Governments must do all they can to develop, retain and motivate teachers

Los Angeles-based businessman- philanthropist Lowell Milken is promoter-chairman of the Milken Educator Awards, TAP: System for Teacher & Student Advancement and National Institute for Excellence in Teaching. In April he was conferred the James Bryant Conant Award for exceptional individual contribution to American education. Excerpts from an e-mail interview.  For over three decades you have focused your attention on promoting teacher development institutions — Milken Educator Awards (estb. 1987), TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement (1999), and the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (2005). What was the motivation behind these initiatives? My first teachers were my parents, who nurtured my childhood curiosity and planted the seeds of a lifelong love of learning. During my K-12 years in California public schools, I was fortunate to have a number of exceptional teachers, whose vision of excellence and means for achieving it had a lasting effect on me. Yet beyond my personal experiences, research has proven that the single most important in-school factor driving student learning is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. Educators play the essential role in ensuring that every young person is afforded the opportunity to acquire the skills, knowledge and experiences to take advantage of life’s opportunities.  This understanding shaped my mission as a philanthropist and inspired me to create the Milken Educator Awards three decades ago. These Awards recognise exceptional early to mid-career educators with a surprise $25,000 (Rs.16 lakh) financial prize presented with great fanfare before entire schools, dignitaries and media. The awards celebrate, elevate and activate recipients to achieve at ever higher levels, and inspire students to consider teaching as a profession. While the Milken Awards recognise excellence, I soon came to realise that what was also needed was a system to generate high-quality teachers. And so began an intensive multi-year effort to research and develop TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement, which I introduced in 1999. At the time, TAP’s whole school reform model — incorporating multiple career paths; continuous job-embedded professional growth; performance-based compensation; accountability with trained evaluators and detailed feedback for improvement, was revolutionary. But by 2005, it was clear that demand for the TAP System and its proven results necessitated an independent organisation to manage not just TAP, but new best practices being developed to promote educator growth at every level. And so I established the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET), which today impacts more than 250,000 educators and 2.5 million students across America. Our goal: A talented teacher for every student in every classroom in the country. Subsequently in 2007, you established the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes in Kansas, which also includes a museum and research center (and also invested timely seed capital in EducationWorld, India). Would it be correct to infer that you believe history is shaped by individuals rather than events? The question of whether history is shaped by individuals or events is a challenging one. I believe it’s shaped by both. There are the rare leaders like…