How the Gates Foundation Spins its Research
The Gates Foundation has released the next installment of reports in their Measuring Effective Teachers Project. When the last report was released, I found myself in a tussle with the Gates folks and Sam Dillon at the New York Times because I noted that the study’s results didn’t actually support the finding attributed to it. Vicki Phillips, the education chief at Gates, told the NYT and LA Times that the study showed that “drill and kill” and “teaching to the test” hurt student achievement when the study actually found no such thing.
With the latest round of reports, the Gates folks are back to their old game of spinning their results to push policy recommendations that are actually unsupported by the data. The main message emphasized in