By Grant Oliphant

 

Bravo to Superintendent Mark Roosevelt, teachers’ union head John Tarka, and the entire Pittsburgh Public Schools team for their big win in qualifying for a Gates grant to support teacher excellence. This is HUGE news not just because of the potential size of the Gates funding (we’re talking tens of millions here), but also because of the crazy rigor demanded by the application process. Gates gives away larger sums than most of us can fathom, and they rightly ask an enormous amount of grant applicants. Qualifying for a grant in a process like this is, for a school district like ours, akin to training for and eventually winning the Funding Super Bowl.  The competition for these grants was intense, and just the process of applying forced the school district and its many supporters to double up on our ambitions and behave like we really mean them. In many ways, winning the grant was just the icing on the cake-admittedly very rich icing, but if PPS and the teachers union keep on the path they started during this process, that will be a mammoth victory in its own right. Pittsburgh started this process as the clear underdog. We won because the PPS board, staff and teachers drove themselves hard, thought big, worked together and got the job done. What a great example of leadership in action. Congrats!