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Recently the Wall Street Journal featured an interview with Bill Gates in which Gates conceded some missteps in his philanthropic efforts toward public education. $5 billion dollars after his debut into public education affairs, Gates admits “It’s been about a decade of learning.” It’s a common concern that private dollars toward education can actually be counterproductive when they direct attention and commitment to misplaced priorities, and so it’s somewhat gratifying to hear Gates acknowledging this.

Gates offered a more tempered view on education than the WSJ interviewer (who in the article described public education in cities as “dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider”), but despite his avowed learning from past mistakes,  he still seems naïve in some respects.

The article notes that one of the Gates Foundation’s initial major pushes was in small schools, where he hoped to fund initiatives to promote better student attendance, engagement, and behavior. Beginning in 2004 the foundation spent $100 million to open 20 small high schools, including in San Diego, Denver, and New York City. Gates acknowledged that “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” though the article doesn’t mention other problems associated with the foundation’s actions. While the article doesn’t mention it, the Gates Foundation also backtracked on funding early-college high schools after finding mediocre results despite heavy investment. The withdrawal of Gates Foundation funding has created major financial troubles for these schools (see more information about this here and here).  

In any case, now instead of focusing on school-level investments, Gates says his foundation is currently focusing on using private funds to inform and redirect how public education dollars are spent, specifically in the form of research. Lately, he says “the foundation has been working on a personnel system that can reliably measure teacher effectiveness.” Here Gates makes some cogent points about the efficacy private money can have in filling necessary roles. He says, “I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts." He points out that compared with research and development in other sectors like pharmaceuticals or information-technology, next to nothing is spent on education research. "That's partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don't think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research." And since, as the article notes, teachers are typically the most significant school factor, Gates wants to focus on finding out if aspects of effective teaching can be measured systematically. The five-year, $335-million Measuring Effective Teaching (MET) project involves collecting and observing videos of more than 13,000 lessons by about 3,000 elementary school teachers in a number of school districts.

Besides some concern that Gates has been taken in by the teacher-as-superhero myth [link] since he cites “to Sir, With Love” as the ideal in teaching, this sounds like a promising initiative. Unfortunately, even though both the NEA and AFT have voiced enthusiastic support for effective teacher assessments (to replace the poor ones typically in place), the article claims (in what seems to be the author’s assertion more than Gates) that “ he'll have a tough sell with teachers unions, which give lip service to more-stringent teacher evaluations but prefer existing pay and promotion schemes based on seniority—even though they often end up matching the least experienced teachers with the most challenging students.”

Gates likewise affirms that teachers unions like “to stick up for the status quo” and stick up for their least capable members, though he thinks they simultaneously also stand for excellence in education.

So here again we see the perpetuation of the idea that unions want to cling onto bad teachers, even though both the NEA and AFT frequently stress that they do not want bad teachers teaching. The NEA recently adopted a Policy Statement on Teacher Evaluation and Accountability that outlines rigorous teacher standards and provides specific recommendations for the dismissal of ineffective teachers. AFT President Randi Weingarten has frequently called for fair and transparent processes to identify and deal with ineffective teachers, and the AFT has worked to expedite disciplinary cases against teachers. AFT local affiliates have also worked with district officials in New Haven, CT, Toledo, OH, Denver, CO, and Hillsboro, FL (among others_ to develop new evaluations systems for teachers. Further, it is certainly in the self-interest of unions to waste expensive legal resources on defending bad teachers.

To be fair though, when the WSJ reporter asks a leading question regarding union backing of school reform that diminishes their own power, Gates noted that “educational achievement of K-12 students is not at all predicted by how strong the union rules are.” And Gates clearly recognizes that current assessment measures are lacking (though there is clearly no guarantee that this initiative will create desirable assessment systems).

Riley ends the article saying “You can quibble with Mr. Gates about that strategy. You can second-guess him. You can even offer free advice. Or you can shake his hand, thank him for his time and remember that it's his money.” True. However when that money impacts the focus of reform in public schools—for better or worse—everyone with an investment in public education is affected.