Gates Foundation Announces New Focus on Teacher Quality
Bill Gates expresses a serious commitment to improving teaching quality in his 2009 Annual Letter on U.S. Education. Reflecting the Gates Foundation’s investment in education over the last nine years, Gates announces a refined strategy that focuses on the development of effective teachers. Gates writes,
“Whenever I talk to teachers, it is clear that they want to be great, but they need better tools so they can measure their progress and keep improving. So our new strategy focuses on learning why some teachers are so much more effective than others and how best practices can be spread throughout the education system so that the average quality goes up.”
SMHC is working closely with the Gates Foundation, a core funder of SMHC, and is pleased to see the core principles of SMHC reflected in the new Gates program strategy. Gates specifically emphasizes the need for measures of teaching effectiveness that can be used to guide, and evaluate, the recruitment, distribution, induction, ongoing development, evaluation, promotion, and compensation of effective teachers. SMHC has many efforts underway to identify and advance successful policies and practices in regard to these human resource management issues through the work of its Task Force and National Reform Network, and additional research to pinpoint best practices.
Filed under: Education Community News
