by Elizabeth K. Jeffers
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been a major supporter of not only the charter movement in New Orleans, but also the research that supports the New Orleans education reform model and its expansion to other cities and states. Not included in the totals below, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $5.4 million to New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO) in 2007 order “to help incubate new schools, scale the promising practices of high achieving urban charter schools, enable the expansion of pre-existing great schools, and support an orderly approach to school closure for underperforming schools in New Orleans.”
The year that BESE approved Leslie Jacob’s motion to offer $17,000 to teachers from out of state to relocate to teach in the Recovery School District, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $1 million to Teach for America “to address the urgent situation and to help catalyze the reform efforts under way in New Orleans.”
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has supported research and reports about the success of the RSD. For instance, it granted $308,000 for Learning Matters, Inc. to produce reports on districts including New Orleans school districts in 2007. In 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $1 million directly to the RSD “to support a comprehensive analysis of the districts human capital practices and policies.” This same year, it donated $27,000 to the Trustees of Dartmouth College “to provide support for National Student Clearinghouse data match for the state of Louisiana to study the effectiveness of charter schools within the RSD of New Orleans.”
