Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
$500,000 won
Data & Evidence
Verified Win

Gates Foundation: centering teacher effectiveness and measurable student outcomes

The Gates Foundation funds education work that demonstrably improves teacher effectiveness and student outcomes. Proposals that describe activities without connecting them to measured student achievement are consistently declined.

Dr. Jennifer Park

Director of Research & Evaluation

Oakland Unified College & Career Initiative

58 upvotes

The Strategy

Gates Foundation's education funding has narrowed to interventions with rigorous evidence of improving student outcomes, particularly for Black, Latino, and low-income students. If your proposal describes what you will DO without showing how it changes what students KNOW and CAN DO, it will not be competitive. The evidence bar: Gates wants randomized controlled trial evidence or quasi-experimental evidence for the intervention model. If you are piloting a new approach, frame it as a development grant that will generate evidence, not as a scale-up. Gates funds the evidence-building phase differently from the scale-up phase. Teacher effectiveness is the through-line: Gates funds interventions that change what teachers do…

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gates
teacher-effectiveness
student-outcomes
evidence-based
education-equity

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