If we want to improve our educational system, we must ensure that all students have access to qualified, effective teachers. Koret works with several organizations that recruit, train, and support high-quality teachers and principals working in disadvantaged school districts. These programs also support measuring teacher effectiveness, generating research that can improve our entire educational system.

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) is a nonpartisan research and advocacy group committed to restructuring the teaching profession based on the principle that every child deserves effective teachers. By working to improve federal, state, and local teacher policies, as well as lending greater transparency to the institutions that influence teacher quality, NCTQ seeks to improve public knowledge and build a mandate for change. The group was co-founded in 2000 by Koret Task Force chairman Chester E. Finn, who currently serves on its board of directors.

Resources for Indispensable Schools and Educators (RISE) asserts that effective teachers are the key to student learning. Recognition and retention of effective teachers serving low-income communities (where high turnover of the best teachers is the norm) is therefore critical to improving educational quality. RISE works in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Chicago to curb the attrition rate of high-quality K–12 public school teachers by recognizing effective teachers and providing them with varied incentives to stay in the classroom.

Teach For America’s (TFA) mission is to build a cadre of lifelong leaders on educational issues by putting highly skilled, highly motivated young teachers into the classrooms of our most impoverished K–12 public schools. TFA functions like a domestic education Peace Corps, recruiting high-achieving college seniors from top universities and requiring a two-year commitment to teaching in inner-city or rural schools. Over the past 15 years, 14,000 college graduates have become Teach for America teachers, directly improving the lives of more than 2 million students across the nation. One-third of the program’s alumni continue teaching after their two-year required commitment, and an additional third go on to work full-time in education. Today, 3,500 teacher corps members and more than 10,000 TFA alumni continue this important work. TFA alumni have gone on to create innovative programs in education, including the KIPP Academy school model and DonorsChoose, a nonprofit organization that matches citizen philanthropists with classroom projects.

New Leaders for New Schools (NLNS) promotes high academic achievement for every child by helping to recruit, train, and support the next generation of leaders for our nation’s urban public schools. Within 10 years, NLNS plans to grow to a corps of 2,000 new leaders annually to serve as principals to 1 million children nationwide.