[Editor's note: This "What Matters Most" column appeared in the New York Times on Sunday, March 8.]
In his address to Congress last month, President Obama let it be known that despite the tough economic times, education was going to remain front and center in his agenda, saying: “In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity, it is a pre-requisite.”
The President’s speech made clear he has a firm grasp of the challenges we face, and we look forward to working with him to identify both the programs that work and the promising new ideas that can shape the best policies to improve our schools.
Unfortunately, the debate over education policy often ends up in a vacuum, producing a series of fads whose proponents rarely take into account how the latest fad will indeed work on the ground, or how it fits into the larger and more complex puzzle of school improvement. That is why teacher voices are so important.
Take teacher quality — the issue of the day in education circles. Columnists are writing about it and school leaders are touting its importance. It is important. But so are the issues of how to attract, retain and support great teachers and great teaching. We can’t talk about teacher quality without talking about finding an appropriate way to define and measure it. And it’s hard to measure a teacher’s performance when we haven’t done such a great job figuring out how to measure student performance. And how, really, can we assess our progress as a nation without a common set of academic standards? Simply making everything in public education about whether a child does well once a year on the state’s math or English test really doesn’t do the trick.
These issues are interconnected. And the best way to ensure success is to make sure that new policies are developed from the ground up, with teacher input, thus ensuring that we never forget to ask the question “what happens next?” We know from experience that new policies that are sufficiently broad-based and are formulated and implemented with teachers rather than imposed on them have a much greater chance of success.
Take, for example the innovative teacher compensation program being tried in Minnesota. The team that put together “Quality Compensation for Teachers” or “Q Comp” used input from teachers in its design from the beginning and unlike traditional “merit pay,” which trades higher student test scores for individual teacher bonuses, Q Comp is a refreshingly holistic approach that includes things like a career ladder, job-embedded professional development and a wide array of teacher evaluations using numerous criteria — the kinds of components that both identify and grow good teaching.
A new independent evaluation of Q Comp shows that it is working. The findings show that teachers are supported and are sharing and collaborating around student needs more than ever. The most important finding, however, is the following: “There is a significant and positive relationship between the number of years a school has been implementing Q Comp and student achievement.”
This is an exciting time to be an educator. We have a president who owes a great deal of his success to his education and whose roots as a community organizer taught him the importance of listening to the folks “on the ground” when developing policies. In just six short weeks in office, he has fought for and achieved an unprecedented level of investment in our schools. We look forward to working closely with him to implement a full range of comprehensive education reform measures that call upon the deep experience of teachers as we make America’s public schools the best they can possibly be.
