Our Work

Communities Supporting Effective Teachers

We all know how important teachers are to academic success.  Since United Way has set aggressive 10 year goals related to education, we want to call the community to be supportive of one of the single-most important factors in the education of our children: TEACHERS. 

In an era of “Race to the Top” and other education reform efforts, teachers and students are being called to meet even higher standards.  That’s why we, as a community, need to be there to support these teachers and empower them to best do their jobs of educating students. 

This project specifically is intended to strengthen United Way’s efforts to mobilize communities, individuals and organizations and frame the debate around a policy agenda that can bring meaningful and sustainable changes to increase teacher effectiveness.  A successful project in this initiative will:

1. Build diverse coalitions of education stakeholders; and

2. Develop and advocacy plan and strategies to lead statewide conversations about teacher effectiveness in 2010 and implement in 2010 – 2011.

Listening Sessions

We have been setting up small focus groups to ask community members what makes a teacher effective.  Community members (specifically, parents and teachers) usually know who the most effective teachers are within a school.  United Way wants to learn about this community knowledge and present this to local and state decision-makers as they develop new teacher evaluation systems.

You can read our report here.

Communications and Outreach

Read the “Supporting Teacher Quality” blog

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Regional Coalitions

These coalitions will collaboratively develop a vision in line with current education reform efforts already underway.  Currently, both coalitions are working to support the “Expect More, Achieve More” campaign recently launched by SCORE and the Governor’s Office.  These coalitions are framed around the idea that schools and teachers cannot do everything alone; education is a community issue that needs broad support and understanding.

These groups meet bi-monthly in the Knox Area and the Northeast Tennessee regions.  Contact luterg@unitedwayknox.org for more information.