Negative knowledge can be as important as positive knowledge

Kudos to Gates for doing that which others shy from - measuring real outcomes from honest efforts to improve education. From 'An Expensive Experiment': Gates Teacher-Effectiveness Program Shows No Gains for Students by Madeline Will. A half billion dollars spent trying to improve educational outcomes by improving the capacity to identify and retain superior teachers and no measurable student improvements.

The article explores what they were attempting to do and why and also discusses some possible reasons for the absence of improved student performance.

Perhaps the more important aspect is that Gates has all along been trying to apply rigorous philanthropy. Articulate your hypothesis, forecast your outcomes, measure your results. That behavior is largely alien in many fields and yet is a foundation for progress.

Earlier, from 2000 to 2006, the Gates Foundation, with a similar objective of improving student performance, invested some hundreds of millions in charter schools and helping schools reconfigure into smaller education environments, the idea being (if memory serves) that smaller entities would be more transparent, be more accountable to parents, and have greater capacity to change to address immediate local circumstances. It also was adjudged to not have achieved its goals of improved student performance.

Repeated failures such as these are disappointing but I suspect that they do slowly build an awareness that there are no one-size-fits-all, scalable, solver bullets. The problem is multi-variable and multi-dimensional.

I suspect that we will get nowhere trying to find the answer because there is no singular answer. What we are building towards is an awareness that every tangled pathology requires a unique combination of cumulative solutions known to work under tightly defined circumstances.