant surprise yesterday to see the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation crop up on the front page of the conservative Washington Times newspaper. The Times article quoted from an April 2 op-ed piece that the foundation’s executive director for education, Tom Vander Ark, wrote in Education Week, which said several “pockets of success” point the way forward to improving schools. Among them, he wrote, are “a century of success in private education, particularly urban Catholic schools,” and “innovative and highly successful charter schools.”

It’s attracted little or no press attention so far, but earlier this year, the Gates Foundation issued an education policy paper with some sound recommendations on school choice. “Create policies that make it easier to create charter schools and other new schools,” the paper recommends. “States should remove existing limits on the number of new charter schools, provide assistance to new schools in obtaining and renovating facilities, assure that states and district per pupil funding is equal to traditional schools at the same grade level, and create incentives to in crease the number of charter authorizers and sponsors.”

Mr. Vander Ark’s deputy, Carol Rava Treat, told us that she recently testified in Olympia, Washington, in favor of legislation that would create charter schools in Washington State. The bill is opposed by the state’s teachers union, school boards association, and school superintendents, but a newly Republican state senate has been pushing it along. Ms. Treat told us that she also pointed out the flaws in the legislation — it includes a cap on the number of charter schools and it doesn’t provide any facilities funding. “It’s a weak bill, but it’s a step,” she said.

The Gates Foundation hasn’t yet gone the full way to endorsing school vouchers, but it has backed some private and parochial schools, including a network of Christian alternative schools. With a $24 billion endowment and education second only to global health on its list of giving priorities, the Gates Foundation is a player to watch on the education scene. If Microsoft’s Bill Gates succeeds in bringing to the schools a fraction of the entrepreneurial energy and innovation he unleashed in the software industry, there’ll be students and parents standing in line to thank him.