Bill Gates
“There is no feedback loop in rating colleges,” Gates explained at a small roundtable of six bloggers and journalists held on Wednesday at the Omni Berkshire Place hotel in New York City, “The control metric shouldn’t be that kids aren’t so qualified. It should be whether colleges are doing their job to teach them. I bet there are community colleges and other colleges that do a good job in that area, but US News & World Report rankings pushes you away from that.”
A college dropout himself, Gates is still a big fan of higher education, though worried about soaring costs and the lack of funding of R&D in education overall. “College is perfectly designed for me. I’ve watched more MIT OpenCourseWare than anyone I know. I love taking college courses, love hanging out at college. I didn’t leave college because it wasn’t suited to me. I left college because I thought I had to move quickly on the Microsoft opportunity. I had already finished three years and if I had used my AP credits properly I would have graduated,” recalled Gates, “I am as fake a dropout as you can get.”
Co-chair of the $36.2 billion (endowment) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he made these comments and observations about the country’s flawed college ratings as part of a discussion of his just released fifth annual foundation letter, which is dedicated to measuring the effectiveness of various nonprofit initiatives around the world. “In the past year I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition,” he stated.
Gates is trying to address some of these issues through his foundation’s Post Secondary Strategy and says measurements he’d like to see in place include ratings of colleges that look at effectiveness of preparing low-income students as well as ratings of teachers colleges.
While that is very much still in its early stages, he’s farther along in the area of K-12 education where he’s been exploring the best approaches to measuring teachers’ effectiveness and improving performance for several years. “Five years ago the debate was whether you should measure teachers at all,” Gates said, “Amazingly that question hardly exists now. Even the NEA (National Education Association) would agree.”
Thirty three states have laws to measure teacher performance though most rely on test based systems in large part because they are cheaper. “We’re huge believers that if you want teachers to be better, test scores are simply not the way to do it,” Gates noted, “Tests play a role but the reason we downplay them is because it’s not diagnostic of what’s wrong.”
Starting in 2009, the Gates Foundation supported a project known as the Measure of Effective Teaching, or MET, which worked with 3,000 teachers to come up an evaluation and feedback system that helped teachers improve. “The report concluded that there were observable, repeatable and verifiable ways of measuring teacher effectiveness,” wrote Gates in the letter. Anonymous student surveys that asked such questions as “Does your teacher use class time well, get class organized quickly, help you when you are confused – were proven to provide useful feedback as were reports from trained professionals observing teachers at work.
One of those observers, Mary Ann Stavney, a high school “Master Teacher” profiled in the annual letter, spends 70% of her time observing other teachers, meeting with them and providing input. The problem, of course, is that this kind of measuring, particularly the hands-on observation in classrooms, is costly, adding about 2% onto payroll.
That is one reason that implementing such techniques across the nation’s public schools will be a tough sell. Still don’t count anything out, as long as Gates is willing to commit his time and vast resources.
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