How Gates Foundation’s new $450 million education initiative will look

Ted S.
Warren/AP

• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent more than $200
  million on a teacher effectiveness initiative, and an independent
  assessment found that the program failed to help students.
• Now the Gates Foundation is trying a new approach: supporting
  local organizations that work directly with teachers and
  principals.
• Professors who specialize in education told Business Insider
  that the new initiative’s focus on local groups is a step in the
  right direction.
• However, experts noted the Gates Foundation is funding some
  of the same groups as before, and one professor said many of the
  new projects are vague and broad in scope.

In 2009, the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched an ambitious
project to improve teacher effectiveness among certain primary
and secondary schools in California, Florida, Tennessee, and
Pennsylvania. 

The goal was to reform teacher evaluations. More effective
teachers, the foundation predicted, would improve student
achievement, raise graduation rates, and help low-income and
minority students get into college.

About $1 billion went into the Intensive
Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, with the
Gates Foundation itself pouring over $200 million into a group of
school districts and charter school networks in the four states.

The initiative, designed to last seven years, ended in 2016. This
year, the Rand Corporation released
a report concluding the program had failed to dramatically
improve student achievement or graduation rates. Bill Gates
himself noted the initiative’s poor results in a speech last
fall, saying his foundation will no longer invest in teacher
evaluation.

Speaking
at a Harvard event in April, Gates said his foundation has
failed to elevate the US education system to the top despite
hundreds of millions of dollars in donations.

“We have no noticeable impact after almost 20 years of working in
that space,” Gates said. “But we’re committed.”

Now the Gates Foundation is trying a new approach: It has given
out $92 million in grants through a new initiative,
called Networks
for School Improvement (NSI), to 19 organizations that work
with middle and high school students across at least 12 states.
The Gates Foundation plans on spending more than $450 million on
NSI over a five-year period.

Unlike the previous initiative — which implemented classroom
observations and student surveys of learning conditions and
teacher professionalism — NSI will not introduce sweeping
reforms among participating schools. Instead, the foundation is
encouraging grantees to determine how to solve problems that are
specific to a particular group of schools or students.

Some of the grantees’ goals include increasing the number of
black, Latino, and low-income students who successfully complete
eighth-grade math; increasing the number of students who are on
track by the end of their freshman year to graduate from high
school on time; and making sure high-achieving students do not
enroll in colleges that are less rigorous than what they are
qualified for.

Several professors who specialize in education and public policy
said the Gates Foundation’s new initiative is a step in the right
direction, but they are concerned about NSI’s potential to fall
flat like its predecessor. 

Why the first initiative was unsuccessful

The Gates Foundation’s teacher effectiveness initiative tried
improving students’ performances by overhauling how teachers are
evaluated.

In Memphis, Tennessee, reforms like classroom observations and
student surveys appeared to improve student achievement in Shelby
County Schools, then known as Memphis City Schools. The district
offered few evaluations before the Gates Foundation stepped in.

But the changes also produced some challenges; a few years in, a
number of teachers felt demoralized and stripped of their job
security, while principals realized they had not been adequately
equipped to change schools’ teaching culture,
according to Chalkbeat. By March 2016, elementary school
students in the district were scoring in the 30th percentile on
math and reading assessments, far from a 60% proficiency goal.
Middle school students were behind as well, scoring in the 40th
percentile.

The Rand Corporation acknowledged in its report that schools
succeeded in implementing new ways to evaluate teachers, mainly
through direct classrooms observations and patterns in student
achievement.

But Madhabi Chatterji, a professor of measurement, evaluation,
and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, told
Business Insider that assessing teacher effectiveness based in
part on student outcomes was too simplistic.

“They undertook something that is
so broad and difficult to define in terms of a problem that to
find black-and-white results that can be documented on a large
scale would be very difficult,” Chatterji said.

Student achievement is measured through standardized tests, but
Chatterji said teachers only account for a relatively small
percentage of how students perform. Most of the variance in test
scores can be attributed to students’ prior performance in a
given subject area and their background, such as socioeconomic
status, she said.

Chatterji added that while the Rand report painted the Gates
Foundation’s initiative as a failure, an analysis of such a large
program after a short period of time may not even detect positive
outcomes.

Sue 
Desmond-Hellmann, the Gates
Foundation’s CEO, told Business Insider that the teacher
evaluation initiative provided the foundation with valuable
information for future projects, adding she is excited about
supporting teachers and principals on a local level. 

“Sometimes, the best thing the Gates Foundation can do is
enable others to share best practices and learn from each other,”
she said.

Critiques of the Gates Foundation’s management

Katrina Bulkley, a professor of educational leadership at
Montclair State University, told Business Insider that private
foundations’ engagement with education policy is both helpful and
challenging. Some foundations don’t place much weight on
understanding the needs of the communities they try to help, she
said, but they still provide important resources that
schools may not otherwise receive.

The Gates Foundation has been criticized for its management
approach, likened to treating grantees like contractors instead
of partners, according to research conducted for Megan
Tompkins-Stange’s book on the Gates Foundation and other large
philanthropies. Tompkins-Stange, a professor of public
policy at the University of Michigan, has said
this strategy is ineffective in the long-term.

Tompkins-Stange, who could not be reached for comment,
told Non-Profit Quarterly that the Gates Foundation “has
perhaps listened to some of the criticism” while creating NSI.

But Sarah Reckhow, a professor of political science at Michigan
State University, said NSI is not a total shift for the
foundation. 

“They are funding some of the
same old grantees they have funded in the past, so I wouldn’t
overemphasize it as breaking strategy,” Reckhow said.

The New York City-based New Visions for Public Schools,
for example, recently received
a five-year, $14 million grant. Since 2000, the organization has
received
more than $75.6 million in other grants from the Gates
Foundation. 

New Visions for Public Schools,
which has worked to improve on-time graduation rates among high
school students, will use the new money to increase
post-secondary readiness among black, Latino, and low-income high
school students in New York City. (
Robert Hughes, the Gates Foundation’s US
director of K-12 education, previously led New Visions for Public
Schools.)

Reckhow said NSI reminds her of
the Annenberg Foundation’s
Challenge grants, which allocated a total of $500 million in
the 1990s to 18 public education programs that supported networks
of schools.

“I feel like we keep coming back
to this type of strategy in education reform of some type of
intermediary that is not a district and not a traditional public
sector entity that is holding the network of schools together,
and yet it’s not a school all on its own,” Reckhow said.
“
I don’t want to be overly
dismissive. The basic idea of continuous improvement has backing
in research, that’s fine and well. … [But] you can’t have
continuous improvement if you only wait four years.” 

The NSI initiative has potential, professors say

Chatterji, the Columbia University professor, sees potential in
some of the NSI grantees. She said a few projects seem to have
well defined, targeted goals that could produce measurable
outcomes in a few years. On the other hand, Chatterji said
she worries many of the grantees won’t produce observable effects
because they seem vague, are broad in scope, and aim to produce a
major change in a short amount of time.

As a whole, using funding to support local programs is consistent
with research on school improvement, Bulkley said. The NSI
initiative is trying to empower local organizations in a way that
the Gates Foundation has sometimes failed to do, she said. 

Reckhow noted that the Gates
Foundation is a lot more transparent than peer organizations. Its
grants can be searched, and the foundation hires researchers to
release public reports on its progress. She added that the
foundation’s Request for Proposal is also unusual because many
foundations just donate money to groups they support.

She said the foundation seems to
be reorienting its approach to shaping education policy, though
she has not seen a “big flashiness” around the new initiative so
far.

“I guess we will see how that
plays out with this new strategy, but in the past what tended to
happen — whether it was small schools or the teacher quality
thing — is this sort of magnetism of what Gates is doing that
seems to attract other funders,” Reckhow said. “Because they have
this enormous agenda-setting power, because Bill Gates and
Melinda Gates are public figures, if they give a speech or if
they want to talk to the media, everybody listens.”

Hilary Brueck contributed
reporting.