• A one-year residency program for aspiring teachers;

• A data warehouse of assessments to measure individual students’ growth;

• A performance-based pay system that teacher help design.

A consortium of five charter school organizations operating in Los Angeles will make these innovations with a seven-year, $60 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,plus $16 million in matching money that they must raise.

They are also precisely the sorts of things that the state should be considering in its application for the Race to the Top competition. Improving teacher performance, including using data as a factor to set teachers’ pay, is a  primary focus of the $4.35 billion federal program.

The grant to the consortium is  part of a $290 million initiative dealing with teacher performance and evaluations that the Gates Foundation announced last week. Three school districts – Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida, Memphis City Schools in Tennessee and the Pittsburgh Public Schools in Pennsylvania – also received money. The initiative marks a new direction for Gates, which had focused on breaking up big high schools into smaller schools.

The stipend for promising teaching will allow teachers to observe good teachers and gain confidence in the classroom before having to plunge into their first full-time job.

The five charter management organizations are Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, ICEF Public Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, PUC Schools and Aspire Public Schools. All are based in Los Angeles except for Aspire, which is based in Oakland and operates nine schools in the Bay Area, including two in East Palo Alto. The consortium altogether serves more than 28,000 students.

Judy Burton, CEO of Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, said that the one year-residency program, a partnership with university masters’ programs, will be for between 9 and 18 aspiring teachers — a number still to be determined. Many new teachers earn their credential by attending university classes at night while teaching during the day – making for a difficult, tiring, largely unsupervised first year in the classroom.

The stipend for promising teaching will allow teachers to observe good teachers and gain confidence in the classroom before having to plunge into their first full-time job. They’ll also understand the charter schools’ practices and beliefs. Their credential will enable them to teach anywhere in the state, not only charter schools.

The goal of the data piece is to create “value-added assessments” that measure individual students’ growth over the course of a year. The standardized state STAR tests, taken once a year to measure proficiency, don’t do this, and periodic benchmark tests, which most districts use, are limited, Burton said. The charter organizations will come up with common measures.

The ability to track individual student growth will then become one element of performance-based plan that teachers will help design. It won’t take effect until the fourth year of the grant, Burton said, and will be preceded by two years of testing the system. The Gates grant will include money for extra pay, but the charters must figure out how to build in the pay structure after the grant runs out, Burton said.

State officials have mentioned a data assessment warehouse and a residency program for principals as ideas for Race to the Top. Regardless, the charter consortium should serve as a model for the state.

By John Fensterwald on November 22nd, 2009