Gates Foundation Provides Money, and Mandates
By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 4, 2006; A01
Irasema Salcido's heart raced when she pulled the letter from a stack of mail in her Capitol Hill office. She tore open the envelope.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is pleased to award the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools a grant in the amount of $1,570,000. . . .
Salcido rocketed into her staff's offices to share the news. She had landed what thousands of other nonprofit organizations are chasing: a Gates grant. One of the world's largest charitable foundations, the most important sponsor of efforts to improve U.S. schools after the government, believed in her seven-year-old educational experiment.
That moment in September 2005 marked the launch of a partnership between a Harvard-educated daughter of migrant farm workers and a charity built on the fortune of a billionaire Harvard dropout.
If all went as planned, two Cesar Chavez schools would become four. Then four might become more. With that jackpot letter, the Chavez school motto -- "Sí, se puede! Yes, it can be done!" -- seemed to have become "Yes, it will be done!"
"I thought, 'Well, Gates, they're probably going to give us the money, and we're very thankful, and that's that,' " Salcido recalled.
But Gates money doesn't just come with dreams. It also comes with demands.
* * *
With nearly $32 billion in assets and more coming from investment guru Warren Buffett, the Gates Foundation is a leading sponsor of global health and economic development initiatives. In the United States, the foundation focuses on upgrading libraries and public education. In the school arena, it seeks to raise high school graduation rates and prepare more students, particularly minorities, to go to college.
"America's high schools are obsolete," Bill Gates argued in a speech last year in Washington. "Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting -- even ruining -- the lives of millions of Americans each year."
The Microsoft founder has the means to do more than complain.
Overhauling schools is all the rage among the entrepreneurial nouveau mega-rich, such as personal computer pioneer Michael Dell, Netscape founder James Barksdale and home builder Eli Broad. But the Gates Foundation is lavishing unprecedented sums of money on the effort. So far, it has awarded $1.5 billion in grants to improve secondary education, including $285 million last year. Richard Colvin, director of Columbia University's Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, called the foundation an "unparalleled force" in U.S. schools. "They are going to change the high school experience for tens of thousands of kids," he said.
Gates grants have flowed to schools and school systems in 42 states and the District, including $126 million to New York, $65 million to Chicago and $38 million to Oakland, Calif. The grants have helped open 1,100 schools and revamp an additional 700. The foundation also has sunk millions into education think tanks and policy and academic groups (including Hechinger). Its agenda is to create high schools with rigorous college-prep curricula, to replicate successful experiments and to convert giant, mostly urban schools into effective, manageable units.
Reviews of the Gates school initiatives have been mixed.
This fall, Denver shut down a high school that had received $1 million in Gates grants; officials cited plunging enrollment after the school was divided into three smaller ones and students fled to other schools.
In Lebanon, Ore., parents and school board members rebelled after a foundation-backed effort broke up the lumber-mill town's high school and cut back on traditional vocational classes. Gates pulled out abruptly in May, and the school system lost half of its $950,000 grant.
"Sometimes I'm not sure Gates wants all the headlines they get," Lebanon Superintendent Jim Robinson said. "When things get a little rocky, safer ground is easily found elsewhere."
The foundation, through research it has commissioned, has found that Gates-funded schools have strong attendance and more rigorous English and reading assignments. But the research also showed that test scores have improved only slightly, and math performance has been stagnant or lower compared with other schools.
So far, the foundation and intermediaries have spent about $4 million in the District. Most has gone to charter schools such as Chavez, which receive public funding but are independently operated. Gates officials have shied away from larger investments in the turbulent and troubled D.C. school system.
But now the foundation is considering a larger effort. Mayor-elect Adrian M. Fenty (D) has asked for its guidance in a possible bid to take over the public schools.
Irasema Salcido could offer the incoming mayor insight on working with Gates.
* * *
Salcido, an administrator for 12 years at Bell Multicultural Senior High School in Northwest Washington, opened the first Cesar Chavez Public Charter School for Public Policy in 1998 in a Southwest Washington supermarket basement. The school, named for the late Mexican American labor and civil rights leader, seeks to offer a college-prep curriculum to kids whose families earn less in a year than the annual tuition of pricey private schools.
The school days are long and expectations lofty. After-school tutoring and summer school are required for all students regardless of academic standing. So are internships and service projects with community groups or think tanks. Four-fifths of the students are African American, and most of the rest are Latino.
Although some kids show up academically prepared, most arrive at the high school two to six grades behind. Some struggle with basic arithmetic or with writing a paragraph. Chavez seeks to help them catch up.
Three years at Chavez changed the life of Moises Flores, 22, a Nicaraguan immigrant. "I finally realized that I could do something," he said. "I could learn, and I could excel." He graduated in May from American University and is headed for law school.
Salcido, 44, an elegant and dark-eyed woman, knows the obstacles Flores overcame only too well. She moved to the United States from Mexico at age 15 knowing almost no English. To get through high school, she memorized passages from textbooks. It took her more than a decade to get through college and graduate school.
With her life experience and vision, Salcido has proven adept at attracting students. Her flagship campus moved three times in eight years to accommodate growth, settling on Capitol Hill; a second campus with a combined middle school and high school opened east of the Anacostia River last fall. Enrollment is now more than 1,100.
However, test scores have been just slightly better than the mediocre citywide average; the latest test data show one-quarter of Chavez students were proficient in math and one-third in reading. Just as worrisome, many students leave the school after their freshman year.
Salcido reached out to the Gates Foundation in 2004 through an official she knew there, education program director Jim Shelton, who arranged for Melinda Gates to tour the school that year. (Like Buffett, Melinda Gates serves on the board of The Washington Post Co.)
Salcido said she begged the foundation for help. "This is the time to make the investment," Salcido told Shelton last year, "not later when we make mistakes."
The pitch worked. The foundation dispatched program officer Andrew Smiles to help Salcido put together a proposal.
After prowling around the Capitol Hill campus, Smiles liked much of what he saw. Girls in bracelet-size hoop earrings and boys in baggy jeans walked past hand-lettered posters listing the grade-point averages of top students. Like the tail of a kite, sheets of paper lined a hall with the names of graduating seniors and the colleges to which they had been accepted. Bates, Penn State, Howard, the University of Maryland -- every Chavez graduate has been accepted to college, according to the school.
Many teachers were former policy wonks with Ivy League degrees. Smiles also saw promise in the public policy-oriented focus that linked coursework to the world at large. The school fit with the Gates "three R's" approach: rigor, relevance and relationships.
But some classes weren't as rigorous as they could be, Smiles concluded, and inexperienced teachers didn't know how to push kids to do more than recite answers by rote.
In a few weeks, he and Chavez administrators hammered out a 30-page plan with 11 target actions, known as "deliverables," in exchange for foundation support to fix problems and add two campuses. Most of the Gates money would come toward the end of a five-year grant. The deliverables included strengthening the curriculum, training teachers, drawing up more detailed budgets and taking steps to reduce student attrition. Nearly a quarter of the freshman class, Smiles discovered, had disappeared by the time their sophomore year began.
The Gates model is more common in business than philanthropy. Experts say Gates officials seek to hold grant recipients accountable and find formulas for success. The foundation "doesn't give all that much money to a school just because it's good and they want to make it better," said Paul T. Hill of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, which also has received Gates funding. "They give money to the school because it's an exemplar and they want to have it reproduced."
So far, the Chavez schools have received $370,000 in two installments and have met the foundation's conditions. Salcido and her administrators hired a dropout prevention specialist, recruited a curriculum expert for their board of directors and hired a principal to open a third campus next fall. But tough questions remain. Will the dropout rate decline? Will teacher training help raise test scores? Will the new school have a strong academic plan?
One key element of the Chavez expansion has been delayed. Two new campuses, not one, were supposed to open next fall. Salcido still aims for that fourth campus. Her enrollment target is 3,000 students.
"They've learned a lot of tough lessons over time," Shelton said of Salcido's team.
Smiles stays in constant contact by phone and in person, taking on an oversight role typical for a central office in a large school system. In July, he met with Chavez administrators to review progress on such matters as the new school calendar and dropout prevention. With pressed khaki pants and a thatch of unruly brown hair, Smiles looked like a cross between a Microsoft engineer and a prep-school English teacher as he took notes on a legal pad.
"It'd be great to get some perspective on the deliverables," he told them. "I'm also hoping that this meeting can serve as reflecting time to say, 'Here we are, getting prepared for two more schools.' "
Salcido gave a mock groan. "Do you have to remind us?" she said, as laughter rippled across the room.
Smiles grinned. "I know," he said. "Exactly."
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