The NEA Foundation created the Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative to accelerate the achievement rate for low income and minority student groups, thereby closing the gap between these students and their higher achieving peers, while raising achievement for all groups.

Our work is research-based and the following resources and organizations help inform and frame this important work.

Union/District Capacity and Collaboration

Resources

Peer Assistance and Review: All Teachers on the Road to Instructional Leadership in Columbus (OH) “100% Project Schools”
Most professions have mechanisms in place to ensure that their practitioners know and carry out the highest standards of practice. Teacher peer assistance and review programs (PAR) are just such a mechanism in public education: teachers observe, support and assess the quality of practice and professional growth of their peers. This Issues Brief provides a snapshot of an NEA Foundation-funded PAR program in Columbus, OH, where teachers have led the way in achieving higher standards of professional practice and corresponding results for students.

The NEA Foundation hosted six teams of district and union leaders who spent two days together learning how to develop PAR programs. This brief video includes excerpts from a presentation of national research on PAR by Dr. Susan Moore Johnson, Harvard University’s Jerome T. Murphy Professor in Education. It also includes remarks from educators and union leaders who have undertaken this important work.

Want to learn more? This longer video includes Dr. Moore Johnson’s entire presentation with more remarks from educators and union leaders who joined her in the panel discussion.

Expanding Learning Opportunities to Close the Achievement Gaps: Lessons from Union-District Collaboration
Through expanded learning opportunities (ELOs), time is being reconsidered in districts across the nation to improve student learning and increase teaching effectiveness in support of 21st century learning goals. Given the relative newness of many of ELO programs and activities, a thin research base exists about how effective ELOs are spearheaded, developed, administered and governed. The cases and analyses presented in the NEA Foundation’s newest report, Expanding Learning Opportunities to Close the Achievement Gaps: Lessons from Union-District Collaborations, provide examples of ELO programs that have been jointly designed and collaboratively operated by leaders from the school district, teachers' unions and community.

Parent/Teacher Home Visits: Creating a Bridge between Parents and Teachers as Co-Educators in Springfield, MA and Seattle, WA
Parent-teacher home visits—virtually unheard of a decade ago—are rapidly gaining national attention.  They are proving to be a way of deepening trust and relationships among teachers, parents and students, and helping teachers better understand the unique academic and other needs of all of their students. This NEA Foundation Issues Brief tells the powerful story of parent-teacher home visits in two of the Foundation’s Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative sites—Seattle, WA and Springfield, MA.

Human Capital: Unions and School Districts Collaborating To Close Achievement Gaps
This report examines the collaborative development of systems to improve the knowledge and skills of public school educators and leaders.  The report studies the work in the Foundation’s Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative sites as well as other local initiatives that have been developed with, and not just for, educators.

Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Montgomery County Public Schools:
This report tells the story of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools’ transformation into a system committed to closing the achievement gap through deep and sustained reform between local unions and the district. Three related case studies are available for free download at The whole book is available for purchase from Amazon.com, among other online vendors.

Transforming Teacher Unions: Fighting for Better Schools and Social Justice.
This anthology challenges myths about unions and shows exemplary practices of teacher unions from the local to national level.  The 25 articles address issues of teacher unionism, classroom reform, working with local communities, and social justice.

Collective Bargaining in Education: Negotiating Change in Today's Schools
Collective bargaining shapes the way public schools are organized, financed, staffed, and operated. This publication offers a thorough and nuanced analysis of the available research and varied perspectives on teachers unions and collective bargaining in education.

Win-Win Labor Management Collaborations in Education: Breakthrough Practices to Benefit Students, Teachers, and Administrators.
(The entire book is available for purchase from Amazon.com and other online vendors.)
This handbook for union leaders, teachers and managers provides a national review of path-breaking collective-bargaining agreements, highlights strides made by districts throughout the nation, as well as best practices implemented in major urban regions.

Unlikely Allies: Unions and Districts in the Battle for School Reform
This new report by the Education Sector describes a groundbreaking plan calling for shared decision-making, shared accountability, and shared leadership between the union and district in Providence RI.

Organizations

The Consortium for Educational Change 
The CEC is a network of Illinois School districts and professional organizations that improves student achievement by assisting member districts and schools to become collaborative, high performing organizations. It includes over 80 member districts and partners. CEC is independent from both unions and management and has extensive work both with AFT and NEA locals in a number of progressive union leadership initiatives, including a partnership with National Louis University to prepare leaders for progressive union work.Teacher Union Reform Network
TURN is a nationwide network of more than 50 union locals promoting progressive reforms in education and in teacher unions - to improve student achievement, increase teacher connectivity, and  elevate teachers' voices in the reform debate.

Teaching Capacity

Resources

Means to an end: A guide to developing teacher evaluation systems that support growth and development
This practical toolkit, released by the Aspen Institute, lays out strategies for designing and implementing new teacher evaluation systems. Examples from districts and charter networks at the vanguard of this new work are included throughout the guide.

Knowing and doing: What teachers learn from formative assessment and how they use the information
This study, conducted by National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing (CRESST), analyzed three different middle school mathematics formative assessment programs, examining how features of each program were associated with the information they provided to teachers and the manner in which teachers used the information.

Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, explores how evaluation methods can best be used to tell teachers more about the skills that make them most effective and to help districts identify great teaching. Research reports and policy briefs are available for free download.

Rethinking teacher evaluation in Chicago: Lessons learned from classroom observations, principal-teacher conferences, and district implementation
This report of the Consortium on Chicago School Research summarizes findings from a two-year study of Chicago’s Excellence in Teaching Pilot, designed to drive instructional improvement by providing teachers with evidence-based feedback on their strengths and weaknesses.

Landmark Study Supports Student Standardized Test Score Use to Determine Teacher Effectiveness
A recently released (December 2011) study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (Working Paper No. 17699) sheds new light on the debate over the best way to measure and improve teacher quality. The study focuses on evaluation of teachers based on their impacts on students’ test scores (“value-added” -- VA approach). A teacher’s value-added is defined as the average test-score gain for his or her students, adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics such as prior scores. The researchers track one million children from a large urban school district from 4th grade to adulthood (over 20 years) to determine the accuracy of standard VA measures and impact on students.

Three reports from the Aspen Institute on high quality teacher evaluation systems:
As policymakers and education leaders seek to accelerate reform in this area, it is essential to learn from efforts already underway. The Education & Society Program has published three new reports: profiles of the performance management work in District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) and the Achievement First (AF) charter school network; and a synthesis of issues that emerge from the two profiles.

The Same Starting Line: How School Boards Can Erase the Opportunity Gap Between Poor and Middle-Class Children
This report from Appelseed focuses on ways that school boards, superintendents and key-decision makers can ensure that all children, especially poor children, are given the learning-related resources they need to succeed academically. The report is also a study of the disparity in educational resources in districts in five states--Alabama, Connecticut, Illinois, Georgia and New Mexico.

Transforming High Schools: Performance Systems for Powerful Teaching
Alliance for Excellent Education’s policy brief on assessing of high quality teaching in high schools. This brief provides several recommendations for federal and state policymakers to support educator development in high schools.

Teacher Leadership as a Key to Education Innovation: Action Steps and Promising Strategies for State, District, and University Officials

This report examines how teacher leadership can improve teacher retention, strengthen the teaching profession, build the capacity of school leaders, and facilitate innovative advances to the structure of school staffing.

Transforming Teacher Education Through Clinical Practice: A National Strategy to Prepare Effective Teachers
A national expert panel composed of education experts and critics calls for teacher education to be "turned upside down" by revamping programs to place clinical practice at the center of teacher preparation. This new vision of preparation also will require the development of partnerships with school districts in which teacher education becomes a shared responsibility between P-12 schools and higher education.

Transforming School Conditions
A project of CTQ, the TeacherSolutions Teacher Working Conditions (TWC) Team is a group of 14 accomplished teachers from urban districts around the country. In this new report, Transforming School Conditions, the educators merge their own experience in high-needs schools with the best current education research, to discuss conditions that are needed for teachers to teach all students effectively. Their recommendations for school policy and practice offer a guide to developing systems of support for meaningful and sustainable school reform.

A Better System for Schools: Developing, Supporting and Retaining Effective Teachers
This report and a set of associated papers from the Center for Teaching Quality and Ken Futernick explore what it really takes to accomplish the goals of developing, supporting, and retaining effective teachers. It draws on a recent Teachers Network survey of 1,210 teachers nationwide, as well as a wide array of related research.

Organizations

Center for Teaching Quality
The Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ) seeks to improve student learning and advance the teaching profession by cultivating teacher leadership, conducting timely research, and crafting smart policy — all in an effort to ensure that every student in America has a qualified, well-supported and effective teacher. CTQ has been a critical partner in helping the NEA Foundation to shape a coherent vision for teaching capacity building in all of its funded Closing the Achievement Gaps sites.

National Commission on Teaching and America's Future
For more than a decade, NCTAF has been a leading voice on what matters most for student learning: quality teaching in schools organized for success. NCTAF calls on policymakers and education leaders to provide every child in America with 21st century teaching. With support from the NEA Foundation, NCTAF prepared the 2007 report "Reducing the Achievement Gap through District/Union Collaboration: The Tale of Two Districts." This report features key lessons generated by the NEA Foundation Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative in Hamilton County, TN.

Learning Forward
(previously known as the National Staff Development Council) Learning Forward’s purpose is ensuring that every educator engages in effective professional learning every day so every student achieves. Learning Forward is an international association of learning educators focused on increasing student achievement through more effective professional development.

Parent and Community Engagement

Resources

Beyond Random Acts: Family, School, and Community Engagement as an Integral Part of Education Reform
This recent report provides a research-based framing of family engagement; examines the policy levers that can drive change in promoting systemic family, school, and community engagement; and focuses on data systems as a powerful tool to engage families for twenty-first century student learning.

Parental Involvement Assessment for Elementary Schools
Developed by Appleseed (Washington, DC), this practical assessment tool is designed to measure the effectiveness of parental involvement in elementary schools, a crucial factor in student success. Developed in collaboration with top experts in education policy and field tested in two very different communities, this assessment will help schools better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their efforts to engage parents in education.

Organizations

The Parent Teacher Home Visit Project
This project began in 1998 as a partnership among a faith based community organizing group, a local teachers union, and a school district in an effort to address the cycle of blame between parents and site personnel at several Sacramento schools. It has blossomed into a nationally recognized parent engagement model especially where there is a pervasive history of low student achievement, high levels of poverty, and where high percentages of children enter school as English learners. Parent Teacher home visits are currently being implemented with support from the NEA Foundation in Seattle Public Schools as a participant in the NEA Foundation's Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative.

National Coalition for Parent Involvement in Education
An important resource used by the NEA Foundation to inform its Theory of Change for closing the achievement gaps, NCPIE's mission is to advocate for the involvement of parents and families in their children's education, and to foster relationships between home, school, and community to enhance the education of all of the nation's young people. The group monitors legislation, initiates projects, and shares information and ideas about relevant research, programs, and policies.

Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships
Current projects include research on the Center’s National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS). NNPS provides inservice education and ongoing professional development for school, district, and state leaders, and teams of educators, parents, and others to improve their programs of family involvement and community connections.

Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP)
Created to strengthen family, school, and community partnerships, early childhood care and education, promote evaluation and accountability, and offer professional development to those who work directly with children, youth, and families. The audiences for HFRP's work include policymakers, practitioners, researchers, evaluators, philanthropists, teachers, school administrators, and concerned individuals.