Yale National Initiative®

In 1984 the American Association for Higher Education, Council of Chief State School Officers, National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching singled out the Institute as a "pioneering and nationally significant program with an exemplary approach for improving public education."

In 1985 the U.S. Department of Education cited the Teachers Institute as "exemplary" and "among the most substantial and effective" university-school partnerships in the nation.

The Institute Director presented testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Education, Arts, and Humanities. The Committee was considering legislation that would authorize a major national program of teachers institutes in the humanities in all the states. The sponsors of the legislation singled out the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute as a most successful example of precisely the kind of program they envisioned the legislation would establish in many communities across the country.

In 1988 in their report, An Imperiled Generation; Saving Urban Schools, the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recommended that "colleges should have summer and year-long institutes, following the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute model which asks the teachers themselves to shape the content of the program."

In 1989 in testimony before U.S. Senate and House committees Ernest L. Boyer, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recommended the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute as a model for institutes to be established across the country.

In 1997 in "Creative America," its Report to the President, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities recommended partnerships to "provide professional development for teachers; improve instruction in the arts and the humanities by encouraging colleges, universities and cultural organizations to cooperate with local school systems; and provide incentives to college and university faculty to develop collaborations with school teachers, educational administrators, and artists." The Committee cited the Institute as an "exemplary" partnership of this type: "Teachers in the arts and the humanities need the time and resources to participate in professional development to enrich their own knowledge and to gain practical ideas for their classrooms. At the community level, innovative partnerships have formed among some universities, cultural institutions, and school districts. Yale University and the public schools of New Haven, Connecticut have worked in partnership since 1978 to strengthen teaching in the city's schools. The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute brings college faculty and school teachers together on an equal footing to develop new course material in the humanities and the sciences, and to discuss issues chosen by the teachers themselves."

In 2001 in a feature article for a special issue of On Common Ground, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige commented: "I applaud the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute for supplying models for what universities should do. Its projects are not just inspiring, they are creating an environment in which partnerships will be the norm, not the exception. Every great university should be linked to its surrounding schools by a thriving and many-tiered partnership. Observers should not ask why a few universities have partnerships, but why the rest do not."

At a 2001 national conference at Yale, Susan K. Sclafani, Counsel to the U.S. Secretary of Education, spoke of ways that the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute model differs from conventional professional development for teachers: "What appealed to us in Houston . . . was that there was . . . a way to change your way of thinking about how you might approach a topic, how to engage yourselves in an experience that got you excited about a topic . . . That is one of the challenges that is so exciting about this project: that the same topic that you engage in, on an adult level, can be presented at so many different levels to the young people that you teach. . . How do we turn district-wide professional development into this? . . . How do you start having an influence on the way in which all teachers are engaged in intellectual pursuits? Because that really is the great issue."

In 2002 in the Congressional Record U.S. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro declared, "New Haven has certainly benefited from this tremendous organization which has not only touched the lives of so many teachers, but countless numbers of our children. The Institute has earned a distinguished reputation and has been recognized at every level of government as a model for all communities."

That year Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, said, "Having worked in urban universities for more than thirty years, including in New York and Chicago, I have seen many attempts at partnership between institutions of higher education and their local public schools. The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute is a remarkably effective, enduring example of such collaboration . . . Drawing upon the distinctive strengths and common interests of a university and an urban school district, the Teachers Institute is an instrument of great promise for other cities across the country. The ultimate aim is to support teaching and learning for students. But the collateral benefits, both for a university and for the city it calls home, are broader. As a face-to-face, intensive, sustained collective undertaking, the Institute is a model that can be adapted and implemented widely."

Yale President Richard C. Levin observed, "For 25 years the Institute has served as the premier partnership between Yale and New Haven schools and has provided the model for the type of productive relationships that we now strive for in many spheres. Yale faculty members working together with New Haven teachers have mutually enriched their professional lives and enhanced the education of countless students in the public schools."

President of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Gerald N. Tirozzi commented: "The continuing professional development of teachers must be at the centerpiece of school reform. As New Haven's Superintendent of Schools in the late 1970's, I fully understood that a school district alone did not have all of the necessary resources and subject matter expertise to energize and stimulate professional development activities. At that time, we helped to develop what has now become a 25-year exemplary model a partnership between Yale University and New Haven Public Schools to form a cooperative and coherent effort to enhance the teaching profession. I am very proud to have been a part of this program and witnessed its dramatic growth and impact over the years.

In the 109th Congress Connecticut Senators Joseph Lieberman and Christopher Dodd introduced a bill (S. 990) to create a grants program to establish Teachers Institutes in states throughout the nation. The Senators' plan was modeled after the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of New Haven introduced a companion measure (H.R. 2663) in the House of Representatives. Connecticut's Congressional delegation was unanimously in support of this bipartisan legislation. House cosponsors included Chaka Fattah, Rush D. Holt, Nancy L. Johnson, John B. Larson, Christopher Shays, and Rob Simmons.