On February 20th, The Education Sector released, 'Eight for 2008: Education Ideas for the Next President.'
The most important of the eight ideas is 2) American teachers deserve a New Deal that treats them like true professionals. The spirit of the idea is absolutely aligned with what needs to be done to support and improve the teaching profession in this country. And most of the recommendations for action would represent positive steps to build the profession.
But the biggest problem is that the entire Ed Sector plan for “treating educators like professionals” is created with no mention of how educators themselves could contribute to, inform and buy into any of the proposed strategies. We absolutely need to pay teachers differently based on outstanding performance – demonstrated with multiple measures. We absolutely need to provide additional incentives for teaching in hard-to-staff schools and subject areas. We absolutely need greater investments in mentoring, induction, peer review processes and school leadership training. These recommendations from Ed Sector certainly represent part of treating educators like professionals, but creating these strategies in concert with our best and brightest educators is an equally essential element of professionalism that will prove necessary for any of these reforms to succeed.
Ed Sector is right that TQ dollars should not continue to go toward only class size reduction and traditional professional development. They are correct that some of the proposed reforms represent a hard sell with teacher unions. But reform-oriented union interests will not be “won over” by funding as Ed Sector supposes. Union interests and broad overall teacher support can only be won over if and when the proposed strategies for preparing, developing, evaluating and compensating teachers are effective and represent the realities of teaching in the field.
For example, CTQ is currently working with a representative national team of highly accomplished teachers to hone in on the advantages and disadvantages of using different professional compensation models, defining how different models are most likely to recruit and retain accomplished teachers—including teachers for low performing, hard-to-staff schools in both urban and rural settings—and how to best use a variety of student learning results to validly and reliably support school improvement, teacher learning and professionalism.
These educators will not “fight tooth and nail against differential pay,” these exemplary teachers will fight hard for compensation systems that accurately reflect real teaching ability and reward teachers accordingly. And there are tremendous educators across the country with essential insights for improving and implementing every reform strategy proposed by Education Sector. The key is that reforms are undertaken with quality educators and not done unto educators as often proposed by policy wonks.
Finally, Education Sector should also consider two other essential reforms to throw into their TQ reform mix. Any discussion of recruiting and retaining more effective teachers in challenging schools must include a hard look on the increasingly national movement to assess and improve working conditions for teachers (http://www.teachingquality.org/twc/whereweare.htm).
And Ed Sector should support improvements to all types of teacher preparation, not only the alternative routes to the profession which they favor. We should recognize that the greatest variance in the quality of preparation exists within respective routes into teaching and not across – a fact where both sides of the traditional vs. alternative preparation debate can and should agree: http://www.letsgetitright.org/blog/2007/02/more_unexpected_synergy.html
Posted by Scott Emerick
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