ALL SPELLED OUT: Memphis City Schools Supt. Kriner Cash said the district’s $90 million, seven-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has implications for education across the nation. -- PHOTO BY BILL DRIES

Even as Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda Gates, were announcing a $90 million, seven-year grant to Memphis City Schools last week, the school system already had an important clue about the effort to define an effective teacher.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant is part of a national effort to research what it means to be an effective teacher. The school system, as well as private foundations and other donors, must come up with another $66 million combined for what Memphis Supt. Kriner Cash calls a “$156 million ask” over approximately seven years. Cash said even without the Gates money, he would have pursued the reform.

Following the numbers

The search for teacher effectiveness is the main work of the Gates Foundation in the United States, an organization that actually has a global reach.

Melinda Gates said in some ways, the U.S. goal is more difficult politically than fighting AIDS in Africa and other health problems. The foundation is a 10-year veteran of education reform discussions that have included a foray into smaller class sizes and some public complaints by the Gateses about the politics of school reform.

“There’s clearly no easy solution here about what to do,” Melinda Gates said in a conference call from Seattle last week. “Teachers matter more to student achievement, more than any other factor inside our school buildings. This is something we know absolutely for certain at this point.”

The Memphis school system was chosen, in part, because Tennessee already has more data about teachers than any other state.

Among the data Cash showed the foundation leaders was a sample of 10 teachers each from two anonymous elementary schools.

The Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS) ranks the approximately 2,500 teachers in elementary and middle schools as well as teachers of state-tested subjects at the high school level. The lower a teacher’s number, the higher they rank. The closer they are to 2,500, the more they need to improve.

The top-ranked elementary school had five teachers with numbers lower than 200 and two who were ranked above 2,000. The elementary school at No. 82 in the rankings had the No. 6 ranked teacher in the system and eight teachers above 2,000.

Cash said the data is intriguing because it shows the difference in teaching quality isn’t from school to school but from classroom to classroom.

“It is data that no other state really has as much access to and goes as deep down into each classroom for every teacher who teaches a core or tested subject,” Cash told The Daily News. “We don’t typically know this. Parents don’t always know it. Teachers themselves can be made aware.”

Thomas Kane, the deputy director of Education for Data and Research at the Gates Foundation, said the data is a “huge untapped source of energy that could really drive the next stage of reform” in schools nationally.

“There are huge differences in student achievement gains in different classes,” he said. “If we could just figure out a way to tap into that … that will be the way that we will be able to generate the large gains in achievement that our country needs to compete on the world stage.”

Acknowledging what is known

For years, some of the data has been churned out in a less-than-timely fashion, so it’s meaningless by the time it is reviewed. But in other cases, it can’t be used.

“Because of state law, the TVAAS data that’s out there cannot be used for teacher evaluations,” said Ken Foster, executive director of the Memphis Education Association. The participation of the teachers union in the TEI plan has been crucial.

“That’s one of the things that we have agreed with the district on, is that if it does become available to be used for evaluations, that we will use that as part of the evaluation process,” Foster told The Daily News. “We want to capture what these outstanding teachers are doing.”

The foundation awarded $290 million to the Memphis school system as well as the Pittsburgh public school system, Hillsborough County, Fla., schools and a coalition of Los Angeles charter schools. The education researchers from the foundation said they chose Memphis in part because of Cash’s blunt statements about the ineffectiveness of the school system’s current hiring practices and methods for evaluating teachers.

“I’ve been in the profession for 33 years. My parents were teachers and educators. Many of us come from traditions of education,” Cash said. “As far back as you want to go, parents have always known who the good teacher was at the school. The students themselves have always known who the best teachers were in a school. But we as educators have found it much the allegory of the blind men and the elephant.

“We’re studying what … we agree to be the elements of effective teaching. We are going to reach a common definition – for the first time – not depending upon what part of the elephant you touch. It’s a first-time, common, agreed-on definition with teachers leading the way with input into that definition. That’s significant.”

Finding teachers

Memphis is no stranger to education reform efforts in the past decade.

Vicki Phillips of the Gates Foundation told The Daily News she is aware of the cynicism at some levels locally.

“We shared the concerns and looked closely at the risks in Memphis given the past history,” she said. “But we do actually think that that cynicism can be overcome with the research and the evidence and the plan that has been put in place. In Memphis, what better place and worthy place to try this out than where the kids and the teachers are so reflective of the issues and challenges that this work represents currently?”

The teacher training and merit pay system creating a master teacher status will contain incentives city school teachers can opt in or out of. And the option was crucial to winning the union’s cooperation.

So far, no one from the MEA or the school system is willing to make a public guess about how many teachers might participate.

The school system is already recruiting 1,000 teachers who will agree to four classroom visits a school year for two school years and taping of the classroom sessions for evaluation as well as research. With $1.9 million from the Gates Foundation, the school system is offering each of the participating teachers a stipend of $1,500 – $1,000 at the outset and $500 at the end of the two-year process, which will involve about 12 extra hours of work a school year.

“It’s very important that that work get started as a bridge so that we can lay that foundation,” Cash said. “The big results won’t come from the big piece until we get this research part going.”