Who We Are

Vision

Good teachers are critical to student success. Yet much of the public school teaching workforce is inadequately prepared, poorly evaluated, and inequitably distributed, problems that disproportionately affect our poorest and most vulnerable students. To address these challenges, we believe that public education needs to recruit, prepare, promote, and compensate teachers based on their effectiveness in promoting student learning. Public education needs to better align its human capital policies and practices with its educational objectives. We envision changes in teacher policies that fairly measure, support, and reward teacher effectiveness, particularly in high-needs school and school districts.

Rationale

Education Sector believes that teacher quality would improve if the public education system shifted from an emphasis on credentials to a focus on demonstrated performance at every point in the teaching profession “value chain,” beginning with pre-service training and continuing through recruitment, induction, evaluation, professional development, and compensation. Finding fair and reliable measures of teacher effectiveness, and building confidence and consensus among key stakeholders to employ these measures in public education is a critical task.  

Strategy

Education Sector hopes to focus policy discussions on ways to define, support, and measure the impact of teachers’ work that stress teachers’ effectiveness. We will work with policymakers and change agents at the national and state levels, and we will work closely with key leaders at the school district level, where the majority of teacher policies are negotiated.

The next two years present a unique window of opportunity for us to pursue this work. The 2008 presidential campaign and the reauthorization of NCLB provide important opportunities to frame national teacher policy. And we believe that there is also important work to do at the local level, where teacher collective-bargaining contracts influence the daily professional lives of teachers.

We have two goals for our work over the next two years:

1. Identify effective ways to define, support, and measure teachers’ work and communicate these ideas to education policy makers, school-reform advocates, and education philanthropists at the federal and states levels. ;Our recent report on teacher evaluation, for example, presents recommendations on how to introduce more rigorous ways of measuring teachers’ performance.

2. Encourage local school district leaders—teacher union officials, school system management, and school board members—to work together to promote teacher quality through innovative public policies. An example of how we hope to promote such collaborations is a forthcoming national survey of teachers. It will reveal what types of teacher reforms public educators support.

Impact

We plan to monitor significant shifts in the national teacher policy debate and the adoption of specific teacher policies that reflect our ideas and recommendations. Our goals are to have Congressional re-authorizers of NCLB and 2008 presidential candidates embrace our recommendations, and to see our ideas reflected in the emergence of new models of collective-bargaining contracts in several cities.