Education Week - November 1, 2017 - 13

Gates Changes Up Agenda With Latest Grants
Bill Gates announces
his $1.7 billion pledge
to support education
last month at the fall
conference of the
Council of Great City
Schools in Cleveland.
The new investments
follow several earlier
pushes by the
foundation to
improve schooling.

with the tasks on their own.
In both districts, the teachers agree
that the process builds students' selfefficacy. "They're really, really independent when you do this workflow,"
Kutis said. "I think it prepares them a
lot for the adult work space."

Institute, who has written about education
philanthropy.
Much of Gates' past work did prompt
major changes to state policy on teaching
and standards, but those efforts have not yet
shifted student learning across the board.
And that may be the bigger insight for K-12
philanthropy in general: Change in American education is often incremental, small,
and complex.
"My sense is that the foundation has had
bigger tangible impacts on affecting health
outcomes around the world than they have
in education, and they've been at it for a
while," said Daniel Goldhaber, the director of
the Center for Education Data and Research
at the University of Washington, who has
studied issues of teacher performance for
more than a decade and whose center has
received Gates funding.
"I don't mean to be singling out the
Gates Foundation," he added. "I think
this is just sort of the way it is. It's hard
in developed countries to change well-entrenched institutions."
(Education Week receives financial support
from the Gates Foundation for coverage of
continuous improvement strategies in education. The newspaper retains sole editorial
control.)

Clarence Tabb Jr./CGCS

Photos by Julia Rendleman for Education Week

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

Link for Learning Communities?
An Australia-based organization
is making quite a bit of headway
bringing Scrum to schools in a different capacity: for teacher professional
learning.
Simon Breakspear, a former high
school teacher and educational researcher, founded Agile Schools after
spending time in Silicon Valley five
years ago and seeing how technology
companies were using the approach.
His organization trains teams
of teachers to do up to monthlong
"learning sprints," during which they
home in on a specific concept or skill
they're teaching. "We are using student-learning outcomes as the focus
of what we're trying to improve," said
Breakspear.
It's akin to how professional learning communities were meant to be
used-but Scrum provides a process
and set of protocols for the work and
the meetings.
"PLCs often became a discussion
about what students aren't doing or a
general discussion about learning and
planning," Breakspear said. "Learning sprints have this incredible intentionality. ... There's an emphasis on
speed and delivery, and teachers are
getting a dopamine hit every one to
four weeks."
His group is working with more
than 300 schools in Australia and
Canada and inching into U.S. schools.
The Ross district, north of San Francisco, will begin getting training from
the group this spring.
As for the Chesterfield district
leaders, they see innumerable opportunities for using Agile, including
for teacher professional development.
But they recognize that pushing people too hard too fast on the method is
likely to backfire.
"There will be teacher teams that
jump in right away and move forward
taking on Agile projects," said Lane,
the superintendent. "But I want them
to choose that for themselves."

Rocky Road on Teachers
Gates' last major push in the K-12 space
was to fund plans from four districts and one
group of charters to reorient their teacherevaluation, -pay, and-promotion systems.
By 2013, as Education Week reported at
the time, the foundation had spent nearly
$700 million, primarily on those grants and
on a massive study of how to measure effective teaching, which remains a fruitful
source of follow-up research.
Four years later, early results are decidedly
mixed across the sites. A final study, which
includes additional years of student achievement data, will be released in early 2018.
It's not the first time that nuanced findings from Gates-funded reforms weren't immediately headline-friendly. Its small-high
schools initiative, which dates to the early
2000s, also had mixed results.
The foundation's teacher work was far
more politically charged than the smallschools work, though, and Gates officials
have hinted obliquely that the foundation
didn't quite anticipate the level of ill will its
ideas would generate. The push for teacher
evaluation-which dovetailed with federal
policymaking at the time-quickly alienated
many teachers. Key support from teachers'
union leaders, like the American Federation of Teachers' Randi Weingarten, faltered
under pressure from members.
Gates officials have acknowledged some
missteps, such as emphasizing the evaluative aspects of the systems rather than their
support-and-improve components.
And some of the challenges were outside of
the foundation's control, including the high
levels of turnover in leadership that are endemic to urban school systems. Within a few
years of securing the teaching grant, the superintendent and union leader in Pittsburgh
had left their jobs. By 2011, Memphis was
bogged down by the politics of merging its
system with neighboring Shelby County,
which would not be complete until 2013.
Sustainability-a theme in Gates' remarks
last week-also proved to be a sticking point.
In Hillsborough County, Fla., the district's
new teacher roles and pay system created

financial stress for the district.
Recent grants show Gates will still be
putting millions into teacher-quality efforts
in the coming years, but that will not be
as comprehensive as the teaching partnerships were, or as singlemindedly focused on
teacher performance.
At least some experts, like Goldhaber,
aren't sure that now is time to ease up on
teacher evaluation. Although he agrees that
efforts to reform teacher evaluation have not
led to significant changes in many places, he
noted that there is some evidence, as in the
District of Columbia, that rigorous evaluations can improve both teacher performance
and boost student learning.
"I think people have learned that politically it's very tough to influence evaluation,
but I also believe that evaluations are sort
of the linchpin to leveraging lots of other
change in education," he said. "So it may be
moving away from that field is learning the
wrong lesson."

A Focus on Curriculum
To be sure, the foundation's focus on standards and curriculum isn't new, either. It offered key support for the development and
implementation of the Common Core State
Standards, and for many other groups that
have developed instructional supports and
lessons.
But the new announcement signaled a significant increase in this kind of grantmaking.
It hasn't gone unnoticed among education
leaders.
"As I have learned from hundreds of school
visits each year, Gates also recognizes that
teachers need real curriculum support and
professional development to build on the
standards," the AFT's Weingarten said in a
statement following the announcement.
Like the teacher-evaluation work, the common core has proved remarkably controversial, with some states backing off or renaming the standards. About 35 states still use
some form of the standards, however.
The foundation's new direction brought
cheers from advocates who long have called

for a greater focus on high-quality curricula
that are easy for teachers to use.
"I get the sense that they learned from
their mistakes," said Robert Pondiscio, the
vice president for external affairs at the
conservative-learning Thomas B. Fordham
Institute. "Let's be honest, a lot of the things
we've tried under the banner of 'ed. reform'
haven't worked or have been disappointing,
and those who have said, 'It's the curriculum,
stupid,' are getting more attention."
It makes sense for the foundation to pair
a newfound focus on curriculum with one on
networks of schools, Pondiscio added, noting that some of what sets apart New York's
Success Academies-an academically highflying, if controversial, New York City charter
school chain-is its use of a common curriculum across its schools.
Last week, the foundation released a request for information hoping to gather feedback from groups interested in applying
for a new grant. It will use that to craft its
request for proposals in early 2018. A major
focal point will be funding "intermediary organizations" to launch networks of secondary
schools in the summer of 2018, the document
says.
The details remain hazy, but it appears
that the foundation will also draw on the
concept of improvement science, using the
networks to test out different approaches to
solve problems.
Donald J. Peurach, an associate professor
at the University of Michigan's education
school who has studied networked improvement, called that aspect of the grants very
promising. He cautioned, though, that the
foundation's newfound enthusiasm for continuous improvement could collide with the
impact of the accountability movement.
"This whole space still expects quick return on investment," he said. "What we've
learned about how this plays out is that
it's a lot harder to do well than many people expect."
The remainder of the new investment will
support education research and development
and to improve charter schools' ability to
serve students with special needs.

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Education Week - November 1, 2017

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