PIE: Partnership For Innovation in Education

Tennessee Races to Top

Posted by P.I.E. | October 18, 2010

Tammy Sommers, Chief Operating Officer for NAI Knoxville

As a business executive and member of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, it is with great pride our state received the primary “money spot” in the Race to the Top (RttT) federal education grant.  With $501M awarded to Tennessee in 2010, we feel lucky to have gained so much attention since our reform efforts began in 2007.  In that year, Tennessee received an “F” by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the “Truth in Advertising” category comparing Tennessee proficiency to national proficiencies.  That rating allowed us to evaluate our school system, and refocus our efforts to create a new educational opportunity for Tennessee children.

With such a poor rating among comparable state and national competitors, a Tennessee Alignment Committee was formed representing state and local government officials, businesses, postsecondary, and K-12 leaders from across the state.  This group established mandatory benchmarks representing a scalable new education system that would ultimately prepare our schoolchildren for college and rewarding career opportunities both in the Untied States and overseas.

Personally, my background in education spans over 20 years.   After 13 years as an educator in four counties and several states, I became the Chief Operating Officer for an international company located in Knoxville.   With both an education and business background, I quickly began to encourage partnerships between our local schools and businesses.  As the Alignment Committee established goals and objectives, Business Roundtables were created to give Governor Bredesen feedback about what was needed in schools to prepare students for workforce “on-ramping”.

Upon completion of this work, the Committee established a timeline to implement the necessary changes in the Tennessee Curriculum, known as the Tennessee Diploma Project.  This timeline began in November of 2007 with the rollout of expected changes like – increasing credit requirements, new course requirements, and developing new assessments – to begin in the 2009-2010 school year.

As Tennessee learned of the “Race to the Top” opportunity, we continued our existing work.  We focused on recently established collaborations between educators, community leaders, and the business community.  When individual issues arose, legislators called special sessions and allowed community leaders to help find solutions among all stakeholders.

A primary issue revolved around increasing educator requirements.  Historically, our educators have been evaluated solely on observation.  Tennessee Legislators focused on adding student performance to teacher evaluation.  I was personally inspired as Legislators listened directly to the Tennessee Education Association, and made an unprecedented vote deciding that 50% of Tennessee public teacher evaluations would involve student performance.  In this decision, 35% of the evaluation was based on a process called the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System.  The Tennessee Evaluation Advisory Committee, comprised of state and local government officials, business, postsecondary, and K-12 leaders is currently working on criteria affecting the remaining 15%.

Our education reform has not taken any new direction since winning the primary Race to the Top grant.  Both during the RttT process and waiting period, we continued our work heightening academic standards.  In fact, we just completed our first round of tests with the changed standards, and our schools realized a significant gain in cut scores from the past two years of the same standardized tests.  Cut scores are selected points on the score scale of a test.  For example, student performance on a test may be classified into one of several categories such as basic, proficient, or advanced on the basis of cut scores.

Ironically, failure served as our catalyst to providing new opportunities for Tennessee schoolchildren, and we are committed to increase our valuations as compared to the other 49 states.

State Senator Jamie Woodson said it best when Tennessee received the RttT honor and resulting monies to further support our work.  She said it was quite an accomplishment to receive the federal funding for our schools — especially since the community began creating new benchmarks and requirements just three years ago. However, she noted,  “We need to be clear that Tennessee has 90% of the work left to do in school reform. We cannot rest.”  Please refer to this site with an overview of that upcoming work, “First to the Top.”

About the Author

Tammy Sommers is the Chief Operating Officer for NAI Knoxville.  She also serves as the education member executive of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce.  Before her business career, Tammy was a classroom teacher and public school counselor.  She has played an ongoing role in education reform serving as a representative in State and Knox County education summits and collaborative union, school administration, business partnership and State government meetings.

Save Room for the Mice

Posted by P.I.E. | October 14, 2010

Mary Welsh Schlueter, PIE Founder and Chief Executive

The Federal Government thinks we edupreneurs are cool – or at least their marketers do.  In the case of education, the government just announced The Social Innovation Fund (SIF), a program matching federal grants dollar-for-dollar, creating million dollar public-private grants focused on building effective “cradle-to-grave” education solutions.

However several SIF winners, including Cincinnati’s United Way, mandate all nonprofits must “pony up” a $500,000, 5-year matching commitment for a chance to participate.   Clearly, some of the newest and brightest organizations don’t have a chance to qualify.  Instead, burdened by federal RFP requirements, the largest and most staid nonprofits have the greatest opportunity to qualify for funds.

Unfortunately, those larger, national organizations are not generally branded as delivery systems offering innovative and agile new programs for the 21^st century.   The truly innovative SIF program would have brought those “younger” groups together and coordinated a truly transformative opportunity not only for the sponsoring organizations, but the community itself.   Now THAT would have been an innovative use of funding, guaranteeing cross-pollination of newer technology and social media relationships with older, more traditional service implementation.

It’s simple: Kids want viable career opportunities.  Those opportunities rarely come alive in a structured classroom with a teacher using curriculum created in the 1950’s.  Innovation is about 24/7 learning using technology, creativity, and tech-literate classrooms.  Just like business, education has moved beyond the physical bricks and mortar classroom.  The federal government must recognize this transformation, or be left behind by global competitors like China and India who have already embraced more rigorous and innovative education programs.

If you listen to conservatives Dr. Rand Paul, John Kasich or Governor Chris Christie, you’d think the future of the federal government lies in the hands of American entrepreneurs.   It once did.   However, having Paul recently threaten to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education may not serve his U.S. Senate candidacy well, as State legislators continue to adopt rigorous national curriculum requirements.   Alternatively, loosening State and Federal budget reins might spur the adoption of regional best practices to accelerate school-specific academic achievement.

Sometimes, you need to listen to the smallest guy in the room.  Elephants are big and slow moving –not to mention the food intake!  Including nimble and truly innovative mice will offer productive change.   But, overlooking the agile edupreneur will only delay the educational reform demanded by some of the biggest government and global business institutions.  Sometimes, well-positioned mice can do much more than a horde of elephants…

Video of interview with Michael Baker, Director – Social Innovation Fund:

Testing Teachers: The Value of Measuring Student Performance

Posted by P.I.E. | October 8, 2010

Dr. Lawrence J. Johnson, Dean & Professor, Early Childhood and Special Education, University Cincinnati

Measuring student achievement is one of the most controversial issues facing education. All stakeholders: parents, teachers, administrators, policy makers, and the community can all agree that they want fair ways to determine student progress and performance but they often disagree on the role of standardized tests in achieving this goal. Some would argue that we rely too much  on such tests, while others would argue that we do not give enough importance to such tests. Some would argue these tests are flawed and have problems, while others would argue that they are objective and fair measures. Unfortunately, all sides of this issue have merit and everybody is correct to a certain degree.

When we place undue importance on standardized tests and ignore the many other measures that teachers can use to assess performance, we are placing too much emphasis on single measure of performance and the results can be misleading. On the other hand, if we ignore the important information standardized tests can provide we do our students a disservice. Yes standardized tests are flawed and they sometimes disadvantage subgroups of our population. But we must remember that any measure of human performance is flawed and a mere proxy for the truth. Although standardized tests are flawed, they are among the most carefully developed tests we have at our disposal and if used with the appropriate caveats they are important indicators of student performance.  If we wait until we have the perfect measure we will never assess students and our best option is to use multiple measures of performance to measure student growth and to understand the limitations of these measures.

We also need to move away from a norm-referenced view of student achievement where student performance is reported in a percentile rank that compares students with the normative group. From this perspective 50% of students are always below average. Moreover, this is a static comparison and it says nothing about student learning and growth. Students that are from schools serving students from high socio-economic backgrounds tend to have high percentile comparisons that may actually hide the real growth they are or are not making. That is, a student may not be making much growth and still have a high percentile rank. On the other hand, schools serving students from a low socio-economic background may have a low percentile comparison even though they are making more than a year’s growth in a year. In the first instance percentile comparisons hides underperforming students and in the second situation percentile comparisons mask good performance.

A better way to use student achievement data is to move to a value-added system of assessment where student growth becomes the key metric instead of the student’s percentile comparison. In this model, a student’s current level of learning is compared to the students past level of learning. If a student is making more than a year’s level of growth in a year they have a positive value-added score and if they are not making progress at the same level as the past they have a negative value-added score. This approach focuses us on what is most important – how well are students performing. It also provides a more equitable comparison because we are comparing students to themselves instead of comparing them to other students who may have a more advantaged situation. A value-added system also allows us greater accountability by linking a student’s value-added score to individual teachers. Finally this system provides better diagnostic opportunities by helping us see when student learning begins to falter.

In closing, all educational stakeholders want a fair system to measure student performance. Although standardized tests are controversial and not perfect, there are one of our most carefully developed measures of student performance and can provide useful information to help us understand how students are learning.  Standardized tests should not be our only measure of performance and should be a key part of balanced set of performance measures.  A value-added way of looking at student achievement is superior to a norm-referenced view of student performance. However all measures of performance have limitations and when using a value-added system of achievement the appropriate caveats need to be taken into consideration.

About the Author

Dr. Lawrence J. Johnson is Dean and Professor, Early Childhood and Special Education, CECH at UC. Dean Johnson also serves as Executive Director of the Arlitt Child and Family Research and Education Center at the University of Cincinnati.

Dean since 1999, Johnson has published extensively completing 10 books, 33 chapters in books and 71 refereed journal articles. In addition to his publications, he served as the Principal Investigator or primary author of 200 grant proposals that were funded for a combined budget exceeding $100 million. The scope of these projects has had an impact at the local, state, and national level.

Dean Johnson has been recognized by multiple organizations for his contributions in education and by the by the states of Illinois, Alabama and Ohio. Dr. Johnson served a 6-year term as co-editor of the Journal for Teacher Education and Special Education and was twice the chair of the State of Ohio University of Education Deans.

Adopt-A-Class Walks Its Talk

Posted by P.I.E. | October 7, 2010

Mary Welsh Schlueter, PIE Founder and Chief Executive

It’s easy to talk about innovation.  The hard part is implementation.  You’ll see in the coming months, we’ll profile selected edupreneurs and review their specific steps for success.

This week, in the P.I.E. article, Our City of Adopters, we learned how Bill Burwinkel introduced and implemented Adopt-A-Class – a mentoring program that fosters relationships between schools and the community.  When I asked for his “Call to Action” steps, he offered PIE some guidelines for the program’s success.

First, he looked to help schools with the highest levels of poverty, and therefore, highest financial strain.   Generally, students impacted by poverty have an inconsistent learning environment preventing proper development of their mental, physical, and emotional health.

Second, he chose partner businesses highly interested in promoting a culture of community philanthropy, cohesiveness, and teamwork among its employees.   A recent study indicated 95% of Adopters reported the program had been a positive team-building experience for their business or community group, and allowed them insight into the issues facing urban schoolchildren.

Third, AAC provided communication, oversight, and “matchmaking” links between the educational institutions and their adopters.   In fact, AAC does such a good job they have a 97% adopter retention rate, and 25% of existing participants have increased their involvement by adopting more schools and classes.

Fourth, AAC offers specific tools for K-8 grade students that spur academic achievement.   Young students are offered the chance to meet and partner with professional adults from the work world.  Moreover, Adopters profile how education is a valuable pathway to success, and they serve as concrete role models to underserved kids.  In fact, a recent AAC Teacher Survey stated that a large percentage of teachers report the program has had a positive impact on their students’ social (93%) and written communication skills (90%).

Fifth, AAC has earned teacher and adopter praise by serving as a partner who believes educating students should be the community’s first priority.

The Adopt-A-Child program was just a figment of Bill Burwinkel’s imagination until he partnered with like-minded community and school members.  There are schools in every district that can benefit from a program like AAC.  Use Burwinkel’s example to transform a challenge like poverty into an opportunity through mentoring.   Ready, set…

Our City of Adopters

Posted by P.I.E. | October 4, 2010

P.G. Sittenfeld, Director of Community Engagement, The Community Learning Center Institute

One of the true superheroes of our city’s public school system presents an unlikely profile: Bill Burwinkel is neither a teacher, principal or public school parent.  In fact, he’s not even a high school graduate.

But seven years ago, Burwinkel observed a then-failing public school system and recognized that communities share responsibility for school neglect and failure.  He believed a vibrant education system was the better alternative, and decided to roll up his sleeves and begin working to help fix the problems.

Burwinkel’s efforts produced one of Cincinnati’s largest and most successful mentoring programs named “Adopt-A-Class”.  Begun in 2003, AAC paired businesses, community organizations, high schools, and colleges with students from elementary public schools.  Adopters threw holiday parties and celebrations for their students, and delivered needed classroom supplies.  Bonds grew, mentorships developed and deeper commitments evolved as adopters hosted career fairs, student service projects, and offered job-shadowing opportunities.

Burwinkel, a 60-year-old Cincinnatian and CEO of National Marketshare Group, Inc., began AAC initially as an opportunity to donate extra consumer items his retail brokerage company had accumulated.

Having pulled himself up by the bootstraps to start his own company, Burwinkel believed “giving back isn’t an option; it’s an obligation.”  Burwinkel chose a nearby public school to offer the extra supplies and paired many of his employees with one classroom of students.  Within a year, Burwinkel matched 671 students with 17 sponsoring companies, all of which continue as Adopt-A-Class partners six years later.

AAC started in just one school, but today has expanded its army of adopters.  Today, more than 170 businesses and community groups mentor more than 6,000 students at 17 area pubic and parochial schools.  High profile businesses, professional sports teams, police departments, and university athletic teams participate by offering positive role models to those neediest members of the community.

“Adopt-A-Class has become an indispensable piece of our community learning centers,” says Darlene Kamine, who oversaw the public school district’s community learning center strategy for 10 years.  “Adopt-A-Class embodies the vision of connecting our schools to the community in the ongoing effort to make our schools neighborhood hubs.”

For many new volunteers, the program offers a comfortable — yet impactful — way to get involved in improving the lives of young people.  Once a connection to the students is in place, more meaningful relationships and deeper commitments often result.

One of the many devoted champions for Adopt-A-Class is Judy Oden, an employee at a local developer, who has coordinated her co-workers’ mentoring relationships.  Her sponsoring company has arranged Easter egg hunts and graduation parties; organized coat drives and school supply donations; and regularly sends volunteers to tutor students.

“It’s good for our own company morale,” says Oden.  “The real gift is seeing the student’s faces light up when we visit the school.”

Burwinkel regularly witnesses transformations in company cohesiveness.  “It made my company feel like more of a team,” he says.  “I had one employee tell me after our first student holiday party that he began to feel the true meaning behind Christmas for the first time.”

Adopt-A-Class is just one example among many organizations in Greater Cincinnati connecting students and mentors.  In a city where only 1 in 5 residents have school-aged children, the growing base of volunteers has helped fuel broad civic support of the school system, including an overwhelming 60 percent to 40 percent margin in support of renewing last year’s school levy.

In the case of Adopt-A-Class, the education and inspiration is just as much for the adopters as for the students.  “As more than 6,000 adopters have now discovered for themselves, our public schools aren’t places to fear or avoid or ignore,” says Burwinkel.  “They’re places to rally behind, cheer for, and invest in.”

About the Author

P.G. Sittenfeld is the Director of Community Engagement for The Community Learning Center Institute – a Cincinnati based organization that leverages the use of schools as neighborhood hubs providing additional academic support, health resources, and recreational and cultural opportunities. Sittenfeld has written for The New York Times, TIME magazine, and The Cincinnati Enquirer. He serves as a division co-chair for the United Way of Greater Cincinnati’s 2010 Annual Campaign; a board member of the Freestore Foodbank; a board member of CincyPac; and a member of the CincinnatiUSA Chamber of Commerce HYPE advisory committee.

The Queen City’s X Factor

Posted by P.I.E. | September 30, 2010

Daniel Hurley, Director of Leadership Cincinnati

At the 2009 Leadership Exchange, Sandra Pianalto, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, reported the results of studies conducted by her staff about the factors that drive metropolitan success.  Those studies identified two factors that will separate successful and failing metro regions in the future. The first is a commitment to high quality education. The second is the embrace of a “culture of innovation.”

If those conclusions are correct, greater Cincinnati faces real challenges. Over the course of decades, we have developed a self image as a “conservative” community.  Because of the partisan political overtones of that term, I prefer the term “cautious.”  Examples of our cautiousness are legion, but what has been forgotten is that for over a century Cincinnati had a reputation as an aggressive urban competitor characterized by a spirit of innovation, risk taking and flexibility. By 1850, Cincinnati became the third largest manufacturing center in the nation. When we were cut off from our most important markets in the aftermath of the Civil War, the City government used public dollars to build the Cincinnati Southern Railroad, which remains the only municipally-owned railroad in the country.

When the boat building industry declined after 1870, the accumulated capital and skilled workforce was redeployed and transformed Cincinnati into the single most important machine tool center in the world. For over half a century Cincinnati Machine Tool (Milacron) emblazoned the word “Cincinnati” on hundreds of thousands of machines that were shipped around the world.

The change came in the period from 1880 to 1940 when new industries drew immigrants, with their fresh ideas and willingness to take risks, to places like Cleveland Chicago and Detroit.  At the same time Cincinnati embraced its homogeneity and settled into a comfortable pattern.

The good news is that innovation flourishes in many spots in contemporary Cincinnati—in the laboratories at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, in the research labs at the University of Cincinnati and at P&G, in the marketing studios of LPK, Landor and Dunnhumby and in dozens of medium sized and start up companies across the region. The challenge is to move that spirit of innovation and risk taking beyond the labs and studios into the public life of the region, including education and schooling.

The new report released by Agenda 360 and Vision 2010, “Our Region by the Numbers,” and the accompanying website makes it clear that when we compare ourselves to 11 other metropolitan regions, we are in a crisis. Either we learn to foster a culture of innovation—in our businesses, our public affairs and our classrooms—or we are destined to continue the long slide to non-competitiveness.

About the Author

Daniel Hurley is the Director of Leadership Cincinnati, a 34 year old program sponsored by the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber of Commerce that is recognized as the premier leadership development program in the greater Cincinnati region. He is also a reporter for WKRC TV as well as host and executive producer for Local 12 Newsmakers.

Kids Before Politics

Posted by P.I.E. | September 24, 2010

Jeff Berding, Cincinnati City Council Member

I was proud to hear Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) recently became the first large city school district in Ohio to achieve the state rating “effective.” This is good news.  But much more has to be accomplished to ensure every child receives a high-quality education. To continue making progress, CPS must focus on the one thing that matters most: improving student achievement.

A recent newspaper column written by dozens of business and community leaders insisted achievement goals begin with CPS and the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers (CFT) agreeing, as a part of their contract negotiations, that teacher effectiveness should guide staffing, professional development and compensation decisions.  As a City Council Member, I fully agree with such suggestions.   I believe student achievement should be the dominant factor in assessing teacher effectiveness.  In addition, providing schedule and curriculum flexibility for turnaround schools is essential to moving CPS forward.

These educational reforms – specific to Cincinnati — were identified in a report conducted by The New Teacher Project and were aligned with the Race to the Top $400 million federal funding grant program recently awarded to Ohio. CPS could have received almost $13 million of the available funds ($4.35B) if the CFT contract included key policy changes.  For example, Washington D.C. School District, Colorado and Tennessee require satisfying specific academic achievement rates, affecting 50% of a teacher’s total evaluation.

The contract should also include systems that reward and retain highly effective teachers while also helping struggling teachers to improve.  For those teachers unwilling or unable to improve, there must be a streamlined process for an efficient exit from the district. In my opinion, student achievement matters far more than teacher seniority.

CPS received the “effective” rating partly because of the Elementary Initiative which turned around the district’s 16 worst-performing elementary schools.  Thirteen of the 16 schools showed improvement this year, and seven moved up one or more categories.  This occurred because CPS added 2 weeks of school instruction and trained principals and teachers on data-driven programs measuring weekly and quarterly individualized progress of students. This year, because of contract restrictions, CPS had to abandon an early start to the school year. These unacceptable restrictions in the contract must be addressed to allow administrators, principals and teachers to create innovative programs aimed to increase student achievement.

CPS must continue to improve achievement for all students. This will require educational reform.  The final agreement between CPS and CFT must reflect “transformational change” –  anything less is unacceptable.   Please join me in demanding such accountability from Cincinnati Public Schools and the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers.

Editorial Notes: Maverick Berding

Posted by P.I.E. | September 23, 2010

Mary Welsh Schlueter, PIE Founder and Chief Executive

I first met Jeff Berding, Cincinnati City Council member, at a panel forum discussing ways elected officials can partner with education organizations and economic development agencies.   Everyone agreed more collaborative partnerships were necessary to heighten the benefits of a healthy education infrastructure.  However, other elected officials sitting at the table differed in goals and implementation.  Yes, everyone agreed education was “a good thing”, but authentic commitment was best exemplified by working the details.

Jeff is a “detail” kind of guy.  He studies what is working in neighboring cities, and suggests innovative options.  Of course, not everyone likes his independent thinking, but his first priority lies with serving Cincinnati’s residents and corporate citizens.  And Jeff has a young family, just like mine.  We both have a parental and civic responsibility to create the best learning and teaching environment for education stakeholders – especially children — across southwestern Oho.

During the 2009 election cycle, I witnessed Jeff at political forums and “meet the candidate” nights, declare repeatedly, “people before politics.”  He truly believes working together we can create better opportunities for Ohio’s school children.  If it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly requires the experiences of many school districts, educators, political leaders, and parents to effect education reform.  This too is evident in Jeff’s efforts as a City Council member.

In his upcoming P.I.E. article, Jeff examines the push-pull relationship between the teacher’s union, education administrators, business executives and government leaders concerned about Ohio’s education infrastructure.  There are no easy answers, but he demands accountability among the stakeholders with the greatest power to influence change.

Superman vs. Super Reform

Posted by P.I.E. | September 22, 2010

Bill Sims, President and CEO of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools

The title of the soon-to-be-released movie about education reform in America, Waiting for Superman, reminds us of the fierce urgency of educational reform. Of the top 30 developed countries in the world the United States ranks 25^th in math and 21^st in science.  That’s not a promising basis for American resurgence in a globally competitive twenty-first century.

Geoffrey Canada, pioneering reformer, educational innovator and founder of the Harlem Children’s zone famously says with characteristic candor, “Either kids are getting stupider every year or we are doing something wrong in our educational system.”  Well, kids aren’t getting stupider but our world has changed.

The popular German term “zeitgeist” has been defined as the “spirit of our times.”  The temptations and challenges of technology have accelerated the pace of change creating a chaotic contextual culture for learning.  Nations across the globe understand the urgency of educational systems that can cope with the educational challenges of such rapid change, and young people more than ever understand the urgency of a high-quality education.  They will demand from our educational systems the lessons and tools to compete.  Nineteenth and twentieth century educational methods and frameworks can’t cope with today’s zeitgeist.  In one sense, it’s that simple.

Charter schools are one manifestation of this fierce urgency of educational reform.  School choice has given many parents the ability to break away from situations where they have felt trapped in chronically poor performing schools. Further, charter schools tend to be smaller, more personalized, frequently set to particular student learning styles and because of their autonomy they tend to be more agile when it comes to change and adaptation.  But like many new entrepreneurial ventures, results have been mixed.

Passion is not enough in pursuit of high-quality education reform.  Accountability is the ironclad responsibility that comes with autonomy.  In Ohio, successful charter school leaders and management companies are hewing to the tenets of accountability and they are welcoming state laws that are explicit in these regards.  Educational “reformers” who are solely transfixed on high-minded educational philosophies at the expense of student performance are doomed to fail in today’s reform environment.

I’m happy to report that Ohio charter schools are making progress in these regards.  Most all Ohio charter schools are in the “Big-8” urban districts.  Of these, 75% of charter schools achieved an Ohio Department of Education grade of “continuous improvement” or better (effective or excellent).  Of the traditional public schools in the same Big-8 districts 66% achieved a grade of continuous improvement or better. In previous years the performance difference has been virtually indistinguishable.  This is a positive trend and Ohio’s strict closure laws for chronically underperforming charter schools have provided essential encouragement for charter schools to take accountability seriously.

Waiting for Superman is a great title, but it’s still a comic myth.  Education reform and school performance is just plain hard work.  But this soon-to-be released movie does evidence the fact that too many American families are waiting for reform to catch up to their children and their children’s futures.

About the Author

Mr. Sims’s career spans the fields of education, non-profit organizations and the private sector. Mr. Sims is currently the President and CEO of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools based in Columbus, Ohio.  In addition to teaching and a school principalship, Sims held previous management positions with the Denver Council on for Relations, The Brookings Institution, the Cisneros Foundation, OneSoft Corporation, and K-12 Inc.  Sims led the first American students into China in 1976, 1978, and 1980 after the Cultural Revolution.

Status Quo vs. Compensation Reform: Who Wins?

Posted by P.I.E. | September 17, 2010

Jason Glass, Senior Director of Human Capital Strategy at Battelle for Kids

Marketing guru and futurist Seth Godin tells us that one of the first steps to significant change is that the new approach must be “better than nothing.” More precisely, the new system must reasonably offer the promise that it will be significantly better than doing nothing.

Seeing new systems or significant change through this lens gives us some insight into why districts would consider changing their educator compensation systems. Why is a strategic compensation system, one that aligns pay with performance, organizational goals and market conditions, better than just continuing with the near century-old step and level pay system? And, why is strategic compensation better than doing nothing?

One major reason relates to labor economics. A common cliché among labor economists is “you can’t repeal the law of supply and demand.” Meaning, like it or not, there is a market for teaching talent where what you pay effects supply and demand. We don’t pay enough for teachers who work in high poverty schools and we don’t pay enough for math, science and especially special education teachers. How do we know we are underpaying these areas? The market tells us this because there is a shortage. Would we have teachers jumping out of special education jobs to teach in less challenging areas or leaving the field at the rate they do if we doubled their pay? Could we attract and retain more math and science teachers by paying them closer to what the outside market pays for their skills? Could we keep better teachers in tough schools if we paid them in a way that acknowledges that the job of teaching economically challenged students is harder than teaching affluent students?

Practically everyone wants to pay teachers more, especially the teachers I’ve just noted. The question is, of course, “how?” We all know financial resources are finite, especially in our field. Strategic compensation calls on us to use the money that we have in ways that are sensitive to the market. Some types of teachers do in fact demand higher rates of pay than others. The persistent shortages of teachers in tough schools, in STEM subjects and in special education calls on us to do something different with compensation.

A second reason schools should be strategic with their compensation relates to signals. Organizations use compensation as a signal to employees about what’s important. Current compensation systems in education signal that sticking around another year and taking more higher education credits are what’s important. Research on experience and higher education credits show little effect (or at best a conditional effect) of these two concepts on what school organizations should really hold as important – quality teaching and learning. This begs the question, why not compensate based on the important concepts of quality teaching and high student learning rather than their poor proxies of experience and education credits? At least part of the answer to this question lies in definition and measurement. Defining what quality teaching and what high levels of student learning look like are difficult tasks and measuring them is even more daunting. However, just because something is hard is not a justification for not doing it. Schools should be having conversations about, defining, and measuring quality teaching and high levels of student learning. There is nothing of greater importance to schools than teaching and learning.

Finally, we should be using compensation strategically out of a simple sense of fairness. While it can, and should, be argued that all teachers are valuable human beings and their efforts on behalf of our children deserve our respect and admiration, it cannot be argued that all teachers are of the same quality. Simply, some teachers work harder than others or have greater natural ability than others. This is not a job everyone can do. It takes dedication and it takes skill to do this well. The best teachers should be making more than those who are less deserving. One of the most insulting things we do to great teachers is to treat them exactly the same as everyone else. Do teachers need great leadership? Absolutely. Do teachers need better and more coordinated professional development? Without question. However, neither of these mitigates the fact that not all teachers are the same and that they shouldn’t be compensated the same.

In sum, here are three compelling reasons why school districts should be using their compensation systems strategically: labor economics, organizational signals, and simple fairness. For the sake of our best teachers and our students, it’s high time we step off the “step and level” system and start some significant change when it comes to teacher pay.

Doing nothing should no longer be accepted as a viable option.

About the Author

Jason Glass, is Senior Director of Human Capital Strategy at Battelle for Kids, a Columbus, Ohio-based not-for-profit organization that works with hundreds of school districts in Ohio and across the country to improve teaching and learning. He can be contacted at jglass@battelleforkids.org.