What Bill Gates Doesn’t Understand About Supporting Teachers

Many of you may have seen the TED Talk that Bill Gates gave in 2013 about how teachers need more useful feedback. You may have also read the headlines in 2018 about how the Gates Foundation commissioned an independent study of the $575 million dollars they had invested in teacher support and how the study reported that the vast majority of the money was essentially wasted.  

It’s worth applauding the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their desire to seek an honest assessment and for their transparency in sharing the findings. But it does force us to ask the question: how can you burn $575 million dollars in teacher ‘support’ and not see any significant improvement on test scores or teacher retention? The plan made sense, but it must have failed to understand something fundamental about the type of support that teachers need. 

The fatal flaw here was a misunderstanding about the type of feedback that teachers need. 

Most principals, along with people like Bill Gates, tend to equate support with instructional feedback. Opportunities for teachers to receive constructive critiques of their classroom practices. This makes a kind of sense. But when teachers are asked to order the types of support they value they tend to put them in this order: emotional, administrative, instructional. 

Teachers need to feel emotionally supported and they need to feel like they are in a school that ‘works’. When teachers say they need ‘support’ they mean recognition for a job well done. They do not mean an administrator watching them for part of a class period and then telling them what they did wrong. 

The design of the Gates plan was informed by research. There is substantial research about the effectiveness of coaching and there are piles of research about how much teachers want more support and how support connects with student performance. But the research on coaching is largely from schools that already support their teachers emotionally and organizationally. And too much of the research on teacher support fails to specify what the teachers mean by ‘support’. The result is a miscommunication where teachers say they need support and funders respond with money for coaching programs that are forced to operate in dysfunctional systems. 

Bill Gates also made the common mistake of underestimating the complexity of the education ecosystem overall. The approach of finding a single high-leverage intervention works much better when it comes to improving nuclear power plants or innovating new sanitation systems, both of which are Gates Foundation initiatives that have proven more successful than their education reforms. 

In education, the intersection of different variables is more complex and dynamic. Just at the macro level, we have factors as disparate as curriculum, funding, poverty/trauma, segregation, school choice, discipline policies, family engagement, and quality teaching. If we narrow this to talent pipelines we have issues around recruitment, training, development, and retention all distinct from each other and all taking place in the context of significant diversity issues. If we just look at diversity in teaching, we find that people of color disproportionately step out of the talent pipeline at every stage: high school graduation, college enrollment, enrollment in education programs, completing of education programs, passing the PRAXIS, and staying in the profession. Even if we want to take on the relatively narrow question of diversifying the teaching force, where does it make the most sense to focus? Will we see ripple effects to other stages of the talent pipeline? And even though the data on teachers sharing a racial background with their students is very strong, to what extent can we expect to see the effect sizes of current studies taken to scale if we only focus on this question? 

It is important to do the focused and deliberate research necessary to identify the most impactful strategies, but we must also understand that there is no single innovation, no first domino that will cascade across all of the domains that education brings together. 

I applaud all of the strategies that the Gates Foundation funded with their $575 million dollars and I applaud their soliciting an impartial third-party review. But the findings of that review must force us to acknowledge that peripheral initiatives will not be sufficient to create a tipping point across the rest of the education ecosystem. To transform education we need to understand the ways the system is interconnected and develop a coherent approach to push from as many angles as possible. Beyond this, we also need to examine our basic assumptions about how teachers and students learn.

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William Minton is the Founder and CEO of CanopyEd where he works with districts to reimagine the use of virtual platforms in professional development strategies. He also does a range of consulting around managing and measuring Collective Impact initiatives and district needs assessments. He designed the national award winning parent engagement initiative 'Cradle to K - Baton Rouge' for the Baton Rouge Mayor's Office. He can be reached directly on LinkedIn or at William@CanopyEd.com.