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Kennedy Center Honors, and had all the glitz of an Academy Award ceremony for teachers. Those 662 teachers had been singled out from their schools as highly effective. It was clearly a special evening for all of them. Before he sang, one of the performers, Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, recalled the teacher who had most influenced his life: his mother, who had taught in a Virginia public school for thirty-five years. “She was up before the sun every day, grading papers, and every night when it went down,” said Grohl. Seven teachers, nominated by their principals, were singled out as All-Stars. Each came onstage to receive a plaque and a $10,000 award (all 662 got performance bonuses), and to deliver an acceptance speech. Kennedy Center chairman David Rubenstein was so moved by the event that he donated twenty more $5,000 awards on the spot. Not every community has access to the Kennedy Center, but every community can do more to make teachers feel appreciated and to inspire excellence.

For instance, every year, in addition to granting honorary degrees, Williams College in Massachusetts honors four high school teachers. But not just any high school teachers. Williams asks the five hundred or so members of its senior class to nominate the high school teacher who had the most profound impact on their lives. Then each year a committee goes through the roughly fifty student nominations, does its own research with the high schools involved, and chooses the four teachers who most inspired a graduating Williams student. Each of the four teachers is given $3,000, plus a $2,500 donation to his or her high school. The winners and their families are then flown to Williams, located in the lush Berkshires, and honored as part of the college’s graduation weekend. On the day before graduation, all four of the high school teachers, and the students who nominated them, sit onstage at a campuswide event, and the dean of the college talks about how and why each teacher influenced that Williams student, reading from the students’ nominating letters. Afterward, the four teachers are introduced at a dinner along with the honorary-degree recipients. Morton Owen Schapiro, now the president of Northwestern but formerly the president of Williams, recalled that every time he got to preside over these events one of the high school teachers would say to him, “This is one of the great weekends of my life.” When you get to work at a place like Williams, Schapiro added, “and you are able to benefit from these wonderful kids, sometimes you take it for granted. You think we produce these kids. But as faculty members, we should always be reminded that we stand on the shoulders of great high school teachers, that we get great material to work with: well educated, well trained, with a thirst for learning.”

A variation on this theme that has been running since 1978 is the Yale–New Haven Teachers Institute, directed by James R. Vivian. It brings together Yale faculty members and New Haven public school teachers for seminars in the faculty members’ subjects of expertise. In the seminars, which meet regularly for several months, the teachers work with a faculty member to prepare curricula on the subject they are studying, which they then teach in their schools during the following school year. The seminars thus give the teachers the opportunity both to learn more about a subject of interest—chemistry, mathematics, literature, American history, or another of many different offerings—and to prepare strategies to teach it to their elementary or secondary school students. They also receive a modest honorarium for participating. The program has enjoyed such success that twenty-one different school districts in eleven states are now participating in the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools, which the Institute launched in 2004. The Initiative is a long-term effort to establish similar Institutes around the country and to influence public policy on the professional development of teachers.

Teachers’ institutes differ from most