One day when I was serving as superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools, I learned what education is all about.
 
It was at a meeting of the School Board where we were scheduled to hear about the program at one of our middle schools. There were several speakers, the last of whom was a seventh grader named Robert.
 
Now, a seventh-grade boy can be any height between four-and-a-half and six feet. Robert was on the short side. So short, in fact, that when he stood at the podium we could not see him at all. He didn’t let that stop him. He pulled the microphone down and began telling us about his school. You couldn’t see his face but his eager, disembodied voice coming out of the speakers told the whole story—he liked his school a lot and was excited about what he was learning. Robert wanted to be sure we understood just how important education was and so he concluded his presentation with these words: “After all, education is everything!”
 
Why focus on education?
 
Our Board agrees with Robert. It chose increasing educational achievement as one of only three goals to pursue for the next decade because they think like Robert. Education is everything. It is the engine of our economy and the key to the vitality of our communities. Research shows a direct link between educational attainment and higher income. The industries and opportunities that are part of our potential future will rely on educated workers—those who have graduated from high school and finished trade school or college. We cannot compete in the national or global economy by falling behind in educational achievement.
 
Today, only about 25 percent of students in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota earn a degree after high school, and the disparities in educational achievement among students in different ethnic groups and income levels are huge. Without something to push against these discouraging facts, the future for these three states is uncertain.
 
That’s why in 2008, our Board set a pretty challenging goal for our work in education: By 2018, the percentage of students in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, from pre-kindergarten through college who are on track to earn a degree after high school, increases by 50 percent and disparities among diverse student groups are eliminated.
 
 
How we’ll do it
 
Many, many things affect educational achievement—family background, class size, length of school day and school year, early learning and numerous others. But research shows that effective teachers matter more than any other school-related factor in increasing educational achievement. And there is powerful evidence that effective teachers can close the achievement gaps between diverse student groups.
 
That evidence is why we’ve chosen to focus on improving teacher effectiveness as the principal means for achieving our goal. Effective teachers are those who ensure that every student gains one year of learning for each year in school.
 
Over the next 10 years, half or more of the 50,000 teachers in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota will retire or leave. Since the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers, who takes their places, how they are trained and what these 25,000 new teachers do to help all students succeed are critically important.
 
In the next decade, the Bush Foundation will focus its resources on producing those 25,000 new effective teachers for Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.
 
To do this, the Foundation will form partnerships with teacher preparation programs to recruit, prepare, place and support their teacher graduates. We will work with organizations of all kinds involved in teacher preparation to ensure that:

		Those most capable choose teaching either as their first career or when they decide to change careers.
		Teachers in training are well prepared for the curriculum they will teach and the students they will teach it to.
		Graduates are placed in schools ready to support their effectiveness.
		New teachers are supported in their first four years to ensure and build their effectiveness and their commitment to stay in teaching.
		New teachers have the tools needed to assess student learning and improve their effectiveness.

Recruiting and training effective teachers isn’t enough if we don’t also place and support them in schools that can participate in their effectiveness. And so we will also partner with schools and school districts to ensure that:  

		School leaders are ready and able to support these new effective teachers.
		Schools offer competitive compensation to effective teachers.
		Teachers have data available to help them assess and improve their effectiveness.

As we partner with both teacher preparation program and schools, we will challenge them to guarantee their commitment to these new teachers. We will ask the teacher prep partners to guarantee the effectiveness of the teachers they train and ask our school partners to guarantee that they will hire and support effective teachers.

In addition, the Foundation will reach out to:

		Policymakers in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota who can create policy and fiscal environments that ensure a sustained commitment to teacher effectiveness.
		Education researchers and other foundations to access information and models on what works and what doesn’t.

Measuring effectiveness

In education there is a lot of data but not much information that teachers can use to improve their effectiveness. We will work with researchers who can help convert currently available student achievement data into information that can be used to develop strong measures of teacher effectiveness.
 
Teacher effectiveness has many dimensions and should be assessed with a variety of measures; one dimension that must always be included is the growth in student achievement. Effective teachers produce at least one year of growth with every student who is in their classrooms for a year.
 
We will work to ensure that every new teacher has the tools and information necessary to assess changes in his or her students’ achievement (and thus measure his or her own teaching effectiveness). A teacher with regular access to that information has a chance to see what is working and what is not and use that information to improve.
 
The work we’ve set out to do is challenging. Increasing educational achievement will require substantial change from hundreds of colleges, universities, K-12 schools, policymakers and other stakeholders critical to the future of education. It will be risky. But not changing risks the future of our communities.
 
Robert was right, education is everything!
 
Learn more about the Bush Foundation’s educational achievement goal.