Gates Foundation Unveils New Approach Designed to Improve American Education

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reaffirmed its commitment to education at a conference here this month, announcing a revamped strategy for improving high-school education and a new effort to help more young adults earn a college degree or certificate.

The foundation will shift its secondary-school spending away from structural changes, such as the creation of small high schools, and toward improving teaching, including a push for national standards.

Gates will also spend several hundred million dollars over the next five years on its postsecondary effort, whose goal is to eventually double the number of low-income young people who complete a college degree or a certificate program by age 26.

The announcements follow an 18-month period during which the foundation, which gives $3.5-billion per year, explored diversifying its grant-making in the United States by moving into new areas such as health care and financial services for the poor.

In the end, the foundation decided to broaden its focus on education, says Hilary Pennington, the Gates official who is leading the postsecondary program.

Spending Same Sums

Although the new approaches drew plenty of attention, Gates is not changing its spending on education in any significant way. It expects to make grants worth about $3-billion over the next five years, slightly more on an annual basis than the $4-billion it has spent over the past eight years.

Bill and Melinda Gates unveiled their plans before a high-profile audience of about 100 people, including current and former governors, prominent business executives and school superintendents, and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

The new approach reflects the foundation’s view that the decade beginning in high school and ending at about age 26 is a make-or-break period for low-income youths.

In a speech at the conference, Melinda Gates, a co-chair of the foundation, pointed to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that more than half of all new jobs in the United States will require more than a high-school diploma.

“Completing high school ready for college is a key transition point in the path out of poverty,” Ms. Gates said. “A second transition is earning a postsecondary credential with value in the workplace. If young people fail to make the first transition, it’s unlikely they will make the second. If they fail to make the second, it’s likely they will be poor.”

The foundation, which is based here, hopes to hit its postsecondary goal by 2025. If successful, the new postsecondary program would result in an additional 250,000 people per year with some type of higher-education credential.

The new effort will initially focus on community colleges because of their relatively low tuition and open-admissions policies.

For years, the foundation’s strategy at the high-school level involved creating smaller high schools, but Bill Gates acknowledged in a speech at the conference that the overall results from that spending had been disappointing.

The foundation will now put more emphasis on improving teaching through new standards, curricula, and instructional tools, he said.

“It’s clear that you can’t dramatically increase college readiness by changing only the size and structure of a school,” Mr. Gates said. “The schools that made dramatic gains in achievement did the changes in design and also emphasized changes inside the classroom.”

The foundation will give $7-million to the Educational Testing Service, RAND Corporation, and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan for a study designed to develop better measures of teacher effectiveness.

Mr. Gates said the nation needs “fewer, clearer, higher” standards so that students graduate ready to go to college, and teachers have a common denominator against which they can be evaluated.

While the foundation’s plans were generally applauded by those who attended the conference, others later expressed wariness.

Alexander Russo, a former education adviser to two U.S. senators, says he supports national standards, but worries that the Gates foundation’s massive size might give it too much power to shape standards. “Gates-made national standards creep me out a little bit,” he wrote on his blog.

At the conference, Melinda Gates asked for “candid feedback” — and the foundation received plenty.

Some conference attendees wondered why the foundation wasn’t spending more on elementary and middle-school education, rather than college completion.

“We made a choice,” Mr. Gates said. He said the foundation was motivated in part by new approaches that are helping students make it through certificate programs and community colleges.

Ms. Pennington said the postsecondary grant making would begin with a small round of grants next month. Within a year, the foundation will select the eight to 10 states in which it will focus its work for the next three to five years. Grants will probably go to networks of institutions and organizations, rather than to individual colleges, she said.

Economy’s Woes

The country’s financial crisis may aid the foundation as it tries to persuade states, schools, and colleges to embrace structural changes and experimental approaches. The federal government and many states won’t have the money to lead an improvement effort, noted Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and a former president of Teachers College at Columbia University.

“That means the Gates foundation could become the most powerful force in American education in the years to come,” he said.