The Mirage

In August 2015, The New Teacher Project published The Mirage, a report “confronting the hard truth” that districts make massive annual investments in teacher improvement and training (over $8 billion across the US), yet most teachers do not improve year over year. When TNTP set out to identify what actually works to foster widespread teacher improvement, they found no clear patterns of support. The report urges districts to redefine what it means to help teachers improve, reevaluate existing professional learning, and reinvent how effective teaching can be supported at scale.

There are takeaways from The Mirage that can help us think about teacher development in new and potentially more effective ways. After all, we didn’t find that teachers aren’t growing at all—we found improvers in 95 percent of the schools we studied.

—Karolyn Belcher, President at TNTP

The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth About Our Quest for Teacher Development
August 2015
Published by: TNTP