Gates Foundation put millions of dollars into new education focus: Teacher preparation
You can say this about Bill and Melinda Gates: They are persistent. They poured a few billion dollars into various school reform efforts in the past 15 years — but when things didn’t go quite as planned, they didn’t give up. They always came up with something else to try. That’s just what the are doing now (again).
In the early 2000s, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation put hundreds of millions of dollars into the creation of small schools on the theory that breaking up large high schools with high dropout rates would help increase the graduation rate. When things didn’t go as well as they wanted, they switched their education philanthropy focus to teacher quality by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help some school districts develop teacher assessment systems that, among other things, incorporated the controversial method of using student standardized tests as one of the measures. That effort did not produce the hoped-for results. Hundreds of millions of more Gates dollars went into the creation, implementation and marketing of the Common Core State Standards. Now, the foundation has found a new focus in regard to teacher quality: how to train teachers.
Toward that effort, the foundation just announced that it is awarding nearly $35 million over three years to five new centers — called Teacher Preparation Transformation Centers — that it says “will bring together higher education institutions, teacher-preparation providers and K-12 school systems to share data, knowledge and best practices” and “develop, pilot and scale effective teacher-preparation practices to help ensure that more teacher-candidates graduate ready to improve student outcomes in K-12 public schools.” It is also spending tens of millions more on related efforts.
The five Teacher Preparation Transformation Centers are:
- Elevate Preparation, Impact Children (EPIC), led by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education;
- National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR);
- Teacher2, led by the Relay Graduate School of Education;
- TeachingWorks at the University of Michigan; and
- University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation (U.S.PREP) National Center, based at Texas Tech University.
Each center will “test different approaches in unique contexts to better understand which practices are most effective,” the foundation says, with EPIC perhaps being the most extensive, given that it will involve all 71 “initial Gates Foundation put millions of dollars into new education focus: Teacher preparation - The Washington Post: