State urged to revise teacher hiring, pay.

Mediocrity 'won't cut it,' task force says. 

by Cynthia Howell

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

A national team of scholars invited by Gov. Mike Huckabee to inject a fresh perspective into Arkansas' efforts to improve public education on Monday recommended strenghtening academic standards, relaxing restrictions on charter schools and basing teacher pay on the achievement gains of their students.

"Moreover, too much of Arkansas has been immersed for too long in a culture of educational mediocrity," the task force concluded in its report. “That just won’t cut it in the twentyfirst century.”  The year-long study, done at no charge to the state, includes 45 recommendations in 11 chapters plus a chapter on the history and current state of school funding written by former state Sen. John Brown, R-Siloam Springs, now president of the Windgate Foundation, and Gary Ritter, an associate professor in the department of education reform and first holder of the Chair in Education Policy at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. 

Speaking at a news conference, Huckabee welcomed the recommendations, saying that he had invited the task force to take an objective look “from soup to nuts” on what the state may be doing right and what could be done better. 

“As we are trying to improve education for the students of Arkansas, we should not be afraid of an honest and objective evaluation of our efforts,” he said. 

The governor and Ken James, the state’s commissioner of education, said they were open to the ideas raised in the recommendations including those on making the subject-area standards more rigorous, expanding charter schools and further exploring performance pay plans for teachers. 

Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration and now chairman of the Koret Task Force, said the task force did not deal with the issues of equitable and adequate school funding that have been the focus of state lawmakers and the Arkansas Supreme Court in recent years, other than to note that the schools now have greater financial resources. 

“You are now invited to focus on the other definition of adequacy,” Finn said, “which is whether that money is being spent in such a way to deliver to every child the skills and knowledge they need to learn.”  He said the state has the opportunity to not only catch up with the national average on various education factors but also to become a national leader in education if it carries out the recommendations over the next five years. 

TRAINING EDUCATORS  The task force’s most dramatic recommendations are in the area of teacher hiring and compensation, calling for the state to lessen its reliance on graduates of colleges of education and state certification. It further proposed devoting all new state funding for teacher pay raises toward establishing a reward system for teachers whose students show achievement gains over the course of a school year. 

“There is no convincing evidence that traditional approaches to teacher training and certification yield effective, knowledgeable classroom practitioners,” wrote Terry Moe, professor of political science at Stanford, in the chapter on teacher preparation. “If the state is serious about making significant gains in the quality or supply of teachers, it must be willing to move toward a new system of certification and preparation.”  At a two-hour panel discussion attended by about 80 education, business and community leaders Monday afternoon, Moe said the state should automatically certify anyone who possesses a bachelor’s degree, passes a rigorous knowledge test and clears a criminal background check. Thus certified, those teachers can begin work as long as there is a mentor-support system and a teacher evaluation program. 

“The schools would have a bigger pool from which to select teachers,” Moe said. “They could try teachers out, keep the good ones and weed out the bad ones.”  Colleges of education would have to prove they had value to aspiring teachers or to school districts seeking qualified instructors, he said. 

Teachers can’t control the educational needs of the children who enter their classrooms but they can affect the achievement gains of the child, and successful teachers should be rewarded accordingly, the task force said in a section of its report written by Caroline M. Hoxby and Eric A. Hanushek. 

A substantial portion of each teacher salary should be based on the achievement gains of their individual students, the report said. Such a “value-added” system calculates the yearly achievement gains of students in the past and projects what the gains will be in a new school year. Teachers are rewarded for those students whose gains exceed the projections. 

Such a system in Arkansas should be phased in by applying it to all new teachers and allowing veteran teachers to choose whether they want to participate, the report said. The rewards to teachers should be reasonable in size and be distributed to all effective teachers as a way to attract new ones. Small rewards to many teachers or large rewards to a handful of teachers will not work to draw successful teachers, the task force warned.

CHARTER RECOMMENDATIONS  The task force called for removing limits on the number and locations of the state’s charter schools as well as on the kinds of agencies that oversee the schools. 

“Arkansas’ charter law remains extremely weak, its charter schools are few and small and its other forms of school choice are virtually nonexistent, the task force report concludes. 

The task force members recommended removing the cap of 24 open-enrollment charter schools and letting the market determine the number. Teachers and parents who want to convert a public school into a charter school should have that ability to do so independent of the district’s superintendent or the school board. Consideration should be given to providing resources for charter school facilities and student transportation. And, the authority to approve a charter school should be given to more than just the state Board of Education. Other entities, such as universities, community and municipal organizations, and other nonprofit organizations, should have that authority, too. 

Charter schools should be given more automatic waivers of state laws and regulations — including collective bargaining rights of teacher groups — than now, the report said. 

REACTION TO REPORT  Members of the audience at the panel discussion were reluctant to endorse doing away with teacher preparation programs. 

Rich Nagel, executive director of the Arkansas Education Association, said after the meeting that even the state’s alternative teacher certification program requires teachers to demonstrate teaching skills. 

Naccaman Williams, a member of the state Board of Education, said there is value in at least some teacher preparation programs. 

“No one can walk into an elementary school classroom and begin to teach reading,” Williams said. 

Williams was more enthusiastic over the recommendations for tracking the achievement levels on individual students and performance pay for teachers. He said he liked the task force’s recommendations on providing userfriendly information to the public about school funding and student performance. He agreed that the state’s existing 30-page report card mailed to parents is too big and hard to digest. 

Stacy Pittman, past chairman of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, welcomed the task force’s sentiment that changes must be made to lift Arkansas out of 49th place in the nation in terms of per capita income. 

Sen. Jim Argue, D-Little Rock, said he hoped lawmakers would be open to the different proposals. He said he liked the performance pay recommendations but only if they could be carried out with the support of teachers and not forced on them. 

ACADEMIC STANDARDS  The Koret Task Force report, available on the Internet, is organized into four categories; standards and curriculum, assessment and accountability, organization and options, and teachers. 

In the area of state academic standards — statements of the skills and knowledge that students in a state should acquire — the task force was most critical of Arkansas’ 2000 social studies standards, calling them woefully inadequate and needing a complete overhaul relying on models in states such as Alabama or California. 

Problems cited included lack of any history instruction in kindergarten through fourth grades and no mention of specific people worthy of study. The existing standards do not build knowledge sequentially from grade to grade, the report said. 

Recommendations included grade by grade standards starting with the lowest grades built around history but also including geography, civics and economics. There should be a focus on chronology and the evolution of democratic ideas. An end-of-course test in social studies should be developed. 

The state English and language arts standards, prepared in 2003, are satisfactory in terms of teaching children to decode the written words, but a grade-by-grade focus on specific content is needed to improve reading comprehension. That includes listing in the standards the pieces of literature to be read and integrated with history, the arts and sciences. 

The number of grade-by-grade math standards need to be reduced to allow more in-depth study, the task force said. The standards, which were last revised in 2004, need to lessen the emphasis on technology and hands-on educational tools and sharpen the focus on fractions. 

The state won some accolades for its efforts to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which requires yearly state testing of math and literacy (and eventually science) in third through eighth grades and in at least one high school grade. The goal of the act is to have every student scoring at their grade level by 2013-14. 

“Arkansas’ implementation ... has for the most part been workmanlike and honest. The state has not sought to undo, fight or subvert the law,” said the section of the report written by Finn. But the state is “doing better at labeling weak schools than at strengthening them — or presenting their students with the viable alternatives (other schools, tutoring programs) that NCLB says they should have,” Finn added. 

The state should revamp its testing programs to ensure that academically troubled schools are identified annually by July and that the state should “get serious” about providing students opportunities to transfer to other schools or attaining tutoring, the report said. The state must ensure that the identified schools and districts are aggressively working to raise student achievement or the state itself should take action. Additionally, the state must insist that teachers either have a degree in the subject they teach or pass a a rigorous subject area test so that they can be categorized as “highly qualified” as is required of teachers by the No Child Left Behind Act. 

In the aftermath of the merger of 57 small Arkansas districts to larger districts in the 2004-05 school year, the task force was generally complimentary but urged that mergers be monitored to avoid sacrificing high-performing schools. Multiple strategies — including technologies and incentive pay to teachers — should be used to provide high-quality instruction in rural schools. 

The task force members urged the state to move forward on the proposed reforms. 

“[T]he reforms we recommend will enable Arkansas to establish a k-12 education system that meets the state’s present and future needs and provides a model for others to emulate,” the study said. 

The Koret Task Force report can be viewed on its Web site, www.korettaskforce.org.