Donors Reform Schooling: Evaluating Teachers (Part 1)
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching aimed at identifying effective teachers whose practices raised students’ test scores, giving minority and poor students access to such teachers, and creating new ways of evaluating teachers than currently exist. I offer this example to illustrate how policy elites (top public education officials, civic and business leaders including donors) influence every step of the policy process: framing the problems to be solved, proposing top-down solutions, relying (or not relying) on research, and making requisite policy changes that ripple through the entire decentralized system of U.S. schooling.
Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching
Between 2009 and 2016, three school districts (Hillsborough County, Florida; Memphis City Schools, Tennessee; Pittsburgh Public Schools, Pennsylvania) and four California-based charter networks (Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, Aspire, Green Dot, and Partnerships to Uplift Communities) spent over a half-billion dollars of which Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed $213 million in creating IPET policies that would identify, recruit, train, and evaluate effective teachers while giving low-income minority children and youth access to those effective teachers. Giving children heretofore excluded from having the best teachers would offer equal opportunity to children and youth, one goal of the project. [i]
Teachers would learn how to do peer evaluations, collaborate with other teachers, receive professional development and dollar bonuses if their students scored well on tests. Finally, the project would determine whether student test Donors Reform Schooling: Evaluating Teachers (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
