For education policy to positively impact the learning of all students, it must recognize the complexities, challenges, and extraordinary accomplishments that occur in classrooms daily. We believe that expert teachers are key to informing these effective policies. CTQ identifies accomplished teachers; helps them acquire the knowledge and skills to participate effectively in policy discussions; and ensures that their voices are heard. The initiatives below represent our current efforts to elevate the voices of highly accomplished teachers.

Teacher Leaders Network Forum

What if a national cross-section of accomplished teachers — representing all grade levels, teaching roles and school settings — joined together in a virtual professional learning community that functions 24/7/365? They have! Since 2003, the Teacher Leaders Network Forum has been raising the voices and propagating the solutions of expert teachers who bring their unique perspectives to education’s most intractable problems.

New Millennium Initiative

The New Millennium Initiative, launched in fall 2009, seeks to develop a growing network of young teachers to engage with researchers, reformers, administrators, union leaders and their peers in their own communities. These young teachers will gain policy expertise and learn to market their ideas as they become leaders of improved student learning.

NBCT Return on Investment Initiative

During the last decade, policy leaders have come to realize what parents have always known — teachers make more difference in student achievement than any other single school-based factor. Our National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT) Return on Investment Initiative leverages the expertise of highly accomplished NBCTs in North Carolina, California and Washington state and utillizes cutting-edge Web 2.0 tools to support new and out-of-field teachers in high-needs schools.

ASSET 

Transforming school cultures, particularly in high-needs schools, presents many challenges. What effect does increasing teacher empowerment have on issues such as teacher retention and student achievement? How can — and should — teachers play a larger role in school reform? The ASSET initiative has sought to discover the answers to these critical questions during its three-year implementation.

NBCT Summits

Getting good teachers to high-needs schools — and keeping them there — may be the toughest public education issue facing policymakers today. Research continues to surface a disheartening fact: Poor and minority students, and those in low-performing schools, are far more likely not to be taught by qualified and effective teachers. CTQ asked accomplished teachers what it would take to change this statistic through our series of NBCT Summits.