Bill Gates’ talk at TED covers two topics: medical research for the developing world (first 8 minutes), and education for the USA (the last 10 minutes). He has an interesting slide about the impact of different factors on a teacher’s performance, which was obtained through statistical analysis of explanatory factors for the improvement in students’ scores:

Thus, a master’s degree actually hurts performance, and seniority was irrelevant as a factor. But master’s degree and seniority are the only two factors that will increase a teacher’s pay.

Now, Gates is pushing a lot for gathering and analyzing data. So there might be opportunities for those interested in doing research in education to get grants from the Gates foundation.