CED, a public policy organization comprised of business and education leader, offers several examples of what the authors consider promising reforms.

• Evaluating teachers for compensation purposes should include quantitative measures of student learning, where available, and qualitative assessments of teachers’ skills, knowledge, and classroom effectiveness.
• Compensation policies should be blind to how long teachers stay in the classroom.
• Career paths that provide opportunities for promotion and compensation should be created. However, these career paths should not necessitate teachers leaving the classroom for administrative positions.
• Compensation policies should take into consideration content areas where it is more difficult to recruit and retain teachers.
• Compensation policies should include incentives that encourage teachers to work in the most challenging schools.

See page 9 of the report for highlights on the SMHC project.

Delaware has been on the forefront of human capital reform with the Delaware Cohesive Leadership System (DCLS). In setting up DCLS, Delaware’s goals were to 1) develop leaders with the necessary skills and capacity to improve student learning; 2) enhance working conditions and incentives to enable leaders to improve student learning; 3) ensure that policies, programs, practices, and budgets are coordinated in ways that connect leadership to meeting high expectations for every child, especially those with the greatest needs; and 4) build and support networks, partnerships, and other strategies to share information pertaining to successful programs and policies.

Kelly’s presentation will be from 4:30 pm to 6:00 p.m., at the Dover Downs Hotel and Conference Center. This event is open to the public. To register, contact Alison Willey at [awilley@udel.edu] or (302) 855-1629.

Montgomery CO schools Superintendent Jerry Weast is responsible for much of the district’s high academic achievement, Doyle writes. The greatest testament to Weast’s success is not his function as an irreplaceable leader, but rather his ability to inspire followers. In Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County Schools, a recently published book by Doyle and Stacey M. Childress and David A. Thomas of the Harvard Business School, Doyle documents Weast’s strategies in an effort to develop “the architecture of success from which his successors and colleagues can (and must) learn.”

School leadership was a focus of the recent SMHC National Task Force meeting. Task Force members deliberated extensively how to produce effective principals, and looked in particular at Chicago Public Schools’ ongoing efforts to reform their approach to principal recruitment and placement.

According to Clift, Duncan has moved swiftly and effectively – and largely under the radar – to advance the agenda of tying data on student achievement back to individual schools and to teachers. Forty-six states have signed on to voluntarily work together to adopt common core standards and assessments of student achievement. The move towards common standards is critical to successfully reforming and restructuring school human resource practices. SMHC has emphasized the need for rigorous, clear standards that provide school districts with a single instructional vision, to which all human resources functions can be aligned.

According to Pecheone and Wei, due to the report’s extensive analysis of teacher evaluation systems the authors “build a compelling case for the inadequacy of the current teacher evaluation processes, uses, and policies in the four states.” Additionally, Pecheone and Wei assess the report’s four recommendations – that systems fairly and accurately differentiate between teachers’ effectiveness, have trained evaluators who are held accountable, use evaluations to inform key decisions, and have dismissal policies that offer due process and provide lower-stakes options for ineffective teachers to exit. According to Pecheone and Wei, these recommendations “appear to represent reasonable strategies for improving a broken teacher evaluation system.”

“The leadership around this table is pretty remarkable,” said Secretary Duncan. “I look forward to partnering with you.”

Governor Tim Pawlenty, SMHC task force chair, and Alice Seagren, Minnesota Commissioner of Education, updated the Task Force on the SMHC State Reform Network. Both networks are particularly focused on the broad range of issues related to talent and its strategic management, from recruitment to development, retention and rewards. But to engage in strategic talent management both networks also are addressing the need to measure teaching performance, which is the missing HR metric in most systems. The networks are considering how to pursue robust systems that will accurately and effectively measure teaching performance (and principal performance), which is needed to strategically manage all aspects of teachers and principals.

Among the report’s preliminary conclusions are that there is promising technology to improve the efficiency of teaching assessments, such as the videos and written reflections used in National Board and Pact; and that all assessments need to be aligned based on the same competency model. 

“Review of Teaching Performance Assessments for Use in Human Capital Management” will be available soon on the SMHC Web site.

State strategies to improve teacher effectiveness and increase student learning have been a focus of SMHC in 2009. The SMHC State Reform Network is working diligently to identify key state policies and practices that can support local implementation of district SMHC reforms. The Network is also working to assist states in enacting the necessary laws and policies to implement these reforms. Additionally, SMHC developed a state roadmap that gives states guidance on addressing teacher and principal quality and effectiveness for Race to the Top proposals.

1. Leading the efforts to transform public education
2. Helping to rebuild to middle class by strengthening the labor movement
3. Building the NEA’s capacity as an organization, so as to further increase its influence

Van Roekel also expressed the NEA’s positions on the hot topics in education today, including accountability and compensation. On accountability, he emphasized that NEA’s members “overwhelmingly believe that they should be accountable for what happens in the classroom,” but stressed the need to hold accountable students, parents, school administrators, communities, and policymakers, as well. On compensation, he mentioned many members’ willingness to consider alternatives to the current systems. To read the full speech, please visit http://www.nea.org/grants/33729.htm.

Other relevant resources from the NEA are also available in the Other Resources section of the SMHC Web site.