Champions of ‘Small Schools’ Struggle in the Wake of Gates Foundation’s Pullout

Rick Lear was chatting with a newly appointed deputy school superintendent a few years ago about the nonprofit Small Schools Project when the school leader stopped him short.

“He laughed and said, ‘That looks like an idea that’s come and gone,’” recalls Mr. Lear, who was then the group’s director.

That perception stems, in part, from the fact that the small-schools cause was once the darling of America’s largest philanthropy—until it wasn’t.

When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation decided in 2000 to focus on fighting the country’s school-dropout crisis, it made small high schools a key part of its strategy.

Eight years and hundreds of millions later, the foundation said it would stop putting money toward creating new small schools. In a 2008 speech, Bill Gates described the results of its work as “disappointing.”

But small schools hardly seem to fit neatly into the mold of “philanthropic failure.” New research suggests that some small schools created with help from Gates are outperforming large schools on some key measures:

A Gates-financed study of New York City schools released in January by the research firm MDRC, for example, found that 67.9 percent of students at small schools graduated on time, compared with 59.3 percent of students who went to larger schools.

Such findings are leading some education officials and others experts to wonder if Gates pulled the plug too soon.

For some, the experience at Gates shows how the foundation world’s short-term horizons may not suit the huge, hard-to-assess social problems that foundations seek to solve.

Philanthropies often shift strategy. Gates stuck with its strategy to develop small schools longer than many donors stay with an approach, say nonprofit leaders, and the foundation was clear about its new direction, which it felt could have a far bigger impact on education.

Adam Tucker, a senior program officer at Gates, says the fund moved away from small schools because it zeroed in on the goal of helping U.S. schools graduate 80 percent of students by the year 2025.

“A small-schools-alone strategy didn’t put us on a trajectory to meet those targets,” he says. “We made a strategic decision in 2008 to focus less on the size of the school or the governance structure and more on what actually goes on in classrooms.”

But Gates’s experience with small schools also suggests how difficult it can be for a big, prominent grant maker to change its approach without causing unintended consequences.

Perhaps more damaging than the loss of money was the resulting public perception that small schools had failed, say education officials. Some groups say they had trouble attracting donors in the first years after Gates’s departure, and many are operating with much smaller budgets.

“As they withdrew, people took it as a loss of confidence,” says Mr. Lear, who is now senior director of school design and implementation at the nonprofit New Tech Network. “They tried to soften that. Generally what they said was that the work hasn’t yielded the results we hoped for. Well, fair enough. But I would say that if they had waited two or three years, you might have seen those results.”

Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University, says that small schools aren’t a silver bullet and that some of them work better than others. But she believes smaller schools can help foster learning environments that lead to improved graduation rates and says the Gates foundation missed the nuances in the early results of its support for such programs. She says that creating new schools from scratch, for example, in some cases offered positive returns, while simply breaking up existing schools proved more challenging.

“The Gates investments in small schools in this country were in many ways quite successful,” she says. “Had they had the capacity to understand the data that was coming in and the data that also existed beyond their own research team, they might have been able to fine-tune their strategy.”

But Mr. Tucker of Gates says the foundation didn’t let the bad overshadow the good as it revised its strategy: “We know that there are going to be success stories and stories of struggle.” Focusing on small schools, he says, just didn’t offer the opportunity for “scalable, sustainable impact.”

Life After Gates

While the Gates departure may have dampened the small-schools movement, individual nonprofits that advanced small schools are for the most part still plugging away, if not all at the same pace as before.

EdVisions, a Minnesota nonprofit, didn’t exist before the Gates support. Tom Vander Ark, who was the foundation’s director of education until 2006, visited a school in Henderson, Minn., in 2000 and liked its personalized approach to learning so much that the foundation gave its leaders $10-million to reproduce that model in 50 schools.

They did, creating EdVisions and introducing the idea to a total of 90 schools.

Big Picture Learning used Gates grants to take its approach, which emphasizes personalized learning and practical experience, to more than 50 schools. With Gates money, the organization’s budget grew from about $2-million to $5.5-million. Now it’s down to about $4-million, which comes from other donors and fees that schools pay.

The North Carolina New Schools Project, meanwhile, is bigger than it was during the Gates years. Its leader, Tony Habit, says that its success is due to finding ways to charge schools for services and to win gifts from other private donors. The organization, which was started with Gates money, now has an annual budget of $10-million; about 5 percent comes from Gates.

By contrast, Employers for Education Excellence, a program of the Oregon Business Council that received $28-million from Gates and the Meyer Memorial Trust, no longer has employees who work solely on the small-schools effort.

Winding Down

Gates did not give up on the small-schools strategy overnight. The decision came after a six-months-plus review of its education work following the departure of Mr. Vander Ark and his replacement by Vicki Phillips, who continues to lead Gates’s education grant making, says Mr. Tucker.

The foundation gave nonprofits up to two years’ notice that their grants would be ending. Some groups received help from consultants to figure out how to charge schools for work once supported by Gates.

Dennis Littky, co-founder of Big Picture Learning, says such fees work in some cases but not all. He says some poorer school districts simply can’t afford the coaching and curriculum help offered by Big Picture.

He also wonders if Gates could do more to ensure the long-term success of the organizations it once embraced. Principals and superintendents come and go constantly, and Big Picture Learning must keep up its coaching if the model is to succeed. He says small grants that would occasionally bring together leaders from the schools in Big Picture’s network would go a long way.

“Gates is the kind of foundation that could change their priorities but could also keep funding in a much smaller way the people who they invested a lot in,” says Mr. Littky. “They could keep their investments going.”

Not ‘One Size Fits All’

Mr. Tucker, meanwhile, says Gates was responsive to some similar requests in the short term. Some groups in New York, for example, were given money to keep meeting with one another for a time and sharing lessons from their work.

But, he says, the foundation’s strategy isn’t about individual grantees but about systemwide change. “Though we were cognizant that our move to no longer fund small-school development might prove to be a challenge for some folks, we invest in folks who are smart, who are strategic,” he says. “We had confidence they would have the organizational capacity to not just survive but thrive.”

For critics of wealthy donors’ role in education reform, Gates’s small-schools work is an example of how capricious and disruptive big philanthropy can be. Its new focus on teacher performance and evaluation, for example, will also lead to major disappointments, according to critics.

“Nothing works all the time for everybody and you can always find a reason to support or not support something,” says Jacqueline Ancess, co-director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching at Columbia University. She says there isn’t much evidence for the approaches Gates now supports.

She says donors take too much of a one-size-fits-all approach to improving the education system.

Mr. Tucker says the foundation is “taking seriously” the recent study that showed successes at small New York high schools. He says lessons from small schools provide the foundation with opportunities to shape its future work in education.

“We’re all doing the best we can to bring those learnings to bear in our current work,” he says. “No good strategy I’m aware of stays the same forever.”