luna, from mr. grier is how much improving teacher accountability, improving teacher evaluation depends not on whether you do it, but on how you do it. and the problem is given this design of the american federal system and the complexity of state education agencies and local education agencies and schools, is no matter how well intended, our efforts around trying to spell out improvement models, trying to stipulate preparation for principals who are going to take overturnaround schools, efforts to specify evaluation models, long experience teaches me that we are going to wind up with much more in the way of regulation and case law and compliance than we are with fulfillment of the intent of the law. so i would encourage us to be as cautious as possible about trying to spell out interventions or remedies for either schools or teachers that said, i think there are some particularly useful elements to the law. i think a of the federal law recognizes that there are public goods the federal government to my m

seaton has ideas, mr. grier has ideas. they all sound good. i'm afraid once we make them universal -- while i would probably vote for mr. grier or mr. luna to be superintendent, i don't want them to be the national superintendent of schools. so it is a big difference. how much is it federal. i think for the most part -- and this is a philosophical point. the farther we get away from the local school, the worse it gets. and the farther we get way from local government to national government, the worse the oversight gets. i don't know that we can judge who a good teacher is. i would have to know more. i would have to sit in her class and i would have to look at that. i would have to maybe judge on how well her studenting are doing. but i don't think i can ever know here whether she is a good teacher or not. in columbia, kentucky is different from memphis is different from houston. so my argument for it is to keep in mind that there is a philosophical question here on local versus federal. and i think we're coming together in understanding that m

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