Third Annual Report on Teacher Quality Includes Benwood Initiative Achievements


July 2004
Secretary's Third Annual Report on Teacher Quality, p.38
United States Department of Education
Office of Postsecondary Education

The Benwood Initiative

In 2000, the Benwood Foundation of Chattanooga, Tenn., learned that nine of the state's 20 lowest performing schools were in Chattanooga. In response, the Benwood Foundation, together with the Public Education Foundation and Hamilton County Schools, formed the Benwood Initiative. The two foundations together committed $7.5 million to improve those nine schools so that by 2007, 100 percent of all third-graders would be reading above or at grade level. A core strategy for achieving this goal was to recruit, train and retain high-performing teachers.

In 2001 and each subsequent year, each school in the initiative received a grant of $100,000 to be devoted solely to professional development of all teachers, the addition of full-time reading experts who coach and train all staff and a small number of reading interventionists who work with the lowest performing readers. Superintendent Jesse Register reconstituted the staff of all nine schools; 100 of 270 teachers left these schools in 2002. Register replaced six of nine principals, added an assistant principal at each school and created an office of urban education.

In 2002, the Weldon F. Osborne Foundation agreed to underwrite the cost of developing an entirely new urban elementary education master's degree at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and pay the tuition of the first 100 teachers from the nine schools. Chattanooga's mayor, Bob Corker, 12 business leaders and representatives from the district and the foundations used city tax revenues to offer salary supplements of $5,000 to individual teachers whose students show gains on the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System. Team bonuses were also offered to all full-time certificated staff in schools with exemplary system scores. Financial assistance was offered to teachers who wanted to purchase a home in the neighborhoods of the schools and legal fees were provided gratis by the local bar association.

The combination of extensive, high-quality professional training, additional staff, strong building and district leadership and incentives has yielded exceptional improvement in all nine schools. In the first two years of the initiative, the nine targeted schools have made gains twice the district average in all five subject areas tested by the State of Tennessee. The gains in reading are also higher than 90 percent of all elementary schools in Tennessee.