Education Program 2010 Annual Report

Prompted by the federal Race to the Top competition, states around the Midwest began considering ways to improve the way teachers are hired, supported, evaluated, and held accountable for helping kids learn. In some states, reform efforts became contentious and highly partisan. In Illinois, however, 2010 was a year of slow, patient collaboration that built solid support for meaningful reforms—and, possibly, a model for the rest of the country.

Laying the Groundwork for Reform
The Foundation has invested in a range of strategies for improving public policies on teacher quality in Illinois and other states. It provided startup funding for Advance Illinois, which has led the statewide reform effort, and also supported other reform stalwarts, notably the New Teacher Project. It supported research by the New Teacher Project (The Widget Effect) and others documenting how existing policies and union contracts fail to identify, reward, and retain good teachers while too often protecting poor performers. In 2010 Joyce produced its own guide to the research, Teacher Quality: What You Need to Know. And it lent one of its staff members, Education Program Manager John Luczak (on leave from the Foundation), to serve as an adviser to Illinois Governor Pat Quinn during a critical moment in the reform process.

From the beginning, Illinois reform advocates worked deliberately to build a broad consensus around needed reforms, says the New Teacher Project’s Tim Daly. Both district and union leaders helped identify shortcomings of current policies in The Widget Effect. Both joined other reform advocates in supporting major legislation reforming teacher and principal evaluation and teacher certification early in 2010. Immediately after passage, educators, advocates, and union leaders began meeting monthly to flesh out details of the new evaluation systems. This patient collaboration built a basis of trust, which in turn led to broad bipartisan support for more far-reaching reforms, which eventually passed the Illinois legislature in spring 2011. State Senator Kimberly Lightford, the bill’s sponsor, said “This is the result of all sides—reformers, unions, and administrators—coming together to find workable solutions to long disputed issues.”
 

Next Stop: Implementation
Other states—notably Wisconsin and Ohio—also passed major reforms, although in both the process was much more partisan and contentious. Still, “a great deal has been accomplished,” says Daly. “There’s been more change in the last three years than in the previous three decades.”

The devil, of course, will be in the details of implementation, and the Foundation has been active on this front as well. As mentioned, Illinois reformers began collaborating in 2010 to reform teacher evaluation; a robust and fair evaluation process is key to other reforms around tenure, promotion, and dismissal. Joyce grants in 2010 supported the union-backed Consortium for Educational Change to work with the New Teacher Project on teacher evaluation; supported New Leaders for New Schools to work on principal evaluation; and funded the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research to evaluate a new, more robust teacher evaluation being piloted in Chicago Public Schools and share the lessons.

Read the 2010 Annual Report
Download a printer-friendly PDF
Download a PDF of the 2010 Education Program and Grants