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Gates Foundation satisfied
with new direction, goals
Donna Gordon Blankinship
Puget Sound Business Journal
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has the ideas —
and the money — to start a brand new education organization
specifically tailored to meet its goals, but the people who
run the foundation believe they can get more done acting as
venture capitalists of philanthropy.
"We want to be change makers not grants makers," explains
David Ferrero, director of evaluation and policy, education,
for the Gates Foundation. "We consider our grants to be
a form of social investment."
Ferrero says the organization is working both within "the
system" to transform it and at the margins to encourage
evolutionary shifts in the way education is delivered to American
young people. Some of these philosophies have altered during
the past three years, as the foundation learned from its mistakes
and completed more research on what the nation's education system
needed.
At first, the Gates Foundation was making education grants —
which from 2000 to 2008 are expected to total $1.9 billion,
or about 15 percent of the money granted by the entire Gates
Foundation — directly to schools across the educational
spectrum. They discovered a number of problems with that approach.
First, direct grants led to expectations they would be perpetuated
— instead of giving schools some tools and a hand up, they
were making them dependent on the foundation for funding. Second,
the project was so broad, it wasn't attacking the most needy
issues in education today.
"We pretty much overhauled our grant program within 12
months of launching it," Ferrero says, crediting the philosophy
of the organization, its youth and its leadership for the ability
to be so nimble.
Instead of giving grants to all kinds of schools, it now focuses
on transforming American high schools and increasing high school
graduation rates and participation in higher learning. "The
foundation has a goal of working on the most intractable problems,"
Ferrero says. "School reform has faltered at the high school
level."
And money is no longer given directly to schools. Before the
Gates Foundation begins working in a new city, it first seeks
out government and private partners who will spend the money
for them and perpetuate new programs by finding other funding.
The foundation does not fund capital projects, and there are
limits on technology spending. The grants are spent on enterprise,
professional development, public engagement and outreach, as
well as research, development and analysis.
The foundation has a couple of broad, very long-term goals,
and some smaller, more easily tracked objectives, says Ferrero,
who oversees all the education department's evaluations.
"The kinds of things that we are aiming for are pretty
long-term, basic structure of society type of goals. Ultimately,
what we'd like to see over the next 10 or 20 years is an increase
in the college-ready high school graduation rate over all socioeconomic
groups, races and ethnic groups," says Ferrero, a former
high school teacher who holds a doctorate in education and public
policy from Harvard. He notes that about 82 percent of Asian
Americans, 78 percent of whites, and about 55 percent of both
blacks and Latino Americans now graduate from high school.
There are no national figures for determining how many of these
graduates are "college ready," which the Gates Foundation
defines as someone who is ready to start and pass college level
classes or training without taking remedial courses.
Most of the foundation's education grants are now being channeled
into programs that provide seed money for creating alternative
high school models, including smaller schools and those that
take a different approach to delivering education. They are
also spending funds to attract, train and keep teachers.
Current Washington state programs center on these same issues,
although the foundation has not abandoned the initial projects
that no longer tie directly to its central goals. Over the next
three years, more than 100 Washington state schools will receive
funding to design and implement programs aimed at becoming what
the foundation calls high-achievement schools. The foundation
also gives grants to school districts to recognize high-achievement
districts.
Its Teacher Leadership Project helps teachers learn to integrate
technology into the curriculum in their classrooms. This program
is in the final year of a three-year project. The Gates Foundation
is in the process of evaluating its effectiveness during this
academic year.
The foundation's Washington State Achievers Program works with
16 high schools serving large populations of low-income students.
This program works both to help school improve achievement and
college-going rates and offers college and vocational training
scholarships.
Principal Grant Hosford of Lincoln High School in Tacoma admits
that the promise of scholarship money for his students was the
main attraction of joining the Washington State Achievers Program.
Within the past three years, students from his school have collected
about $2 million in college scholarships. But once the stakeholders
got involved in the process, which will result in an entirely
new program at Lincoln next fall, the excitement of change became
as infectious as scholarship dollars. Hosford is so enthusiastic
about the prospects for his school that he has postponed his
retirement for at least a year to implement it.
"It has the possible impact of so much good for so many
kids," Hosford says of the division of his 1700-student
mega-high school into seven, much smaller and more specialized
minischools.
He says the Gates grant is a dream come true for his school
and for its students, many of whom will be the first to graduate
from high school in their families and certainly the first to
have an opportunity to attend college.
The process has been a lot of work, but both the Gates Foundation
and the Tacoma School District have been supportive of the need
for more teacher planning time and help with all the planning
and paper work. In addition to scholarship money, Lincoln High
School will receive between $700,000 and $800,000 over five
years from the foundation to seed the project. The money cannot
support capital improvements, staff hiring or technology purchases.
Hosford said the school, which has been virtually unchanged
since opening in 1912, also has the good fortune of being next
in line in the district for a major remodel with taxpayer funding.
Measuring the success of these programs is difficult three years
into grant making, but Ferrero says the foundation is starting
to gather some data, which will eventually give a picture of
the outcomes of the programs. The foundation is about to begin
a 10-year study of a group of students from ninth grade into
adulthood, assessing how far they go in their education and
how much initial success they have in their careers.
The foundation also began tracking test scores at the schools
they are helping, both locally and nationally. "One nice
thing about working for the Gates Foundation: A lot of organizations
don't have adequate resources to do adequate evaluation. We
do," Ferrero says. They will be doing softer studies of
the school climate, such as satisfaction of teachers, students
and parents.
They are also watching the bigger picture of public policy and
government action. In addition to watching whether its programs
make a different, the Gates Foundation wants to know if improvement
is being made across the country in the areas they are watching.
It will attempt to find the answer through intensive studies
across the country.
"We won't be able to demonstrate that we caused the change,
we want to see the needle moving in the right direction. …
We're not so concerned with capturing the glory, we want to
see that the results are there," says Ferrero.
© 2003 American City Business Journals Inc. |
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