"Local Context." The New Gates K-12 Strategy is Coming Into Sharper Focus
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced the first $92 million in grants for its new K-12 initiative Networks for School Improvement. The first of three planned rounds included 19 grantee organizations. The foundation plans to invest $460 million in the initiative over the next few years.
Under the new initiative, groups of schools will work together to identify challenges and implement solutions. The goal is to increase the number of black, Latino and low-income students who graduate high school and enroll in higher education.
The new initiative arrived as Bill Gates himself conceded that the results of the billions the foundation has poured into K-12 education had been disappointing.
The foundation has admitted failure and moved onto new strategies and ideas in the past. In 2009, Gates determined that the $650 million the foundation invested to break up large high schools into smaller ones had largely fallen short of the funder’s goals. Last year, Gates said the foundation would no longer invest directly in teacher evaluation, an idea that once had a central place in the foundation's education strategy. A RAND study revealing that the foundation’s five-year Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative did not improve high school graduation rates, teacher effectiveness or retention of the best teachers followed the announcement several months later.
Some critics argue that it is not enough for Gates to learn from past missteps. Instead these failures should discourage the foundation from future work in education. Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University and long-time critic of the foundation, says the funder’s work has demoralized teachers and pulled attention away from the need to adequately fund schools with public money.
Ravitch would like to see the foundation move away from education and instead use its experience in global health to promote better medical care for low-income kids at home. “The schools are not failing,” she said. “Our society is failing.”
But Bill and Melinda have said that they have no intention of abandoning their commitment to improving education. To its credit, the foundation has acknowledged its past failures and responded to underwhelming K-12 results by changing tactics. Earlier this year, Gates launched a national initiative to take on poverty at home at the urging of education leaders, who insisted that the foundation needed to consider factors outside the classroom that affect learning.
Related:
- Game Changer? Just Maybe. Why Gates' Move Into Anti-Poverty Work Is a Big Deal
- It's One of the Biggest Failures Yet in K-12 Philanthropy. What Are the Lessons?
The anti-poverty work is a major departure for Gates, a grantmaker that long resisted engaging the larger social and economic problems that heavily shape the education outcomes and life chances of young people.
Meanwhile, the Networks for School Improvement initiative represents a major about-face in its own right.
A striking feature of the new initiative is the emphasis on local leadership and solutions. It fits a growing Continue reading: "Local Context." The New Gates K-12 Strategy is Coming Into Sharper Focus — Inside Philanthropy
