The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  Even more embarrassing to the Gates Foundation was the dissension in its own backyard at Mountlake Terrace High School, a suburban school of 1,800 students a few miles outside Seattle, not far from the foundation’s headquarters. The school had a dropout rate of one-third and looked for ways to improve. In 2000, the Gates Foundation offered the school a gift of $833,000 to convert itself into small autonomous schools; 83 percent of the faculty voted to accept the grant. Unlike Manual High School in Denver, the school spent two years planning the breakup into small schools.

  In the fall of 2003, Mountlake reopened as five new schools, each with its own theme, and its problems began. A math teacher complained, “All the math teachers used to share rooms, calculators, math tiles. Now that we’re broken up, we’re spread throughout the building and we have to buy five sets of things.” Students immediately began to stereotype the schools; one was for “stoners,” another for jocks, still another for geeks. A student said that one school was “the preppy, white school,” while another was the “Asian, gangsta, druggie school.” The teachers wanted students to be able to move from school to school, or to take electives in another school, but the foundation was opposed to anything that would dilute the autonomy of each school. The teachers didn’t like competing for students and “marketing” their small school to eighth graders, believing that this competition was “very divisive for staff.”17

  At the end of the inaugural year, both the principal and the vice principal of Mountlake High School left for other districts. And nearly a quarter of the staff—twenty-three of one hundred teachers—decided not to return to the school (the typical turnover rate was 5 percent to 10 percent annually). The foundation said it was beginning to understand that the problem was not structure but “teaching and learning.” Teachers heard this and thought they were being blamed for the initiative’s failure. In the fall of 2008, Mountlake Terrace High School abandoned its small schools and reverted to being a comprehensive high school.18

  The foundation’s bold idea worked in some places, but not in others. If foundation officials had considered the work of Valerie E. Lee, a professor at the University of Michigan, they would not have been surprised. Lee and a colleague concluded in 1997 that very large high schools were burdened by weak social relations, that very small schools might not be able to offer a full curriculum, and that the ideal size for a high school was six hundred to nine hundred students. 19 Schools within schools and theme-based schools, Lee told the Seattle Times, promote increased social stratification, with the motivated students enrolled in one or two small schools, and the unmotivated students in the “loser academy.”20 She also found that breaking schools into subunits did not necessarily lead to instructional improvement.21 In Chicago, where the Gates Foundation had invested $21 million to create new small high schools, the results were depressingly familiar: Students had higher attendance rates and were less likely to drop out of school, but the academic results in the new high schools were no different from those of regular high schools.22

  The Gates Foundation liked to point to its work in New York City as one place where it saw good results. It invested more than $100 million to launch two hundred new small high schools. Some of the new schools worked well as compared to the large high schools they replaced. The early returns looked good: Attendance was up, dropouts were down, and the graduation rate at the small high schools was 78 percent, about double the rate of the large comprehensive high schools that were closed.23 But a study by Aaron Pallas of Teachers College and Jennifer Jennings of Columbia University found that the new small high schools did not enroll the same mix of students who had attended the large schools. The students admitted to the new schools, compared to those enrolled in the large comprehensive schools that closed, already had higher attendance rates and higher test scores; they included more females and smaller numbers of English-language learners and special education students. Pallas and Jennings concluded that “the buildings may be the same, but the students are not.”24 A study by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School found that the impressive graduation rates and attendance rates at the new small high schools dropped over time, and the schools experienced very high rates of teacher and principal turnover; furthermore, their graduates were more likely than their peers in large schools to receive “local diplomas” (signifying that they were not college-ready) instead of Regents diplomas. To obtain a Regents diploma, a student had to pass five exit examinations; a student could get a local diploma without passing the exit examinations.25

  So what did the Gates Foundation learn from these problems? It discontinued the evaluations of its small school grants and increased its funding for “advocacy work.”26 In the fall of 2006, Erik W. Robelen reported in Education Week that the foundation had increased its giving to advocacy groups from $276,000 in 2002 to nearly $57 million in 2005. Writing about the foundation’s efforts to “broaden and deepen its reach,” Robelen noted that almost everyone he interviewed was getting Gates money, including the publication he works for. The advocacy groups funded by Gates included Achieve ($8.84 million); the Alliance for Excellent Education ($3 million); the Center on Education Policy ($963,000); the Council of Chief State School Officers ($25.48 million); Education Sector ($290,000); Education Trust ($5.8 million); the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools ($800,000); the National Association of Secondary School Principals ($2.1 million); the National Association of State Boards of Education ($224,000); the National Conference of State Legislatures ($682,000); the National Governors Association ($21.23 million); the Progressive Policy Institute ($510,000); and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute ($848,000).27

  Gates’ biggest grantees were developers of new and redesigned high schools, as well as charter schools. Beginning in 2000, Gates supplied nearly $100 million to charter management organizations. The foundation’s largest grants overall went to the NewSchools Venture Fund in San Francisco ($57 million), Communities Foundation of Texas in Dallas ($57 million), New Visions for Public Schools in New York City ($52 million), KnowledgeWorks Foundation in Cincinnati ($41 million), Jobs for the Future Inc. ($37.62 million), the College Board in New York City ($30 million), the Chicago Public Schools ($28 million), Alliance for Education in Seattle ($26 million), and the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools in Oakland ($26 million).28

  The only dissident voice that Robelen cited in his article was Brita Butler-Wall, president of the Seattle school board, which had previously received $26 million from the Gates Foundation. She said, “I don’t understand if the Gates Foundation sees itself as trying to support districts or lead districts. No one was elected by the Gates Foundation to run schools.” Others quoted in the article quickly rebutted Butler-Wall; an education expert praised the foundation for doing exactly the right things, and my friend Chester E. Finn Jr., who heads the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (where I was a trustee for many years), said “every large foundation” tries to change the minds of public officials.29 But never in the history of the United States was there a foundation as rich and powerful as the Gates Foundation. Never was there one that sought to steer state and national policy in education. And never before was there a foundation that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving almost no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence.

  In late 2008, the Gates Foundation announced that it was changing course. Its $2 billion investment in new small high schools had not been especially successful (although it was careful not to come right out and say that it was unsuccessful). The foundation had received an evaluation from AIR-SRI in August 2006—two years earlier—that found that its new high schools had higher attendance rates but lower test scores than similar schools in the same districts. The evaluation in 2005 found lower scores only in mathematics; the 2006 evaluation revealed lower scores in both reading and mathematics. Bill and Melinda Gates invited the nation’s leading educators to their home in Seattle and told them that t
hey planned to invest millions in performance-based teacher pay programs; creating data systems; supporting advocacy work; promoting national standards and tests; and finding ways for school districts to measure teacher effectiveness and to fire ineffective teachers. Reflecting on its investments of the past eight years, the foundation acknowledged that its emphasis on school structure “is not sufficient to ensure that all students are ready for college, career, and life.” It promised that it would now focus on “teaching and learning inside the classroom.”30

  Early in 2009, Bill Gates released a statement with the foundation’s goals for the year. He candidly admitted that “many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way.” Some had higher attendance rates and graduation rates, but their graduates were often not ready for college. The schools that got the best results, he said, were charter schools—such as KIPP and High Tech High in San Diego—that have significantly longer school days than regular public schools. He also stressed the difference that a “great teacher makes versus an ineffective one.” He fondly recalled his teachers at Lakeside, the private school he attended in Seattle, who “fueled my interests and encouraged me to read and learn as much as I could.” It was clear that the richest foundation in the world planned to put its considerable resources into the proliferation of charter schools and into the issue of teacher effectiveness: how to improve it and how to terminate ineffective teachers.31

  Given the foundation’s significant investment in advocacy, it was improbable that anyone would challenge Bill Gates and tell him his new goals were likely to be as ill advised as the $2 billion he had poured into restructuring the nation’s high schools. Who would warn him of the dangers of creating a two-tiered system in urban districts, with charter schools for motivated students and public schools for all those left behind? Who would raise questions about the sustainability of charter schools that rely on a steady infusion of young college graduates who stay for only a few years? Who would caution him of the dangers of judging teacher effectiveness solely by the ups and downs of scores on standardized tests of basic skills? Who would tell him that the data systems now in use—and the ones he was about to fund—would never identify as great the kinds of teachers who had inspired him when he was a student at Lakeside?

  ELI AND EDYTHE BROAD attended Detroit public schools. He received a degree in accounting from Michigan State University. With his wife’s cousin, Broad entered the home-building business and later bought a life insurance company that eventually became a successful retirement savings business called SunAmerica. That business was sold to AIG in 1999 for $18 billion, and Eli Broad became one of the richest men in the nation. He promptly created the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which invests in education, the arts, and medical research. The foundation’s assets as of 2008 were more than $2 billion.

  Having been trained as an accountant and having made his fortune as an entrepreneur, Broad believes in measurement, data, and results. He created training programs for urban superintendents, high-level managers, principals, and school board members, so as to change the culture and personnel in the nation’s urban districts. He wanted district leaders to learn strategic planning, budgeting, accountability, data-driven decision making, technology, human resources, and other skills to improve the functioning of big-city bureaucracies.

  In 2006, Broad invited me to meet with him at his gorgeous penthouse apartment in New York City. He explained his philosophy of education management. He believes that school systems should run as efficiently as private sector enterprises. He believes in competition, choice, deregulation, and tight management. He believes that people perform better if incentives and sanctions are tied to their performance. He believes that school leaders need not be educators, and that good managers can manage anything if they are surrounded by smart assistants. Broad told an audience in New York City in 2009, “We don’t know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that. But what we do know about is management and governance.” The Broad education agenda emphasizes the promotion of charter schools, the adoption of corporate methods for school leadership, and changes in the way teachers are compensated.32

  His foundation makes investments, not grants. He invested in Alan Bersin’s tough management approach in San Diego, until Bersin lost his slim majority on the Board of Education. After Bersin was forced out by an elected school board, the Broad Foundation decided that it was risky to invest in cities where there was dissension on the school board; it preferred situations where the leadership had longevity and was insulated from conflict and dissenting voices. He invested heavily in Joel Klein’s reforms in New York City, because mayoral control of the school system ensured stable leadership and minimal interference by constituency groups. Broad liked Klein’s commitment to testing, accountability, merit pay, and charter schools, and the fact that he surrounded himself with other noneducators who had degrees in business, law, and management.33

  The Broad Foundation invested in Oakland, California, after the state took over its school system in 2003 because of a large budget deficit. The state put a Broad-trained superintendent, Randy Ward, in charge of the Oakland schools. In the view of the foundation, the removal of the locally elected school board created an ideal situation for change, because there was no board to slow or block the rapid imposition of reforms favored by the foundation. The Broad Foundation was betting that the reforms would take root before the elected school board regained control of the district.

  Supporters of charter schools were enthusiastic about Ward. Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a pro-charter advocacy group, wrote that Ward was perceived as “the man who was leading the single most important and break-the-mold education effort in America.” Allen asked Joe Williams to visit Oakland and find out if it really was a national model for education reform. Williams, formerly an investigative reporter, is executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-charter group in New York City.34

  In his report, Williams described how Oakland’s elected board had been stripped of its power by the state after the schools had run up a debt of $100 million. After the state takeover, he wrote, the city became a “politics free zone” where bold reforms were possible. The previous superintendent had staked his reputation on introducing small schools, an innovation that was popular with Oakland teachers, students, and parents. Ward embraced the small schools but went farther; his school reform plan aimed to turn the district into a marketplace of school choice while overhauling the bureaucracy. He closed low-performing schools and opened charter schools. He attracted $26 million in grants from the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Dell Foundation, and corporations based in Oakland.35

  But three years after he arrived, Ward left to become superintendent of the San Diego County Schools. Reflecting on his three years in Oakland, he said, “We really took accountability very seriously. . . . We created an environment of a free market.” He was replaced by Kim Statham, also a graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy, who continued to close struggling schools and open charter schools (Statham was subsequently replaced by Vincent Matthews, another Broad-trained superintendent). Williams looked for indicators of the success of the high-profile reforms imposed by Ward. Test scores were up, though they were still far below the state average. Williams noted that Oakland’s score gains “have generally coincided with statewide increases as well—increases fueled by districts absent the kind of revolutionary reforms that are underway in Oakland.” And while Oakland had received extensive press attention on the national stage as an exciting arena for reform, the citizens of Oakland were less than enthusiastic. A poll commissioned by the Center for Education Reform, which sponsored Williams’ trip to Oakland, found that “more than half of respondents overall (54 percent) and parents (52 percent) said the school system had either gotten worse or stayed the same in the last decade.”36

  By 2008, when the state began the process of r
eturning the public schools to the locally elected school board, Oakland had 32 charter schools and 111 regular public schools for its 46,000 students. Seventeen percent of the district’s children were enrolled in charter schools. An analysis by the pro-charter group, the California Charter Schools Association, reported in 2009 that twenty-two of the thirty-two charter schools posted higher test scores than similar district schools. But the charters had a few important advantages. First, they enrolled half as many special education students as the district schools (4.6 percent of charter students were classified as special education, compared to 10.45 percent in the district’s schools). And second, they could quietly counsel students out. These differences helped boost charters’ scores in comparison to the regular public schools. Responding to an article reporting higher test scores for charters, a teacher wrote: “I work at a ‘small school’ in East Oakland, and we share our campus with a charter school. We routinely get students showing up at our school mid-year who have been kicked out of the charter school next door, and show up at our door the next morning. The question of whether charter schools truly educate all students is an important one that cannot be ignored. With that said, I am currently applying to charter schools for next year, because I am so sick of all the OUSD [Oakland Unified School District] bureaucratic bull. This district is truly frustrating to work for. Simple payroll and HR issues can take months to resolve, not to mention all the incompetent people at the school and district level when they really should [be] fired!”37 The teacher was describing a district that supposedly had experienced a deep cultural transformation, a purge of incompetent personnel, and a thorough reorganization of its management structure in the previous six years.