1. Teaching Fellows speech. November 2009. Good afternoon, everyone. As a
school superintendent, it makes me really happy to see so many aspiring ...
Teaching Fellows speech November 2009
Good afternoon, everyone. As a school superintendent, it makes me really happy to see so many aspiring teachers! Congratulations to all of you for choosing education as a profession.
I’ve been working in public education since I graduated from college more than two decades ago. I’ve never regretted my decision to enter this profession. Education is an exciting, challenging field. It offers the opportunity for tremendous satisfaction in your work. Why? Because the work of an educator is important. It matters – and because it matters, it’s also important that we do it well.
And there’s a bonus in all this: Education is filled with optimists! We’re all optimists because we work with children. As the late Christa McAuliffe, the 1
teacher-astronaut who died in the Challenger explosion, so eloquently said: I touch the future. I teach.
All of us in education touch the future every day. And that’s my topic for you this afternoon. I want to share with you what I see in that future – where I think American education in general, and teaching in particular, is headed.
Earlier today, we made public our strategic plan for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools for the next four years. It’s called Strategic Plan 2014: Teaching Our Way to the Top, and it sets out our goals and how we’ll meet them through the year 2014.
Because we do touch the future, it’s important for us to have a clear view of where we’re going. My dad worked for the Ford Motor Company for 38 years and 2
he always told me that the reason cars have small rearview mirrors and big windshields is that you need to know where you’ve been but you really need a wide, clear view of where you’re going. Our strategic plan is our windshield for the district. We need to see where we’re going.
Our plan has two major goals and both of them will affect the future of teaching in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools – and beyond. If we succeed in meeting the goals of our plan, I think a lot of school districts will be looking at our accomplishments and asking how we got there. I believe we have the opportunity here in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to lead the way into the future for education, and we’re certainly going to give it our best shot.
The two main goals are improving teaching and managing performance. 3
Improving teaching and managing performance will take CMS to a new level. We can do a better job of educating children. All children.
Great teaching and great leadership will take the high fliers even higher. It will take good students closer to great. And it will take the ones who need help over the academic hurdles to success. When we improve teaching and manage performance, every child gets a better education.
We want to build a culture of effectiveness. We will set and meet high standards for our employees and high expectations for our students.
To do that, we’re going to change the way we measure our teachers, leaders, and ultimately all of our employees. We will link pay to performance and
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create standards that are rigorous and explicit to measure effectiveness.
This far-reaching change in CMS is possible today because a lot of things have come together. CMS stands today at an unprecedented convergence of national, state and local opportunities.
Those opportunities exist now because the education landscape has shifted recently. Such transformational changes would not have been possible four years ago, or ten years ago, because the nation wasn’t ready. North Carolina wasn’t ready. CMS wasn’t ready. But today, a lot of things have aligned.
There is pressure for change on every side.
Nationally, there is a growing awareness of what has been called the silent epidemic of educational failure. 5
The federal government and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have set a race to the top for funding, challenging states to compete for four billion dollars in educational funding to improve our schools.
Secretary Duncan, a former school superintendent in Chicago, has said that his top priority is improving the quality of teaching by measuring and rewarding – or penalizing – teachers based on performance. [insert story about talking to Arne about this and his commitment.]
So there’s federal attention on this issue. There’s also growing concern in the private sector as well.
Major companies and foundations are probing to quantify what constitutes great teaching and great
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leadership, and how we can make our schools better. The leaders of business and philanthropy are concerned about the state of American education, and they’re doing something about it. Let me give you a couple of examples:
The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Educationrelated grants make up about one-third of the grants awarded by this foundation based in Austin, Texas. Globally, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation has committed more than $250 million to improve student performance and increase access to education so that all children have the opportunity to achieve their dreams.
Let me read you something from the foundation’s Web site that spells out an area of focus:
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“In the USA we are working to close the achievement gap by supporting programs to improve large urban school districts in cities nationwide. We strongly emphasize the use of performance management an approach that fosters a culture dedicated to accountability and collaboration and uses technology to gather, analyze and report information. We believe student performance can be improved by giving administrators and teachers access to timely, relevant insights they can use to make decisions, predict performance levels and graduation rates, and change the course of students at risk. We also seek to strengthen school leadership…”
Bottom line here: Michael and Susan Dell believe that managing for performance and improving teaching and leadership are essential to improve American education. Accountability is also a key factor for this large foundation. 8
Education is also the focus for another couple who made a lot of money in computers: Bill and Melinda Gates. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is based in Seattle, is dedicated to the proposition that every life has equal value. It has targeted improving American high schools as an area of focus. The Gateses, by the way, describe themselves not only as optimists, but as “impatient optimists.” They want to see more change faster!
The Gates Foundation works to make sure that high school students graduate ready for success and for college. The foundation gives college and graduate school scholarships, among other work.
The foundation is also funding a national two-year study of what constitutes effective teaching. It’s called Measuring Effective Teaching and it will study about 9
3,700 teachers around the country. Five hundred of those teachers will be in Charlotte – CMS has been asked to take part in this important research, and we’re pleased to participate because we think we’ll learn a lot from the experience.
[talk about the Gates visit to CMS}. A third foundation is also working directly to improve American education. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation is a national entrepreneurial philanthropy that seeks to dramatically transform American urban public education. The foundation wants to ensure that all children receive the skills and knowledge to succeed in college, careers and life.
Since 1999, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has provided nearly $400 million to significantly improve student achievement in urban areas by creating and 10
supporting strong leadership, school district efficiency, competition, best practices and teacher quality. The foundation believes that American school districts and schools must have strong, talented leadership.
These are just three of the philanthropic organizations that recognize the crisis in American education and committing billions of dollars toward improving it. Hundreds of others are also committing money and other resources to helping schools. I chose to mention these three in particular because they’ve given some of the largest amounts of money and resources, and also because Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has partnered with all three of them. So I am familiar with the work they’re doing here and elsewhere.
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So we have federal pressure to improve and private pressure to improve, and support to make that happen coming from both fronts.
At the state and local level, there is pressure of a different kind. The economic downturn of 2008 has squeezed state and local funding.
That pressure is especially acute for us.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools took the largest hit in the state in our local funding for the 2009-2010 budget -- $34 million, more than ten times the next biggest cut of $3 million in Wake County.
These stringent budget cuts are forcing us to find new and better ways to use resources wisely. We have improved and streamlined many of our business operations – and we’re going to do even more. 12
There is also strong impetus for reform here in Mecklenburg County. The Board of Education has set a high standard, directing CMS to provide “the best education available anywhere.”
And then there’s CMS itself. I believe our district is ready for dramatic reform now. In the past four years, we have built a solid foundation. We have accomplished many of the goals in our Strategic Plan 2010 – and this progress has set the stage for our Strategic Plan 2014.
Strategic Plan 2014: Teaching Our Way to the Top continues the goal of increasing student achievement, while also sharpening the focus of the strategies and tactics to accomplish that. It significantly expands the scope of earlier reforms.
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Managing performance means setting goals and then measuring to see if those goals have been met. We will manage the performance of our teachers, our principals and all of our employees.
We want to use performance to support training for teachers, to compensate and reward them, and to retain or dismiss them. We will establish fair and rigorous standards – standards that our teachers will agree are fair and rigorous – and link performance on those standards to compensation. This is something we want to do with our teachers, not to them, and we will consider their input as we design our performance standards.
It will take time to build these standards and we are committed to putting our time, our thought and our talent into this.
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These standards will change the way teachers are chosen, trained, paid and retained. It is essential that this change occur in public schools.
Why? Because it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of great teaching.
Consider this: In 2006, the Brookings Institution published a study of the Los Angeles public schools. That study concluded that having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher for four years in a row would be enough to close the test-score gap between African-American and white students.
Think about that. The achievement gap is the most difficult challenge in American education – and the means to solve it is within our reach.
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And then think about something else: Think what a teacher powerful enough to move struggling kids could do for all the others in the classroom.
Think what a powerful teacher can do for average kids.
Think what a powerful teacher can do for high fliers.
Suppose you are that powerful teacher. Think what you could do for every student in your classroom. You could lift them all. You could help them learn at levels they didn’t think they could reach. It’s the academic version of a rising tide lifting all boats. When great teaching is happening in a classroom, every child in that classroom benefits.
At CMS, we have decided to emphasize educators who are effective, rather than highly qualified. Based 16
on our results and experiences, we have concluded that relying on credentials is no longer the best approach to determining the effectiveness of educators.
Eight years in, it’s apparent that the No Child Left Behind Act is misguided in its reliance on credentials to measure good teaching. Our shift in direction is based on national and local research, as well as our own observation of teachers and teaching.
The best measure of effective teaching must include not only calculating the percentage of students who are proficient, but also measures of student growth.
The most effective instructors are those who can teach students to achieve more than one year’s growth in one year’s time.
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The ability to move students this way is particularly critical in addressing the achievement gaps, where students may be two or more years behind in basic skills. That’s why the researchers at Brookings concluded that top teachers can close the achievement gap over a four-year period.
Great teachers can get students to learn more than a year’s content in a year’s time – and that is the only effective way to catch up those students who are not on grade level. So we are focusing in CMS on establishing new benchmarks in measuring teacher performance, and linking pay to performance.
For our teachers, we will no longer measure effectiveness by credentials or years of experience. Instead, we will monitor year-over-year student academic progress in a variety of ways as the best indicator of effective teaching and leadership. 18
We also will look at how our compensation system is structured. Right now, teacher pay is based in part on graduate degrees and length of time in the profession.
In CMS, we allocate 26 percent of the money we spend on salaries to reward teachers with advanced degrees or experience. That’s a big chunk of money, because salaries comprise most of our annual operating budget – and our operating budget runs just over one billion dollars a year.
Is that the best way, the fairest way to compensate teachers? Does that compensation structure work to the benefit of children in the classroom?
There’s a lot of research out there that suggests that pay-for-experience and pay-for-credentials are not the best ways to structure compensation. They’re not the 19
best ways to attract – and retain – the best and brightest to the classroom. And that’s what we need to move ahead – the best and the brightest teachers.
Preliminary research from one study has found that there is no significant difference between the effectiveness of a teacher with a graduate degree and one who does not have that degree.
That same research also suggests that the most improvement in teaching performance happens in a teacher’s first three years. There’s a big improvement between a new teacher’s first year and the second and third years. The research shows that very clearly. But after that, the gains are minimal.
What this research tells us is this: If we want the best teacher in every classroom, we need to link pay to
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performance, not graduate degrees earned or years of experience.
We want the most effective teachers in our classrooms because great teaching will benefit every student in a classroom. High fliers fly higher. Good students get better. Average students get good. Struggling students succeed. Good teaching benefits every single student in a classroom.
This is the world that all of you will work in. The old way – where longevity and graduate degrees meant more pay – is changing. The new way will look at what has always been the most important thing, all along: How well you are educating students. The measures will be fair and they will be rigorous – and they will shape your career. And they should.
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As part of this, you’ll have access to monthly, weekly, maybe even daily data about your students’ progress. Technology and research have made it possible to track student growth and progress accurately and quickly – and that data is going to help all of you figure out what’s working in your instructional methods and what isn’t. You’ll also know who’s learning and who needs more help.
These standards are not intended to be a “gotcha,” an arbitrary or capricious way to punish you. Instead, we want to create standards that can help you improve your effectiveness. They’re intended to make sure that every student gets a great teacher – because that’s the only way we’re going to improve our schools.
The data and the measurement will support you in your professional growth, by giving you an accurate 22
read on your progress, as well as the growth of your students. We want to do this with teachers, not to them. Another way to say that is this: In order to lead, it’s necessary to have people who will follow! We want teachers to be on board with our goal of improving teachers, and we think most of them will be. People become teachers because they want to help kids – and performance management will make them better at helping kids.
What education is beginning to accept as a reality is something that corporations and other organizations have known for some time: Excellence matters. Truly great organizations are built on outstanding work by every participant. Public education has embraced the importance of measuring student progress in order to improve it. Now it is time to extend performancemeasurement standards to everyone in education, not only the students. 23
The way of the future in education is accountability; holding ourselves accountable for how well we teach children. These next few years are going to be an exciting time, and a demanding one. But I think overall it’s going to be a great time to be in education. I urge all of you to follow the lead of Bill and Melinda Gates, and be impatient optimists! We have a lot of good things to do, and they need to be done quickly.
Now I’ll take your questions.
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