Gates funding school reform

SEATTLE – Three school districts and a coalition of charter schools have agreed to be test kitchens for some radical ideas for improving teacher quality – from paying new teachers to spend another year practicing before getting their own class to letting student test scores affect teacher pay.

In exchange, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is handing them the biggest pile of cash it has spent on education reform in about a decade.

The foundation announced $290 million in grants to the four groups last week, plus another $45 million for education research aimed at uncovering what exactly is an effective teacher.

The grants include $100 million to Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa, Fla., $90 million to Memphis City Schools, $60 million to a coalition of charter school organizations in Los Angeles, and $40 million to Pittsburgh Public Schools.

Vicki Phillips, director of the foundation’s K-12 education program, said the investment is big, the ideas are bold and she hopes the impact could rock every school in the nation.

Foundation co-chair Melinda Gates said she and her husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, consider education reform one of the toughest issues the foundation has taken on. The foundation is best known for its work fighting diseases like AIDS and malaria worldwide.

“Any time you’re trying to change a system and really have some innovative approaches, it’s going to take some long-term work,” Melinda Gates said.

The foundation purposely picked four diverse organizations to work with: from the four corners of the U.S., of a variety of sizes and ethnic mixes, all with existing problems and some successes meeting the educational needs of their students.

A fifth district was in line to join the others, but Omaha Public Schools dropped out at the last minute after deciding it could not meet the matching requirement of the grant during these tough economic times.

Smaller grants to other districts will be announced later, Phillips said.

The various reform projects have a number of central themes.

They will focus on teacher training, put the best teachers in the most challenging classrooms, give the best teachers new roles as mentors and coaches while keeping them in front of children, make tenure a meaningful milestone, get rid of ineffective teachers, and use money to motivate people and schools to move toward these goals.

“If you could boil what we know in education down to one sentence, it truly would be, ‘Nothing is as important as an effective teacher,’ ” Phillips said.

The school districts worked closely with local and national teachers unions in crafting their proposals. One of the first organizations to send out a congratulatory note to the grant recipients was the American Federation of Teachers.