Teacher Quality

Education Program Strategy: Teacher Quality

Goal: The Education Program works to close the achievement gap by improving the quality of teachers in schools that serve low-income students and communities of color. We support efforts to improve federal, state and district policies so that high-need schools in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis can attract and retain first-rate teachers.

Theory of Change: Every parent, student, and community member knows that excellent teachers are the key to student success. Decades of research supports this. Great teaching is important to all students, but especially to those falling behind. With a really good teacher, research shows, students can make as much as a year and a half’s worth of progress in a single year. Replacing a student’s ineffective teachers with highly effective teachers would close the achievement gap in 3–4 years.

The Joyce Approach

Go for the talent – draw more talented people into teaching and hire the best teachers for each school.

• Fund research and policy development to eliminate barriers that keep out promising teacher candidates and help improve central office recruiting and hiring systems.

Make results count – scrap meaningless teacher evaluations and more accurately measure teacher effectiveness.

• Fund research, policy development, and advocacy to support the development of new teacher evaluation systems in Chicago, Indianapolis and Minneapolis.

Help teachers improve – build an opportunity culture for teachers and use new evaluations to guide professional development.

• Support research and policy development to help transform the teaching career to make it more attractive to promising teachers, and to ensure teachers get clear guidance on how to improve.

Reward excellence – offer tenure only to great teachers and rework retirement to improve quality and fiscal stability.

• Support research on job protections and pensions in other sectors, and development of policies to reform tenure, teacher compensation, and retirement options.

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