Ten years and $5 billion into his philanthropic push for school reform, Bill Gates is doing some soul-searching. “It’s been about a decade of learning,” he says, and acknowledges that education isn’t only a civil rights issue but also “an equity issue and an economic issue…It’s so primary. In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there’s such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.”
One of the first large-scale programs launched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the establishment of 20 small high schools in several metropolitan areas, the idea being that smaller schools would translate to fewer behavior problems, better attendance, and more one-on-one interaction with adults. “The overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about—whether you go to college—it didn’t move the needle much…maybe 10% more kids, but it wasn’t that dramatic,” Mr. Gates admits. The program was shut down, but Mr. Gates believes that the students who attended did get “a better deal” than those in larger public schools.
Mr. Gates warns against overestimating the potential power of philanthropy, however. Various government entities spend $600 billion a year on education, while the combined total that has ever been spent by philanthropists on education would not even add up to $10 billion. This “drop in the bucket” reality has made foundations like the Gates Foundation re-think their focus when it comes to helping education reform.
Instead of trying to buy reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent. Gates points out that compared to the money spent on research and development in the pharmaceutical and information-technology sectors, educational research and development is practically nonexistent. This can be attributed to the lack of a clear organization or entity that sees education research as their main business investment. This is the gap that the Gates Foundation is seeking to fill.
Since it is a well-known fact that teachers have greater influence over the quality of a student’s education more than any other factor, including class size and per-pupil spending, the Foundation has been working on a personnel system that can reliably measure teacher effectiveness. The five-year, $335 million project will examine whether aspects of effective teaching—classroom management, clear objectives, diagnosing and correcting misconceptions—can be systematically measured. The research includes studying more than 13,000 lessons taught by 3,000 elementary school teachers in seven urban school districts as well as interviews with students to find out what they think works or doesn’t work in the classroom.
Mr. Gates is hoping that teachers will buy-in to this project, noting that teachers are the key to long-term reform. He knows this part of his dream is an uphill battle, however. When asked whether or not the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers have any incentive to back school reforms that help kids but diminish union power, Mr. Gates questioned the scope of that power. He noted that the U.S. has both union-strong states and right-to-work states, but that “the educational achievement of K-12 students is not at all predicted by how strong the union rules are.”
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