The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation spent 10 years and $575 million on a program aimed at improving teacher effectiveness and increasing student achievement. The result after a decade and all that money? Complete failure.
So, what did the program look like, and what went wrong?
Essentially, the Gates Foundation provided funding to three schools, asking them to adopt new approaches to recruiting and hiring teachers, and rewarding those who performed well. The hope was that this would boost teacher satisfaction, improve their effectiveness, and lead to better student outcomes.
None of those things happened. Here’s why:
The schooling system is based on seven false assumptions:
1) Every student is at the same level of knowledge as other students in their grade.
At the start of the school year, teachers lecture assuming all students are on the same page. In reality, some students retain information better than others, for various reasons—interest in the subject, better memory, etc. The assumption that everyone starts on equal footing is simply false.
2) Everyone learns at the same pace.
Students have different learning speeds due to differences in IQ, interest, or personal circumstances like learning disabilities. It’s unrealistic to assume all students can absorb information at the same rate.
3) Children are interested in all subjects equally.
This is obvious. If a student loves math, they’ll focus more on it. If they dislike history, they’ll study just enough to pass. Interest drives effort, and it’s naive to expect uniform enthusiasm.
4) Children are robots. Outside influences don’t affect performance in school.
The schooling system often treats the classroom as an isolated universe, ignoring the impact of emotional problems, family issues, or even a student’s physical health on their performance. A child from a troubled home is at a huge disadvantage, no matter how hard they try to focus. Take John, a 10-year-old whose parents are regularly called to school because of domestic abuse. How can we expect him to succeed when, every time he tries to study, his mother is screaming at his father as he hits her with a beer bottle? That kid is fighting a losing battle.
5) Teachers are robots. There are no differences between teachers in terms of quality and treatment of students.
This one is also obvious. How many tales of injustice have you heard when a teacher has mistreated a student? How many tales of injustice have you personally experienced? How many times have you heard that one teacher gives hard exams, but the other easy ones. As long as there are human teachers, subjectivity will exist in how students are treated and graded.
6) Explaining something once means a student has learned it.
This is the biggest misconception in the schooling system but the entire system rests on it!
Imagine a coding lesson. After 90 minutes, can a beginner write flawless code? Of course not—they’ll make mistakes, debug, and eventually figure it out. Learning involves trial and error, yet schools punish mistakes with bad grades instead of seeing them as part of the process.
7) Grades and exams measure knowledge
Students may study for an exam, get a decent grade, and then forget everything a few days later. If the knowledge isn’t retained, what was the point?
But the entire schooling system is based on this false assumption. The students are not learning useful knowledge in schools, they’re learning how to pass exams.
With these flaws in mind, let’s revisit the Gates program.
The school sites agreed to design new teacher-evaluation systems that incorporated classroom-observation rubrics and a measure of growth in student achievement.
Madeline Will, in the Education Week report article.
Basically, what this means is that they rated teachers by their performance. We’ve already established that teachers are not sole factors in students’ performance and by improving teachers you will not solve other problems such as 1), 2), 3), 4), 6) and 7). Thus, students’ performance wasn’t raised one bit.
They also agreed to offer individualized professional development based on teachers’ evaluation results, and to revamp recruitment, hiring, and placement.
Madeline Will, in the Education Week report article.
Again, all the focus is on improving teachers’ performance, ignoring all the problems we laid out.
Schools also implemented new career pathways for effective teachers and awarded teachers with bonuses for good performance.
Madeline Will, in the Education Week report article.
This sounds like it could have had a positive impact since teacher’ wages are quite low (at least in Croatia which is where I’m from) but the problem here is defining good performance. Again, the only thing that’s being proven when students perform well on an exam is that the teacher prepared their students for that particular exam well. But what about the retention of information? What about, the more important, retention of knowledge? Knowing a certain factoid is less important than being able to connect certain pieces of information to form new conclusions which will enable you to solve more complex problem.
Conclusion: Nothing will change in terms of students’ performance until we tailor the schools to fit the individual and not the other way around. Students shouldn’t be divided by years but by interest. Math lectures are for students who like math, history for history buffs etc. Second, stop grading performance. Do that and you’ve solved 50% of the problem. After we do this, we can talk about the rest.