91% of Breakthrough participants are students of color.

“My Breakthrough experience has given me the rare opportunity to make tangible impacts on the lives of young people, hear the stories of our nation’s under-resourced youth, and grow as an agent for educational change in America.”
Hai
Breakthrough Sacramento Teacher '09, UC Berkeley

Program Design

How do you design a program for teachers that both centers on the needs of our students and also responds to the growing need to recruit outstanding young people to lead our nation's students into the future?  

Let's start with a few key research points. U.S. schools will need to hire between 2.9 and 5.1 million teachers by 2020 in order to accommodate for retirements, teacher turnover, and enrollment growth. More importantly, we know that there are shortages of teachers in key demographics:

  • Best and Brightest: In the early 1970s, 24% of students scoring in the top decile of student achievement tests entered the teaching profession. The percentage has been steadily decreasing and was at 11% in 2000. (Read More)
    • Breakthrough boasts a 36% selection rate for the 2000+ applicants from top schools across the country. 
  • Males: The number of male school teachers is at a 40-year low. Our national teacher cohort is approximately 1/4 male. (Read More)
    • In 2010, 38% of Breakthrough Teachers will be male. 
  • STEM: 31% of Secondary Schools have "serious hiring difficulties in either math, life science or physical science. (Read more)
    • In 2010, 15% of Breakthrough college age teachers are majoring in Science, Technology, Math or Engineering (STEM).

The stakes are high, and Breakthrough is responding to the challenge. A recent McKinsey & Co report tells us that “the quality of an educational system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” In fact, the quality of a teacher is the single most important variable in the classroom. This how we’ve designed our program to meet these challenges:

Recruitment: Breakthrough recruits our outstanding high school and college aged teachers from three main sources—selective colleges and universities, top high schools located close to our Breakthrough affiliates and our student alumni.  For our colleges and universities Breakthrough runs a national recruiting campaign led exclusively by Breakthrough Teacher Alumni. Click here to meet Ruvani who helps recruit fellow Harvard students to teach with Breakthrough. Campus Recruiters focus on three specific “under-represented” demographics in the field of education: Men, People of Color, and Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) majors.

Training: Beginning with an intensive 1-2 week training program in instructional practice, classroom management, and lesson planning, Breakthrough teachers learn the practical skills necessary to bring their lessons to life. Each teacher is part of an academic department (e.g. Math Department) which is supported by a subject specific Mentor Teacher. Mentor Teachers are expert professional teachers from top local schools who facilitate department meetings, lead on-going professional development, observe classes, approve lesson plans and generally guide the teachers from Orientation to the summer ending Celebration!

Evaluation: Breakthrough Collaborative prides itself on being a “learning organization.” In order to determine how successful our program is, Breakthrough implements a rigorous evaluation process at both the national and site level. All teachers complete a national Pre-Summer and Post-Summer survey which ranges in topic from instructional strategies to the likelihood of the teacher pursuing a career in the field of education. Sites also administer Pre-Summer and Post-Summer student assessments to track how successful teachers were at imparting academic skills over the summer.

Pipeline: To inspire excellent young people into the field of teaching and track our teacher alumni’s impact on the field of education, Breakthrough is launching the Teacher Pipeline Project. Our goal is to guide our most promising teachers into the best teacher training organizations in the United States. Through this project, Breakthrough will select a small number of outstanding partners with whom we will build a pipeline into the classroom for our teachers graduating from college. In exchange for being identified as a Breakthrough Teacher Pipeline Partner, partners will report on successes of Breakthrough Teacher Alumni in their selection process and training programs.