Melinda Gates on the Importance of Evaluations in Shaping Effective Teachers

This from PBS:

Since 1994, the philanthropic [Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] has spent $6 billion on U.S. That has placed the foundation at the center of many debates in education, including smaller schools, testing and teacher evaluation.

Melinda Gates, thanks so much for joining us.

MELINDA GATES, co-founder, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Thanks for having me.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So we just had the 10th national conversation American Graduate teacher town hall. Teachers have been speaking around the country in different forms. What are you hearing?

MELINDA GATES: I'm hearing that they are working under very difficult circumstances, that with the state budgets going down, they're seeing a lot of kids who are at risk in the school system. Their jobs are getting harder.

We know they're working on average about 10 hours and 40 minutes a day. And yet I'm also hearing from them, we want our kids to succeed, and so there have to be structural changes that allow us to do our jobs.

HARI SREENIVASAN: So, what's the foundation's central premise when you're trying to make or enable these structural changes to happen?

MELINDA GATES: Well, we know from good research that the fundamental thing that makes a difference in the classroom is an effective teacher. An effective teacher in front of a student, that student will make three times the gains in a school year that another student will make.

Watch Melinda Gates on the Importance of Evaluations in Teaching on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

And so what the foundation feels our job is to do is to make sure we create a system where we can have an effective teacher in every single classroom across the United States.

HARI SREENIVASAN: We've heard this idea that it takes a village to raise a child. What about the principals, what about the parents, what about all the other factors that contribute to whether a kid or a child does well or not?

MELINDA GATES: There are a huge number of factors of whether a child succeeds in that school building. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the teacher. And that doesn't mean just the teacher teaching the subject matter. As you heard from a lot of the teachers in the town hall, they build these strong relationship with the kids.

And it's that relationship they have. But we're hearing that what teachers don't have today are really three things. One is, they're saying we don't know what we have to teach by the end of the year. So the foundation has been involved in trying to create a core curriculum that 48 states have signed up to say, what are the core subjects and things kids need to learn at every grade level?

Number two, they need great curriculum support, so they can go and grab different modules, and they are flexible modules that help them teach to that core curriculum, though. And then the third thing they need is great professional development. We do not have an evaluation system today in the American school system that says, how do we know we have an effective teacher, and what professional development needs to be in place to support those teachers so they can become the most effective teacher when they're teaching?

HARI SREENIVASAN: One of the measurements in certain school districts around the country has been to tie teacher performance or teacher evaluations to student test performance.

And a lot of teachers push back and say, hey, there's a lot of other reasons that a student does well or doesn't do well. Why should it reflect solely on me?

MELINDA GATES: One of the things that the foundation is really trying to get the message out about is that it's not just the test. The test is just one measure of saying, is the child learning what they need to learn at grade level? That needs to be one component of an evaluation.

But there are other components. The most effective evaluation systems have pure observations, where peers come in who are trained to know what effective teaching is. They come in and evaluate the teacher. And then they coach and they give instruction on teaching.

Another key component is the principal observation, not just coming in with four little check boxes once a year and then never having the coaching conversation, but the principal coming in knowing what great teaching looks like , really being able to evaluate the teacher and then sitting down and having an honest conversation with the teacher: These are the areas where you're doing well. These are the areas you need to do better.

Another piece of the evaluation system can be also student feedback. It turns out students do know whether they have a good teacher in front of a classroom or not. And their feedback is also indicative of whether they're going to learn the material by the end of the year.

HARI SREENIVASAN: A lot of the teachers that are very frustrated say at this point, I'm teaching to the test.

Are we in an over-tested society?

MELINDA GATES: You have to kind of go state by state, because there are different tests in different states.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Sure.

MELINDA GATES: But I think one thing that has happened is there's maybe so much testing today without saying, are we testing against the core important things?

And so one of the things that we have learned, for instance, that is really important is that kids need to learn, for instance, how to read a nonfiction passage and really take that apart and be able to know what the critical pieces are. Most state tests don't even test against that.

So, one of the things we've done with this Common Core curriculum is to say, what is it kids really need to know? And then these 48 states signed up to this core curriculum. And now we can lots of service providers come in and create curriculum around things that actually matter, not some thing that is on the margin that you don't need to test against that doesn't really matter.

HARI SREENIVASAN: A few years ago, the foundation was very focused on smaller schools. And now you're very focused on -- it seems to be teacher evaluation. Why the switch?

MELINDA GATES: Well, it's not really a switch. It's -- honestly, it's an evolution.

So, where we started in small schools, which were these small learning environments, yes, those do make a difference. But what we learned from that was the fundamental thing that made the difference was the teacher, that relationship with the teacher at the end of the day and that teacher's teaching.

So, saying, okay, an effective teacher makes a difference, we then said how do you know when you have one? Where's the research that shows what an effective teacher is? We feel like we know intuitively if we had a great teacher. There was no great research around that. So, we actually went out and did the research, 3,000 teachers in six different school districts, to prove out, what does effective teaching look like?

And now the piece we're involved in saying, okay, how do you get a whole system that has an evaluation system that helps develop teachers into these super-effective teachers?

HARI SREENIVASAN: How do you view your responsibility? Just by the fact that the amount of money that you're contributing to this conversation, do you feel like you have a disproportionate voice?

MELINDA GATES: Sometimes, people look at something like a foundation or our foundation and say, my gosh, they have huge resources.

And the truth is, when you look at the scale of the problems we're going against, the state of California spends slightly under $30 billion a year educating their kids. So our entire foundation is $30 billion. So we could spend -- spend our money all in one year just in the state of California.

But we don't do that. What a foundation has to be is to be a catalytic wedge. It can take innovations and show where they work. It can measure them. It can show what doesn't work and take the problems apart. And it's ultimately for governments to scale up.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Finally, what is working and what can scale up?

MELINDA GATES: Well, I think two things are working.

If you look back a decade ago, when we started into this work, there wasn't even a conversation across the nation about the fact that our schools were broken, fundamentally broken. And I think that dialogue has changed. I think the American public has woken up to the fact now that schools are broken. We're not serving our kids well. They're not being educated for the -- for technology society.

We're being outcompeted by other nations. So I think that has gone well. But the other thing that I think is going really well is people are starting to say, we really do need an effective teacher. And we have districts across the country, Memphis, Denver, Pittsburgh, Tampa, L.A., where they are saying, okay, we're really going to go for teacher evaluation. We're really going to figure out how to make effective teaching happen. And we're going to invest in that. And we're going to keep doing it until we get it right. And we're going to develop our teachers.

And I think we are just on the verge of that happening. I think there will be some pain points along the way. I don't think this work is easy. But I think we're starting to see that bow wave change. And it's going to take a few more years to really see, okay, that's the path, and then lots of districts are on -- are doing it. But I think we're on the cusp of that.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Melinda Gates, thanks so much for your time.

MELINDA GATES: Thanks, Hari.