Sticker shock: How Hillsborough County's Gates grant became a budget buster
TAMPA — The iconic photograph from 2009 shows Hillsborough County School Board members in happier times, holding hands with superintendent MaryEllen Elia to celebrate a $100 million gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The partnership would reform the way teachers were evaluated and paid. Its goal would be to make school better for children — especially poor and minority children. The Gates name would put Hillsborough on the map, and make its superintendent an education superstar.
Six years later, Elia is gone and there is more hand-wringing than hand-holding as the nation's eighth-largest district comes to grips with an experiment that left it in financial disarray.
A review by the Tampa Bay Times has found that:
• The Gates-funded program — which required Hillsborough to raise its own $100 million — ballooned beyond the district's ability to afford it, creating a new bureaucracy of mentors and "peer evaluators" who don't work with students.
• Nearly 3,000 employees got one-year raises of more than $8,000. Some were as high as $15,000, or 25 percent.
• Raises went to a wider group than envisioned, including close to 500 people who don't work in the classroom full time, if at all.
• The greatest share of large raises went to veteran teachers in stable suburban schools, despite the program's stated goal of channeling better and better-paid teachers into high-needs schools.
• More than $23 million of the Gates money went to consultants.
• The program's total cost has risen from $202 million to $271 million when related projects are factored in, with some of the money coming from private foundations in addition to Gates. The district's share now comes to $124 million.
• Millions of dollars were pledged to parts of the program that educators now doubt. After investing in an elaborate system of peer evaluations to improve teaching, district leaders are considering a retreat from that model. And Gates is withholding $20 million after deciding it does not, after all, favor the idea of teacher performance bonuses — a major change in philosophy.
• The end product — results in the classroom — is a mixed bag.
Hillsborough's graduation rate still lags behind other large school districts. Racial and economic achievement gaps remain pronounced, especially in middle school.
And poor schools still wind up with the newest, greenest teachers.
• • •
Since news broke that the foundation is holding back the last $20 million, critics of the reform movement Sticker shock: How Hillsborough County's Gates grant became a budget buster | Tampa Bay Times: