Dueling Education Reforms

A blogger at the American Enterprise Institute has suggested a set of principles to guide education reform. The problem is, well-intentioned and logical as they are, they  look a lot like No Child Left Behind.

“If we don’t have a good system to evaluate teachers, how can we assess progress or reward the best ones?” Jenna Schuette Talbot asked in a blog posting on November 9, 2011. “Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee held a hearing on the Harkin-Enzi bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—the nation’s largest federal education law. Despite the controversy around mandating these systems during the Committee negotiations, there was little mention of this during the hearing.”

“The original version of the Harkin-Enzi ESEA bill sought to require all states to develop teacher evaluation systems that relied in part on student achievement. However, as part of the tireless effort to dial back federal involvement in education, the GOP successfully insisted that these requirements apply only to those states who participate in the voluntary Teacher Incentive Fund. The Fund federally supports states and districts who want to develop performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems.

“As new evaluations become more promising, states and districts are likely to opt in to the Fund to receive resources and political cover for building better systems. These more comprehensive and objective ways of evaluating teachers allow leaders to better identify the best teachers.

“Right now, more than 99 percent of our 3.4 million teachers are categorized as “good” or “great” teachers, even in schools where students fail year after year—a fact that has confirmed skepticism about the efficacy of our current teacher evaluations. However, as we start systematizing these evaluations, many fear that we have yet to get it right.”

“But there’s a way forward. Harvard researchers Heather Hill and Corinne Herlihy provide policymakers with recommendations to consider when designing teacher evaluation systems in their just released Education Outlook, Prioritizing Teaching Quality in a New System of Teacher Evaluation.

“Here are steps we can take:

1. “Invest in a system that assesses individuals directly on teaching, not teacher, quality.
2. “Use multiple criteria to evaluate teachers–including student growth, contributions to the school community, and parent feedback.
3. “Be cautious of systems that rely too heavily on teacher’s value-added scores.
4. “Worry less about the tools used to evaluate teachers, and more about which data schools are using to evaluate.

“As teacher evaluations continue to be lauded–at both the federal and state level–Hill and Herlihy’s recommendations should be thoughtfully considered by policymakers and education leaders.”

Meanwhile, the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) has actually proposed a new set of education reform guidelines that would indeed be novel.  “The key to encouraging a truly dynamic education marketplace is unlocking the resources we already spend so that parents can seek the education models that will work best for their children,” IWF managing director Carrie Lukas points out. “Right now, the average public school student will have more than $100,000 invested in his or her education between kindergarten and graduating high school.”

 

“If parents controlled those resources—if they could select from a wide-variety of schools and education providers—entrepreneurs would have tremendous incentive to find solutions that work.Policymakers need to pursue reforms that put power in the hands of parents and stop pushing students toward the one-size-fits-all models that we’ve used in the past. Schools should be freed from most regulations so that they can pursue more dynamic, innovative learning models. Non-profit education providers should compete with for-profit entities so that we have the best minds focused on finding the best way to provide a quality education for Americans everywhere.”

 

What do you think?

 

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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