WASHINGTON — In the ongoing struggle to boost student achievement, educational leaders should place a bigger emphasis on recruitment of talented teachers into the nation’s most challenged schools — and a “bar exam” for teachers would be a big help.
So argued a scholar on educational leadership Thursday at the Center for American Progress for the release of a paper titled Getting the Best People into the Toughest Jobs.
“Talent matters,” said Allan Odden, the paper’s author and director of Strategic Management of Human Capital, or SMHC, a project of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, of which Odden is co-director.
While the assertion that talent matters may seem like a straightforward proposition, Odden said talent hasn’t always ranked at the top of the nation’s education reform agenda in recent decades.
Odden — who is also professor emeritus of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — also argued for the need to “calibrate policy” and to get more people in America’s education establishment to see recruitment of talented teachers as “important stuff.”
To recruit the best talent and manage the talent strategically, Odden said, metrics are needed to guide the management and to make important decisions about licensure, tenure, promotion, pay, dismissal and other personnel decisions.
Odden argues those and other points further in his new paper, released Thursday through the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy and research organization. The paper adds to the growing amount of calls to tie evaluations of teacher performance to student achievement.
