CURMUDGUCATION: Gates Plan Crashes, Burns School District

CURMUDGUCATION: Gates Plan Crashes, Burns School District:

Gates Plan Crashes, Burns School District

Back in 2012, "teacherpreneur" Ryan Kinser wrote on the Gates Foundation blog, Impatient Optimists, to sing the praises of the Gates partnership with Hillsborough County schools in a program called Empowering Effective Teachers.

Back in 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the Hillsborough County, Florida, school system a $100 million grant to revamp teacher evaluation. The Empowering Effective Teachers Initiative (EET) resulted in a massive overhaul of how we view teaching and learning in the nation’s eighth largest district. 

Sure-- the Gates had made yet another commitment to completely changing the whole teaching profession, because, hey-- they're rich and they think they know what needs to be done.

In 2012, Kinser talked about three big lessons from the program.

1) View teachers as the solution, not the problem. That lesson must have come later, because part of the original plan was to fire the bottom 5% of the teaching force every year (there's that magic 5% again).

2) Teachers and  evaluators must build trust. The plan cycled teachers out of the classroom for stints as evaluators, because, reasons. Apparently, that was not always a big team-building exercise.

3) Use multiple measures that are transparent and authentic. Yeah, the fact that this was a CURMUDGUCATION: Gates Plan Crashes, Burns School District: