The Daily Tell

To help ensure that all students get the educational foundation they need to succeed in high school, in college, and in life, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced that it will invest $335 million to programs and research that can improve teacher effectiveness and student achievement.

A total of $290 million in grants will go toward four Intensive Partnership for Effective Teaching sites that have presented plans to improve teacher effectiveness: the Hillsborough County public school system in Florida, the Memphis city school system in Tennessee, the Pittsburgh public school system in Pennsylvania and a coalition of five public charter schools in Los Angeles.

Each of these programs will develop and implement new ways to improve teacher effectiveness, as measured in student achievement and college readiness.

An additional $45 million grant will go toward the Measures of Effective Teaching project, which researches ways to define effective teaching and identify better evaluative measures.

This $335-million commitment is in response to research indicating that effective teaching is the most critical component of academic achievement.

"We are convinced that in order to dramatically improve education in America, we must first ensure that every student has an effective teacher in every subject, every school year," said Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the foundation. "These communities have shown extraordinary commitment to tackling one of the most important educational issues of our time. We must do everything we can to understand what makes teachers effective and cultivate those qualities across the profession, in every school and classroom, so that all students can benefit."

The Gates Foundation also made another multi-million dollar commitment to improving education, announcing a $300-million initiative to help high-quality Houston public charter schools access financing to expand.