Transcript SMHC Project Overview Jim Kelly and Allan Odden Co-Directors July 21, 2008 SMHC Project • Goal: Dramatically improve student performance, focusing initially on urban districts: – Meaning.

SMHC Project Overview
Jim Kelly and Allan Odden
Co-Directors
July 21, 2008
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SMHC Project
• Goal: Dramatically improve student
performance, focusing initially on urban
districts:
– Meaning to double student performance and
reduce achievement gap as measured by state
or local tests
– For example, increase percent at or above
proficient from 40 to 80 percent, or increase
percent at advanced levels from 30 to 60
percent, or get all averages and sub-group
scores above the 90 percent level
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SMHC Project
• An action project of the Consortium for
Policy Research in Education (CPRE)
based at the University of WisconsinMadison
• Funded with an anchor grant from the
Carnegie Corporation of New York with
generous additional funding from the Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation
• Current funding for two years; project might
last up to 5 years
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SMHC Project
• Our focus for accomplishing the goal:
Strategic Management of Human Capital
(SMHC)
• SMHC includes Two Basic Strategies:
– Recruiting and retaining top teacher, principal
and central office talent, which are key to
tackling the complex educational challenges of
big, urban districts
– Managing that talent around the knowledge,
skills and expertise to make every teacher
effective – produce large student learning gains
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SMHC Project
• SMHC is arguing that:
– Large urban districts can acquire top teacher
and principal talent
– Talent management systems – recruitment,
induction, mentoring, professional
development, evaluation, pay, and career
progression – should be aligned and
anchored in the instructional expertise needed
to produce large student learning gains
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SMHC Project
• Producing these significant and fundamental
SMHC changes is complex and requires
change in deep seated HR practices in big
cities
– It may require significant turnover in teacher,
principal and central office staff
– It will require restructuring of most HR operations
– It will require broad political support from mayors,
governors, legislators as well as school boards
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SMHC Project
Five key strategies:
1. Define SMHC
2. Document leading SMHC practices
3. Explain key actions and leadership tasks
4. Mobilize SMHC reformers
5. Promote SMHC reforms in large districts
and at the state level
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Six Key SMHC Activities
1. National Task Force –2-3 meetings a year
– Next meeting is Nov. 17-18, 2008, noon to noon
2. National Conference – November 18-19
– Will invite teams from the 100 largest districts in
the country
– Will focus on our case studies – Boston,
Chicago, Fairfax County, Long Beach,
Minneapolis, New York City, TFA, TNTP, New
Leaders, and Minnesota Q Comp
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SMHC Project
3. Develop an SMHC Reform Network
– Task Force members
– Superintendents, HR leaders, curriculum and
professional development directors, teacher
leaders from the largest urban districts
• Broad HR network
– Local, state and federal policy makers and
analysts
– Thought leaders
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SMHC Project
4. Conduct case studies of leading edge
SMHC reforms
5. Develop a Web 2.0 site that can become
a digital meeting and discussion place for
the SMHC reform community:
www.smhc-cpre.org
6. Communicate as widely as possible
SMHC reforms, impacts and possibilities
(Latter two assisted by Widmeyer Communications)
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Related Materials
• Odden and Kelly paper on What is SMHC?
• Lawler paper on Strategic Talent Management.
• CPRE Policy Briefs on past 15 years of work on school
finance, standards-based teacher evaluations and
performance pay for teachers
• New series of six papers on teacher compensation
– An overview, teacher salary levels, new salary structures,
performance pay, costs and funding, and one on a possible
federal funding role
• Heneman and Milanowski monograph HR Alignment
• Odden and Archibald book on Doubling Student
Performance and Finding the Resources to Do It
• Odden and Wallace Compensation handbook and
Compensation book (www.freeloadpress.com)
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Task Force Member Expectations
1. Create and implement SMHC actions in
your district, state or organization
2. Be a visible local, state and national
leader for SMHC reform
3. Be an active member of the SMHC reform
network
4. Personally and with your staff become
engaged in the SMHC web site
5. Work to put SMHC on the agendas of key
local, state and national organizations
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What is SMHC?
Allan Odden and Jim Kelly
July 21, 2008
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What is SMHC?
Core ideas:
• A project to boost urban district student
achievement – the toughest educational challenge
in US
• Tough educational challenges – like those in urban
districts – deserve/require top talent
• Need a powerful education improvement strategy
• Need top talent to implement the strategy, and
• Need to manage that talent around the instructional
expertise needed to boost student learning
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What is SMHC?
• To be strategic, human capital management
strategies must:
– Devolve from the system’s educational
improvement strategies
– Be structured around the expertise – largely
instructional expertise – needed to implement
the improvement plan
• Not sufficient to find talent and set it loose
• Must equip teacher and principal talent with the
instructional expertise needed to produce large
improvements in student performance
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What is SMHC?
• Problems of dysfunctional HR systems:
– Lack of a cohesive HR system – paper records,
late/inaccurate salary checks, hiring in late August,
each HR unit disconnected from the other, etc.
– Difficulty in staffing high need schools
– High teacher turnover
– Shortages of math, science teachers
– Difficulty in attracting the best and brightest
– Large expenditures on PD with no impact
– Pay system unaligned with strategic goals
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What is SMHC?
• Glimmers of new action:
– Boston, Chicago, Fairfax, NYC, TFA, TNTP, New
Leaders
– Long Beach, Atlanta and others on aligned HR
programs around instructional expertise
– Minnesota Q Comp and multiple district efforts to
redesign how teachers are paid
– PD fiscal and program audits  restructuring in
Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, etc.
– Other individual HR initiatives
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What is SMHC?
• What is needed?
– A nationwide effort to put the talent and
human capital issues at the top of the national
education reform agenda
– To address the people side of education
reform in a holistic and strategic way
– Thus, SMHC – hoping to shape the crest of
the wave of human capital issues that is
breaking over the country’s education system
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What is SMHC?
• Accept urgent need to improve student
performance and reduce the achievement gap
• Create a powerful strategy to address those
achievement challenges
• Identify key roles for implementing that
strategy
– teachers of core subjects, instructional coaches, principals,
HR leaders, performance oriented superintendents
• Identify the competencies needed for each of
those key roles
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What is SMHC?
• Develop and execute strategies for talent
acquisition, talent development and talent
retention
– Recruitment, selection/placement, induction,
mentoring, professional development,
performance management including
evaluation, compensation and career
progression
• All of the above the focus of SMHC
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What is SMHC?
• SMHC starts with two issues:
– Need to create a strategy to recruit, develop
and retain top talent
– Understanding of the core competencies –
instructional knowledge and skills – that are
needed to be deployed in all classrooms as
the route to producing large gains in student
performance
• This set of core competencies is not exhaustive
but it is the core around which the HC system will
be aligned and developed
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What is SMHC?
• SMHC in practice – talent recruitment
– Moving away from old pipelines and
developing new pipelines
– Districts such as Boston, Chicago, Fairfax,
New York City
– New talent pipeline organizations such as
TFA, TNTP, New Leaders, etc.
– Grow your own programs – Boston teacher
residency, many other districts
– “Solving” the talent problem
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What is SMHC?
• SMHC in practice – talent recruitment
– Sometimes talent enhancement begins with
significant school and district reconstitution
– NYC Community District #2 removed 2/3rds of
principals and 50% of teachers
– Washington, DC is replacing significant central office
and school staff
– Many doubling performance schools and district have
talent overhaul as part of the story
• This part of the Chattanooga reforms tends not to be told –
see Chenoweth (2007)
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What is SMHC?
• SMHC in practice – talent recruitment
– Many of the new talent recruitment strategies
seek individuals after they have earned a BA
• Thus, most need Post BA certification programs –
could be MA cert programs or alternative cert
programs
• Can raise legitimate issues about training, etc.
• What is the role of schools of education and state
funding in these new efforts
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What is SMHC?
• SMHC in practice – talent development
such as induction, mentoring, professional
development, evaluation and performance
management, tenure
– Need to be aligned around instruction and curriculum
– All can be anchored in a set of teaching standards and
performance rubrics
• Danielson Framework, TFA Teaching as Leadership,
Connecticut BEST, TAP, TEC, National Board, etc.
– These measure multiple levels of teacher performance
around which to align and manage induction, PD,
evaluation, compensation, career progression, and
even tenure
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What is SMHC?
• SMHC in practice – retention
– Roles of induction and mentoring to retain the
most effective in the early years
– Ongoing professional development to
continuously expand expertise
– Compensation to initially attract, provide
sufficient long term pay, and reward for
individual performance and impacts on
student performance
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What is SMHC?
• SMHC and school leaders, mainly
principals
– Balance of focus on:
• Principal as instructional leader versus
• Principal as human capital manager at the school:
recruiting, screening, selecting, developing and
performance managing teacher talent
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What is SMHC?
• SMHC and contextual issues:
– Relationship with teacher union
– Labor/management structure
– Requirements of contract – seniority bumping,
evaluation, etc.
– Governance – school board, mayoral control
– State requirements – licensure, tenure,
dismissal, etc.
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What is SMHC?
• An action project to boost student performance,
focusing on urban districts
– Stimulate recruitment of top teacher, principal and
teacher talent in the country’s top 100 districts drawing
strategically on the pipelines that deliver this talent
– Encourage those districts to align/manage the principal
and teacher talent around a core set of effective
instructional strategies that anchor recruitment,
selection, placement, professional development,
evaluation, compensation and career progression
– Identify the key district and state policies and practices
that can support these actions
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SMHC in 2009
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SMHC in 2009
• SMHC Reform Network gathering the
week of March 23
• SMHC Task Force meetings about the
same time in July and November
• SMHC Annual Conference to follow the
November 2009 Task Force meeting
• Odden and Kelly to present at numerous
organizational meetings
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