SMHC

In “So Long, Lake Wobegon?,” a recent report from the Center for American Progress, Morgaen L. Donaldson examines the potential of teacher evaluation systems to raise teacher quality. The report specifically focuses on Cincinnati’s Teacher Evaluation System (TES) as a program that addresses many of the problems that afflict present teacher evaluation systems, and may therefore positively impact teacher and student learning. The SMHC staff at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison helped Cincinnati design, formatively evaluate, and implement its TES, hailed by Donaldson as the best in the country. CPRE’s evaluation of the system focused on the implementation of five significant changes to TES after its initial year. Major changes were:

1. Revisions of the standards and rubrics to improve ease of use, improve consistency of language across rubric levels, and reduce sources of ambiguity.
2. Limiting the scope of coverage of the comprehensive evaluation to new teachers, teachers in their third year as a novice (Novice 3), teachers seeking continuing contracts or lead teacher credentials, teachers on intervention, and volunteers.
3. Reducing the number of classroom observations for the comprehensive evaluation from 6 to 5 to reduce evaluator workload. New hires and teachers on intervention will continue to have 6 observations.
4. Requiring evaluators to meet a standard of agreement with a set of master raters (’certification’ of evaluators) to improve inter-evaluator consistency.
5. Increased emphasis on the annual observation process, including more intensive training for teachers, a focus on the same standards for all teachers each year, and professional development focused on these standards, to help prepare teachers for comprehensive evaluation starting in 2005-2006.

The CAP report also discusses the validity of these performance-based teacher evaluation systems, and the question of whether teachers with higher evaluation scores produce more student learning gains. SMHC researcher Anthony Milanowski, who helped evaluate TES, found that in Cincinnati performance ratings were correlated with value-added estimates of student learning in math and reading over the three years of the evaluation. Correlations averaged .35 for reading and .32 for math. This is a stronger relationship than has typically been found in research on evaluation systems in education, and is comparable to the typical relationship between evaluation scores and objective performance found in research on systems in the private sector.

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In an interview with Education Week last week, Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers and SMHC Task Force member, revealed she will head up a teacher-evaluation task force with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The task force is believed to be part of the Foundation’s new strategy as revealed in early 2009, which focuses on the development of effective teachers. According to Weingarten, the task force had some “great discussions,” and she thinks everyone will be “surprised” by its results.  The task force will aim to address disparities in teacher effectiveness, and identify ways for teachers to implement successful practices in the classroom to improve student achievement.

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Sir Michael Barber, Vice Chair of the SMHC task force, head of McKinsey & Company’s Global Education Practice, executive director of the Education Delivery Institute in Washington, D.C., and a former top advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was featured at a recent meeting of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence in Louisville, KY.  Barber stated that in order for any education system to be world class, it needed to address:

1. Standards and accountability
2. Human capital
3. Structure and organization

He also laid out the following four principles for improving education systems:

1. The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.
2. The only way to improve student outcomes is to improve instruction.
3. High performance requires every child to succeed.
4. Great leadership at the school level is a key enabling factor.

He pointed out that the Human Capital part of the education puzzle includes recruiting great people and training them well, continuously improving pedagogical skills and knowledge, and providing great leadership at the school level.  All of these ideas are parallel to the SMHC principles and have been outlined in the “What is SMHC?” paper.  The State and District Roadmaps for Federal “Race to the Top” Proposals offer states and districts a framework for addressing these human capital issues in policies and practices.

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In this op-ed in Education Week, Allan Odden, SMHC Co-Director, offers insights on innovative ways to manage teacher-salary structures. SMHC advocates that schools and teachers be strategically managed around measures of student performance and measures of teaching performance. Odden argues that from adequate measures of teachers’ performance in the classroom, we can implement pay schedules that both reward excellent performance and increase teachers’ skills.

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Today, the Carnegie Corporation of New York – Institute for Advanced Study Commission on Mathematics and Science Education released a new report, “The Opportunity Equation: Transforming Mathematics and Science Education for Citizenship and the Global Economy.” This report - which makes recommendations to “do school differently” and “mobilize for excellence in mathematics and science education” – is the culmination of two years of work by a distinguished Commission of 22 mathematicians, scientists, educators, public officials, and business and nonprofit leaders. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan expressed his support for the report at its launch today, while SMHC and several organizations represented on the SMHC Task Force – including the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and The New Teacher Project - also signed a statement to show their support for the report’s objectives.

“The Opportunity Equation” includes a section on the human capital needs for implementing its various recommendations, and cites extensively the work of SMHC, with references to our “What is SMHC?” paper and the SMHC Case Studies.

SMHC applauds the Carnegie Corporation and its Commission for the inclusion of these important SMHC resources in its critical report.  We encourage the SMHC Task force and others to study “The Opportunity Equation” and consider adopting its many recommendations to improve science and math teaching and learning in American schools.

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On May 27, Allan Odden, co-director of SMHC, was a guest on Schoolhouse Talk. Citing the SMHC Case Studies, Odden reminded listeners that contrary to popular belief, it is not “in the DNA of urban districts to have low levels of teacher and principal talent.” The first step to addressing the problems of recruitment and retention we see in urban districts is to implement innovative recruitment systems and intensive, comprehensive teacher induction programs. To hear more, listen to the full segment here.

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The New Teacher Project, whose President Tim Daly is a member of the SMHC National Task Force, released yesterday “The Widget Effect.”  This report shows that too many systems inaccurately represent teacher effectiveness by failing to acknowledge differences in teaching effectiveness. The systems treat teachers as “widgets,” ignoring both outstanding teachers as well as ineffective teachers, a practice that undermines treating teachers as real professionals.

The report’s recommendations underscore a major tenant of SMHC, specifically that rigorous measures of teaching performance, teacher evaluation and a measure of student achievement, are needed to design and manage an aligned HR system within districts and schools. SMHC recently launched the SMHC District and State Reform Networks, and is recommending that members develop and use such a performance-based teacher evaluation system, targeting stimulus funding in the short term as the one time development dollars needed to create such systems.

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Join SMHC on Thursday, May 21 from 1-2 pm ET for a webinar on recruiting and staffing effective teachers in tough economic times. Allan Odden, SMHC co-director and Tim Daly, president of The New Teacher Project (TNTP) and SMHC Task Force member, will discuss how the systems and institutions responsible for recruiting and keeping quality teachers are often misaligned with the goal of an effective teacher in every classroom. Daly will explore the reasons for this misalignment, and discuss how TNTP successfully recruits teachers to boost the academic achievement of typically underserved students. In addition, he will address how schools are doing more with less in the current economy. 

What:  SMHC Webinar on Recruiting and Staffing Effective Teachers in Tough Economic Times
Who:   Allan Odden, SMHC Co-Director, and Tim Daly, President of The New Teacher Project (TNTP) and SMHC Task Force member
When: Thursday, May 21 from 1-2 pm ET

To register for the event online:
1. Go to https://widmeyer.webex.com/mw0306l/mywebex/default.do?siteurl=widmeyer
2. Click Register.
3. On the registration form, enter your information and then click Submit.

For assistance, please contact WebEx Technical Support 1-866-229-3239 or sara.lense@widmeyer.com, 202-667-0901. 

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In a major move towards national content standards, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers assembled representatives from 41 states last week to develop common math and language arts standards that are aligned with college and workforce expectations. Gene Wilhoit, executive director of CCSSO and SMHC Task Force member, said that state chiefs and governors will work with groups already pursuing rigorous, common standards, including Achieve, College Board, and ACT.

This major policy initiative is crucial to successful human capital  management. Standards are vital to the central SMHC focus on providing districts with a clear instructional vision around which they can organize the full range of supportive human resource functions, including recruitment, selection, and induction, through career development, retention, evaluation and compensation.

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A new report from McKinsey & Company, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools, examines the dimensions and startling economic impact of the achievement gap. According to the report’s authors, the cost of the dramatic underutilization of our society’s potential imposes the equivalence of a permanent national recession on the United States. The report examines the dimensions of four gaps in education: (1) the international gap, (2) the racial gap, (3) the income gap, and (4) the system-based gap.

At a report briefing held yesterday in Washington, D.C., Secretary of Education Arne Duncan identified another gap in education: the talent gap. He asserted that our best talent is actually incented to not work in the toughest communities, and if we are to close the four achievement gaps articulated in the McKinsey report, we must ardently address the differential between talent in the neediest and wealthiest districts. Sir Michael Barber, Partner at McKinsey & Company and SMHC Vice Chair, also urged talent reform as a requisite for change.

There’s hope in the new models emerging in the education reform discussion.  But unless we scale best practices and align the different elements of talent reform – recruitment, development, retention, and compensation –we will be left with a disconnected system. So we ask: How do we use what we know from existing research and build on that to create change that produces better teachers and school leadership? Comment below.

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