Dear Memphis City Schools Family,

As you know, Memphis City Schools has received extraordinarily exciting news regarding our application to establish an Intensive Partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  We are one of five finalists seeking significant, multi-year support from the foundation to focus on empowering effective teaching.  Final decisions are expected by early November. 

We are committed to doing everything possible to ensure our students benefit from effective teaching.  Important work can and will be done in this area regardless of the final outcome of this significant grant application.  Of course, our Teacher Effectiveness Initiative would be greatly accelerated by a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and significant local community support.  It is certainly exhilarating for Memphis City Schools and the City of Memphis to be in the national spotlight and at the forefront of an educational reform effort that is supported by President Barack Obama. 

Our Teacher Effectiveness Initiative is focused on what matters most for our students: their teachers.  As we all know, effective teachers have always been essential to students’ success—and never more so than today, with higher state standards and an increasingly competitive global economy.  Many of our students are fortunate to have terrific teachers, and we must strive to ensure that every classroom is led by an effective teacher in order to graduate every student college and/or workforce ready.  To achieve this, our Teacher Effectiveness Initiative focuses on four main strategies:

1) We will use a common, agreed-upon process to define and measure what we deem to be effective teaching.
2) We will make smarter decisions about who teaches our students.
3) We will better support, utilize, and compensate our teachers.
4) We will improve the surrounding contexts for teachers and students to foster effective teaching. 

I strongly believe that this Teacher Effectiveness Initiative will make it even more rewarding and enjoyable to be a teacher in Memphis City Schools.  In very real ways, teachers will be newly valued and esteemed.  Thank you, teachers, for your dedication and service to our students. 

To provide comment on the plan, or to volunteer for future planning sessions, please email David Hill, Coordinator of Strategic Planning and Accountability, at hilldavids@mcsk12.net or Ken Foster, Executive Director of the Memphis Education Association, at kefmea@isdn.net.  Your feedback and ongoing input is much needed.

Respectfully,

Irving Hamer