Washington Post
November 19, 2009
Nick Anderson
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Thursday a $335 million investment in teacher effectiveness, with major grants for experiments in tenure, evaluation, compensation, training and mentoring in three large school systems and a cluster of public charter schools.
Through the grants, which amount to one of the largest privately sponsored school improvement initiatives in recent years, the foundation aims to reshape how policymakers approach teaching. Its goal is to focus on performance rather than qualifications.
The winners, picked from 10 applicants, are: Hillsborough County (Fla.) schools, in the Tampa area, to receive $100 million; Memphis schools, $90 million; Pittsburgh schools, $40 million; and five charter networks in Los Angeles (Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, Inner City Education Foundation and Partnerships to Uplift Communities Schools), $60 million.
For individual school systems and charter networks, the grants represent huge sums. The total expenditure puts the initiative in the same league with some major school reform efforts underway in the Obama administration.
"We are convinced that in order to dramatically improve education in America, we must first ensure that every student has an effective teacher in every subject, every school year," Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the foundation, said in a statement.
"These communities have shown extraordinary commitment to tackling one of the most important educational issues of our time," she said. "We must do everything we can to understand what makes teachers effective and cultivate those qualities across the profession, in every school and classroom, so that all students can benefit." (Gates serves on the board of the Washington Post Co.)
Prince George's County schools competed for the grants but were not chosen, even though former Prince George's superintendent John E. Deasy works for the Gates foundation and is a key player in the initiative.
Teachers' unions applauded the foundation for working collaboratively on the initiative. Federal officials are pushing in much the same direction with a $4.35 billion school-reform grant competition called Race to the Top that stresses teacher effectiveness, tied to student achievement data.
For Thursday's winners, the Gates grants constitute a reform jackpot. Public school budgets have been stretched thin in the economic downturn. Teacher salaries and core operations soak up most funding, leaving school administrators little discretionary money to improve education.
MaryEllen Elia, superintendent of the 191,000-student Hillsborough County system, described her reaction as "euphoric, and also very serious." She added: "I'm a pretty focused person. I feel like right now I have to become quadruple-focused."
Elia said the $100 million will help the school system redesign evaluation so that student performance accounts for 40 percent of a teacher's annual job review.
"It isn't just single tests," she said, "but multiple ways to look at the performance of students, and also multiple ways to look at performance of teachers." Teaching peers will have an expanded role in evaluations, she said.
The county also plans to refine an existing performance-pay program and create a performance-based career ladder that will raise the bar for tenure.
Gates foundation officials acknowledge that educators have long been stumped when asked to define effective teaching. Their initiative will spend $45 million in the next two school years to help answer the question, seeking to pinpoint metrics that unions, administrators and policymakers will agree are reliable indicators of a teacher's impact on student achievement. The project will track 3,700 teachers from Memphis, New York, Pittsburgh, Denver, Hillsborough County, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system in North Carolina and elsewhere.
For the foundation, which is emerging as a central player in national school reform efforts, the initiative marks an evolution. Several years ago, it concentrated on restructuring large high schools to create smaller, more personal academic communities. That effort had mixed results.
In a speech a year ago, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said: "In the first four years of our work with new small schools, most of the schools had achievement scores below district averages on reading and math assessments." He added: "It's clear that you can't dramatically increase college readiness by changing only the size and structure of the school."
Now teacher effectiveness has become the foundation's new education rallying point.