Milken Family Foundation National Education Conference: How Stakeholders Can Support Teacher Quality

The morning session started with a breakfast that was not only healthy, but tasty as well.  We found our seats, and I ended up at a table with new Milken Educators—math teachers all—from Oklahoma, Indiana and the District of Columbia.  In addition, we were joined by the inimitable Rosey Grier, former all-pro football player, ordained minister, and a member of the Milken Family Foundation board of trustees.

As the audience finished breakfast, Richard Sandler, executive vice president of the Milken Family Foundation, began the orientation session for the new Milken Educators, outlining the many programs the Milken family has created in making the world a better place. The Foundation, he explained, is involved in epilepsy research, in prostate cancer research, in community improvement, and in the preservation of American Jewish music, to name a few general areas.  He showed a moving video clip of the work in the realm of Jewish music, which has grown to include music that would fill 90 DVDs, but which is currently being released as a 50-CD series.

Dr. Jane Foley, senior vice president of the Milken Educator Awards, talked to us about what it means to be a Milken Educator.  She started with excerpts from Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," and commented that we as educators have chosen such a road.  We interviewed each other at our tables and discussed our favorite teacher.  Rosey Grier immediately identified Mrs. Tring, who had encouraged him to be a speaker after he moved to New Jersey from Georgia in 1941.

Greg Gallagher, program administrator for the Milken Festival for Youth program, gave us a heartwarming overview of the impact the program is making across the country.   In his film clip, participants described Festival for Youth projects as life-changing.  Rosey Grier, who is also involved in the program, described encountering these little faces that looked so bright for the future.  "I am special!" he told them to say, "I am one of a kind!"

Bonnie Somers, vice president of communications, told us what we could do to get the good news about education out to the public.  "Media," she reminded us, "multiplies the message!"  She suggested that we concentrate on a single important message during our encounters with the media, rather than trying to cover too much.

The Teacher Advancement Program

Tamara Schiff, vice president of administration for the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET, formerly the Teacher Advancement Program Foundation), began by outlining the discouraging progress of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  After working hard to advance NCLB and trying various strategies, the Foundation discovered that the most effective approaches to improving education centers on the teacher.

"Certified does not necessarily mean qualified," she said, and one does not guarantee the other.  For example, Lew Solmon, the president of NIET, has a Ph.D in economics from the University of Chicago, but would have to be recertified to teach in high school.  The three most important considerations, she found, in effective teaching include subject matter knowledge, verbal ability, and teaching experience.  Effective teachers make almost as much difference on achievement as the home environment.

Another thing they found was that blanket raises reward the least effective teachers as well as the most effective.  Just pouring money indiscriminately into the salary schedule does not act as an incentive for effective teachers or to highly qualified candidates.

And so TAP was created to address this and many other teacher quality issues.  The goal of TAP:  to increase student achievement by focusing on teacher quality and reforming the system as a whole. Many recruitment and/or incentive/retention programs have been tried, but often they arenot systemic:  curing one problem created others.

With those considerations in mind, TAP proposes building into the system the following key elements:

Multiple career paths: a career continuum for teachers. The individual can take on even higher responsibilities and still teach in the classroom.

Ongoing applied professional growth:   The program makes use of cluster groups to implement mentored follow-up for the teachers in the program.  They usea value-added model based on research and school-based, local data.  They recommend that these professional growth efforts take place during the regular school day for at least 90 minutes per week.

Performance-based compensation, based on responsibilities, workload, skills, and knowledge.   This creates instructionally focused accountability, for mentor and master teachers as well.  There are clearly defined rubrics for evaluation, and these are designed to help teachers get even better, not to take them to task.

There has been widespread buy-in from a lot of different stakeholders:  political figures, the private sector, local districts, and teacher unions.  On the federal level, the Teacher Incentive Fund was recently passed, providing funding for schools to implement teacher quality reforms such as TAP.

TAP needs support from school principals, and those who participate are rewarded for participation.

There are also provisions for oversight in a TAP school to help ensure a fair evaluation.  Multiple evaluators are involved at multiple levels (colleagues and mentors, as well as administrators).  Visitations occur both announced and unannounced.  Evaluators go through training, and each evaluator's scores are regularly reviewed.  In addition, there are schoolwide bonuses for schoolwide improvement to promote professional cooperation, but TAP also holds individuals responsible.  Finally, the TAP focus on the value-added approach to evaluation means that all teachers at all levels have the potential toachieve growth.

Most classroom costs of the program are personnel-related—more days, salary augmentation, use of specialists, replacement of teachers going into mentoring positions. This is not necessarily new money, however.  Existing programs have funded themselves by rerouting some monies and by discontinuing ineffective programs.  The approach sidesteps the temptation to stack reform upon reform upon reform. 

Current TAP program results are encouraging.  Retention is up, student performance is up.  Conferences are growing to learn about best practices, funding, and existing structures. Existing programs report lower levels of student referrals, higher attendance, and those kinds of things which tend to support the appraisals of success.

With our minds filled, we shuffled in to lunch to performthe same service for our stomachs.  

For more information on the Conference—including the agenda, bios of Conference presenters, photos and videos—please visit the Milken Family Foundation Web site at www.mff.org.

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