Educator moved far, fast on way to Gates Foundation
The new director of education giving at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation almost didn't make it to college.
Most families in her rural Kentucky community never thought about higher education, Vicki Phillips recalled Friday. Hers was no exception, and she applied only because a more-affluent friend paid the application fee.
"I got my college education by luck," she said. "I want to assure that more kids get it by design."
Phillips, 49, announced this week that she'll leave her job as superintendent of Portland Public Schools to help the world's largest philanthropy reach its ambitious goal of ensuring that all students graduate from high school ready for college and work.
She replaces Tom Vander Ark, the foundation's first education director, who helped craft a large-scale effort to retool the nation's high schools. So far, the foundation has given away $3.4 billion in education grants, with no plans to slow down.
Phillips' selection makes sense to many familiar with her work in Portland, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Kentucky. She is known as a hard-charging leader who has a lot in common with Vander Ark, but has more experience inside schools and school districts.
"She is probably one of the most knowledgeable and capable education leaders in the country right now," said Michael Cohen, president of Achieve, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit founded by business leaders and governors.
In her three years in Portland, Phillips moved fast. To help stabilize finances, she closed eight schools and consolidated others. She re-established the district's curriculum department and made plans to switch to a "core" curriculum to be taught at every school. She added more full-day kindergarten classes, and broke up some big high schools into smaller schools-within-schools.
She won a lot of fans, but also has critics who say she moved too fast and was too top-down. Willamette Week recently called her "Hurricane Vicki."
Phillips said she is sad to leave Portland, but that the Gates job was "the opportunity of a lifetime."
The Gates Foundation searched for six months for someone to build on what Vander Ark started in 1999, when the foundation was just getting off the ground. He moved fast, too, and put high-school improvement on the national agenda.
Allan Golston, president of the foundation's U.S. program, said he and his staff asked leaders inside and outside education who should be considered to replace Vander Ark, the former superintendent of Federal Way schools who's now president of the X Prize Foundation in California. Golston said they started with 50 names, winnowed them to 10, and brought in four to six for interviews.
"We are confident that we talked to the absolute best in the country," Golston said.
Phillips started her career teaching middle and high school in Kentucky. She worked in that state's education department, and then moved to education-policy groups in Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Her first superintendent job was in a small urban district in Lancaster, Pa., where Cohen said she "brought about some of the most phenomenal improvement in achievement in an urban district." From Lancaster, Phillips was appointed Pennsylvania's secretary of education. She moved to Portland in 2004.
Phillips has long been on the foundation's radar. In 2002, when she was superintendent in Lancaster, the foundation gave that district a grant. Vander Ark once tried to hire her, but Phillips chose to stay in Pennsylvania because the governor wanted to name her secretary of education.
Golston said Phillips' breadth of experience in schools, districts and at the state policy level was a big plus for the Gates foundation job.
"It's clear she knows how the system works. She's been innovative. She's fantastic about thinking at scale," he said.
He agreed, as some observers noted, that Phillips has the outsider's edge that the Gates Foundation is known for, but also an insider's knowledge.
When she arrived in Portland, the district was unstable, said Bobbie Regan, co-chair of the Portland School Board. It was in the middle of a financial crisis so deep that it had eliminated its curriculum department. Relations with teachers and other staff weren't good, Regan said. There was a lot of turnover on the School Board, she said, and little focus on student achievement.
Portland wanted a leader, and got one.
Critics say she fails to build consensus.
"Collaboration has not been a strong suit of Superintendent Phillips," said Jeff Miller, president of the Portland Association of Teachers.
Others question her judgment because she hired a principal who recently left under a cloud. There is controversy over her plans to introduce the "core" curriculum. And she's leaving before it's clear whether what she's started will work, said Martín Gonzales, executive director of the grass-roots Portland Schools Alliance.
But many say she's leaving the district in much better shape than it was in when she arrived, even if she's leaving in the middle of what she started.
"I think they got somebody good, darn it," said Scott Bailey, president of Community and Parents for Public Schools, an advocacy group.
Phillips says she likes the fact that the Gates Foundation is always evaluating its efforts and making adjustments. She says she likes to do the same thing.
Whatever she does at Gates, it will be watched closely and will send ripples across the nation, said Rick Hess, director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
"We're all waiting, with interest, to see how this is going to evolve," he said.
Linda Shaw: 206-464-2359 or lshaw@seattletimes.com