Perspective: Gauging impact of Gates' $100 million Hillsborough schools grant (w/video) | Tampa Bay Times:
Perspective: Gauging impact of Gates' $100 million Hillsborough schools grant (w/video)
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation may not view our country's stressed public schools as full of Neanderthal teachers trying to bash knowledge into bored, thick-skulled students. Yet the foundation's leaders do consider most U.S. schools terribly outdated, technologically deficient and bureaucratic morale-suckers in need of overhaul.
That's why the foundation decided to try to help.
Just a quarter of U.S. public high school graduates possess the skills needed to succeed academically in college. That statistic should terrify this country, given the aggressive rise of economic competition and rapidly improving education elsewhere in the world. Left unchecked, we are slipping in the global race to sustain a quality workforce.
That's a big reason why the Gates Foundation's $100 million grant to the Hillsborough County public school system is so compelling. The grant is wrapping up Year Four of a seven-year partnership between the Seattle-based foundation and Hillsborough schools. It's clearly a team effort. To get the Gates grant, Hillsborough has committed to match the foundation's $100 million. The goal: to improve student achievement by rethinking how best to support and motivate teachers to elevate their game during the adoption of the Common Core curriculum and beyond.
To gauge the partnership's progress, the Tampa Bay Times recently sat down at Blake High School in Tampa with Vicki Phillips and MaryEllen Elia. Phillips is the visiting Gates Foundation education leader, a former secretary of education and chief state school officer for the state of Pennsylvania, And here's the real street cred. She's a former school superintendent and middle and high school teacher.
Elia is not only completing her ninth year as Hillsborough's school superintendent. She also has emerged as a prominent figure in the broader Tampa Bay educational and economic development communities.
Nine years running the same school system is commendable. Especially in Florida where public schools rarely receive adequate attention or funding. Florida spends roughly half per pupil compared to New York or Connecticut. And Florida teachers remain among the poorest paid in the nation.
Contrast Elia's longevity in Hillsborough with Pinellas County, which has had four superintendents in the same nine years — Clayton Wilcox, Julie Janssen, John Stewart and now Mike Grego.
Let's be clear. The Gates Foundation picked Hillsborough County from among a national pool of applicants to receive such generous funding and a partnership role because the school system already was doing innovative things. Hillsborough also demonstrated a willingness to look at itself in a Gates-supplied mirror and change how it operated — if better ways to teach could be found.
According to Elia and Phillips, Hillsborough's education mission is to support innovation that can improve K-12 public schools and ensure students graduate high school ready to succeed in college. Accomplish that, says Elia, and the regional workforce becomes a strong economic selling point to businesses looking for quality employees.
"Great quality education is what draws businesses and people to a community," Phillips agrees. "The things MaryEllen is talking about is not just pushing more science and math but about asking students: 'Can you critically think and problem-solve?' "
When Hillsborough County and Tampa economic development officials are pitching this area to businesses looking to expand, education is no longer an afterthought.
Increasingly, business leaders want to know how dynamic the area school system is, not only for hiring sharp workers with 21st century skills but to gauge whether their own children should attend.
"We are at the table and part of those discussions," Elia said. "Hillsborough is one of the districts identified five years ago to get a very large grant from the Gates Foundation. Does that open eyes? Yes, I would say so."
