Talent Management in Education

October 31, 2013

Educators and policymakers across the United States want to place effective teachers into all classrooms and effective principals into all schools.

But only recently have those efforts become strategic. 
UW–Madison education professor Allan Odden and colleagues collaborate with administrators and policymakers across the nation to make talent management more effective.
Odden explains that a “strategic” approach means a district or school manages all its human resource programs based on a set ofeffectiveness metrics that capture instructional practice and student-learning growth.

This approach covers teacher and principal recruitment, selection, placement, development, evaluation, tenure, promotion, dismissal, and compensation. Strategic systems aim to ensure that only effective teachers and principals are recruited, tenured, retained, and well-compensated. This is particularly important in urban and poor rural communities.

Odden says this holistic view of strategic talent management results in part from recent, ambitious federal and state policies and rapidly changing local practices. 
He says strategic initiatives will succeed if they:  

• make the new evaluation systems affordable; 
• ensure that teacher evaluation scores are set at rigorous levels to accurately identify the most effective and most ineffective teachers; 
• establish tough requirements for entering the teaching profession; and 
• embed the system in an effective school-improvement strategy linked to the new Common Core State Standards Initiative.

As recently as a dozen years ago it was rare for a teacher or principal evaluation to seriously address what teachers or principals should know and be able to perform, let alone assess evidence of impact on student learning.

Teacher and principal promotion into positions of leadership or practice depended primarily on years of experience. Pay scales did not necessarily align with effectiveness.

No state law specified the evidence on which tenure should be based. Few, if any, local school districts had rigorous guidelines for awarding or denying tenure. As a result, most teachers received tenure after 2 to 4 years on the job, however effective or ineffective they were.

Without evaluation systems that could gauge the quality or effectiveness of teachers and principals, there was little evidence on which to deny tenure or to dismiss staff. The dismissal process was usually costly and rarely successful.

There was wide acknowledgement of poor teacher quality in many urban school systems. The common view was that schools and districts with high concentrations of students from poor and ethnic minority backgrounds simply could not attract the best and brightest teachers and administrators.

In a few instances school systems began “reconstituting” low-performing schools by changing the people in them. But reconstitution largely ignored the system that had allowed the school to have such ineffective educator talent in the first place. 
Odden points to the success of Teach For America and The New Teacher Project in recruiting top talent into the nation’s school systems, particularly in urban and rural districts. These programs recruit and select bright people with high potential, even though thy lack traditional teacher preparation.

About a dozen years ago Odden and staff at the UW–Madison branch of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) began hosting conferences and seminars to share knowledge about designing new approaches to teacher compensation. Teachers had to buy in to these approaches, and so they were vetted by the two national teacher unions.

Odden and CPRE staff showed how metrics could shape new teacher salary structures that would provide major pay increases when a teacher’s instructional practice met the standards of a higher level of performance.

With colleague Jim Kelley, Odden created the Strategic Management of Human Capital Task Force, which included elected officials and educators from several states. (Kelley is the founding president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.) With support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Ford, Gates, and Joyce Foundations, the Task Force worked to place on the nation’s education agenda a strategic approach to education talent management. 
Today about 40 states and the District of Columbia are designing, piloting, or implementing new teacher and principal evaluation systems. The two national teachers unions are working to move these reforms forward. The National Education Association now encourages districts and states to design new systems that use student test scores in teacher evaluation. The American Federation of Teachers works with many local districts to design talent-management reforms. These include using student achievement data to inform teacher placement, promotion, tenure, and compensation.

This approach seeks to transform traditional back-office “personnel administration” activities into strategic human-capital-management systems, aligned around metrics that assess instructional effectiveness and student-learning growth, the twin goals of today’s education system. The latter is the prime goal; the former is the means to that goal.

Odden emphasizes, however, that the improvement process, not the evaluation system, should drive education actions. Evaluation must determine whether the improvement process works.