Research Library

Empowering Effective Teachers  

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Subtitle: Readiness for Reform

Author: Issue Brief

Publisher: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Publication Date: 2010, Feb.

Summary or Abstract: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation embarked on a process to find sites that would help determine how to use measures of teacher effectiveness to transform human resources, specifically in determining who is hired and retained, how tenure is granted, how teachers are placed, and how compensation and promotion are determined. In April 2009, the foundation asked nine school districts and one coalition of charter management organizations to propose strategies for dramatically improving teacher effectiveness, including:

• developing meaningful measures of teacher effectiveness, including but not limited to student achievement growth over time
• increasing the overall numbers of effective teachers
• providing increased pay and greater roles and responsibilities for teachers who earn tenure
• concentrating effective teachers where they are needed most .

The participating sites committed to bringing district leadership, school board leadership, and teachers’ union leadership to the table to develop a plan to transform teacher effectiveness policies and practices. These working teams spent the summer of 2009 developing proposals that outlined how the sites would radically reorganize their practices and policies to ensure that every student is taught by an effective teacher.