May 7, 2009 | Read Time: 5 minutes
During a recent morning in the Tenleytown neighborhood here, about 700 students at Woodrow Wilson High School meandered into an auditorium to be part of an unusual experiment in philanthropy.
Slowly finding their seats, the rowdy students settled down as a short video of the MTV celebrity Sway appeared on the pull-down movie screen at the front of the room.
Sway, a hip-hop musician and correspondent for MTV News, explained that the billionaire Bill Gates had asked the teenagers to assemble here today.
The Microsoft co-founder and his foundation were trying to find out what students think of their high school.
“They want, actually it’s more like they need, your feedback,” said Sway.
Indeed, the gathering was part of the so-called YouthTruth Survey, a national attempt by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle, to do what few grant makers have tried in any systematic way: ask beneficiaries whether a foundation’s approach to giving is making a difference in their lives.
Together with the Center for Effective Philanthropy, a nonprofit research group in Cambridge, Mass., that is best known for its surveys of nonprofit grant recipients, the Gates foundation this year polled 5,400 students at 20 schools across the country, in places where it has made grants to increase graduation rates and help graduates better prepare for college.
While YouthTruth involves only a few of the 2,000 high schools that Gates has worked with, it is an experiment to find out if the foundation can gather feedback that it can use to improve both American education and its own operations, says Fay Twersky, director of impact planning and improvement.
“This was a way for us to think about high-school students as, in a sense, consumers of the products we’re investing in and really listen to their voices and their experiences,” she says. Gates wanted to know: “What was working well for them, what wasn’t working so well, what could be improved in the high-school experience?”
While foundations have done surveys before of grantees and the populations they want to assist, Ms. Twersky says YouthTruth seeks to create more quantitative results: “We wanted to add more rigor to the process.”
Keep It Interesting
Key to the effort, which cost $1.2-million, was making sure the students didn’t simply dismiss the survey as a boring assignment.
At Wilson, as with other schools, Gates and the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which organized the YouthTruth effort, hoped that Sway and the slick MTV-produced video would attract the teenagers’ attention, then, to reel them in further, they would get a chance to give instantaneous feedback.
With equipment and presenters from AmericaSpeaks, a nonprofit group that organizes town-hall-style meetings to discuss social issues, the students used small wireless devices to respond to several questions about their lives and studies. The answers were displayed on the movie screen within a few seconds.
For instance, the teenagers were asked, “How do you feel about the size of your high school?” The majority, 68 percent, picked option three, “It’s just about right.”
The process was chaotic, with students shouting out answers and often trying to push buttons on their neighbors’ remotes. But the instant-polling responses were actually only an exercise and did capture their interest.
The real survey, taken in computer labs after the assembly, included questions like:
- Have you ever seriously considered dropping out of high school?
- What obstacles, like drugs, crime, or family responsibilities, make it difficult for you to perform well in your studies?
- How many of your teachers try to be fair, care if you are really learning, or make an effort to understand what life is like for their students outside of the school?
“These are to provoke and keep them thinking,” says Valerie Threlfall, who runs YouthTruth for the Center for Effective Philanthropy and directs the group’s West Coast office, in San Francisco.
‘Valuable Tool’
YouthTruth data collection ended this year, and Ms. Threlfall met with principals last month at the Gates headquarters, in Seattle, to discuss the findings. Each school official received a report on his or her students’ views and were able to compare the responses with those of the other 19 schools.
Jay Tyus, principal of a high school in Mabton, Wash., who attended the meeting, says the survey was a “very valuable tool for us.”
He was mildly surprised to see that the survey showed that some students were unaware of the tutoring services the school offers. “It’s helping me reframe how we identify students [who need academic assistance] and give them information they need to get to our different programs to support them,” he says.
For Gates, the feedback won’t have an immediate effect on its education grant making. Indeed, the foundation had promised the school principals that it would not use the YouthTruth results to justify cuts or other big changes in its grants to school districts.
But Ms. Twersky says YouthTruth may pave the way for other surveys of students or of beneficiaries of Gates’s global-health and international-development programs.
The grant maker and the center will publish a report this summer outlining the initial effort’s successes and failures and whether YouthTruth can be duplicated on a bigger scale. The report will be made public so other grant makers can consider similar questionnaires for their beneficiaries.
While it remains unclear what will come of YouthTruth, Ms. Threlfall is optimistic.
“It really lays the groundwork for the foundation community to consider a great test case on how you can collect this kind of feedback, and that it’s viable to do this in a way,” she says. “It starts a dialogue about the approach.”
