Gates Downloads a Proposal for Schools

By Andrew Trotter

New Orleans

Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bill Gates says every school district needs a "digital nervous system" that would help educators manage their schools more efficiently and serve students better.

But first, he told administrators at a national conference here last week, producers of school-management software must agree on a common standard for the ways their applications describe data, so they can work with any computer system.

He rallied educators to support a set of technical standards that Microsoft is developing with 18 other software companies ranging from Jostens Learning Corp. to Chancery Software, which makes school-management applications. Called the "Schools Interoperability Framework," it would establish common definitions and units of...