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If we don’t have a good system to evaluate teachers, how can we assess progress or reward the best ones? 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 policy  makers 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 policy makers and education leaders.

These days, everyone’s getting involved in education—John Legend, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, the list goes on. Some of the potentially most influential players includes dozens of prominent businessmen and corporations.

But you’ll often hear many business leaders complain that their after-school tutoring or local scholarship funds are yielding little results. For Rick Hess here at AEI, that’s no surprise. While he and our colleagues don’t belittle the importance of those well-intentioned gestures, they often argue that until the system itself is transformed, we’ll see little results with such efforts. So then what can business do?

AEI’s Whitney Downs and Hess spent this past winter visiting three communities that have created successful business-education partnerships: Austin, Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and the state of Massachusetts. From their extensive interviews and research, they crafted five key lessons for other business leaders hoping to improve their future workforce. Check them out here.

Jenna Schuette is manager of external relations and a Jacobs Fellow in education policy studies.

This week at AEI, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressed the pressing need for cost-efficiency in America’s schools. The secretary noted that, “For the next several years, preschool, K-12, and postsecondary educators are likely to face the challenge of doing more with less.” However, he expressed confidence that this was “an opportunity for innovation and accelerating progress.”

The secretary called on superintendents and state leaders to consider their budgets in terms of efficiency and to make the tough decisions that will pay off long term, including rethinking teacher compensation and class size and integrating technology into school systems.

Duncan further explained that “the factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century … tens of billions of dollars are tied up in unproductive use of time and technology, in underused school buildings, in antiquated compensation systems, and in inefficient school finance systems.” His remarks parallel AEI scholar Rick Hess’s argument in his new book, The Same Thing Over and Over.

For the last two years, the AEI education policy team has been writing about the need for states and districts to rethink the way they allocate their dollars. As Hess and Whitney Downs pointed out this month, the K-12 budget picture is looking bleak for many years ahead. But today, we’re encouraged that this may be the dawn of a new era of smart spending in public education. And that this newfound respect for fiscal responsibility may be a promise of bipartisan education reform for 2011.

Jenna M. Schuette is a Jacobs Associate in education policy with AEI.

Good news rarely gets its fair play. But here’s a worthwhile gospel according to a new study released today by AEI: teachers don’t hate America!

Although public school teachers are often accused of being left-wing and anti-American, this new survey of over 1,000 high school social studies teachers says otherwise. An impressive 83 percent of teachers report seeing America as a “unique country that stands for something special in the world” (see graph below). This finding parallels a study of the general public which found that 84 percent of respondents see America in the same light.

So what does this mean for our high school students? Well, it likely means they aren’t being taught to view America as a fundamentally flawed country. Instead, 82 percent of their teachers find it important to teach students to “respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings.”

For those waiting for the bad news, it’s not clear that high schoolers are actually gleaning anything from these well-intentioned teachers.  Regarding key concepts of citizenship, no more than 24 percent of public school teachers express great confidence that most of the students from their high school have learned these concepts before they graduate.  So while our students aren’t learning to disavow America, they may not be learning how to participate, either.

For more on the political breakdown regarding teachers’ views on citizenship, check out my colleague Cheryl Miller’s upcoming blog post.

Jenna M. Schuette is a Jacobs Associate in education policy at AEI.

Today AEI’s Rick Hess and the Fordham Institute’s Stafford Palmieri and Janie Scull are releasing a major study ranking the reform environments in America’s 25 largest cities and a handful of other noteworthy places. While many education studies focus on test scores, this report instead takes a look at numerous environment-related indicators, acknowledging that education reform is a bigger undertaking than just adopting the pedagogical fads of the moment.

Not surprisingly, New Orleans came in at the top, followed closely by Washington, D.C., and New York City. Rounding out the top five were Denver and Jacksonville. It’s interesting to note that all top five cities’ states are round-two finalists in the Department of Education grant competition Race to the Top. Those winners will be announced today at noon.

Cities were scored on the ability to attract talented individuals; access to reliable funding from both public and private entities; a robust charter school community; application of helpful quality-control metrics for entrepreneurial endeavors; district friendliness to nontraditional education providers and reform; and municipal support for entrepreneurs and district reforms. As witnessed in cities like New Orleans and D.C., noticeable reform requires political support, financial flexibility, gutsy and talented individuals, and useful checks and balances.

Despite its limitations and imperfections—the authors were subject to survey responses and public data—“America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform” is an interesting and useful way to consider school reform. While ranking the health of a city’s ecosystem is a common approach in many sectors, it’s a rarity in education. By considering the environment of a city, the report looks beyond the popularity of particular pedagogical or reform practices within the district and instead lays out a more comprehensive guide for sustainable and penetrating school reform. For further reading on such a holistic approach to ed reform, I recommend Hess’s newest book, Education Unbound.

Jenna Schuette is a research assistant in education policy at AEI.

Image by Andrew Decker.

Late last night, the U.S. House of Representatives passed Rep. David Obey’s (D-Wisconsin) amendment to the “edujobs” provision in the House version of the 2010 Supplemental Appropriations Act, which focuses mostly on defense. To pay for the $10 billion edujobs provision, Obey’s amendment proposes to siphon $800 million from the Race to the Top fund and other education initiatives—charter school grants and the Teacher Initiative Fund—championed by the Obama administration. In response to the amendment, the White House announced, “If the final bill presented to the President includes cuts to education reforms, the president’s senior advisors would recommend a veto.”

The bill will move on to the Senate, to be voted on when session resumes the week of July 12th. A key education expert in the Senate shared with me this morning that it is “highly unlikely that the House version of the defense supplemental will become law” and that the Senate version will likely succeed instead. The Senate’s passed version of the defense bill contains no education provisions. And, this afternoon, 13 senators signed a letter to Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate’s appropriations committee, asking him not to cut $800 million from education reform efforts.

We once again find rhetorical battles over “it’s for the kids.” American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten spoke out against the Department of Education and President Obama’s opposition, accusing the Department of Education of trading teacher jobs for its pet programs. She said failing to save these jobs will cause “well-documented harm to children.” The National Education Association’s “Speak Up For Education and Kids” initiative urged their Facebook fans last night to call their members of Congress and urge them to vote for the Obey amendment.

On the opposing side, Democrats for Ed Reform and 25 other education reform organizations released a statement decrying the amendment for cutting funds to programs that “show promise in improving the quality in education for ALL our nation’s schoolchildren.” Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution wrote, “When push comes to shove, it is appears that it is not about the kids—it is about the adults.”

So which is it? Are America’s schoolchildren most at risk with understaffed classrooms or with underfunded initiatives seeking to spur educational entrepreneurship? A case could certainly be made for both. Saving teaching jobs is a noble aim, but one that shouldn’t be pursued at the cost of reforms which are working to improve both the teaching profession and the quality of American education.

Jenna M. Schuette is a research assistant in education policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image by schluesselbein.

In an interview with Washington Post education columnist Jay Matthews, New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein sensibly notes, “systems don’t change because you charm them. Systems change because you have levers that enable the system to move. And it’ll be noisy because the people who are there often like the status quo.”

Successful reforms and new practices have failed to change education on a grand scale because of the barriers that lie within our current system. In a similar spirit, AEI’s Rick Hess takes an in-depth look at such barriers in his upcoming book, Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling. Using examples of vibrant organizations and individuals who are finding promising ways to address our nation’s education needs, he offers, as Klein puts it, “a well-thought-through analysis of how to enable entrepreneurialism and innovation to flourish in a way that will drive truly dynamic school reform.”

Greenfield schooling eliminates obstacles to problem solving; outfits districts and providers to assess achievement on a multifaceted scale; creates policies that attract, retain, and respect teacher talent; and frees up capital for new ventures that are willing to shake the status quo. Enacting such levers will allow for sustainable, effective approaches to address our nation’s education needs.

Jenna M. Schuette is a research assistant for education policy at AEI.