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The high school report released today shows that the Gates Foundation’s support for small schools was worthwhile, according to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

His statement contrasts with the foundation’s own evaluation of its small schools spending, which it said last year had not produced the academic gains it had hoped. Bill Gates himself said in November that while New York City’s small schools have done better than others his foundation started, the schools still do not adequately prepare students for college.

Delivering introductory remarks before a panel discussion about small schools this morning, Klein said the Center for New York City Affairs report “confirms the work of the Gates Foundation,” which provided much of the funding that allowed the city to open small schools.

Today’s report ”carefully documents” that the schools have gotten better results than the large schools they replaced, Klein said — and with the same type of students, contrary to the charges by critics who say the small schools’ students start off better prepared. (In the schools’ early years, they enrolled students who were slightly less at-risk, but they now admit their fair share of overage students, students with disabilities, and students who are learning English, the report concludes.)

Despite his generally favorable review, Klein disputed some of the report’s findings, especially around graduation rates. (more…)

The importance of raising teacher quality and a ramped-up declaration of support for charter schools are the education points getting attention from Bill Gates’ first annual letter about the state of his philanthropic giving. But here’s another really important point that Gates makes about his efforts to improve American education:

Unlike scientists developing a vaccine, it is hard to test with scientific certainty what works in schools. If one school’s students do better than another school’s, how do you determine the exact cause? But the difficulty of the problem does not make it any less important to solve. (Emphasis mine.)

A hint at how the foundation might improve educational research is in my feature on the Gates Foundation’s new direction from late last year:

One initiative will invest about $7 million in a partnership between three research groups, the Educational Testing Service, the Rand Corporation, and a University of Michigan research group, which will study ways to measure teacher effectiveness. The goal is to find “fairer, more powerful, and more reliable measures” than current standardized tests provide, the foundation’s director of education programs, Vicki Phillips, said.

John Goodlad

In the fourth essay in “Those who Dared,” John Goodlad writes about his career, which included stints teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Canada and at American universities, spent promoting the notion of schools as places where children can learn from each other in a nurturing, age-integrated setting. Goodlad’s description of what he thinks inspired educators ought to be doing to schools presents another option, or two, for GothamSchools’ ongoing name-those-reformers contest:

School reform is a nasty concept; reform is defined by my Webster’s dictionary as “amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved.” What an insult to throw at the stewards of schooling! My conception of school renewal, which aims at improving our educational institutions, is vastly different.

School reform will never give us the schools our democracy needs. Reform is a companion of the mechanistic, Industrial-Age, command-and-control model of organizational behavior that has been challenged again and again by thoughtful analysts for its dehumanization of the workplace and, indeed, work itself. Renewal is a radical departure from that model, fitting more systems, complexity, and perhaps chaos theories, which have been discouragingly slow to enter the schooling enterprise. Business leader Dee Hock has coined the word chaordic in describing the emerging age of chaos, complexity, and necessary order in which “the second digital” decade Bill Gates talks about will be only a part, admittedly an important one. …

The common practice of trying to replicate some existing, perceived model, whether or not it is mandated, is doomed to fail — even if bits and pieces of it come into being. The major goal in renewal is to establish the right chaordic circumstances — primarily cultural.

The University of Washington, where Goodlad is a professor emeritus, recently announced that it would create the Goodlad Center for Educational Renewal.

From today’s AP story:

“Arne Duncan actually reaches out and tries to do things in a collaborative way,” said Randi Weingarten, head of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers.

From Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, in a report on Bill Gates:

Gates does seem to be weighing in on Obama’s pick for secretary of education. He favors choosing from today’s exciting collection of hard-charging, china-breaking school superintendents. One of those he likes a lot is Joel Klein of New York City, which is ironic considering that, as a Justice Department lawyer in the 1990s, Klein almost succeeded in breaking up Microsoft.

SEATTLE — Here’s an update to the who’s-who list I started yesterday, name-checking the notable people here in Seattle for the Gates Foundation’s announcement.

It really is remarkable to have so many players in one place. I guess the prospect of dinner at the Gates family estate, which was offered to all guests Monday night (plus a romp on the family trampoline, says Eduwonk) was hard to pass up. Or is it that Bill Gates is more powerful than even the U.S. Education Secretary (see Skoolboy at Eduwonkette: “Bill Gates, U.S. Superintendent of Schools”)?

Below the jump, and in no particular order, the list. I’ve added links this time so you can read more about these people. Warning: One link will direct you to a MySpace page with loud gospel music. This will not be an error.

UPDATE: Jim Hunt, the former North Carolina governor and a mentioned name for Education Secretary, was physically in Seattle; he did not teleconference. (more…)