A seven-year, nearly $1 billion education initiative centered on improving teaching quality in low-income schools — and bankrolled in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — largely failed to help students, according to a new report from nonprofit policy think tank RAND.

RAND was selected at the outset of the initiative by the Gates Foundation to evaluate whether the project improved outcomes for students.

“Overall…the initiative did not achieve its goals for student achievement or graduation, particularly for LIM [low-income minority] students,” the report’s summary said.

By 2015, six years into the initiative, “student achievement, access to effective teaching, and dropout rates were not dramatically better,” than in schools that didn’t participate in the program, according to the RAND study.

Source: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s education initiative failure – Business Insider