Schools Matter

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Proposal: convert schools into prisons to improve student life

Ithaca public schools superintendent Nathan Bootz proposes making schools into prisons to improve things for students. I add a comment.

Published in Big Think

http://bigthink.com/ideas/38573

05/24/2011

Dear Governor Snyder,

In these tough economic times, schools are hurting. And yes, everyone in Michigan is hurting right now financially, but why aren't we protecting schools? Schools are the one place on Earth that people look to to "fix" what is wrong with society by educating our youth and preparing them to take on the issues that society has created.

One solution I believe we must do is take a look at our corrections system in Michigan. We rank nationally at the top in the number of people we incarcerate. We also spend the most money per prisoner annually than any other state in the union. Now, I like to be at the top of lists, but this is one ranking that I don't believe Michigan wants to be on top of.

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This is why I'm proposing to make my school a prison. The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?!

Please provide for my students in my school district the same way we provide for a prisoner. It's the least we can do to prepare our students for the future...by giving our schools the resources necessary to keep our students OUT of prison.

Respectfully submitted,

Nathan Bootz, Superintendent, Ithaca Public Schools

S. Krashen comment:

Nathan Bootz is right: Prisoners get a much better deal than many students do: they get health care, libraries, and good food – children of poverty get little or none of these. For many children, school is worse than prison.

These same children are also exposed to a mechanical, rote, test-prep oriented curriculum in school, while children of high-income families are exposed to a curriculum that emphasizes creative problem-solving. This adds mental torture to the physical discomfort of poor nutrition and lack of health care that many poor children endure.

The deadly curriculum children of poverty get in school was documented decades ago by Jean Anyon, and is more true than ever today, thanks to No Child Left Behing testing hysteria, made even worse by current US Department of Education policies.

We are even seeing the elimination of recess, in order to jam in more test-prep time. Ohanian's book, What Happened to Recess? is as relevant today as it was when it was published ten years ago.

Ironically, middle class children who attend well-funded schools do very well on international tests: They score near the top of the world. Our overall scores are less spectacular because we have such a high rate of child poverty, the highest of all industrialized countries. Providing poor children what our prisoners already have would profoundly improve school achievement.

Bully Lawbreaker, Chris Christie, Reeled in By NJ Supreme Court

And yes, they had a whopper on the line with this loud-mouthed poster boy of the privileged. From the NYTimes:

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a major piece of Gov. Chris Christie’s cost-cutting was unconstitutional and ordered lawmakers to raise spending for poor, urban schools by $500 million next year, despite a state budget shortfall estimated at $10 billion.

The decision is a new milestone in the intertwined disputes over school financing, taxation and the role of the courts that have roiled the state’s politics since the 1970s. And those disputes remain; the ruling intensifies Mr. Christie’s running battles with the Supreme Court and the Legislature, and it will resonate in the coming negotiations to balance the budget, negotiate new contracts with state workers and rescue the government employee pension plans.

The majority in the 3-to-2 decision accused the state of willfully violating previous Supreme Court orders in the long-running school-aid case under review.

“Like anyone else, the state is not free to walk away from judicial orders enforcing constitutional obligations,” Justice Jaynee LaVecchia wrote in the ruling. She added that “the state made a conscious and calculated decision” to renege on the commitment it made two years ago, the last time the case, Abbott v. Burke, went before the court. . . .

Please pay attention to the LEARN Act

Posted on the NCTE Connected Community, May 24

The NCTE Inbox (May 24) confirmed NCTE's official support for the LEARN Act and urged members to pitch in and call their Senator to support the Act. I posted my letter opposing the LEARN Act, which was published in the Seattle Times. Today (May 24), Valerie Strauss in her Answer Sheet blog in the Washington Post carried an expanded version of my critique of the LEARN Act. Please check it out at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-learn-act-an-expensive-mistake/2011/05/23/AFG4569G_blog.html

This is a big one, colleagues. As NCTE points out, LEARN is a “comprehensive literacy policy sustains investment in literacy learning and instruction from birth through grade 12" and will be very hard to reverse. It will dominate language arts instruction for years, is filled with direct instruction and testing, is very expensive, and has, in my opinion, zero empirical support. For my full analysis (long), please write me at skrashen@yahoo.com.

Stephen Krashen

"Non-Confidentiality Notice: This message, including any attachments, contains no confidential or privileged information. It can be shared, and used for any reasonable purpose. It can be posted, downloaded, and shared with anybody, with the following exceptions: Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter.

If you are not the intended recipient, read it anyway."

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Are school libraries obsolete?

Sent to the Los Angeles Times (May 24)

Those who think school libraries are obsolete might consider the results of a Scholastic-Gates Foundation poll, given to 40,000 teachers, published in March, 2010. One question was: Where do your students get books for their independent reading most often? Select all that apply.

The winner: School libraries. Teachers reported that 80% of high school students, the group least dependent on school libraries, get reading material from school libraries. In contrast, 35% get books from retailers and 46% from public libraries.

Will e-books take over? To compete with the library as a source of books, e-book readers and e-books need to get cheap enough for everyone to be able to buy, use, and replace. Kindles now cost over $100, e-books about $10, and there are restrictions on sharing. Little wonder that only 7% of adults read e-books (NY Times, 10/14/10) and they are an affluent group (Mediamark, 12/1/2009).

Stephen Krashen

A Review of Alexander Russo's 'Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors'

Anyone in search of a rather level-headed look at school turnarounds should check out Alexander Russo’s Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors. It’s both an enjoyable read and highly interesting – I’d place it in the rather small education drama-slash-documentary genre.

The book is not a puff piece, nor does it leave out criticisms. I say that as someone who generally is quite skeptical of charter management organizations, outsourcing, and reforms that deal almost exclusively with school-level changes.

I should also note that I play a very small (minuscule) role in some of the drama that unfolds in the book.

Readers beware: I may say some things here that you disagree with, or that you’re surprised to hear.

Let’s start with Steve Barr, because that’s a fitting way to start a conversation about the book’s real story: the school “turnaround” at Locke High School. Also, I think it’s better to deal with my small role right away and then focus on more important topics.

Honestly, I have a good deal of respect for Steve Barr. However, I have an equal amount of concern when it comes to his tactics and rhetoric, and I seriously question whether or not his strategy (and the strategy of other CMO operators) will lead to serious improvements. I think he means well, and, to some degree, he’s right about certain topics. Although I’ve never met him, he’s clearly an engaging fellow, charismatic, and probably someone that would be great fun to have a beer with (incidentally, that’s where Barr spent some of the money in question: drinking with teachers). His rhetoric and search for the spotlight seem to undermine the ideas that some of us would find more reasonable.

It’s fitting to start with Barr because he’s been practically synonymous with Green Dot since the organization’s early years. Barr eventually kind of departed Green Dot and started another organization, Green Dot American, now known as "Future is Now Schools". Marco Petruzzi became the lead man (although he'd had a significant role at Green Dot for a while), and the book makes it sound like it wasn’t all roses between those two:

“’That was Steve,’ said Petruzzi, who had since his arrival at Green Dot been dismayed at how many times he had to swoop in and clean up one of Barr’s messes or make good on one of his unanticipated commitments.” (p 170-71)

Ouch.

On October 30, 2009, I posted an entry on this blog that noted a curious statement in Green Dot’s 990 form. At the time, I didn’t know what it meant, but I did know that it suggested CEO Steve Barr did something that was questionable. That was the full extent of my knowledge of the situation. (In hindsight, my comments were a bit too dramatic, and probably didn't reflect what actually happened.) Only later – after a few brief emails with Russo, by reading a few postings on his blog, and reading this book – did I learn about how Barr spent the money. He twice used a Green Dot credit card to pay for personal expenses – but promptly paid back that money the following day. (Not a wise move, but not exactly all that scandalous.) He went out with some teachers and paid for drinks, which certainly isn’t a wise move (nonprofits can’t buy alcohol with their funds). There were also "isolated instances of expenses that were more extravagant than they needed to be for a nonprofit," according to Green Dot Chairman Shane Martin.

I still wonder why Green Dot included the note in their 990. It seems unnecessary to me. Were they required to note it, or was it included for some other reason?

The real substance of this story, however, is whether or not this will be a promising way to improve schools in America’s toughest neighborhoods. Keep in mind that the Locke turnaround required many millions in additional funding, and it’s unclear if there will be lasting improvements. Is the school better than it was before? I don’t think too many people would say it’s worse now than before, but I don’t think anyone can rightly claim it’s a miracle or even a turnaround. As Russo says, “Expecting big things immediately is understandable but ultimately destructive,” and I think he’s right: judging the effectiveness of this turnaround in year one isn’t really fair. Baby steps forward are appropriate in the first year, as are some baby steps backwards. So, while I’m quite skeptical, it is still worth knowing how this experiment works out in the long run.

Russo spends most of the book talking about the people involved at Locke: teachers, administrators, and students. (I do wish there'd been a bit more about parents and families, however.) Their stories range from inspiring to depressing, and they all add to the nuance of the book. He also spends a good deal of time explaining the problems Green Dot faced, and the ways they were and were not prepared for the dramatic change. This on-the-ground stuff kept me engaged just as much as the discussion of 30,000-foot issues.

The Locke experiment may prove to be an incremental improvement over the much-disliked “status quo” (disliked by everyone, I might add). It makes me quite nervous that our Secretary of Education says he thinks Barr and Green Dot have “cracked the code” considering there have been such small improvements to date. Although I’m quite skeptical, I try to remain open to the fact that certain reforms I may not favor could lead to positive changes.

If this doesn’t prove to be a promising way to turn around schools, what are other options that can be considered? I found myself thinking about that question as I finished the book, and it’s a question at the heart of many criticisms of the current reform movement: If (when?) the “evaluate teachers with test scores,” "test a lot more," and “open lots of charters” craze ultimately proves to be unsuccessful, what changes could actually make big improvements?

Teacher Evaluations Based on Test Scores Will Requires Dozens of New Tests

The argument for longer school days and school years is getting a big boost in recent weeks, as states contemplate the dozens of new tests that will be needed for teacher evaluation plans based on test scores. Kindergarten or 12th grade,
P. E. or computer programming, history or home ec, everyone will have to be tested, and more than once a year. Remember, this is about added value. Remember?

When Broadie (rhymes with toady) Peter Gorman (Class of '04) rolled out the Oligarchs' year-round testing plan in Charlotte recently, non-corporate ed reformers noted that it didn't make much sense to spend $2 million on 52 new, unnecesssary tests for kindergarten through grade 12 that parents do not want, especially when the school system is laying off teachers and aides to make payroll. But, then, we have come to learn from the Broadies that it is not the needs of adults that schools should consider--it is about the needs of corporations. How could anyone, even Bill Gates, make the case to parents that this year-round testing to evaluate teachers can be in the interests of children? Anyone, anyone?

Well, now another Broadie, Bloomberg's school CAO Shael Polakow-Suransky (Class of '08) has marched out the plan in New York City, this one with a price tag of over $60,000,000 for testing companies to develop tests for grades 3 through 12 (twice a year) in math, science, English, and social studies.

These tests come on top of the annual NCLB testing and the end-of-course Regents' Exams. Initial implementation is planned for this Fall, even though no community or teacher input has been sought or received, and no validity or reliability has been established for these tests that the testing industry is still cooking up. And what happened to the new Chancellor? The last time we saw him, Mr. Wolcott was walking his grandson to school and preparing pink slips for 4,500 NYC teachers.

From the Times:

. . . .Elementary school students would most likely take at least one or two additional tests every year, beginning in the third grade. High school students could take up to eight additional tests a year, and middle school students would also have extra tests. These would be in addition to the state English, math and Regents exams that students already take.

The exams, which would begin rolling out as early as next academic year, are being created as part of a statewide overhaul of how teachers are evaluated. Under a law passed last year that helped the state win $700 million in a federal grant competition, known as Race to the Top, each school district must find a way to evaluate teachers on a scale from “ineffective” to “highly effective,” with teachers facing potential firing if they are rated ineffective for two years in a row.

Under the law, 40 percent of a teacher’s grade will be based on standardized tests or other “rigorous, comparable” measures of student performance. Half of that should be based on state tests, and half on measures selected by local districts. The remaining 60 percent is to be based on more subjective measures, including principal observations.

Most districts will not create their own standardized tests, an expensive process that requires considerable expertise. The state does not require them to do so, instead permitting districts to set academic goals for teachers, broadly defined.

But New York City, which has made standardized tests a centerpiece of its school reform efforts, is pushing ahead. The city schools system is planning to use up to one-quarter of its $256 million share of the federal grant money for as many as 16 new standardized exams to cover science, math, social studies and English in the 3rd through 12th grades.. . . .

AP History Exams Help Students (a) understand history, (b) memorize history facts, (c) pay Caperton's $872,061 salary, (d) both b and c?

The "non-profit" College Board rakes in almost 10 percent profit each year on the millions of tests that American students choke down every year in an institutionalized trivial pursuit game that substitutes for big chunks of the curriculum in American high schools. Meanwhile, the College Board's CEO is paid nearly a million bucks a year and the CB has almost a billion dollars of "non-profit" in the bank. The biggest insult, however, is how the College Board's AP tests determine what our brightest kids get taught or not taught about history, literature, and science.

Michael Winerip reports this week on a Connecticut high school teacher, Chris Doyle, who won't settle for the sanitized, memorized factoids that are demanded by the AP exam:

. . . .When Mr. Doyle began his career 25 years ago, schools taught current events. But standardized testing and canned curriculums have squeezed most of that out of public education. The A.P. history course is a yearlong race to master several centuries’ worth of facts that may or may not turn up on the exam in May.

“A lot of A.P. is memorizing timelines,” explained Anna Hagadorn, who memorized enough last year to earn a top score of 5.

Even the College Board, which makes so much money selling SAT and A.P. tests that it can pay its president, Gaston Caperton, $872,061 a year, has acknowledged that its A.P. American history exam needs to be revamped. Mr. Caperton has promised by 2013 to deliver a new test that will do a better job of fostering analytic skills.

Mr. Doyle is way ahead of him. For the past several years, after his students have completed their A.P. exams in early May, he has taught a five-week course on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “Public education must engage the most pressing and troubling issues of our time,” he once wrote in an essay for an education journal.

There is no textbook yet for these wars, so Mr. Doyle does what teachers did in the olden days: creates his own curriculum. Students read excerpts from “Plan of Attack,” by Bob Woodward; “The Forever War,” by Dexter Filkins; “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; and many more.

He brings in combat veterans to speak, including Jonathan Lebeau, a retired Navy medic who is a half-brother of a former student; Richard Williams, a retired major in the British Army and a former neighbor; and Peter Van Loon, a retired Navy captain who attends the same church as Mr. Doyle.

Mr. Van Loon told the students about the time an American convoy in Afghanistan killed a 12-year-old boy, who “was my own boy’s age.” He described his feelings when he and a village elder negotiated over how much money the American military would pay to compensate the family for their dead son.

The moment they put down their No. 2 pencils, most A.P. history students forget the three ways the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the Hartford Convention and the South Carolina Exposition and Protest were similar.

Mr. Doyle’s students aren’t likely to forget Mr. Van Loon. Caitlan Miranda took the class last year. Asked if she remembered whether Mr. Van Loon supported or opposed the war, she said, “I wouldn’t exactly say it was either,” adding, “I’d say he was conflicted” — which was exactly right.. . . .

Monday, May 23, 2011

The Lose-Lose of Value-Added (EVAAS) in Houston

Terry Grier brought with him to Houston a fixation for test scores that he learned in Guilford, NC, where he came under the spell of former adjunct professor and agricultural statistician, Bill Sanders, who created there a vast subsidiary for SAS, Inc. in school testing--the value-added variety. The Sanders brand, EVAAS, has become so big, in fact, that Sanders has moved from the SAS campus back to Ground Zero in TN, where he got his start and where there are now a half-billion reasons, thanks to RttT, to get EVAAS sewn into the fabric of Test Scores Gone Wild--the Tennessee Version.

He did the same for his TVAAS brand in the 1980s, when he managed to get his proprietary statistical wizardry added to the Tennessee Code Annotated as THE algorithm to be used for testing kids. No doubt he is fantasizing about getting it into federal law at this point.

Now it is teachers who are to be evaluated based on the Sanders scheme, and Sanders couldn't care less about what happens when his method is applied to the already shell-shocked urban and rural schools where the explosive effects of test and punish have been amplified by poverty. When a quality teacher like Jennifer Blessington (story below), who is getting the demanded test score gains and rewards, is fed up, demoralized and leaving the profession in Houston and public schools elsewhere, some would say that what is happening in Houston is a case of unanticipated consequences. The sad fact is that Grier and the corporate fools who are running Houston ISD see the loss of Blessington as another opportunity for a white TFA missionary to be put in her place at a huge savings in salary and future retirement payouts.

Here is Grier in a brief clip hawking his EVAAS snake oil at a Board meeting in Houston. Below it find out the reality from Jennifer Blessington.

I started working for the Houston Independent School District in 2005. Teaching was not my first career, but almost instantly, I knew I had found the job I would do for the rest of my life. The best part? Connecting with kids during those awkward years of early adolescence and helping them learn to think and read critically and write well and creatively. Six years later, my desk at home is covered in earnestly penned, sweet thank-you notes from former students. ("Ever since I started grade 7 English I thought you were the nicest teacher and you were.")

But now, six years later, I am planning to leave HISD and start a new job next year teaching at a private school.

By any measure, I think I am a teacher HISD would want to keep. I've won a few awards, volunteered to participate in district initiatives, and am generally well liked by students, parents and colleagues. I don't put any weight in the Education Value-Added Assessment System, which uses student test data to measure teachers' effectiveness, but EVAAS rates me a highly effective teacher. I've regularly received some of the highest achievement-related bonus payouts on my campus since the program began. My students who fail the state assessments can often be counted on one hand, and the majority earn commended status. I've tried my best to follow the procedures and policies of the district without making waves. While I support some of the union's views, I've never been a member. But under Superintendent Terry Grier, I have seen the culture of HISD change, and not for the better.

In my opinion, morale is sinking, and if the state budget crisis hadn't squashed hiring by other school systems, I believe even more good teachers and administrators would be leaving. Schools are losing autonomy and are being micromanaged. Focus on testing is unyielding, and new programs and policies are implemented with little warning. Certainly any attempt to gain input from those who will be affected by the changes is window dressing at best. Above all, the district's rhetoric has created an environment where good teachers feel that we're never trusted.

The district's focus on standardized test scores has become so intense, I dream about bubble sheets. In years past, my colleagues and I were allowed to create our own tests to see how our students were doing. After all, we knew our kids best. But this year, despite the consistently strong records of the teachers at my exemplary-rated school, we were mandated to give district-created tests every month. This cut into instruction time with our kids. Sadly, this focusing-on-the-test trend shows little sign of ending. For teachers, EVAAS scores and other end-of-course test data now carry more weight than ever before: In the evaluation system recently passed by the school board, they make up half of each teacher's rating.

We teachers should be held accountable, and I believe student growth on standardized tests should be part of that accountability. Parents should be able to know whether their child's teacher has demonstrated good instruction. Taxpayers should be able to know whether their dollars are being well spent.

But the public also needs to know that EVAAS figures are misleading for many reasons, and including them in the teacher evaluation system could lead to good teachers being punished. First of all, many teachers earn their EVAAS scores based on a complicated formula that reflects a combination of growth not just on the state test but also on the Stanford Achievement Test. Unfortunately, Texas' state curriculum — which HISD teachers are required to teach, and which our textbooks cover - is not aligned with the Stanford. For example, eighth-grade U.S. history teachers earn their EVAAS scores strictly from the Stanford, which includes questions on world history, anthropology, and sociology - none of which are included in the eighth-grade state curriculum. So what's a teacher supposed to teach?

Even worse, EVAAS data does not help us become better teachers. I challenge you to find one single teacher in the district who can clearly explain how his or her EVAAS scores will help improve what happens in the classroom. I've pored over my EVAAS data and can find little to take away - except for that magic, seemingly random final score that determines my bonus.

Grier has repeatedly said that there is no time to wait, that Houston's children need reform now. But a sense of urgency cannot be used as an excuse to dismantle and demand without reflecting on the impact of major changes. Schools and parents are still frustrated with his mandatory breakfast-in-the-classroom program, one of several new initiatives implemented with little warning or input from campuses. And don't get me started about Grier's rushed, poorly received audit of the magnet-school program.

A successful superintendent creates a culture that hires innovative, free-thinking principals who are rewarded for taking risks instead of toeing a party line. Bad teachers need to be fired without making good teachers feel endangered and abused. If schools and teachers are successful, ask them what help they need instead of forcing them to change. Train principals to support good teachers and to give them real power in the schools. Most importantly, if you are going to hold teachers accountable for the value added to student achievement, do it with data that we can use to help our kids improve.

I don't envy anyone who tries to lead a large urban school district. The problems are many and complex - the kind of problems that require thoughtful individual solutions, not one-size-fits-all proclamations. My campus, like much of HISD, is full of hard-working, wonderful children and adults, and it desperately needs thoughtful, careful leadership from its school superintendent.

I thought I would retire from this district, and it's still strange to think I won't be returning next year. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Terry Grier.

Blessington is a middle school English teacher in HISD.

Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7574534.html#ixzz1NCi7W6wH

Bill Gates's Call Boy, Rick Hess: "Everybody's implicated."

I know that it makes selling yourself to the Oligarchs feel more justified, Rick, but no, that's another lie you can add to the ton of them that you have told for Sugardaddy Bill. There are many "everybodys" around the world who aren't "implicated," even though their voices often go unheard and their messages aren't bought to the top of the Google search list. You made your bed, Hess, just like Finn at Fordham I., and the Eduwank at Bellwether, and the Sorority Sisters at Education Mistrust. But don't call all of us whores, Rick--it's just not so. In fact, shut up, roll over, and do what you're paid to do.

From a political angle, the Times decision to allow this story to be written and to appear just under the fold in the middle of page 1 of the Sunday Times may presage an Obama ed strategy moving forward. Having been brought to the White House by Oligarch cash, Team Obama is now boxed in on one side by their school-as-testing policies that are hugely unpopular with teachers, students, and parents who see no reason to keep in place a pedagogical model built upon inculcating memorization skills that Gutenberg made passe over 500 years ago. On the other side of Obama's box are the cons and neocons, who have no problem with parrot learning but who remain totally unwilling to give Obama another domestic policy victory on NCLB II (RttT expanded) before the 2012 election. Besides, they have their own corporate brand names to stick on the Business Roundtable ed agenda before it is implemented.

So if nothing else, this real education journalism piece will at least create more room for Obama to maneuver if he has to on ed issues, rather than being entirely locked in by the Billionaire Boys Club strategic plan. Could it offer more significant foreshadowing for what a second Obama Admin might mean for education? Maybe. With the self-serving corruption of the Oligarchs now being called out and exposed, could it mean the end of the Duncan Days and the beginning of ed policy done by real educators and educational researchers? Don't bet the farm on it.

I have taken the liberty to bold some of my favorite tidbits from Sam Dillon's piece, who now is a third of the way there. Parts 2 and 3 have to focus on the Broad and the Walton Gangs.

INDIANAPOLIS — A handful of outspoken teachers helped persuade state lawmakers this spring to eliminate seniority-based layoff policies. They testified before the legislature, wrote briefing papers and published an op-ed article in The Indianapolis Star.

They described themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform — one sympathetic state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, said, “They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” They were, but they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies. To that end, the foundation is financing educators to pose alternatives to union orthodoxies on issues like the seniority system and the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups. The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

“We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes,” said Allan C. Golston, the president of the foundation’s United States program. “The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer.”

The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy.

Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency. Few policy makers, reporters or members of the public who encounter advocates like Teach Plus or pundits like Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute realize they are underwritten by the foundation.

“It’s Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who said he received no financing from the foundation.

Mr. Hess, a frequent blogger on education whose institute received $500,000 from the Gates foundation in 2009 “to influence the national education debates,” acknowledged that he and others sometimes felt constrained. “As researchers, we have a reasonable self-preservation instinct,” he said. “There can be an exquisite carefulness about how we’re going to say anything that could reflect badly on a foundation.”

“Everybody’s implicated,” he added.

Indeed, the foundation’s 2009 tax filing runs to 263 pages and includes about 360 education grants. There are the more traditional and publicly celebrated programmatic initiatives, like financing charter school operators and early-college high schools. Then there are the less well-known advocacy grants to civil rights groups like the Education Equality Project and Education Trust that try to influence policy, to research institutes that study the policies’ effectiveness, and to Education Week and public radio and television stations that cover education policies.

The foundation paid a New York philanthropic advisory firm $3.5 million “to mount and support public education and advocacy campaigns.” It also paid a string of universities to support pieces of the Gates agenda. Harvard, for instance, got $3.5 million to place “strategic data fellows” who could act as “entrepreneurial change agents” in school districts in Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere. The foundation has given to the two national teachers’ unions — as well to groups whose mission seems to be to criticize them.

“It’s easier to name which groups Gates doesn’t support than to list all of those they do, because it’s just so overwhelming,” noted Ken Libby, a graduate student who has pored over the foundation’s tax filings as part of his academic work.

An early example of the increased emphasis on advocacy came in 2008, when Mr. Gates teamed with Eli Broad for a campaign aimed at focusing the presidential candidates on issues like teacher quality and education standards. The Gates Foundation spent $16 million on the effort.

Mr. Gates later acknowledged that it achieved little, but in the years since, the foundation has helped leverage sweeping changes. Its latest annual report, for instance, highlights its role — often overlooked — in the development and promotion of the common core academic standards that some 45 states have adopted in recent months.
The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which developed the standards, and Achieve Inc., a nonprofit organization coordinating the writing of tests aligned with the standards, have each received millions of dollars.

The Alliance for Excellent Education, another nonprofit organization, was paid $551,000 in 2009 “to grow support for the common core standards initiative,” according to the tax filings. The Fordham Institute got $959,000 to “review common core materials and develop supportive materials.” Scores of newspapers quoted Fordham’s president, Chester E. Finn Jr., praising the standards after their March 2010 release; most, including The New York Times, did not note the Gates connection.

“What Gates got for their money was an honest review,” said Mr. Finn, a longtime advocate of national standards. “All I could say to Gates before the common core came out was that we were hoping the new standards would be good.”
The Center on Education Policy, which calls itself “a national independent advocate,” was awarded $1 million over two years to track which states adopted the standards. Its president, Jack Jennings, said he had nonetheless publicly criticized the Gates stand on other issues, including charter schools and teacher evaluations. “I feel free to speak out when I think something is wrongheaded,” he said.

In 2009, a Gates-financed group, the New Teacher Project, issued an influential report detailing how existing evaluation systems tended to give high ratings to nearly all teachers. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cited it repeatedly and wrote rules into the federal Race to the Top grant competition encouraging states to overhaul those systems. Then a string of Gates-backed nonprofit groups worked to promote legislation across the country: at least 20 states, including New York, are now designing new evaluation systems.

While the foundation has given money to both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, totaling about $6.3 million over the last three years, some of its newer initiatives appear aimed at challenging the dominance that unions have exercised during policy debates.

Last year, Mr. Gates spent $2 million on a “social action” campaign focused on the film “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” which demonized Randi Weingarten, the president of the federation.

In 2010, the foundation gave $500,000, to the Foundation for Educational Excellence, founded by Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida.

In 2009, the foundation spent $3.5 million creating an advocacy group to buttress its $290 million investment in programs to increase teacher effectiveness in four areas of the country: Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., Pittsburgh, Memphis and Los Angeles.

A document describing plans for the group, posted on a Washington Post blog in March, said it would mobilize local advocates, “establish strong ties to local journalists” and should “go toe to toe” with union officials in explaining contracts and state laws to the public.

But to avoid being labeled a “tool of the foundation,” the document said the group should “maintain a low public profile.”

Ms. Weingarten complained to the foundation that the document appeared to be antiunion, and Mr. Golston said the foundation had shifted the group’s mission to support union-management engagement.

“Unlike some foundations that would rather just scapegoat teachers and their unions, Gates understands that teaching is a profession, that you have to invest in and support teachers,” Ms. Weingarten said. “That doesn’t mean we agree with everything they do.”

Two other Gates-financed groups, Educators for Excellence and Teach Plus, have helped amplify the voices of newer teachers as an alternative to the official views of the unions. Last summer, members of several such groups had a meeting at the foundation’s offices in Washington.

Two Bronx teachers, Sydney Morris and Evan Stone, founded Educators for Excellence in March 2010, to argue against seniority-based layoffs. But it was a $160,000 donation from Mr. Gates months later, Ms. Morris said, that allowed them to sign up 2,500 teachers.

Teach Plus was founded in 2007 in Boston by Celine Coggins, a former teacher with a Ph.D. from Stanford, to give young educators incentives to make the classroom a career.

With relatively small grants from other foundations, Ms. Coggins began working with teachers in Chicago and Indianapolis in 2008. The next year, she received Gates foundation awards totaling $4 million, for expenditure over three years, which allowed her to expand to Los Angeles and Memphis, build a Web site and move into new offices at the Boston headquarters.

In Chicago, union activists have accused Teach Plus of being an “Astroturf” grass-roots organization. In Indiana, some lawmakers accused the group of being “part of a conspiracy by Gates and hedge fund managers” to undermine the unions’ influence, according to Ms. Sullivan, a Democrat who voted to end seniority-based layoffs, as Teach Plus wanted. “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories.”