Although not strictly speaking a story from the 'UK Eduscape', yesterday's op ed piece in the Washington Post by Bill Gates is too interesting and topical a story not to cover. Through the US program strand of his charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Microsoft founder has invested a huge amount of money in developing initiatives to spur transformative improvements in the quality of education.
As Gates sees it the acute challenge facing educators and policymakers in the US is how to re-engineer or "flip the curve" to dramatically improve performance without spending any new significant sums of money:
"Over the past four decades, the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while out student achievement has remained virtually flat. Meanwhile other countries have raced ahead".
In his view, the strategic mistake of successive generations of policymakers, has been a failure to develop systems to identify excellent teachers, find out what makes them so effective and transfer those aspects of their pedagogical approach that are replicable to others so more students can benefit from access to dedicated, high-performing teachers:
"We know that of all the variables under a school's control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching… Yet compared with the countries that outperform us in education, we do very little to measure, develop and reward excellent teaching. We have been expecting teachers to be effective without giving them feedback and training".
His foundation is currently working with nearly 3,000 teachers across seven urban school districts to develop what he describes as a system of fair and reliable metrics to judge teacher effectiveness, through indicators tied to gains in student achievement.
Part 2 of this blog article can be read here.
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