Gates Foundation: Time to Declare an End to EdReform 2.0
By Anthony Cody.
This coming week I will be back in Seattle, a few months shy of the third anniversary of my first visit to the Gates Foundation. I will give a talk at the University of Washington, introduced by Jesse Hagopian and several Teachers of Conscience from the area, who have refused to give high stakes tests to their students
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.The world of education has shifted since that visit. Then I was in conversation. The Gates Foundation said they wanted to hear how their work was being received. In the online dialogue that followed,however, we were unable to resolve the biggest differences between us. Since then, the Gates Foundation has continued on its path, largely undeterred by mounting evidence of major errors.
It would be great if representatives from the Gates Foundation would join us at UW on May 15. There is a new CEO there, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, and she has voiced a willingness to learn, and spoken of the need for humility in the Foundation’s work. I sent her my book, The Educator and the Oligarch, a Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation, last month, and it would be remarkable indeed to see this influential institution show a capacity to learn and change direction.
Bill Gates entered the field of education about fifteen years ago with some interesting ideas. Starting around the year 2000, his foundation invested about $650 million in promoting small schools. On the positive side, this was a concept with some basis in how students learn best. There was an understanding that human relationships were improved when schools and class sizes were smaller. Schools like High Tech High were able to experiment with project based learning and other innovative approaches. On the negative side, the foundation was determined to “scale up” this approach, and so there was a tendency to give money to anyone willing to go through the motions.
The small schools that Deborah Meier had created in the decades preceding this were carefully developed, with staff that was devoted to working closely together, solving problems in a democratic way. When the Gates small schools money came to Oakland, where I was working at the time, we saw large schools broken up into smaller ones left and right, with little time or expertise to develop coherent and sustainable practices. While some succeeded, many were not much better than the larger schools they replaced, and they came with a high price tag for increased administrative costs. Oakland is still burdened with too many schools long after the Gates funding disappeared, and a number of the small schools have been re-combined in recent years.
In 2009, there was huge shift in focus for the Gates Foundation. They drew some unfortunate lessons from their small schools work:
Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way. These tended to be the schools that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school. Even so, many schools had higher attendance and graduation rates than their peers. While we were pleased with these improvements, we are trying to raise college-ready graduation rates, and in most cases, we fell short.But a few of the schools that we funded achieved something amazing. They replaced schools with low expectations and low results with ones that have high expectations andGates Foundation: Time to Declare an End to EdReform 2.0 - Living in Dialogue:
