TeachPlus: How to Vault Student Success? Reward Effective Teaching.

 

The mission of TeachPlus, an education initiative incubated at the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy in Cambridge, MA, is to increase the outcomes for urban students by ensuring that they have effective, experienced teachers. Research makes clear that teachers are the most important school-based variable in student success, yet the profession is not organized to reward excellence, promote teacher development, or retain top performers in the classroom. TeachPlus’s T3 Initiative, which sends high performing teachers into the most desperately failing urban public schools to turn those schools around, is on the SheGives slate because it is a thoughtful, powerful initiative to address these issues.

TeachPlus’ just launched book, Learning from the Experts: Teacher Leaders on Solving America’s Education Challenges (Harvard Education Press) takes on seven critical challenges facing education today from using data in schools, measuring effective teaching, recruiting and retaining high-performing teachers in struggling schools, building a performance-driven teaching profession, improving school leadership, and raising the status of the profession.

SheGives applauds TeachPlus for its relentless efforts to advance the conversation on how to improve our failing public schools with the considered views and voices of teachers. We congratulate its bold leaders, Celine Coggins and Monique Burns Thompson, on their audacious mission. SheGives is honored to have TeachPls :: T3 Initiative on our slate.

SheGives connects committed, inquisitive, engaged funders with a slate of diligenced nonprofits in the Greater Boston area.  We provide members with relevant data about the nonprofits in our portfolio and an opportunity to meet directly with our nonprofits’ Executive Directors and senior staff in small settings that promote in-depth q&a’s and, ultimately, informed giving.  Giving is personally driven, but because we give side-by-side our collective impact is greater.

Photo credit:  Courtney Mirenzi