Popular Frameworks Found to Identify Effective Teachers

This from Education Week:

Teachers who embodied the teaching skills outlined in certain popular teaching frameworks tended to help their students learn more, concludes a new study released by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The report is the second major release from the foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project, which seeks to identify the best gauges of effective teaching. Ultimately, the Seattle-based foundation plans to devise a prototype teacher-effectiveness measure based on the findings.

Among other implications, the study’s results suggest that observations of teaching practice hold promise for being integrated into teacher-evaluation systems—if observers are carefully trained to ensure consistent application of the frameworks over multiple observations. Also, the study indicates that the gauges that appear to make the most finely grained distinctions of teacher performance are those that incorporate many different types of information, not those that are exclusively based on test scores.

“I was surprised at how aligned all the measures were,” said Douglas O. Staiger, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., and one of the principal researchers on the study. “They seem to pick out teachers who are good on a range of dimensions, and I think that says there really is something kind of coherent about good teaching.” ...

Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill Gates

The information in the chart above is now more than a year old and only partly reflects the scope of influence the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has brought to American education policy. (I'm not sure when I'll have the time to update it.) How does all that play out? To paraphrase Chuck Colson, When you've got them buy the wallet they're hearts and minds will follow.

This from Sam Dillon in the New York Times:

A handful of outspoken teachers helped persuade state lawmakers this spring to eliminate seniority-based layoff policies. They testified before the legislature, wrote briefing papers and published an op-ed article in The Indianapolis Star.

They described themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform — one sympathetic state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, said, “They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” They were, but they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies. To that end, the foundation is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups. The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

“We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes,” said Allan C. Golston, the president of the foundation’s United States program. “The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer.”

The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy.

Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency. Few policy makers, reporters or members of the public who encounter advocates like Teach Plus or pundits like Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute realize they are underwritten by the foundation.

“It’s Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who said he received no financing from the foundation.

Mr. Hess, a frequent blogger on education whose institute received $500,000 from the Gates foundation in 2009 “to influence the national education debates,” acknowledged that he and others sometimes felt constrained. “As researchers, we have a reasonable self-preservation instinct,” he said. “There can be an exquisite carefulness about how we’re going to say anything that could reflect badly on a foundation.”

“Everybody’s implicated,” he added.

Indeed, the foundation’s 2009 tax filing runs to 263 pages and includes about 360 education grants. There are the more traditional and publicly celebrated programmatic initiatives, like financing charter school operators and early-college high schools. Then there are the less well-known advocacy grants to civil rights groups like the Education Equality Project and Education Trust that try to influence policy, to research institutes that study the policies’ effectiveness, and to Education Week and public radio and television stations that cover education policies.

The foundation paid a New York philanthropic advisory firm $3.5 million “to mount and support public education and advocacy campaigns.” It also paid a string of universities to support pieces of the Gates agenda. Harvard, for instance, got $3.5 million to place “strategic data fellows” who could act as “entrepreneurial change agents” in school districts in Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere. The foundation has given to the two national teachers’ unions — as well to groups whose mission seems to be to criticize them.

“It’s easier to name which groups Gates doesn’t support than to list all of those they do, because it’s just so overwhelming,” noted Ken Libby, a graduate student who has pored over the foundation’s tax filings as part of his academic work...

Other Gates funded groups cited in the piece:

• The National Governors Association
• Council of Chief State School Officers
• Achieve Inc.
• Alliance for Excellent Education
• The Fordham Institute
• New Teacher Project
• American Federation of Teachers
• National Education Association
• Gates spent $2 million on a “social action” campaign focused on the film “Waiting for ‘Superman
• Jeb Bush's Foundation for Educational Excellence
• Educators for Excellence
• Teach Plus

In what seems to be the exception rather than the rule,

The Center on Education Policy, which calls itself “a national independent advocate,” was awarded $1 million over two years to track which states adopted the standards. Its president, Jack Jennings, said he had nonetheless publicly criticized the Gates stand on other issues, including charter schools and teacher evaluations. “I feel free to speak out when I think something is wrongheaded,” he said.

KDE Receives $1 Mil Literacy and Math Grant

The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) has received a two-year, $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support implementation of the new Common Core Academic Standards (CCAS).

The goal of the grant is to improve classroom instruction and align content taught to the Common Core standards by developing instructional strategies and tools in mathematics and literacy. The project will build off the work already underway in Kentucky via the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) and the Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) and shared so that teachers throughout the state can use them to improve student learning.

“This work is directly connected to Kentucky’s successful implementation of the Common Core Academic Standards, the development of a model curriculum framework and the mandates of 2009’s Senate Bill 1,” said Felicia Cumings Smith, associate commissioner of KDE’s Office of Next Generation Learners. “These strategies will provide immense benefits for teachers and promote students’ critical thinking skills within and across the content areas.”

KDE will partner with the state’s school districts through its Leadership Network system during this project. The networks — comprised more than 2,500 Kentucky educators across 29 networks — are designed to build the capacity of each Kentucky school district as they implement Kentucky’s Common Core Academic Standards, develop assessment literacy among all educators and work toward ensuring that every classroom is a model of highly effective teaching and learning practices.

Network partners, such as the regional education cooperatives, institutions of higher education, the Council on Postsecondary Education and the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, also will be included in the expanded implementation of LDC and MDC. As part of an earlier, separate grant from the Gates Foundation, the Prichard Committee has been working with a group of pilot school districts on LDC and MDC implementation, and the work of those districts will be shared through the Leadership Networks.

The pilot school districts for LDC are Kenton County (lead), Boyle County, Daviess County, Fayette County, Jessamine County and Rockcastle County. The pilot school districts for MDC are Kenton County (lead), Boone County, Daviess County, Jefferson County (Doss and Iroquois High Schools), Jessamine County and Warren County.

The grant is part of a larger nationwide effort by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the development and testing of prototype mathematics and literacy classroom assessments and instructional tools to help educators better prepare all students for life beyond high school.

SOURCE: KDE Press Release

Study: Value-added data, surveys indicate teacher effectiveness

Despite my moderate acceptance of value-added measures of teacher effectiveness, I'm always skeptical of studies ordered up by an interested party. The results either produce what was ordered, or are buried.

That said, preliminary results of the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching study -- sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- support the use of value-added data to predict future teacher performance.

The study found that student improvement on standardized tests reflected gains in learning and critical-thinking skills, not memorization, as some critics have suggested. Furthermore, the value-added predictions were corroborated by the results of student surveys, which often identified the same teachers as the most effective.

This from the Los Angeles Times:

Teachers' effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging their students' progress on standardized tests, according to the preliminary findings of a large-scale study released Friday by leading education researchers.

The study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provides some of the strongest evidence to date of the validity of "value-added" analysis, whose accuracy has been hotly contested by teachers unions and some education experts who question the use of test scores to evaluate teachers. The $45-million Measures of Effective Teaching study is a groundbreaking effort to identify reliable gauges of teacher performance through an intensive look at 3,000 teachers in cities throughout the country. Ultimately, it will examine multiple approaches, including using sophisticated observation tools and teachers' assessments of their own performance...

The approach estimates a teacher's effectiveness by comparing his or her students' performance on standardized tests to their performance in previous years. It has been adopted around the country in cities including New York; Washington, D.C.; Houston; and soon, if local officials have their way, Los Angeles.

More on the study at Education Week, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Other views of value-added:

L.A. teachers union rejects pay cuts, proposed evaluation system: The Los Angeles teachers union is balking at efforts to cut educators' pay and tie evaluations to students' test scores through a value-added system. The district wants students' scores to account for at least 30% of teachers' evaluation, but United Teachers Los Angeles prefers using data to improve instruction. The contract with the union, which already has seen teachers' pay cut through furloughs, expires in June. A $142 million school system deficit is projected for next year. (Los Angeles Times)

Why test scores can't measure teacher effectiveness: There are many qualities that effective teachers have that cannot be gauged by student test scores or other measures, according to a North Carolina teacher and reading specialist. Cindi Rigsbee writes that effective teachers are committed to their students and to the profession, build relationships with their students and have a passion for learning. Effective teachers also look for ways to improve through professional development and other opportunities, she writes. (Teacher Magazine)

Survey - Teachers need higher pay, but ineffective ones should be fired: More than half of Americans surveyed in a new poll by The Associated Press and Stanford University believe teacher pay is inadequate, but 78% said it should be easier to dismiss poor-performing teachers. About half of respondents said pay should be linked to student test scores and evaluations, while 35% said they believed underperforming teachers are a major problem in U.S. schools. (The Associated Press)

Kentucky Joins National Education Improvement Institute

The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) has been selected to join with the U.S. Education Delivery Institute to enhance its process for driving progress and delivering results in the P-12 education arena.

The institute is working with Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee on P-12 and postsecondary education issues to help them set targets, plan strategies, monitor data and solve problems related to the implementation of reforms. There is no cost for Kentucky to join the project.

Sir Michael Barber, founder of the U.S. Education Delivery Institute and former chief advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and institute CEO Kathy Cox met Friday in Frankfort with KDE staff to share insights on “deliverology,” a systemic process to drive progress and deliver results in education. Barber and Cox provided tools and ideas so that KDE can create its own delivery unit.

Barber and Cox also presented information to officials in the Kentucky Cabinet for Education and Workforce Development, the Education Professional Standards Board and the Council on Postsecondary Education.

“In the course of history, when the U.S. has been at its most powerful and generous, the world has prospered,” said Barber. “With the huge challenges facing us globally in this century, we all need the U.S. to be at the top of its performance in terms of educating its young people to be problem solvers.”

The U.S. Education Delivery Institute (EDI) is a non-profit organization that helps implement change in public education. EDI’s mission is to develop the capacity of system leaders in P-12 education and higher education to define and deliver on their academic vision — setting and reaching goals that increase the number of students who graduate from high school college- and career-ready, then enter and succeed in college.

EDI supplies a set of tools and a framework for leaders to deliver on their big goals, so that intent at the system level ultimately translates into impact at the student level. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York have provided core support to launch the organization and to enable delivery work.

SOURCE: KDE Press release

Kentucky Educators Part of Innovative Literacy Initiative

This from Prich:

Educators in six Kentucky school districts are part of an innovative new effort to dramatically improve students' literacy skills and their preparation for college and
career.

The Literacy Design Collaborative focuses on organizing the class work that students do around reading and writing in all subject areas - a break from the traditional practice of limiting most reading instruction to English or language arts classes - and preparing them for challenging writing tasks. Teachers in Kenton, Boyle, Daviess, Fayette, Jessamine, and Rockcastle counties are developing the approach along with researchers and educators from states across the country.

The academic foundation of the work is the new standards that Kentucky has adopted, along with many other states, defining what students should know. The standards for language arts and math were drafted by nationally respected experts who used research and information on how each subject is taught in the countries with the highest academic results.

The Literacy Design Collaborative approach involves the development of components, or modules, for classroom use that specify reading and writing tasks and assignments on specific topics; "template tasks" that can be used to teach a variety of subjects to students working at different levels; and plans that set out teachers' step-by-step approach to helping students successfully prepare for and complete
assignments.

In Kentucky, the collaborative work is supported by a $300,471 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, for supporting and coordinating the work in the six participating districts. The committee is a statewide citizens' organization that works to improve education at all levels. Committee associate executive director, Cindy Heine said, "The Gates Foundation is providing important new tools for teachers, supporting implementation of the newly adopted Kentucky Core Academic Standards.

This kind of support was not available in the 1990s when Kentucky adopted standards for student learning and an accountability system for our schools and
we believe this professional work with teachers will improve our efforts to help students become ready for success in college and career."

Working With Teachers to Develop Fair and Reliable Measures of Effective Teaching

This from Vicki Phillips at Gates:

Over the past four decades, research has consistently confirmed what we have known intuitively all along—that no school-based factor matters more for a student’s learning than having an effective teacher.

It’s ironic, then, that we give teachers so little useful feedback on the quality of instruction—the strengths they bring to the classroom and the gaps in their practice that need to be filled.

As part of our education strategy, we have made a commitment to learning from great teachers about what makes them great. To this end, we launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project last fall to explore ways to provide better feedback to teachers on their practice, so that schools can reward and retain those who are most effective, and create new professional development tools to help all teachers improve.

The project is led by independent researchers who will spend two years developing and rigorously validating new ways of identifying effective teaching. Two principles are guiding that work:

• In the grades and subjects where it is feasible to do so, any assessment of the quality of instruction should include student achievement growth as a major component.
• There should be multiple indicators of teacher effectiveness, such as classroom observations and student feedback, not just test-based measures of student achievement. These indicators must be demonstrated to be helpful in identifying classrooms with exemplary growth in student achievement.

Because we do not believe there is one single measure that can capture the range of skills which teachers need—the art and science of teaching—we are testing many different tools for their association with growth in student achievement...

A new white paper articulates the scope and methods...

Three Ideas that Drive the New Approach to Foundation Work

This from Jeff Rakes at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:

“I think a lot about the ‘three-legged stool,’

the idea that philanthropy, government, and business

have to work together to create effective social change.”

--- Jeff Rakes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

For the last several months,Rakes led a group of 12 foundations that are working with each other—and with the U.S. Department of Education—in new ways to drive innovation in education.

Foundation Grants Support Public Grants

Last year, the Department of Education committed $650 million to its Investing in Innovation, or i3, Fund. At the end of April, the 12 foundations announced that they’d be adding $500 million, bringing the total up to more than $1 billion.

A Blueprint for Education Reform

Sharing information and putting out a blueprint for education reform allows foundations to see what each foundation or government entity is doing and where we may be under-investing. For example, it was discovered that very little was going into innovation in education for rural areas. So the Kellogg and Walton Family foundations decided to take that on. It creates a more efficient deployment of resources.

Technology in Support of Cooperation

The use of technology has created one of the most important developments in foundation work. The common application developed for i3 grants is shared with foundations. i3 applicants apply on line so that the department and each foundation can see where innovation occurs. That allows foundations to see what the great ideas are that they might invest in matching ideas to foundational goals.

Rakes says, “I'm really excited about this collaboration for two reasons. First, I am confident it will be an important part of an aggressive push to improve student achievement in this country. Second, I think this new model of collaboration—both between philanthropy and government and among philanthropies—can help us make progress on other pressing issues.”

KSN&C Backstory:

Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed

This from the New York Times:

In the world of education, it was the equivalent of the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria.

Executives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey consultants and scholars from Stanford and Harvard mingled at an invitation-only meeting of the New Schools Venture Fund at a luxury hotel in Pasadena, Calif. Founded by investors who helped start Google and Amazon, this philanthropy seeks to raise the academic achievement of poor black and Hispanic students, largely through charter schools.

Many of those at the meeting last May had worried that the Obama administration would reflect the general hostility of teachers’ unions toward charters, publicly financed schools that are independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. But all doubts were dispelled when the image of Arne Duncan, the new education secretary, filled a large video screen from Washington. He pledged to combine “your ideas with our dollars” from the federal government. “What you have created,” he said, “is a real movement.”

That movement includes a crowded clique of alpha girls and boys, including New York hedge fund managers, a Hollywood agent or two and the singers John Legend and Sting, who performed at a fund-raiser for Harlem charter schools last Wednesday at Lincoln Center. Charters have also become a pet cause of what one education historian calls a billionaires’ club of philanthropists, including Mr. Gates, Eli Broad of Los Angeles and the Walton family of Wal-Mart.

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools...

Foundations Impacting Education Policy....again.

A few months ago I began looking into the impact of foundations in American education policy. Holy cow! We've never seen anything like this before.

As the incomplete picture below (from a working draft of a paper) begins to show, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone has had a huge impact, giving money to schools and other policy groups that support Gates' strategies, while former Gates-associated personnel have found their way into the Obama Administration.

Now comes a new joint effort to improve education from a coalition of foundations, and it not the first of such partnerships we've seen either - but perhaps the biggest.

This from Google:

Foundations offer $506M for education innovation

A coalition of wealthy foundations is offering up to half a billion dollars to match federal grants meant to encourage education reform, taking the pressure off schools scrambling to find the matching dollars they need to get the money.

A dozen foundations plan to announce this week that they are investing $506 million, a portion of which is for a matching fund for the $650 million federal government grant program, called Investing in Innovation.

The foundations also set up an Internet portal for applying for matching funds from all the foundations in one step, streamlining the task of seeking money from multiple sources. School districts, schools and other nonprofits have until May 12 to apply for the money, which will be paid out by the end of September.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he was ecstatic about the foundations' interest in the innovation program and called the partnership unprecedented.

"This is how we should be working together. This is how sectors should collaborate," Duncan said. "If this goes well, think of the possibilities going forward."

The unusual group effort by a dozen education-focused foundations reflects their enthusiasm for the fact that the Obama administration is pushing states and school districts to embrace changes the foundations have long championed. Some of the foundation money will go to innovative proposals that do not get federal dollars.

"Every foundation dreams of having one of its programs scaled up by the federal government" and expanded across the nation, said Brad Smith, president of The Foundation Center, a national authority on philanthropy since 1956.

The foundation money and the federal program are both aimed at three aspects of education reform: innovation in the classroom, ideas for turning around low-performing schools and research to study ideas that can be expanded across the nation...

The group of foundations includes the Annie E. Casey Foundation; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Carnegie Corporation of New York; Charles Stewart Mott Foundation; Ford Foundation; John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Lumina Foundation; Robertson Foundation; The Wallace Foundation; Walton Family Foundation; William & Flora Hewlett Foundation; and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

On the Net:
Foundation Innovation Project Registry:

U.S. Department of Education:

HT 2 KSBA.

High Schools to Offer Plan to Graduate 2 Years Early

Oops. I forgot to post this a couple of weeks ago ... and it's potentially a very big deal.

Sometime, back in the early 90's, I sat on a workforce development task force that was looking at future directions for vocational schools in Kentucky. I remember that Bill Samuels (yes, Maker's Mark) and I had some thoughts about top students moving on to college earlier. We thought there were a number of juniors ready to go, and senior year was about half wasted for most decent students. I wasn't very creative, I suppose, so I didn't get very far outside the box. But I argued that the GED ought to be used by two types of students, rather than one. The first was the typical student who had dropped out and wanted to get back on track. But the second group of students were our top Juniors who were bored with school and who were treading water. I reasoned they should drop out, immediately pass the GED, and go straight on to college. My solution lacked sophistication, but in my mind, got the job done. It was a lovely chat that produced no results.

Now Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday is thinking along the same lines. But the Commish is taking a swing at the almighty Carnegie unit and promoting a system where, at a certain level of maturity, top students would be incentivized to pass an exam and move on.

This from the New York Times:

Eight states are introducing new courses and a battery of tests for sophomores that will allow students who pass to enroll immediately in community college.

Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.

Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th-grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but also subjects like science and history.

The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including
Denmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore.

The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and its goals include insuring that students have mastered a set of basic requirements and reducing the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. ...

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded a $1.5 million planning grant to the NCEE which will, in turn, spend about $500 a student, to buy courses and tests and to train teachers in a new system. Those eight participating states - Kentucky, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont - will begin the new coursework in the fall of 2011. Holliday has pledged to have pledged to sign up 10 or more schools for the pilot project, and has begun to reach out to district superintendents.

Kentucky’s commissioner of education, Terry Holliday, said high school graduation requirements there had long been based on having students accumulate enough course credits to graduate.“This would reform that,” Dr. Holliday said. “We’ve been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach based on subject mastery — a system based around move-on-when-ready.”

The new system aims to provide students with a clear outline of what they need to study to succeed, said Phil Daro, a consultant based in Berkeley, Calif., who is a member of an advisory committee for the effort.

School systems like Singapore’s promise students that if they diligently study the material in their course syllabuses, they will do well on their examinations, Mr. Daro said. “In the U.S., by contrast, all is murky,” he said. “Students do not have a clear idea of where to apply their effort, and the system makes no coherent attempt to reward learning.”

The idea is to reduce the need for colleges to offer remedial courses. The plan calls for tests in the sophomore year that would be set at the level necessary to succeed in first-year college. Failure would alert students to the specific knowledge and skills they need to master in high school before seeking to enroll in college. The board exam could be retaken in the junior and senior year.

Presently, top students begin taking college-level courses, for credit, while they are still in high school.

States that participate in the pilot project on board examinations will pick up to five programs of instruction, with their accompanying tests, for use by the participating high schools. Those programs already approved by the national center include the College Board’s Advanced Placement, the International Baccalaureate Diploma, ACT’s QualityCore and the International General Certificate of Secondary Education programs offered both by Cambridge International and by Edexcel, part of Pearson Education.

A fast-track approach, which is focused on “at risk” students, is already in place at 71 North Carolina high schools, and is spreading in New York, California and Texas.

The Times asked some others to weigh in on the idea as well:

Bard College President Leon Botstein says the approach is long overdue but warns, "whatever system is put in place must stress teaching, not new tests. Relying on American-style standardized tests that reduce subject matter to fill-in-the-blank responses has not worked. If the intent of the initiative is to emulate European models, then the tests have to measure reasoning skills in mathematics, science and writing."

In Kentucky, Senate Bill 1 mandates...a set of substantially American-style standardized multiple choice tests.

MATCH Charter Public School founder Michael Goldstein of Boston opines that "16-year-olds are being offered a trade. Instead of $12,000 per year being spent on them in high school, the state is offering to spend perhaps $2,000 per year on them in community college — thereby subsidizing all the kids who don’t choose this option."

NCEE's Marc Tucker says that because each of the lower division programs (grades 9-10) will be set to a standard of “ready for open admissions two- or four-year college without remediation,” students will know that when they succeed on the lower division exams, they have choices: they can go directly to an open admissions higher education institution without having to take remedial courses, or they can stay in high school and continue in one of the upper division board examination programs (i.e., a series of A.P. classes).

Sandra Stotsky a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas says, "The Gates Foundation, which has abandoned its unsuccessful small high school initiative, and the National Center on Education and the Economy, which once supported the unsuccessful school-to-work initiative, have come up with another idea that makes no sense, whether for the potential high school dropout at the age of 16, for the student who can barely pass Algebra I by grade 10, or for the student who has passed Algebra II by the end of grade 10."

New York schools Chancellor Rudy Crew says, "At the end of the day this is about connecting students to their post-secondary and career dreams. As a nation, we need to create a system of schools whose architecture is no longer aimed at a traditional high school diploma, but focused on multiple exits that can lead down career, military, vocational or collegiate paths. In a globally-connected century, this is what a good education means."

Kenneth J. Bernsteinn, a teacher of AP government at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Md. opines, "Going to college early is nothing new. My mother graduated from Hunter College High School at 14, Cornell at 18 and Columbia Law at 21, which is perhaps why she only let me skip one grade — she wanted to let me grow up."

Education Trust VP Amy Wilkins says,"Such exams are not a panacea for our nation’s high schools or the achievement gaps that plague them. But well-designed — and well-utilized — end-of-course assessments can help fill the urgent need for good information about where we should be aiming all students and how close we are to getting there."

Prichard Wins $600,000 Gates Grant for Math Pilot

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced 15 grants totaling more than $19.5 million to support the development and testing of prototype classroom assessments and instructional tools in math and literacy to help educators better prepare all students for success beyond high school. The investments are part of the foundation’s support of the effort to build a coherent system of consistent college- and career-ready standards, aligned assessments, and teaching tools to strengthen teacher effectiveness and dramatically improve student achievement.

This from the Prichard Committee press release:

Prichard Committee to Pilot

New Teaching and Testing Resources for Math

Grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will help fund work

Teachers in six Kentucky school districts will be among the first in the nation to explore new ways to teach mathematics under a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence. The ninth and tenth grade teachers will work with new teaching and testing resources that have been developed by national experts to accelerate students' mastery of mathematics.

"We’re tremendously excited by this opportunity," said Robert F. Sexton, executive director of the Prichard Committee. "The new materials will help schools implement Kentucky's brand new mathematics standards, tracking each student's level of understanding and developing teaching methods that keep all students moving forward. It's an early look at the kind of professional development all Kentucky teachers will need."

The new approach—known as "assessment for learning" or "formative assessment"—fits well with legislation passed by the 2009 General Assembly requiring that Kentucky adopt new mathematics standards and develop a new testing approach. The "assessment for learning" approach emphasizes classroom-level activities that provide teachers with better insight into student learning needs. The emphasis is on quickly helping teachers adjust their teaching to help all students reach high standards of learning.

During intensive professional development sessions, the participating teachers will work with classroom "performance events" that provide immediate information on what part of a topic students already understand and what still needs work. In turn, that will allow teachers to adjust instruction so that all students ultimately master the mathematics being taught.

"Each performance event will allow teachers to shape future learning," said Ann Shannon, a mathematics researcher with a leading role in the project. "We'll be working on how teachers can quickly address student difficulties, pose follow-up questions that deepen understanding, and ensure that all students end up with a strong grasp of the key concepts they need to master."

The pilot testing in Kentucky is part of a larger nationwide effort by the Gates Foundation to support the development and testing of prototype math and literacy classroom assessments and instructional tools to help educators better prepare all students for life beyond high school.
The Prichard Committee has selected the following high schools to participate in the project:

• Boone County, Conner, Cooper, and Ryle high schools, Boone County
• Apollo, Beacon, and Daviess County high schools, Daviess County
• Doss and Iroquois high schools, Jefferson County
• East Jessamine and West Jessamine high schools in Jessamine County
• Dixie, Scott, and Simon Kenton high schools in Kenton County
• Warren Central and Warren East high schools in Warren County
• Eighth-grade mathematics teachers in Daviess County also have been invited to participate in the work.

Speaking of the recipients,

"These states have shown great leadership and commitment, working together to develop consistent, clear college- and career-ready standards," said Vicki L. Phillips, Director of Education, College-Ready, at the foundation. "Providing teachers with the resources and support they need to teach creatively and effectively is the next step. Innovative and well-designed classroom assessments will provide vital feedback to help teachers target their instruction and prepare all students for success beyond high school."

The recipients:

Development of New Assessments and Instructional Tools

The Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at the University of California Los Angeles
$4.3 million over three years

Media Contact:
Ron Dietel
310.794.9168
To create a new architecture for aligning college- and career-ready standards with instruction and assessment; to design and validate formative assessments of literacy and mathematics standards for secondary students; to design and pilot computer-based scoring of complex, student responses; and to conduct targeted, international benchmarking studies.

Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin
1.2 million over two years

Media Contact:
Lee Clippard
512.471.3285
To refine and evaluate its Academic Youth Development program, a summer bridge program to support the successful transition of students into Algebra 1. Concepts will be integrated into a year-round curriculum to assist teachers in engaging students in learning complex math skills. Materials will be tested and disseminated through an open access on-line resource.

Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley
$3.6 million over two years

Media Contact:
Steve Cohen
510.642.0137
To help define high standards; help construct mathematics courses aimed at meeting those standards; and produce and field test high-quality formative and summative assessments that reflect ambitious, but attainable, math goals for all students.

Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley
$3 million over three years

Media Contact:
Janet Noe
510.642.2226
To extend the Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading model to grades 6-8. This approach, currently for grades 2-5, combines science and literacy content-helping students develop the inquiry skills needed to make sense of the physical world while building fundamental literacy skills. The extension will be piloted in San Francisco and then tested nationwide.

Math Solutions
$2.2 million over three years

Media Contact:
Audrey Mann Cronin
914.861.2009
To fund the development of a Web-based diagnostic tool that will help middle school teachers assess students' computational and problem-solving skills.

The Education Trust, Inc.
$2.2 million over two years

Media Contact:
Stephanie Germeraad
202.293.1217 ext.354
To develop and bring to scale a set of open-access literacy courses for grades 6-8 designed to teach students the reading and writing skills they need to be adequately prepared for college.

Research, Testing, and Validation of

College-Ready Assessments

The Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at the University of California Los Angeles
$576,191 for one year

Media Contact:
Ron Dietel
310.794.9168
To develop a conceptual platform for college readiness, design a process to validate a common core of standards, and refine and test assessments against international benchmarks.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (N.C.)
$143,973 for one year

Media Contact:
Kathleen Johansen
980.343.0472
To pilot math assessments and instructional tools under development by the math design collaborative. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) serves 133,600 students in 176 schools throughout the cities and towns of Mecklenburg County, N.C. CMS schools are committed to using data for continuous improvement to guarantee student success.

Cristo Rey Network
$149,733 for one year

Media Contact:
Rob Birdsell
312.784.7202
To pilot math assessments and instructional tools under development by the math design collaborative. The Cristo Rey Network is comprised of 24 high schools across the country that provide quality, Catholic, college preparatory education to urban young people.

Denver School of Science and Technology
$36,018 for one year

Media Contact:
Sarah Skeen
303.524.6339
To pilot math assessments and instructional tools under development by the math design collaborative. The Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) is a free, open- enrollment public school serving middle and high school students.

Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC)
$777,439 for one year

Media Contact:
Charis McGaughy
541.346.6248
To identify and validate a priority set of clearer, higher standards that define a path to college readiness that can guide instruction and measures of student progress. Standards will be piloted with a set of state and district partners.

Fund for Public Schools (New York City)
$455,394 for one year

Media Contact:
Sunny Larson
212.374.5250
To pilot math assessments and instructional tools under development by the math design collaborative. Fund for Public Schools is dedicated to improving New York City's Public Schools. New York City is the largest system of schools in the United States, comprising 1,600 schools and 80,000 teachers serving 1.1 million students. The district will pilot the math assessments in select schools.

Hamilton County Department of Education (Tenn.)
$74,800 for one year

Media Contact:
Danielle Clark
423.209.8615
To pilot math assessments and instructional tools under development by the math design collaborative. Hamilton County Department of Education (HCDE) is a diverse school system of 41,598 students in 78 schools. Fifty-six percent of district students qualify for free or reduced price lunch.

National Council of La Raza
$322,103 for one year

Media Contact:
Jacqueline Stewart
202.776.1772
To pilot math assessments and instructional tools under development by the math design collaborative. The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) supports a network of small, community-based charter and alternative schools serving underserved Latino and English-language-learner students in 16 states and the District of Columbia. The pilot will take place in 12 NCLR-affiliated schools across the country.

The Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence (Kentucky)
$599,016 for one year

Media Contact:
Cindy Heine
859.233.9849 ext. 222
To pilot math assessments and instructional tools under development by the math design collaborative in high schools. The Prichard Committee is a non-partisan, not-for-profit group created in 1983 to advocate for improved education for Kentucky citizens at all levels. Six districts will participate in the pilot: Boone, Daviess, Jefferson, Jessamine, Kenton, and Warren Counties.

Bill Gates: The 21st Century Andrew Carnegie

In 1905, Andrew Carnegie, then the richest man in the world, directed his extensive philanthropy to the problems of American education and endowed The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress, the Carnegie Foundation's mission was and is "to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education." The Foundation's work grew to include involvement in education from kindergarten through graduate and professional schools and he founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and established many libraries.

The foundation's influential policy reports addressed quality, access and assessment; the development of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA); publication of The Flexner Report, which revolutionized medical education; creation of the Carnegie Unit; founding of the Educational Testing Service; and establishment of one of the leading research tools for educational researchers, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The Carnegie Foundation was also a leader in the effort to provide federal aid for higher education, and has contributed to a major body of work on higher education teaching and scholarship.

One might disagree with any particular aspect of Carnegie's efforts toward improving schools, but it's hard to doubt his commitment or impact. Carnegie was one of America's industrial aristocrats, who rose on his merits and the success of his industry. His thoughts on American education soon became education policy.

Since 2000, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (with a major boost from best-buddy Warren Buffett) has invested nearly $4 billion to improve high schools and provide college scholarships to over 16,000 students in an effort to ensure greater opportunity for Americans through public education.

The particulars of that effort, however, have been a hot topic of debate. Some claim the Gates program is an anti-union, pro-testing, pro-charter school ideology masquerading as more support for teachers. Others believe the reforms promoted by Gates are just what the doctor ordered.

Once again, American industrialists - this time from the technology and financial sectors - are advancing business-based principles as cures for what ails US schools.

If the match between the Gateses policies and those of the Obama administration is as strong as it appears, it is a powerful a signal of things to come. Given that Gates will make investments approximating those of the federal government, it's hard to discount their impact.

In November, Melinda Gates, co-chair of the foundation, told the Washington Post the foundation had discovered that innovation takes long-term commitment because school systems are often "entrenched" in their ways and teachers "siloed in their classrooms." The foundation plans to spend its resources over the century.

"We have been in this work for almost a decade" she said. "We've learned a lot about what works. . . . Let's focus on the thing that actually matters the most, which is the teacher."

What is the Gates plan? How does it connect to the federal government's road map?

Over at Bridging Differences, Diane Ravitch fired a shot across Arne Duncan's bow in "Conflicts of Interest and the Race to the Top":

It is not surprising that the Race to the Top has generated enormous buzz among educators since it dangles $4.3 billion to states that do what the U.S. Department of Education wants them to do. Now President Obama has announced that he is so pleased with the response to the Race that he intends to add another $1.3 billion in prize money to the competition.

Since this is an administration that claims to be about results, it is surprising, is it not, that they are increasing the prize money in the absence of any evidence that the competition is on the right track?

No, it is not surprising because the competition is in the hands of people who arrived in Washington with an ideology. They are not pragmatists. There is a nexus of power, and it begins with the Gates Foundation, which has a lock on decisionmaking at the Department of Education. If this election had been held five years ago, the department would be insisting on small schools, but because Gates has already tried and discarded that approach, the department is promoting the new Gates remedies: charter schools, privatization, and evaluating teachers by student test scores.

As we...know, personnel is policy. Secretary Duncan put Jim Shelton, a Gates Foundation executive, in charge of the department's half-billion-dollar Innovation Fund. And he selected Joanne Weiss to run the Race to the Top competition. Weiss was chief executive officer of the NewSchools Venture Fund, whose primary purpose is to launch charter school networks. I do not know Weiss, and I assume she is an upstanding citizen; but to my knowledge, she has never been an education practitioner or scholar or policymaker. She is an education entrepreneur, who has sold goods and services to the schools, and who most importantly led an organization dedicated to creating privately managed schools that operate with public money. So, why should it be surprising that the Race to the Top reflects the priorities of the NewSchools Venture Fund (charter schools) and of the Gates Foundation (teacher evaluations by test scores?

Ravitch, who worked for President George H W Bush, goes on to complain that certain forces have suppressed "critical discussions of charter schools" citing an Education Sector (think tank)report whose conclusion failed to match think tank expectations and was altered to be more sympathetic. I'm shocked. Shocked.

“The extraordinary demands of educating disadvantaged students to higher standards, the challenges of attracting the talent required to do that work, the burden of finding and financing facilities, and often aggressive opposition from the traditional public education system have made the trifecta of scale, quality, and financial sustainability hard to hit,” concludes the report, “Growing Pains: Scaling Up the Nation’s Best Charter Schools.”

As hard-hitting as the findings seem to be, the report is at the center of a controversy over whether the final text—released by the Washington think tank on Nov. 24—was watered down.

The main author, Education Sector co-founder Thomas Toch, asked to have his name removed from the final product. It “didn’t fully reflect my sense of the current conditions or future prospects for CMOs,” he said in an interview. “Charter schools are an important addition to the public education landscape and the best CMOs have produced great results. ... But the CMO movement has created only a few hundred schools in a decade, and even with more funding it would be difficult for CMOs to expand much faster without compromising the quality of their schools.”

Marc Dean Millot, an education industry observer and publisher, posted a June draft of the report online and Toch discussed his research in a Commentary essay for Ed Week.

Ravitch predicts,

As hundreds and possibly thousands more charter schools open, we will see many financial and political scandals. We will see corrupt politicians and investors putting their hands into the cashbox. We will see corrupt deals where public school space is handed over to entrepreneurs who have made contributions to the politicians making the decisions. We will see many more charter operators pulling in $400,000-500,000 a year for their role, not as principals, but as "rainmakers" who build warm relationships with politicians and investors.

This hearkens back to the student loan and Reading First scandals of the George W Bush administration, where the needs of vendors were placed above the needs of students. As Millot reminds us,

A Secretary [of Education] inclined towards a particular education reform solution, subordinate political appointees with a personal investment in the same solution, connected to organizations practicing that solution - organizations with incredibly thin files of reliable evidence consistently demonstrating an educationally significant contribution to improvements in student performance in the schools where they work today.

Obama has taken steps to reverse the student loan issues, but has seemingly ignored similar concerns over charters.

Seemingly acknowledging defeat, Ravitch concludes that when this all blows up in our faces and millions of public dollars end up in private pockets "we will look to the origins of the Race to the Top and to the interlocking group of foundations, politicians, and entrepreneurs who created it."

There is certainly cause for doubt about charters, writ large. In certain circumstances, particularly where large private donors are brought into play, high quality schools can be established for some students. The problem comes when one tried to replicate the model widely.
As much as I have always liked the idea of offloading burdensome state regulations that make it harder for schools to reach their goals, there is a troubling resegregation going on with charters and it may be a variation on an historical theme; private schools for some and public schools for the rest.

But there is little doubt about the Gates foundation's investment.

The foundation boasts an asset trust endowment of $34.17 billion and employs a hefty 786 individuals. Total grant commitments since inception come to $21.08 billion. During 2008, total grant payments came to $2.8 billion.

Compare that to the federal government's historic high water mark of $4.35 billion in grant funds under Race to the Top and it's not hard to see that Gates is a real player.


It is easy, and perhaps wise, to view large corporate giants suspiciously. The press, including bloggers, ought to be suspicious and ask tough questions as a way of protecting the public's right to know about what's going on behind the scenes.

But another way to look at the Gates Foundation is as American as apple pie.

Gates: A high school computer genius; with a 1590 SAT score; wrote his school's scheduling program (and placed himself into classes with his favorite females); Harvard dropout; starts a business writing computer code (including PC-DOS for IBM for $50,000, but he maintained the copyright and developed MS-DOS for his company Micro-soft) which goes into a bizzilion PCs and Microsoft grows into one of the world's largest businesses and Gates is listed by Forbes as the world's richest man from 1993 - 2007.

That the world's richest man - be it Carnegie or Gates - should choose American schools to be the benefactors of his wisdom and enterprise is a great thing.

The Gates Foundation has played an important role in Kentucky by helping the state with the burdensome filling of its $200 million Race to the Top application, which awaits approval. The foundation is deeply involved in the creation of national standards as well. Last week Kentucky became the first state in the nation to adopt those standards. Expect more Kentucky connections.

So far, Gates has invested:

• $10 million to double KIPP charter schools in Houston
• funded a charter project in Minnesota
• five-year "Get Schooled" campaign, which began this week with a documentary and will integrate a message against dropping out into popular programming on channels such as Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central.
• five-year, $500 million initiative to look at effective teaching methods, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will videotape 4,000 educators in selected U.S. school districts and analyze teacher practices against student performance
• Governor Beshear's TEK task force is looking at the Gates Foundation/SREB college and career readiness initiative,

The Gates Foundation's describes its Education Strategy thusly:

We focus on improving education so that all young people have the opportunity to reach their full potential. We are working to ensure that a high school education results in college-readiness and that a postsecondary education results in a degree or certificate with value in the workplace.

In this month's Kappan, Vicki Phillips and Carina Wong write about the Gates Foundation's strategy of partnering with the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors
Association in support of common core standards, instruction, and (yes....it's coming) assessment. The premise it that "fewer, clearer, higher standards will point the United States in the right direction for developing an education system that prepares high school graduates who are college-ready."

After disclaiming that they "do not come to the issues as “think tank experts” who are clueless as to what it’s really like on the ground in schools, Phillips and Wong describe the typical problems with school reform from the classroom perspective, "There were too many pieces to change at the same time, and never enough money and a lack of political stamina at all levels." Infusions of money and stronger political coalitions might solve that problem but only if it results in better teaching.

The Gates Foundation’s overall strategy considers high-quality assessments a critical resource for teacher effectiveness and teachers’ capacities to prepare students for college-level work. Bill Gates has said emphatically that teachers deserve to have access to the tools and supports they need every time they step into the classroom. “Doctors aren’t left alone in their offices to try to design and test new medicines,” he told an education forum in November 2008. “They’re supported by a huge medical
research industry. Teachers need the same kind of support.”

That would be new.

Instead of strategies that constrict teaching, the partners working with Gates are developing tools that will show teachers what is possible when they use fewer, clearer, and higher standards.

• Common Core of Standards are broadly written
• Gates partners are analyzing the knowledge and skills underneath them
• Adding next-generation assessments to that base
• Assessments can be used as single modules or linked together to make a full course
• They will work in traditional or in more proficiency-based classrooms
• Create a technology-based program to map specific math and cognitive skills that can guide assessment and provide a clear target for teachers as they decide what students need to be college ready.
• Teachers and state assessment systems will be able to draw from a bank of assessments — formative and summative — that set performance targets
• rubrics and examples of student work will be included
• Once the research is completed on field trials, the assessments will be universally available and will provide an assessment blueprint for math that could be an alternative to current state assessments.
• 20 instructional packages are being developed by Gates partner organization, the Shell Centre at the University of Nottingham in Great Britain under the aegis of the University of California Berkeley
• Each unit will be anchored on a task or a set of tasks and suggest interventions that address difficulties students may be having, follow-up questions, and how teachers can manage classroom discussions.
• Developing summative end of-course tests in order to establish college-ready expectations
• During 2010, the college-ready work will continue to focus on developing and validating instructional tools including webbased thechnologies that will provide immediate analysis of student performance
• Within four years, we hope to be implementing the instructional and student support tools in 10 states and 30 school districts, collaborating with several national policy networks to bring the tools to scale
• All tools will be "open access"
• Gates will facilitate the use of the college-ready standards in admission policies of university systems in selected states.

The technical partner for the general assessment work is the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at the University of California Los Angeles. CRESST is mapping two frameworks for states:

• One is the content and skills in the Common Core of Standards,
• the other is the core cognitive skills (for example, problem solving, reasoning, collaboration) that can be layered on the content maps.
• CRESST is developing a third framework that will link these two frameworks into an assessment system.

CRESST also will validate the assessments being developed by the math and literacy teams.

The Gates Foundation acknowledges certain political risks in setting its ambitious agenda on the table including an open access system of college-ready standards, aligned assessments, and teaching tools. But with the current political harmony between Gates and the Obama administration and fresh financial support for state actions on core standards and new assessment systems, Gates believes that taking risks and being ambitious is the right approach.

For states like Kentucky, that are looking to revive enthusiasm for public schools and keep school reform on track following Senate Bill 1, Gates may appear to be a godsend.

Piloting Mathematics Units

The Shell Centre has developed two kinds of math units for teachers in grades 8 to 11: units that develop students’ conceptual understanding of the content and units that apply previously learned content to problem solving. Both types:

• Give students the opportunity to learn the Common Core of Standards;
• Use discussion, team work, and other nonlecture modes of learning;
• Suggest next steps for instruction based on student performance;
• Help teachers identify common misconceptions and mistakes by students and suggest ways to address them;
• Use different tools, such as individual mini white boards or poster boards, to foster discussion among students; and
• Include formative assessments and end-of course assessments for each grade level.

Depending on the outcome of the field trials, the work may be extended to grades 6 to 12.

All of this will require investments in strong professional development for teachers as they adapt to this new system.

To dramatically increase the number of students who are college ready, we will need more “responsive” systems. Schools that are “high demand, high support” develop both academic preparedness and academic tenacity. Responsive districts and states allow such school environments to flourish and encourage innovation. What if the schedule in high schools offered choices such as on college campuses, for example — with day, night, and weekend options or field studies online and abroad?

More from the Gates Foundation:

Promoting Effective Teaching
Teachers matter most when it comes to student achievement. Read more about the role of effective teaching in preparing students for college success.

Fact Sheets

• Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching
• Measures of Effective Teaching

Research & Reports

• Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job
• The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness
• Best Practices for Teacher Effectiveness

Related Articles

• "Gates Foundation Focuses on Teacher Quality"
  (Associated Press)
• "Multi-City Study Eyes Best Gauges of Good Teaching"
  (Education Week)
• "Hillsborough School Board Accepts $100M Gates Grant"
  (Tampa Tribune)
• "Memphis City Schools to Sign Pact for $90 Million from Gates Foundation"
  (Memphis Commercial Appeal)
• "Gates Foundation Awards $40 Million to City Schools"
  (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Common Core State Standards

Governors and state education commissioners are developing a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. These standards are research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, and aligned with college and work expectations.

• College and Career Readiness Standards for Reading, Writing, and Speaking and Listening
  (PDF, 3.14MB, 49 pages)
• Evidence for Individual Reading, Writing, and Speaking and Listening Standards
  (PDF, 1.25MB, 57 pages)
• Evidence for Mathematics Standards
  (PDF, 484KB, 10 pages)
• College and Career Readiness Standards for Mathematics
  (PDF, 892KB, 23 pages)
• Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class Education
  (PDF, 2.8MB, 52 pages)
• More information is available at the Common Core State Standards web site.

Postsecondary Success Strategy

In an era when workers can be located anywhere on the globe, a college degree or training beyond high school is required for the best-paying jobs. Read more about how the foundation is trying to increase college graduation rates among low-income students.

Background and Fact Sheets

• Financial Aid
  (PDF, 98KB, 4 pages)
• Technology
  (PDF, 46KB, 3 pages)
• Improving Postsecondary Success
  (PDF, 69KB, 6 pages)
• Postsecondary Success Fact Sheet
  (PDF, 776KB, 2 pages)

Recent Reports

• Re-imagining Community Colleges in the 21st Century: A Student-Centered Approach to Higher Education
  (PDF, 622KB, 64 pages)
• Strong Students, Strong Workers: Models for Student Success through Workforce Development and Community College Partnerships
  (PDF, 2.38MB, 48 pages)
• Training Tomorrow's Workforce: Community College and Apprenticeship as Collaborative Routes to Rewarding Careers
  (PDF, 442KB, 48 pages)
• With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them: Myths and Realities About Why So Many Students Fail to Finish College
  (PDF, 1.4 MB, 52 pages)

Gates/Buffet photo by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair.