Tully: Great teachers find new ally in IPS

A fundamental problem with the way schools are structured is that there aren’t enough ways for great teachers to advance in their careers without leaving the classroom.

Over the years, I’ve met many teachers who felt it necessary to move into administration or policy positions — not because they had tired of teaching, but because they wanted the new challenges and other benefits that come with career advancement. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with leaving the classroom for new opportunities, schools and communities are a lot better off when great teachers who would prefer to spend their days teaching kids have the incentives to do so.

That’s one of the things that is so encouraging about a new program coming to Indianapolis Public Schools, courtesy of the education organization Teach Plus and a $1 million grant from the Lilly Foundation. The program will infuse three struggling IPS schools with leaders from within the teaching ranks, providing great experienced teachers with more responsibilities and pay while filling their schools with more collaboration and techniques aimed at better addressing the needs of at-risk students.

The Teach Plus program, titled Turnaround Teacher Teams, or T3, has been implemented in Boston and Washington, D.C., in recent years, program Vice President Meghan O’Keefe said, with the goal of retaining classroom teachers and allowing them “to express leadership at the school level.”

“We have heard from teachers who tell us they want to be in the classroom working with the students who need them most, but they also want to have more of an impact beyond their own classrooms,” O’Keefe added.

With the new grant, IPS will create 24 “teacher leader” positions within three elementary schools: 14, 44 and 61. The teachers will receive training and frequent coaching and oversee small groups of colleagues, developing strategies to better use data and other methods to tackle their schools’ unique challenges. They will receive an annual $6,000 stipend as a recognition of extra work they will take on.

In other cities, the teacher leaders have come from both the impacted schools and districts, and from applicants who in many cases had previously left the districts. The deadline to apply for the Indianapolis T3 program, at www.teachplus.org, is April 25.

Gene Pinkard is the principal of Marie Reed Elementary School in Washington, which is in its first year with the T3 program. Seven teacher leaders in that school work with colleagues on the goals of improving student academic achievement, as well as the school’s culture and atmosphere.

“It’s pretty powerful,” Pinkard said, noting that the teacher leaders “take complete responsibility for their teams.” He said the leaders’ colleagues have embraced the turnaround program and that the leaders, as fellow teachers and not administrators, have a special ability to build camaraderie around a larger mission.

Pinkard said it’s too early to make sweeping pronouncements about the program’s impact on academics, but he pointed to “significant positive movement” on interim exams the school has taken. According to Teach Plus, schools in the program’s first three years have experienced significant gains in language and math scores, outpacing turnaround initiatives at other schools.

“We are going to hold ourselves accountable for the results we achieve,” O’Keefe said. “And we won’t consider this a success unless we are getting great results in the schools as a whole.”

In each of the three IPS schools, most students come from poverty, and no more than four in 10 have passed recent state standardized tests. The challenges are daunting. But the district and the schools’ principals have welcomed the outside partnership. IPS Superintendent Lewis Ferebee said the program is both a chance to recruit and retain talented teachers and to build excitement within the schools around “conversations about instruction and students.”

“Teachers flock to certain schools based on school leadership,” he said. “What teachers see at the school level, in terms of leadership, is crucial to our future.”

It’s also crucial that teachers hear more often that they are valued and that their ideas are desperately needed to turn around struggling schools. This program, advocates note, was created by teachers. And if it succeeds, that also will be because of the teachers behind it.

You can reach me at matthew.tully@indystar.com or on Twitter: @matthewltully.