(2006-07-18) Gates Education Efforts

Business Week on Bill Gates' efforts to improve Educating Kids In Nyc. * After gathering a team of experts, they decided to focus on High School Drop Out-s, the 20% to 30% of teens who fail to get a degree in four years. The Gates Foundation embraced what many social scientists had concluded was the prime solution: Instead of losing kids in large schools like Manual (which had 1100 students), the new thinking was to divide them into smaller programs with 200 to 600 students each.*

• I agree with the Small Schools concept, but 1100 students isn't that big for a High School. The best public High School-s in New York City are all bigger than that. My public High School out in the New Jersey Suburb-s was roughly that size.

Tom Vander Ark concedes that the foundation initially placed too much faith in just making schools smaller. He realizes now how important it is to focus on what happens in the Class Room. "Today we are much more explicit about the curriculum," he says. The Gateses are applying what they have learned to New York City (Educating Kids In Nyc), their most ambitious effort to transform a school district. Their foundation has pumped in more than $100 million since 2000 to help create some 150 new small schools that currently enroll more than 50,000 students. Most are only partly full, since they typically start with only the ninth grade and add a new grade each year. Once they're up and running with complete student bodies, new small schools will serve more than a quarter of the city's 350,000 high school students, says New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.... In its latest report, scheduled to be released later this month, Policy Studies found that only a third of the schools it has visited had benefited from community partners as helpful as East Side Settlement House. Another third had "ineffective partnerships," in which outside nonprofits clashed with schools or did inconsistent work, researchers reported. They warned that social tensions are rising in some of the new schools as they keep adding more grades and students. As a result, the percentage of students suspended from these schools tripled from 2% in the 2002-2003 school year to 6% last year, which is approximately the systemwide average.

Sidebar piece offers 10 Best Practices, including School Choice.

Sept: Village Voice piece focuses on one student in one of these new High School-s - the Bronx Guild. In typical Village Voice Framing, the article's title is "Can Bill Gates rescue Evelyn Cabrera?" But maybe the question should be "Should He?" By February, Evelyn has been admitted to Johnson and Wales University, which has six campuses; the closest one to the Bronx is in Providence, Rhode Island. She's still waiting to hear from New York Institute of Technology, her top choice. Recently though, she has been mentioning to Joan Ruley, now the school's college counselor, that she's considering taking a semester off and starting college in January 2007 instead of in the fall. This is the first time Ruley has heard Evelyn talk about not going to college right away, and the counselor worries that Evelyn has gotten too caught up with her part-time Starbucks job and her boyfriend, Ben. (Ben is the 24-year-old son of one of Evelyn's teachers.) By graduation, Evelyn had been accepted to New York Institute of Technology, but she decided not to enroll. Instead she moved in with Ben into a one-room apartment on the Grand Concourse that they rented on a week-to-week basis. By July, their relationship was falling apart; they were arguing constantly. They got into fights - physical fights. In the last one, both claimed the other drew blood. After that, Evelyn moved out... For now, her plan is to work as much as she can, get her own apartment, and start taking college classes in January. Maybe she's not a representative case: She didn't get in at first after the high school selection lottery, so her grandmother, an aide at a Bronx elementary school, wrote a letter to the principal and pleaded with him to accept her granddaughter. The letter worked and Evelyn was in. Or maybe she is: * Last June, Evelyn graduated from Bronx Guild, along with 51 out of the 75 students who started with her in 2002, or nearly double the citywide average.* - how sad is that?