The Gates teacher evaluation system in action—a costly and ineffective adventure in Hillsborough, Florida
Executive Director, Network for Public Education and former New York principal
(Part of this report first appeared in Valerie Strauss’ The Answersheet as a guest blog by Burris)
In 2008, Florida’s Hillsborough School District received a $10,000,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The initiatives in the grant included: the establishment of an evaluation system based 40% on student test scores; the inclusion of test scores in decisions to grant tenure and determine teacher career paths; merit pay, which is referred to in the grant as “pay for performance”; bonuses for principals and teachers who raise low performing students’ scores; the use of data for hiring; and the use of “data dashboards” to make instructional decisions.
By 2012, the Hillsborough district had spent a whopping $28.4 million on the grant’s initiatives, using Race to the Top, additional grants, and district funds. District funds were 19% of all expenditures. $3,224,000 was spent developing a value added model (VAM) to measure teacher performance by test scores. The $24.8 million was considered a “lower bound” estimate by AIR, which studied the spending.
Winning the grant was heralded as a reform in which a teachers union had cooperatively worked with a Superintendent, Mary Ellen Elia, to enact evaluation reform. In his book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, Stephen Brill describes Hillsborough union president, The Gates teacher evaluation system in action—a costly and ineffective adventure in Hillsborough, Florida – The Network For Public Education:
When Gates came to Chicago
by Mike Klonsky
Chicago Educator and Community Activist
Gates supported small schools like a rope supports a hanging man.
When Gates came, uninvited, to Chicago in 2001, an initial $50 million investment soon led to the transformation of a vibrant, teacher-led small-schools movement, into a top-down corporate-style reform initiative imposed on schools and on the school district. Schools and teachers were mandated to create “small schools” as a way to tap into funding, regardless of local conditions or whether they were needed, wanted – or not – by the school community. The devastating impact was felt, not only on the schools, but on the city’s flourishing education foundations who couldn’t compete with the might of the Gates Foundation and ended up pooling their resources into a fund ruled by Gates and administered by the Community Trust.
When asked by educators and small-schools activists if they could be on the board that would administer the grants, the response from a Trust leader was: “That would be like allowing the workers to run the factory.”
