Bill Gates spent hundreds of millions of dollars to improve teaching. New report says it was a bust.
A major new report concludes that a $575-million project partly underwritten by the Gates Foundation that used student test scores to evaluate teachers failed to achieve its goals of improving student achievement — as in, it didn’t work.
Put this in the “they-were-warned-but-didn’t-listen” category.
The six-year project began in 2009 when the foundation gave millions of dollars to three public school districts — Hillsborough County in Florida (the first to start the work), Memphis and Pittsburgh. The districts supplied matching funds. Four charter management organizations also were involved — Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools and Partnerships to Uplift Communities Schools.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pumped nearly $215 million into the project while the partnering school organizations supplied their own money, for a total cost of $575 million. The aim was to create teacher evaluation systems that depended on student standardized test scores and observations by “peer evaluators.” These systems, it was conjectured, could identify the teachers who were most effective in improving student academic performance.
This, in turn, would help school leaders staff classrooms with the most effective teachers and would lead more low-income minority students to have the best teachers — or so the thinking went. Schools also agreed to boost professional development for teachers, give bonuses to educators evaluated as effective and change their recruitment process.
The 526-page report titled “Improving Teacher Effectiveness: Final Report,” conducted by the Rand Corp. actually says:
Overall, the initiative did not achieve its stated goals for students, particularly LIM [low-income minority] students. By the end of 2014—2015, student outcomes were not dramatically better than outcomes in similar sites that did not participate in the IP [Intensive Partnerships] initiative. Furthermore, in the sites where these analyses could be conducted, we did not find improvement in the effectiveness of newly hired teachers relative to experienced teachers; we found very few Continue reading:Bill Gates spent hundreds of millions of dollars to improve teaching. New report says it was a bust. - The Washington Post
