What We're Doing

The Teacher Leaders Network (TLN) is a virtual network connecting and supporting accomplished educators who share a desire to apply what they know and can do to spread teaching expertise, advance school reform and influence teaching policies and programs.

TeacherSolutions is an initiative designed to amplify the voices of expert teachers in national education policy debates. The TeacherSolutions model brings together a diverse cross-section of accomplished American teachers who work in teams to carefully examine critical issues facing public education and offer solutions based on their deep understanding of teaching and learning and how schools really work.In its first venture, TeacherSolutions assembled a representative national team of 18 accomplished teachers focusing on professional compensation and the teacher "pay for performance" proposals now being heavily debated in states and school districts across the United States. The resulting report, Performance-Pay for Teachers: Designing a System that Students Deserve, has garnered national attention from media and policymakers because of its innovative approach to a comprehensive teacher compensation program with the goal of improved student learning at its core.

A central tenet of the TeacherSolutions alternative compensation framework was that any compensation system must be flexible enough to allow different schools and districts to make decisions that advance their specific student-learning goals. CTQ has been able to take this type of local lens to the state and various regions of Kansas through our TLN-Kansas initiative.

CTQ launched the Achieving School Success through Empowering Teachers (ASSET) initiative in 2005 to address the challenging issue of reducing teacher turnover in high needs schools. Initially targeting six high needs middle schools in Orange County and Wake County, NC, the overall goal of the ASSET partnership was to implement new models of distributed leadership in order to improve teacher retention and student achievement in schools throughout the region. Now in its third year, CTQ has taken advantage of virtual technology to expand the impact of the initiative.