The Race to the Top - District Competition (RTT-D) has explicit goals of closing the achievement gap and ensuring that each student is college and career ready. Within those goals, the focus is squarely on personalizing student learning. The core reforms mirror those emphasized in the state competition. They include building and using data systems that measure student growth and inform instructional improvement; recruiting, developing, rewarding and retaining effective teachers; and turning around lowest-achieving schools.

CTAC has extensive expertise and a national record of success in these areas, by way of providing technical assistance, research and evaluation services, and policy guidance to districts and schools. Specifically relevant to RTT-D, our expertise includes support to develop:

• Educator evaluation and performance-based compensation systems. With the twin goals of accountability and support, CTAC's approaches help districts determine teacher and principal effectiveness while at the same time strengthening instruction. A national leader in performance-based compensation systems, we continue to build on the expertise we brought to Denver's pioneering compensation reform more than a decade ago. Our focus remains on both the most challenging schools and district-wide initiatives. Notably in our work on federal Teacher Incentive Fund initiatives, our partnerships particularly emphasize attracting, supporting, and retaining effective educators. Current and past CTAC partners include districts in California, Colorado, North Carolina, Virginia and numerous other states.
• Student Learning Objectives (SLOs). SLOs personalize learning. They enable teachers to develop education plans for each student that set academic goals, tailor instruction toward those goals, and measure student growth in both tested and non-tested grades and subjects. Importantly, the SLO process enables doing so systematically across a district. Introduced nationally by CTAC, SLOs are rapidly becoming a core component of effective educator evaluation and performance-based compensation systems as well as a vehicle for classroom and school improvement. CTAC is the nation's leading practitioner and evaluator of SLOs. We are partnering with New York State on the rollout of new teacher and principal evaluation systems. Through our CTAC SLO Support Center, we're working with numerous RTT states and districts within them, and with leading districts in states as diverse as Florida, California and Ohio. 
• School turnaround strategies. Our Standard Bearer Schools approach helps entire school communities examine multiple sources of data and use specific analytical tools to identify and address root causes, not just symptoms, of persistent underperformance. Armed with new insights and changed perceptions, educators use CTAC assistance and tools to take targeted action-often with dramatic results. For example, the Murkland School in Lowell, Massachusetts, whose student population is 55% Cambodian and 28% Hispanic, met its three-year targets in a single year and showed the biggest gains of all 35 of the state's "level 4" schools.

If you are interested in discussing an RTT-D application in partnership with CTAC, please contact us at (617) 423-1444 or [email protected].