Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Results from the Gates "Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative "

Rand:
Overall, however, the initiative did not achieve its goals for student achievement or graduation, particularly for LIM students.

With minor exceptions, by 2014–2015, student achievement, access to effective teaching, and dropout rates were not dramatically better than they were for similar sites that did not participate in the Intensive Partnerships initiative.
One summary:
“From 2009 through 2016, total IP [Intensive Partnership] spending (i.e., expenditures that could be directly associated with the components of the IP initiative) across the seven sites was $575 million.” In addition, Rand estimates that the cost of staff time to conduct the evaluations to measure effectiveness totaled about $73 million in 2014-15, a single year of the program. Assuming that this staff time cost was the same across the 7 years of the program they examined, the total cost of this initiative exceeded $1 billion. The Gates Foundation paid $212 million of this cost, with the rest being covered primarily by “site funds,” which I believe means local tax dollars. The federal government also contributed a significant portion of the funding.

So what did we get for $1 billion? Not much.
More here.