Overview
Evidence shows clearly what most people know intuitively: teachers matter more to student learning than anything else inside a school. But they need support to help students succeed, and they deserve recognition and rewards for doing a great job. The foundation is investing $290 million in four communities across the country to support bold and ambitious plans that will transform how teachers are recruited, developed, rewarded, and retained. The large and mid-size urban school systems that will benefit from these grants currently serve more than 350,000 students, many of them from underserved communities.
Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching sites:
- Hillsborough County Public Schools (Tampa, Fla.): $100 million
- Memphis City Schools: $90 million
- Pittsburgh Public Schools: $40 million
- The College-Ready Promise (five charter school networks in Los Angeles: Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, Aspire Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, Inner City Education Foundation, and Partnerships to Uplift Communities Schools): $60 million
In addition, as part of its plan to promote and support effective teaching, the foundation is supporting research to better understand and define what makes a teacher effective and to identify multiple measures of effectiveness on which teachers, researchers, and policymakers can all agree.
Reform Plans
In the Intensive Partnership sites, district and school leaders will implement bold reform plans over the next several years to better recruit, retain, and reward effective teachers and ensure that the highest need students are taught by the most effective teachers. While the individual plans vary, they include common elements such as creating career ladders so teachers can advance while remaining in classrooms; boosting teacher development, training, and support; and tying tenure decisions more closely to student achievement. Each partner is working in close collaboration with its local teachers union and other community organizations to implement its plans.