Section 1: Year In Review
Promising Practices:
Memphis Teacher Effectiveness Initiative
Before Tennessee won Race to the Top and leapt
into the national education reform spotlight,
Memphis City Schools was already well on its way
to tackling perhaps one of the toughest reforms
in education – ensuring every classroom is taught
by an effective teacher.
The initiative is focused on four substantial goals:
defining and measuring teacher effectiveness;
making smarter decisions about who teaches;
better supporting, utilizing, and compensating
teachers; and improving the surrounding context
to foster effective teaching.
In November 2009, Memphis was awarded a
$90 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation to fund the Teacher Effectiveness
Initiative (TEI), a four-pronged plan to make
teachers both more effective and more
accountable. The goal of the intensive sevenyear project, said TEI executive director Tequilla
Banks, “is to have a highly effective teacher in
every class.”
A key question that the initiative hopes to
answer is how to recruit, retain, and ultimately
reward the most effective teachers, an effort
which starts with tying student performance to
teacher evaluation. The initiative is committed
to using a cadre of measures, including student
achievement,