Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students' achievement in any significant way.That's one of the (many) good things about being one of the richest and most famous people in the world. You can straightforwardly admit that your initiatives haven't always been successful, because having done so you're still one of the richest and most famous people in the world. It's also the upside of moving into charitable work in the middle of your life as opposed to the end--you have time to learn, refine, and plan for the long term. Gates also said:
We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.This is important because it goes right to the heart of how we think about accountability and educational improvement. NCLB-style regulatory accountability systems are primarily designed to identify low-performing schools and make them better. How they make them better is complicated and subject to debate: we identify them publicly, we give their students the option to transfer away, perhaps we give them more money, or send a technical assistance team from the State Department of Education, or ask them to submit an improvement plan, or implement a new curriculum, or extend the school day, or replace the principal, or the teachers, or something else. There are a lot of options. But they all involve preserving the existing school. And that approach , in turns, stems from the fact that schools are seen as public institutions, which they are, and thus we apply public institution improvement ideas to them. In many areas of public interest, we have little choice--if the Department of Defense isn't performing well, we have to improve it, because we can't not have a Department of Defense, nor can we build a whole new one from scratch.
Schools are different. They're structurally small and decentralized, whereas Defense Departments are, for obvious reasons, not. We don't have to improve existing low-performing schools. It's perfectly possible to just shut them down and build new ones. The fact that the Gates Foundation had more success creating new schools than changing old ones is unsurprising--turning around a chronically underperforming school is really difficult. So difficult that it's worth asking why we should try, when there are other, better, faster, less expensive options instead?
5 comments:
Here's an answer to your rhetorical question in the form of an other rhetorical question:
New schools seems like a viable option for a foundation that's working at the margins. But is it really a viable approach in terms of large-scale systematic reform?
Maybe the problems are not with the schools, but rather, society?
No, new schools is not a solution for systemic reform.
No, the problem is not with society, it is with the schools.
The problem with the schools is that they use the wrong model, a boring reductionist one. Where innovation-based models are used, schools are effective (exciting even) and kids' performance skyrockets. But our education leaders, in their infinite wisdom, don't realize this.
You identified the solution best yourself: "we identify them [failing schools] publicly, we give their students the option to transfer away."
There are plenty of people out there figuring out how to build better schools, mostly outside the system, and few within. The key is letting the kids out of the system headlock to choose those schools
Thank yOu
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