Last week, Bob
Hughes, appointed director of the Gates Foundation K12 division in 2016, made
his first big move.
He announced $92
million in grants for the new Networks
of School Improvement initiative to be given to 19 organizations,
collaboratives and districts, out of 532 applications submitted.
New Visions, the NYC-based organization that Hughes
ran before coming to the Foundation, received the second largest grant at $14
million – to work with 75 NYC schools, as yet unidentified.
The grant was more
than the amount given to the entire Baltimore system of public schools –
despite New Visions’ spotty record.
Though Hughes
admitted that there’s not much evidence behind the theory of network
improvement, he’s determined to push forward nonetheless:
“I don’t think the research base is fully
developed, and that’s one reason we’re making these investments,” said Hughes.
Asked by EdWeek
reporter Steven Sawchuk how the results of this new initiative would be
evaluated,
Hughes
replied that “ the foundation is
still formulating its research approach.” And:
"We don't have details for you,
but we remain deeply committed to a third party evaluation of all our work and
transparency about the results of those evaluations so we can enable the field
to understand what we do well and what we don't do well," he said.
Yet it appears that The Center for Public Research and
Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia Law School has already been chosen by Hughes to
evaluate the networks initiative.
As the CPRL website
notes, “In January 2018, CPRL received a
two and one-half year grant to report on the research underlying the NSI [Networks
for School Improvement] initiative and to use the research to design and
conduct a formative evaluation of the initiative’s initial implementation.”
(Sure enough, the
Gates Foundation lists a grant for $1.9 million over 31 months to be
awarded “Columbia University” to "support evaluation”.)
The first
Gates-funded CPRL
study was a literature review of network impacts. The findings were described by Sawchuk this
way:
A Gates-commissioned review of the
research on the topic from Columbia University's Center for Public Research and
Leadership noted that there are more studies on the norms and conditions needed
to support healthy networks than on how they affect K-12 outcomes; most of the
34 studies were case studies or qualitative, rather than quasi-experimental
designs that sought to answer cause-and-effect questions.
CPRL is headed by
Columbia Law professor James Liebman, who was appointed head of the NYC
Department of Education’s Accountability Office under Joel Klein, despite the
fact that he had no K12 education experience either as a teacher, administrator
or researcher.
Liebman made a
mess of the School Progress Reports at DOE, instituting a volatile, unstable system in which school
grades wildly
veered from year to year. A blog
post by Professor
Aaron Pallas in Edweek was memorably entitled, “Could a Monkey Do a Better Job of Predicting Which Schools Show Student
Progress in English Skills than the New York City Department of Education?” Under Liebman’s direction, DOE efforts were statistically
inept and I would not trust his ability to undertake a credible evaluation.
Liebman also commissioned the expensive ARIS data system, which lived up
to none of its promises. It was rarely
used by parents or teachers and was finally
ditched in 2015 after costing the city $95 million.
In any case, I
hope the Gates Foundation has not decided against commissioning an evaluation
from more experienced, credible organization like RAND.
RAND recently released a highly critical analysis
of the results of the Gates-funded Teacher
Evaluation Initiative and before that, a skeptical evaluation of the
Gates-funded NextGeneration Learning Challenge schools, those that feature “personalized [online] learning.”
John F. Pane, senior
scientist at RAND and the chief author of the latter study frankly pointed
out to Ed Week, the evidence base for personalized learning is still "very
weak."
Hughes himself
doesn’t have the greatest reputation for transparency. In 2005, he tried to suppress a Gates-funded research
study that contained negative findings about the New Visions Gates-funded small schools initiative
in New York City, a study that was subsequently leaked
to the NY Times .
In 2007, it was
revealed that New Visions threatened
these small schools that they would not receive their full Gates grants
unless they chose New Visions as their DOE “partnership support network” and
paid the organization a fee in return.
"I thought, 'Oh, my God, what a
huge conflict of interest,'" a principal said. "We have to join their
PSO and pay them for support in order to get this grant that we qualified
for?"
Only time will tell,
but the hints of insular cronyism in these decisions by Hughes to award grants to
New Visions and to Jim Liebman’s outfit do not bode well for the future.
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