Phew! At Least Bill Gates Didn’t Announce Another Big Experiment on Our Children
Bill Gates presented the keynote at the U.S. Education Learning Forum, an event this weekdescribed by Education Week‘s Alyson Klein as “meant to mark the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s 15th year playing in the education field.” In his remarks Bill Gates is reported by Liana Heitin of Education Week to have, “recommitted the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to its current work in supporting the use of high academic standards and helping teachers improve through evaluation systems that provide useful feedback… Test scores should be a part of teacher evaluation systems, Gates said, but just a part.” We can breathe one sigh of relief. The Gates Foundation is not launching another new and different social experiment on our public schools.
It is reassuring to have Education Week‘s reporter parse Gates’ words, which are a little more flowery and not quite so transparent. Gates explains the Foundation’s priorities: “I believe we are on the right track. For today, and for the coming years, this is our vision: Every student deserves high standards. Every student deserves an effective teacher. Every teacher deserves the tools and support to be phenomenal. And all students deserve the opportunity to learn in a way that is tailored to their needs, skills, and interests. This is the combination of advances we are backing that we believe will transform America’s schools—and at the center of it all is an effective teacher.”
In other words, the Gates Foundation will continue to support implementation of the Common Core, to support teacher effectiveness through evaluations that incorporate students’ test scores, and to support what the Foundation calls ‘personalized’ learning that involves computers.
Gates confesses that his foundation’s work has been experimental: “Early on, we thought smaller schools were the way to drive up college-ready rates. We set out to build the model of a successful school by breaking large high schools into new, smaller ones. Those efforts did raise graduation rates. But only some of the smaller schools also raised college-readiness rates—and the ones that did put a huge focus on training skilled teachers. So we weren’t going to reach our goals simply by changing the size of the school. We needed to look much closer at what happens inside the classroom…. A growing body of evidence told us that teacher effectiveness is the single most important in-school factor in student achievement….” Hence the foundation’s decision by 2008 to abandon its support for breaking up big high schools into smaller schools and to shift focus.
Notice that Gates seems to understand the consequences as pertinent to the research experiment; he pays less attention to the impact on the students, the teachers, the school, and the community. Not so much thinking about the expense for school districts when high-paid principals and assistant-principals of several small schools were located into one building. Not so much thinking here about the students whose futures were affected by the inevitably Phew! At Least Bill Gates Didn’t Announce Another Big Experiment on Our Children | janresseger:
