A Change in Leadership on K-12 for the Gates Foundation, But Not Direction
The U.S. Department of Education is not the only big player in K-12 policy undergoing a change of leadership.
Vicki Phillips announced recently that she would step down from her position as head of the K-12 program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at the end of 2015. Phillips has been with the funder since 2007, occupying one of the most powerful positions in education philanthropy. Her appointment marked the funder's shift away from a focus on smaller high schools to an emphasis on instruction and teacher quality.
"The baton was passed to me eight years ago," Phillips wrote in a letter announcing her resignation. "I have been honored to run my leg, and I am ready to hand the baton forward to the next leader." Phillips' announcement comes only a few weeks after Arne Duncan announced his resignation as U.S. Secretary of Education. Duncan, appointed to the post by President Obama in 2009, plans to return to Chicago to spend more time with his family.
Tasked with identifying a strategic lever for improving U.S. education, Phillips and her team at Gates concluded that despite a mountain of evidence that teachers played the most crucial in-school role in driving student achievement, little research existed on how to identify the best teachers. That led to the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, a multi-year study that used videotaped observations, surveys, and extensive academic data to identify the measures most associated with effective teaching. Since beginning MET in 2009, Gates has spent an estimated $900 million on grantmaking in the area of teacher effectiveness, according to Education Week.
It was under Phillips' leadership that Gates embarked on another ambitious endeavor: underwriting the development of the Common Core State Standards in reading and math, which have since been adopted by more than 40 states and the District of Columbia.
Both initiatives have attracted their share of controversy. Teachers' unions opposed tying standardized test scores to teacher evaluations, while the A Change in Leadership on K-12 for the Gates Foundation, But Not Direction - Inside Philanthropy: Fundraising Intelligence - Inside Philanthropy:
