From 2009 through 2016, school districts and charter school organizations in four states participated in a sweeping, $575 million educational initiative sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, titled “Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching.”

The initiative sought to build new, comprehensive systems of teacher evaluation and connect low-income minority students with quality educators, as part of a wider effort to improve student outcomes. Despite years of effort and considerable resources, however, the initiative fell short.

We speak with the RAND Corporation’s Brian Stecher, who led a team of researchers from RAND and the American Institutes for Research in conducting a six-year evaluation of the Gates Foundation initiative. Stecher discusses his team’s final report, published in June of 2018, which found that while the initiative did bring some improvements to the host sites, it failed to make an impact on student achievement.

Featured research: Stecher, Brian M., Deborah J. Holtzman, Michael S. Garet, Laura S. Hamilton, John Engberg, Elizabeth D. Steiner, Abby Robyn, Matthew D. Baird, Italo A. Gutierrez, Evan D. Peet, Iliana Brodziak de los Reyes, Kaitlin Fronberg, Gabriel Weinberger, Gerald Paul Hunter, and Jay Chambers, Improving Teaching Effectiveness: Final Report: The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching Through 2015–2016. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018.