Findings from an evaluation of a $575 million program to improve teacher performance found that, while sites implemented new measures of teaching effectiveness and modified personnel policies accordingly, the program had no impact on student outcomes.

The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, designed and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aimed to dramatically improve student outcomes by improving students' access to effective teaching. Three U.S. school districts and four charter management organizations participated in the program, which ran between 2009 and 2016.

The final evaluation report, published by the RAND Corporation, found that by the end of 2014-15, outcomes for students in the sites that took part in the initiative were not better than outcomes for students in similar sites that did not take part. There was no evidence that low-income minority (LIM) students had greater access than non-LIM students to effective teaching. In addition, it found very few instances of improvement in the effectiveness of teaching overall, and no improvement in the effectiveness of newly hired teachers compared to experienced teachers. The evaluation also found no increase in the retention of effective teachers, although there was some decline in the retention of ineffective teachers in most sites that took part in the initiative.

The report states several possible reasons that the initiative failed to achieve its goals for improving student outcome: