• TEACHER PAY – Almost three out of four Americans favor merit pay for teachers. Advanced degrees, student academic achievement, and administrator evaluations are the three most favored criteria for awarding merit pay. Americans estimate that teacher salaries are lower than what they believe teachers should receive. Americans also believe that beginning teachers with a bachelor’s degree and teaching certification should earn more than they are currently paid by their community’s schools. 
• TENURE – Americans are split on teacher tenure, depending on how the question is asked. They disapprove of teachers having a “lifetime contract” but agree that teachers should have a formal legal review before being terminated.
• ECONOMIC STIMULUS – Economic stimulus money should be used to retain teachers slated to be laid off, followed by support to the lowest performing schools.
• TEACHER CERTIFICATION – Three out of four Americans believe we should have national standards for the certification of public school teachers.
• TECHNICAL TEACHERS – Americans overwhelmingly favor increasing the number of scholarships to college students who agree to teach science, math, and other technical subjects, while only three out of 10 Americans approve relaxing certification requirements to allow more teachers to teach these technical subjects.

SMHC supports new ways to pay teachers, including incentives for teachers of STEM subjects and new approaches to teacher tenure. How we compensate teachers can have a significant impact on teacher recruitment and retention in subjects and schools with teacher shortages. SMHC research shows that schools need a strategic reward systems that is aligned with the needs and goals of the education system.  In setting pay levels, states and districts should consider how people are paid in comparable jobs outside of education. Additionally, to make teaching more attractive to young teachers and principals, states and districts should consider rewarding individuals for expertise and providing a fast track towards instructional leadership.

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.

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.

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.

The Wallace funded projects summarized include the innovative Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED), which is designed to assess leadership behaviors in a 360 degree format, and other targeted tools that can be used to assess aspects of leadership practice. This piece and other sources available from Wallace are well worth exploring by school leaders or policymakers interested in educational leadership.

The paper raises a number of provocative questions about the state of leadership assessment, what the work has uncovered to date and the terrain yet to be mapped. What is adequate evidence to reliably capture principal practice? How might this evidence vary across school and district contexts? Who is best positioned to judge principal performance? What outcome data is appropriate and how can it be used to inform both summative and developmental purposes? Is behavioral evidence alone adequate to measure leadership affects? What weight should be given to principal’s human capital management strategies versus the current focus on instructional leadership? And, is 360 degree feedback sufficient for summative decisions? These are just some of the areas that this work has begun to address and that call for more answers.

SMHC Co-Director James Kelly and SMHC Task Force member Sharon Robinson are presenting at the Celebration on effective practices to recruit, retain, reward and train top school talent.  Celebration keynote speakers include: Sir Kenneth Robinson on the unique challenges educators face into today’s global economy; Alan Alda on science; Temple Grandin on autism; Danica McKellar, interviewed by NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, on math; Eric Schmidt, interviewed by journalist Charlie Rose, on technology; Sesame Workshop’s new cast of “The Electric Company” on literacy; and Bill Gates, Sr. on the current state of public education.

To register, Visit thirteencelebration.org.

SMHC provides states and districts with a framework for addressing complex human capital issues. For urban districts in particular, the findings of the SMHC Case Studies offer integrated suggestions in the areas of teacher and principal recruitment, development, retention, and pay. Hopefully states and districts will draw from the SMHC framework and the SMHC Case Studies as they craft comprehensives plans as part of their proposals to secure stimulus funding.

Critics of alternative certification programs argue that the teachers produced by these programs are less effective and harder to retain, due to the minimal preparation they receive prior to teaching.

This new study supports others findings which advocate for alternative programs, described in this op-ed by Education Sector co-founder and co-director Andrew Rotherham, as well as this study from Louisiana State University, which shows that novice teachers in Baton Rouge and New Orleans who earned their teacher certification through the Louisiana Practitioner Teacher Program outperformed experienced teachers in improving students’ performance in math, reading, and language arts.

What’s the best way to make a teacher? Comment below to let us know what you think.

1.     Cast a wide net and don’t let top talent get away
2.     Get online to turn human-resources departments into customer-service centers.
3.     Focus on rigorous training and retention.
4.     Keep strong leadership at the top.
5.     Get unions and management to work together.