years in nonprofit juvenile prevention programs, he decided to work with children in memphis and he works in the eighth grade with exceptional children. special education children and i understand that he's involved as every tennessee teacher and principal is right now in the new teacher/principal evaluation process. so we might hear something about that from him. welcome. >> all right. thank you very much, senator alexander. next is -- i would invite senator hagen for the next -- >> thank you. thank you, mr. chairman. i am proud to have an opportunity to introduce a -- an old friend of mine, a proud north carolinian and an east carolina pirate and one of this country's foremost education leaders and innovators dr. dpreer. while dr. grier has served as the superintendent across six

states he has experienced the public education situation from all levels. a graduate of vanderbilt and as a teacher, a coach and a high school principal. i first met him in 2000 when he was the superintendent of my hometown of the gilford county in north carolina. i happen to represent that county in the state senate at the time. during that eight years, dr. grier led the district as it cut the dropout rate in half to less than 3%, increased the high school graduation rate from 63% to nearly 80%. received one of the -- and the center for creative leadership to help train the leaders and as we know today, early college institutes across the country wildly seen as one of the most effective ways to steer our low income students on a path to success.

then dr. grier continued his track record in san diego where he helped reduce the dropout rate by 50% and increase scores on the california standards test to all-time district highs. in 2009, dr. grier became superintendent of the houston school district t seventh largest in the nation. and then houston, his initiatives continued to produce results. for schools and students and last month it was announced that the houston independent school district landed 87 schools on the 2011 list of the state's high performing school, by far the leader in the state. so i am pleased and honored to welcome my old friend, dr. grier to this committee. thank you. >> thank you very much, senator hagen. next is amanda -- sorry, senator

mikulski could not be here today, but wanted to express her definite appreciate eight for what you do and for being here today. she teaches special education and teaches at a school for those with medical disabilities. in addition to her school responsibilities, she serves as a resident adviser for new special education teachers. and works with families of children with autism to support them in their homes and communities. next to amanda, mr. wade henderson. mr. henderson is the president and ceo of the leadership conference. formerly known as the leadership conference on civil and human rights and he heads up the education fund. and prior to these roles, mr. anderson was the washington bureau director of the naacp. finally, i'd like to invite

senator paul to introduce the last witness. >> i would like to welcome today elmer thomas, principal of madison central high school in richmond, kentucky. he's the vice president of the kentucky association of secondary school principals. he this year was the kentucky principal of the year. and he has spent time working in his school on focus and finish program which identifies struggling seniors and has career certification and work study programs. we're very happy to have principal elmer thomas with us here today. >> thank you very much. thank you all for being here for this very important discussion. mr. hess and mr. sherm i'm told may have to leave early, around 11:30. we appreciate you being here and that goes for all the panelists. thank you all for being here. before we start, let me explain the format of the roundtable. i'll start by asking a question by one of the panelists. if one of the panelists wants to

respond to the question as well or to something the panelist has said, take your name tent and put it on the head like that that way i know to call on you. or if a committee member wants to ask a question or a follow-up or an intervention, i ask them to do the same. so we usually have a folks who want to talk. this won't be like a formal hearing. although it is being recorded. so i'll ask different committee members to join in asking questions as well. we'll try to keep the question flowing while being respective of one another and hope it will be a good in depth conversation regarding the bill. i also ask everyone to refrain from giving speeches. well, if they're a couple of minutes long, that's okay, but long speeches. so given that, we may lose you

early. i'll start with mr. shnur. can you tell us what you believe are the strengths of the bill that the committee has passed or how you think it could be improved? >> thank you, so much, chairman. and members of the committee, it's an honor to be with you. you're tackling one of the most pressing problems for the country and both as a national priority and a state and local responsibility is a delicate one. i understand there are issues at play in this bill on that. what i'm going to try to briefly answer your question, i have been in, you know, dozens and dozens of schools around the country looking at where we have leaders working to improve urban and rural schools. i think we have seen some lessons emerge from that. i'll take the implications of a couple of the biggest positive aspects of the bill and a couple of areas that i think can be improved.

so when we have looked at the schools we have analyzed the schools that are making dramatic progress, including serving those with low incomes or with special needs. we have actual examples. we're getting dramatic progress. and we have got some of the own leaders who actually are in schools that have gotten incremental progress. a few trends we have seen. one, in all the schools where there's big progress, there is genuinely high expectations for the kids. specific expectations that get kids in terms -- gets kids on track to be ready for success and in college and in careers. secondly, we didn't realize this ten years ago when we started the principal training program, there's constant improvement of teaching and feedback to improve the quality of teaching in the school. because teachers aren't just born. you have great teachers, but teachers who are working at it. and they can make dramatic improvement when there's the

right feedback and pockets of schools are doing that. most are not. third, cultures of intense cultures, high expectations and personal responsibility. and efficient use of time for all kids. you can't legislation that from the federal level. you have to drive it through the effective leadership and drive the high expectation and track dis. fourth, adequate funding. including funding for the teaching profession which is so important, but also discretionary funding. the little bits turn out to make an enormous difference to help principals or superintendents make improvements in those. so your discretionary programs have outsized importance. and fifth and finally, leadership. and leadership at the local level that's invested in drawing outcomes which is inhibited when that's kind of a mind set of checking the box. i think it's a big issue that you're rightly addressing. specifically i think what can be

improved about the bill, one is matching i think what the schools need. the insistence and the requirements of standards is so important. not that that's federally proscribed but having something, most of the schools do not have the pexpectations. the second, the competitive grant programs foi cus -- focused on talent. the great principals that try to train them and support in exchange for performance accountability for the institutions. third is the low achieving schools which is a disgrace that they're achieving in such low levels in the country. and finally i do think that it's important that you have to fix some of the prescription and detail and regulatory mind set in order to remove the culture of compliance. and i think those are really good. two issues. i'll close on. i have two significant concerns about the bill that i would pay at love attention to. if i were in your shoes. and in the senate, i'm working on improving the bill. first of all, there's teacher

and principal evaluation and effectiveness systems. i realize there are those who say that should be mandated. i would recommend improving on the current bill by putting in place a very substantial incentive, not a requirement, perhaps taking as much as 50% of the title ii program which has not been effective to support competitive grants to help states and districts design and use the systems and someone is building on senator alexander's bill, it could be larger. i think over the course of ten years, every state could get funds. it turns out 42% of title ii right now is used for professional development. i think you can get more funds through this approach than the current program. i think the last thing i'd say, right now title ii isn't working very well. i think if you put in place on a competitive and voluntary basis

you can get more bang from your buck. the thing i would say, there needs to be much more press on the performance targets and i think there's various ways to drive that transparency and accountability. thank you. >> thank you very much. it's interesting you said the successful schools, five things, high expectations, constant improvement of teaching, culture of personal responsibility, adequate funding and leadership. what i understand that under culture of personal responsibility comes the subset of families. in other words. we focus on schools but we know what influences the kid's ability to learn, desire to learn is what happens outside the school. what role does the family play in that list of yours and the successful schools? >> as you know, it's huge. as a dad of a 6-year-old and a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, i want my -- i walk my kids to school every day.

but what we have seen that have driven big results do find ways to really engage parents in taking responsibility to drive improvement for kids. you know, most want the best for their kids but a lot don't have the support they need. and there are strategies that can include the parents in this culture of personal responsibilities you're noting. i think especially they're driven by the teachers that they enlist. >> senator alexander? >> thanks, mr. chairman. i'd like to thank all of you for coming and thank senator harkin and enzi and paul for making this hearing happen. i think it's useful. let me take what mr. shnur said and go to mr. seton who's from memphis. mr. shnur suggested it would be improved if we had a larger insensitive for teacher -- incentive for teacher evaluation. mr. seton, tennessee is going through a teacher/principal evaluation process. i think every -- almost every

teacher is involved in it. and that's the result of a program race to top which had an incentive to -- states who wanted to, to do teacher and principal evaluation. what -- what's going on? what's your experience there in your school in memphis, how are teachers and principals responding to it? and what role do you think the federal government ought to have in requiring it, defining it and regulating it? >> good morning. thank you to the chairman and all of you for having me here. we in tennessee are actually i believe setting the standard nationally and hopefully people will start paying attention to what we're doing with regards to the evaluation. we know that if you want something, you have to inspect it or you have to evaluate it. and so we took the lead with

accepting the race to the top money and decided that we were going to look at putting a good teacher, an effective teacher in front of every young person that we have in the state of tennessee. memphis went a step further and we started looking at a number of evaluation models, nationally that were being used. and memphis city schools developed or redeveloped or retool a model and we're using it now. every teacher, every principal, whether they're teaching a student so that means administrative personnel also are being evaluated and they're looking at a number of issues. they put a rubric together that looks at the actual art of teaching, and measures those skills that we believe are effective skills to teach and it also looks at culture or the teaching domain, where you're

at. and i think that we have -- we have seen that it's caused us as teachers, myself included, to re-evaluation exactly how i'm doing and try to put those high-yield strategies in front of myself. >> you're a special education teacher, is that right? >> that is correct. i teach special education. and it's caused us in no child -- and no child left behind has done a good job of focusing at tension on the needs of the special need children, but i think we see in tennessee that we have created now a culture that is data driven, as well as personnel driven. so we're able to look forward. >> thank you. before i call on the next senator, i think senator bennett, let's go to mr. grier

who wanted an intervention on this point. >> sure. >> hit that button. >> thank you so much. good to see you. in houston, we believe that teacher and principal evaluation is just too important to leave to chance. it has to be fixed in this country. as a school superintendent, i have been leading district after district. you get there and you see that student performance is not very high, but evaluation ratings on almost everyone is off the scale. it's just -- it just has to be fixed. we have to have a teacher and principal evaluation system that give our employees a real honest picture of what they're doing. last year in houston, we implemented two new evaluation systems. our teacher evaluation system will contain a wait of about 50%, a little less of student academic performance, as well as with our principal evaluation as we finish it up this year.

this past year, as a result of our efforts, we retained 92% of our highest performing teachers in houston and frankly we replaced 55% of our lowest performing teachers in the district. >> sure. one thing that -- senator alexander has gotten into my head about is how tough it is to do evaluations. and that we don't really have the metrics if that's the proper word that i could use. of what is a good teacher evaluation system or are there a lot of different things out there? you said that 50% in houston was based on performance. is there a template for the rest of the country? i think i have been reading articles about tennessee and it's -- and they're trying to adopt some kind of evaluation. but it's -- it's very difficult.

>> it's difficult work, but as we proved in houston it's not impossible work. when you can retain 92% of your best teachers and you can replace 55% of your lowest performing teachers in a year, that's proof that it's not impossible. we had over 2,500 teachers involved with us in the teacher evaluation system. this is something we did with our teachers, not to our teachers. >> they were involved in developing the system. >> they must be. it's critical that they must be. >> if you had that on paper, maybe my staff has it, i don't know. i'd like to see what you used for the other metrics. what's the other 50%? >> a lot is about how the teachers teach classroom management. >> classroom observations? >> observations. >> are students involved? >> students are not involved in our particular component. >> do you think that's important? because i have often thought that one of the best people to evaluate a teacher is students.

>> it's fascinating, we know several things about evaluation. students know who the good teachers are, as do the parents. particularly parents who understand how the system works and are educated. where we struggle sometimes is in training principals to have the skill sets. we required all of our principals in houston to go through 35 to 40 hours of teaching evaluation documentation of appraisal training. very important. >> mr. luna had his up next. i'll try to -- are you keeping track of who -- mr. luna? >> thank you, mr. chairman. and in response to senator alexander's question about evaluations and incentives, and at some point i would hope to have a discussion also about idaho's discussion about idaho' state chief's views about the law, the good parts and the other parts. when it comes to evaluations and

incentives, we know the most important factor, once a child enters the school, by far the most important factor is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. it's far more than the amount of money spent, the curriculum. the most important factor is the teacher in the classroom. so in my state, we went through the process of developing a teacher performance evaluation that is built upon the charlotte danielson framework. and i think many would tell you that charlotte danielson is definitely an expert in the observations and evaluations of how teachers perform in the classroom. and then 50% of the evaluation now in idaho has to be based on student achievement, primarily focusing on growth, parental input has to be part of the teacher's performance evaluation. and we have also implemented a statewide pay for performance plan, or merit pay as some people would refer to it, where teachers in idaho can earn up to $8,000 a year in bonuses based

on taking on leadership roles, or if they teach in a hard to fill possession. but also if they teach in a school that shows high academic growth. so we've -- and the point i would like to make, and it's to answer your question, senator alexander, you asked about evaluations and incentives. should the federal government require it. should it define it, should it regulate it. we did all of this without any incentive or mandate from the federal government. and if you want to find a balance, i don't see necessarily a problem with the federal government requiring it, but i think it goes too far if the federal government tries to define it or regulate it. i think idaho and other states could demonstrate that we're ahead of the curve when it comes to robust evaluations and incentives so that we don't leave it to chance as to whether every child has a highly effective teacher every year they're in school. >> thank you. senator bennet, ms. danks.

>> thank you, mr. chairman. i would like to thank everybody for being here today, especially mr. seaton and ms. banks. i deeply appreciate it. senator alexander, i spent some time on the phone with your very excellent commissioner of education in tennessee, hearing from him about the evaluation system there. and he sends his regards to you. >> what did he say? >> i'll tell you later. he said they have the best system in the world. and since i support both of senator schnurr's amendments to the bill, i wonder if you could talk frontal boundary your perspective because no one around this table i don't think has spent more time in as many schools as you probably have. from your perspective, what is the importance of the performance targets? and what should that look like in this bill ideally if we're able to find a path that would allow us to include it? >> well, you people in this room

have a lot more expertise on the legislative issues. from a school perspective, from a principal, teacher, kids sitting in schools, i think it is of vital importance. i don't think they don't necessarily care where this comes from, but kids across the country need a press that is supported from outside the school for higher performance. there are too many things conspireing to bring lower expectations. i'm not saying the federal government should at all micromanage this. but from a school perspective, all these things conspire to have in many ways lower expectations. and the best principals need and benefit from the public in some way saying you can do better in specific ways. you've got to hit bigger goals. we're going to have transparency against progress against bigger goals. and the best leaders, they want to do it. but there are a lot of people who will be naysayers. so having that support is significant. my view, i'm sure in this room

umpl universally, but having performance targets is important. i think there should be a lot of flexibility for states as to how that is defined, but i think it's a great blend of empowering states on the how or acquiring the targets to do it would be really helpful. and the transparency against that is as important as anything else. one thing i would briefly mention, and some of the senators know we're launching a new organization america achieves. and convene a panel of people, including former secretary riley and pete guerin and people like eduardo ped drone who runs miami-dade college and others, great teachers and front line principals to put recommendations together for what goals and targets should be. early learning, i think that can help inform the debate. somewhere the government level there needs to be a drive to ensure there are targets in transparency against those. >> thank you very much. ms. danks, ms. castlehart, mr.

paul, and senator isackson. we can probably sit here for the next two hours and discuss performance targets and evaluations there are other aspects of the bill we would like to get to. so we can perhaps, and maybe you're going bring up some other things, i don't know. but perhaps we could have each of them quickly mention what they think is good on the bill and what they think needs improvement on the bill. and then go back to this kind of a format so that nobody gets left out on making their comments. >> all right. let's go to ms. danks then first here. ms. danks. >> good morning. >> do you want to address the performance? >> i just want to respond to your question about how the rubric was created. in baltimore city, we recently passed a contract where the teachers are paid for performance. and we also went through that process creating a rubric. and it took about a year. and we had all our administrators, teacher, some family members working together through many drafts to create a rubric that truly defined what

truly effective teaching looked like in the classroom. i think having the autonomy of -- senator alexander's question of whether or not the federal government should have a hand in that. i think the autonomy our district had in creating that rubric for our specific needs was fantastic. i don't think that our rubric would translate to a lot of school systems, just because we are an urban area with a different set of population. and i do teach at a school for students who are severely disabled and medically fragile. and within our own school, we are actually looking at creating our own rubric just because the rubric that the district created was fantastic because it was so specific. it had footnotes and explained every detail, but for a lot of our students those details are not going to apply. and again, having that autonomy to go through that process on our own and define what highly effective looks like for our student population is great way to ensure that we have highly effective teachers in the classrooms. >> very good. >> mr. castlehart?

>> i was wanting to speak to the teacher evaluation incentive. i just wanted to say that there already incentive as far as the national board certification in most states there is incentive pay for that. and that is a marvelous professional development for teachers. and as far as the evaluation, i think the evaluation definitely needs to be on the local state level, because it is so different in, for instance, in memphis and in rural kentucky. and i think that's one of the great things about your bill is that it does put more emphasis on local and state decision making in all areas. but as far as teacher quality, teachers are -- well, i shouldn't use that term, because that's different in this bill. but as far as evaluation,

teachers want to be evaluated because teachers want to improve. and that should be the purpose of evaluation is to improve teaching, rather than to find fault with teachers and things like that. that is the purpose. and if we can have this where our rubric and things like that give us the needs that we have as teachers to help us improve, that's what we're looking for. but we do very much want to avoid incentives and things like that that cause competition between teachers. and that's a real concern for us as far as teacher evaluation and incentive, because in order for schools to be successful and in order for our students to learn, all teachers and all school personnel must work together for the education of the whole child. and we don't want to start -- i think i'm speaking for all teachers in that regard. we don't want to start anything that causes a competition between teachers, because we do

want to be able to collaborate and work together and be the best that we can be. >> thank you very much. i'd like to start with mr. hess and go down, as soon as we finish with mr. paul and mr. set on the and mr. isackson. >> if you want to. >> okay. i think made a good suggestion. let's start with mr. hess, inner schnur, you already had your shot. we'll skip you. so mr. hess, we'll just go down. what are the two or three things you like about the bill, what are the two or three things you don't like the bill, if that's a fair enough question. >> sure. i appreciate the opportunity to be here, mr. chairman, senator enzi, members. for me, unlike mr. schnur, i don't spend as much time on the ground. i spend much more