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A two-year project to study what makes a teacher good or bad is taking root in some of the city’s schools after struggling to bring teachers on board.

The United Federation of Teachers and the city’s Department of Education announced in September that they had joined forces to promote a study of teacher effectiveness paid for by the Gates Foundation. The $2.6 million project, called Measures of Effective Teaching, will look at ways of measuring teacher quality beyond using test scores.

A UFT special representative, Joseph Colletti, said 96 schools, most of them high schools, have signed onto the project. The goal is to have 100.

“They run the gamut from very high performing schools to schools that are challenged, from senior staff, to new staff,” Colletti said.

Though UFT president Michael Mulgrew enthusiastically supported the project, his eagerness took some time to trickle down to the union’s membership. The DOE changed its mid-October deadline for applications to a rolling deadline after too-few teachers applied. (more…)

The ongoing plight of parents at a Bronx secondary school could augur the future for a new Gates Foundation education initiative.

Last week, the Gates Foundation announced that it would pour $6 million into opening new early college schools in New York State. It’s not clear how many, if any, of the programs will be in New York City, but any that are could face the same problems as Bronx Early College Academy, a three-year-old school that is being moved far away from the college with which it’s ostensibly linked.

Parents at BECA have been lobbying all year against the move, which they say will make it harder for the school to carry out its mission of providing students a college experience while they’re still in high school. I wrote about Annabel Wright, a BECA parent leader, back in May, and now she has published an open letter to President Obama about the school at the NYC Public School Parents blog. Writes Wright:

Parents believed in the academic program and the mission of BECA enough to look beyond what we did not have. We held on to the promises made by DOE officials that they would find us a suitable site near to Lehman or on the college campus itself, with all of the amenities that a high-tech, early college program should provide – as well as a site that would allow our children to easily attend college classes during the school day when they reached 9^th grade.

Yet now, the school is being moved six miles away to the South Bronx –even further away from Lehman.

The pattern is a familiar one for early college schools, which aim to offer a college experience while students are still in high school. Several of the city’s early college schools have had seen their CUNY collaborations erode over time because of space constraints and the colleges’ competing priorities. I wrote about the trend in April in the Village Voice. (more…)

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…)

Back in November, Elizabeth crashed the Gates Foundation’s annual meeting and reported that the foundation was planning to turn its attention to pushing for national standards. 

Today, testifying before the the U.S. Congress Committee on Education and Labor during a hearing on high school reform, Vicki Phillips, who heads the foundation’s education division (and wants “college ready” to be the word of the day), hinted at what those standards might look like. She said a strong set of national standards would bear little resemblance to the ever-expanding lists of skills and content that most states require students to master:

The hard part of this standards process will be making the radical leap from the vast numbers of standards states have today to a focused core that can accelerate performance. Dedicating ourselves to the fewer standards of what students really need for college and career readiness will require courage. Everyone can posture about whose standards are higher — what takes courage is making the tough choices about the fewer things that demand students and teachers attention. 

Four major foundations that have for years poured resources into growing charter schools this week announced that they are also giving money to the American Federation of Teachers, the national teachers union. Their donations are paying for an “Innovation Fund” that would let teachers pilot reforms in their own schools.

Along with representatives of the Gates, Broad, Ford, and Mott foundations, Randi Weingarten announced the fund’s creation at an event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. (Weingarten is the head of the AFT as well as New York City’s local union.)  An informative video the AFT produced from the event is below the jump.

Contrary to what some critics have charged, unions are a natural engine for innovation because they can insulate their members from retribution if their risks don’t pan out, Weingarten said on Tuesday. ”Collective bargaining allows teachers to take well-considered risks,” she said. “If teachers are afraid to do something outside the norm because their evaluations or their jobs are on the line, they may be less inclined to give change a chance.”

Now, the AFT is asking local affiliates to suggest projects for the first round of Innovation Fund grants. Priority will go to projects that aim to develop new compensation and evaluation systems for teachers, or projects that extend learning time for students.

If I know nothing else, I know that GothamSchools readers are full of ideas about how to improve schools. What do you think the Innovation Fund should support? Leave a comment with your suggestions. (more…)

Stephen Colbert appeared at Manhattan Bridges High School this morning to announce a $4 million grant that will help teachers buy supplies.

The comedian Stephen Colbert took time out from his regular ranting to conduct a polite, earnest interview at a Manhattan high school this morning, in an appearance meant to announce a new “citizen philanthropy” project by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation is giving $4.1 million to a Web site that connects private donors with classroom teachers who need extra supplies, DonorsChoose.org, .

Colbert, who sits on the site’s board, made the announcement in the style of his televised interviews, before an audience of students at Manhattan Bridges High School, but without any of his usual mean comments. (He did draw laughs with an awkward attempt to use Spanish, the native language of many Bridges students, to explain that he was a “perdedor gigante,” or giant loser, when he was in high school.) The panel he interviewed included Vicki Phillips, the head of Gates’ education division; DonorsChoose founder Charles Best; and a Manhattan Bridges English teacher.

The Gates money will be disbursed to teachers who apply for small grants through DonorsChoose’s existing “Double Your Impact” program, which allows foundations and companies to earmark donations for specific kinds of projects. When a DonorsChoose user views projects that fall into that category, they appear as already being 50 percent funded. The Gates Foundation money will go to support as many as 17,000 projects that are identified by DonorsChoose as boosting students’ readiness for college, one of the new goals the foundation adopted after it re-considered its mission last year.

(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.

From an invitation advertising the retreat.

Here’s an interesting picture of how things happen at the Department of Education.

A while ago, a source told me about a retreat he attended at a hotel in Westchester, where the Department of Education invited a bunch of education people — especially small school and charter school leaders — to a hotel for a two-day community-building experience.

An invitation had promised discussion of “The Future of Our Work,” including a run-down of the successes and challenges of the Bloomberg administration’s school efforts. Successes included the fast expansion of small and charter schools, which the invitation concluded are out-performing traditional district schools and the reorganization of the school system with “schools at the center.” Challenges included the financial “sustainability” of partner groups that assist the schools; the requirement of sharing facilities with traditional public schools; and “Human Capital development.”

There was also a lot of worrying about what is probably a bigger potential obstacle: The possibility that, come 2009, when the state Legislature votes on whether to keep, abolish, or alter mayoral control of the public schools, the system could be organized in a completely different way. There was no question on which side the Department of Education stood. At the end of the first day, a group that is fighting for the preservation of mayoral control of the public schools, but which has said it has no formal ties to the Bloomberg administration, spoke about its political plans. Chancellor Joel Klein also gave a speech passionately declaring that the successes that have happened would endangered if mayoral control was abolished. (more…)

Writing at the Huffington Post, former Gates Foundation honcho Tom Vander Ark suggests a radical response to education budget cuts that could actually gain traction in New York City:

While far from easy, states with courageous governors could use this crisis to make a radical change: cut the budget by 10% and send the money directly to schools. Every school would get a three year performance contract (i.e., charter) and would be required to join a support network (which could include what used to be a school district, a university, a non-profit like New Tech Foundation, a charter management organization like Green Dot, a for-profit like Edison Learning, or a self-organized coop).

New York City schools already get to choose exactly how much bureaucratic support they want by selecting from a menu of support organizations, and paying the fee the organization (Empowerment? New Visions? Knowledge Network?) charges. What if a school could also select a new menu option: no bureaucracy at all? (more…)

The Wall Street Journal draws attention to this “Statement on the Financial Crisis,” posted on the Gates’ Foundation’s Web site, which discloses that the foundation will give less money next year than previously planned.

The foundation also vows to lobby governments not to cut back on programs:

When government officials write next year’s budgets, it may be tempting to cut back on the very programs our grantees care most about. We will continue to advocate, within the legal limits on lobbying, for funding and policies that advance the work we’re doing with our partners.