State task force on teacher recruitment, retention offers insights for school boards
Recommendations include implications for collective bargaining
Published: September 12, 2012
A group of leading California educators convened by state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson is calling for sweeping improvements to the way teachers are recruited, trained, brought into the profession, mentored, and evaluated. Their recommendations are part of a 90-page report: “Greatness by Design: Supporting Outstanding Teaching to Sustain a Golden State.”
“This is the most comprehensive look our state has taken at California’s most important profession—teaching—in a generation,” Torlakson said.
Economic conditions are threatening the teacher pipeline, and the incorporation of the Common Core State Standards will require significant changes to classroom teaching, said CSBA Assistant Executive Director for Policy and Programs Angelo Williams, Ed.D., who served on the task force’s leadership and career development work group.
“For school board leaders, understanding best practices in teacher preparation, recruitment and leadership are key to setting the environment for student success in each district,” Williams said. “This report will provide some key insights for governance teams to absorb.”
The 48-member task force, co-chaired by Stanford University's Linda Darling-Hammond and Superintendent Chris Steinhauser of the Long Beach Unified School District, was asked to address questions that fundamentally impact school board governance: how to recruit the best people into the teaching profession, how to develop their skills before they begin work and throughout their careers, and how to provide useful feedback, including using measurements of learning to improve teaching.
Some of the task force’s recommendations include:
• Encouraging laid-off teachers to add a second credential in a shortage area, such as special education
• Fixing the inequitable distribution of resources to districts through a weighted student funding formula
• Using performance assessments to improve teacher quality
• Restoring strong new-teacher mentoring programs
• Establishing a robust and updated program for teacher professional development
• Creating new leadership roles for teachers
In a section headed “Developing Leadership Throughout the System,” the report acknowledges: “Implementation of many of the Task Force’s recommendations will require policy changes at the state level, but some will also require innovative new agreements between labor and management at the district level. New systems of evaluation for teachers and administrators recommended in this report will need to become part of the collective bargaining process, with care taken to ensure that they are fully understood by all stakeholders in a district, including parents, students and community members. Similarly, new teacher leadership opportunities and additional compensation for high-need teaching and leadership assignments will require support from labor and management leaders.”
To that end, the leadership work group recommends that superintendents, union leaders and school board leaders convene a statewide conference on labor-management collaboration so they can share innovative practices and promote cross-district dialogue.