It’s been a busy summer at TNTP. Dan Weisberg and Karolyn Belcher stepped into their new roles as CEO and President respectively; we released The Mirage—the culmination of two years of research to understand how teachers improve and what we (and school systems across the country) can do to help them; and, as of today, we have a shiny new website.
Aside from being decidedly prettier than our old online home, the new TNTP.org is also a better reflection of who TNTP is and what we do today. It always surprises people to hear we have a staff of almost 400, and that our teams do a lot more than just training teachers and writing policy reports. Over the past few years, we have deepened our expertise in instruction and academic strategy and broadened our focus well beyond teacher talent, to include all of the factors that go into great teaching and learning—things like strong school cultures, rigorous and engaging content, great school leadership, and smart allocation of district resources. Across the country, we’re helping school districts, charter school networks, and state departments of education tackle all of these challenges and more.
This shift reflects what we’ve learned in our work in schools for two decades. When we started out, we were wholly focused on getting great teachers to more students. Our Teaching Fellows programs, for example, prepared recent college graduates and career-changers to teach in high-need schools and subjects; to date, we have trained more than 34,000 Fellows.
Great teaching is absolutely critical for student success, but it’s not everything. Along the way, we came into contact with many of the barriers that prevented urban districts from recruiting great educators—like hiring timelines that stretched far later in the year than neighboring suburban districts'. We started consulting with districts on how to staff schools more efficiently with stronger teachers.
In 2009, we documented the systemic indifference to teacher effectiveness in The Widget Effect, and began working with districts, state departments of education, and charter management organizations to support the development of better teacher evaluation systems. And once it became more feasible to identify great teaching, we started asking how school systems could support great teaching. That led to work on issues like school culture and leadership, teacher retention and compensation, and most recently, professional development. It’s why we embraced “TNTP” as our name a few years ago—because our work had stretched well beyond “new teachers.”
If that sounds hard to explain in a nutshell (or on a website), here’s how we think about it: Our work focuses on three critical areas for helping students thrive: talented people, rigorous academics, and supportive environments. That means hiring and training great teachers and leaders for our schools, ensuring students are studying challenging and engaging content, and creating conditions at the school, district and state levels that allow everyone (adults and students) to do their best work.
If you know TNTP, you know that change is something we embrace. That’s why we needed a website that would better capture the new ways we’re working and the challenges we’re grappling with. The new site highlights our work across all our core focus areas. The photos are real TNTP staff, real teachers and school leaders in training, and real students in their real classrooms. We hope it helps our friends, clients and, yes, our families, understand just what TNTP truly stands for. Once upon a time it was “The New Teacher Project,” but now, TNTP stands for so much more than that.
