Through its Intensive Partnership for Effective Teaching program, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has recently donated nearly $335 million to promote effective teaching and student achievement nationwide.
The programs awarded include $100 million for the Hillsborough County Schools in Florida, $90 million to Memphis City Schools, $40 million for Pittsburgh Public Schools, and $60 million to College-Ready Promise, a coalition of public charter school management organizations in the Los Angeles area. An additional $45 million was awarded to the Measures of Effective Teaching project to develop measures that will be viewed by teachers, administrators, and policy makers as reliable indicators of a teacher’s impact on student achievement.
The grants are meant to ensure that young people across the country have the opportunity to go to college and earn a degree that has real value in today’s job market. The money will be used to develop and implement new strategies and policies aimed at improving student achievement, with a special emphasis placed on reforming how teachers are recruited, evaluated, supported, and rewarded. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association will act as partners in the effort.
“We are convinced that in order to dramatically improve education in America, we must first ensure that every student has an effective teacher in every subject, every school year,” said Gates Foundation co-chair Melinda French Gates. “These communities have shown extraordinary commitment to tackling one of the most important educational issues of our time. We must do everything we can to understand what makes teachers effective and cultivate those qualities across the profession, in every school and classroom, so that all students can benefit.”
The foundation announced a year ago that investments in effective teaching would be a critical component of its education strategy, a decision based on a wealth of information that shows teachers are the single most important school-based factor in student achievement. Researchers have indicated only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as across classrooms within the same school, underscoring the impact of teachers on student learning.