Teaching and Professional Learning: Managing for Effectiveness

Education is a people business that relies first of all on the talent, skill, and commitment of teachers and school system leaders. For students, no school factor is more important to learning than the quality of their teachers. As the primary asset of the American educational system, our nation’s educators deserve savvy, strategic management. The tasks involved are many: school systems need to recruit and develop qualified candidates for teaching and leadership roles, place them intelligently and equitably in the right positions, cultivate their skills and sustain their commitment over time, and monitor and manage their performance with relevant metrics⁵⁴. For a system dedicated to increasing student achievement in math and science, the incentive to manage well is especially great, since those areas have historically been among the most difficult to staff with highly qualified educators.

Many school districts are seeking to improve their human capital management systems, often experimenting with performance management techniques borrowed from the private sector and getting assistance with specific functions from external organizations. Meanwhile, national groups such as the Business-Higher Education Forum have stepped up research on the “pipeline” of math and science teachers and other human capital questions, using systems dynamics modeling and other techniques⁵⁵. Promising human capital management practices could improve working conditions and help retain highly qualified mathematics and science teachers, yet they have not yet reached enough schools. In the next few years, as the nation seeks sustainable solutions to the current economic crisis, we have an unprecedented chance to look rigorously at the human capital demands of the education sector—the sector on which all other workforce investments depend.

The Commission urges the nation and its school systems to rethink and reorient human capital management with the explicit goal of maximizing math and science learning. The Commission believes that progress, and ultimately success, should be judged in terms of meaningful student learning, teacher effectiveness and improvement, and the ability of schools to innovate and adapt to meet the future needs of society.

Objectives

• Increase the supply of well-prepared teachers of mathematics and science at all grade levels by improving teacher preparation and recruitment

• Improve professional learning for all teachers, with an eye toward revolutionizing math and science teaching

• Upgrade human capital management throughout U.S. schools and school systems toward ensuring an effective teacher for every student, regardless of socio-economic background

Discussion

To achieve dramatic improvements in math and science education for all students, we will need to increase the supply of teachers with strong working knowledge of mathematics and science and the pedagogical techniques necessary to teach math and science effectively. Our secondary schools will continue to need math and science teachers with deep, specialized knowledge of those disciplines, and increasing their numbers must continue to be an important priority. For the future, however, we must also aim to build a teaching profession in which all teachers, in every discipline and from the elementary grades on up, are “STEM-capable,” or sufficiently conversant with math and science content and relevance to infuse their classrooms with rigorous, motivating math and science learning. To prepare American students to participate fully in tomorrow’s economy and society, our K-14 educational system needs a STEM-capable human capital infrastructure.

The question, then, is partly one of numbers. We will need to attract many well-prepared candidates to the teaching profession, expand successful teacher recruitment programs, and provide teachers with more effective support and guidance during their first years in the classroom. We must also do more to retain effective teachers, improve their working conditions, and deploy them skillfully to improve our schools.

But numbers alone will not solve the problem: schools and districts need to manage human capital as part of an educational improvement strategy that takes seriously the practical challenges of educating all students to higher levels of proficiency. We need teachers who are knowledgeable, motivating, inspiring—and able to differentiate instruction to enable every student to achieve higher levels of math and science learning. This will require ensuring that teachers and school leaders know what excellent teaching looks like and have the necessary tools, skills, and opportunities to meet students’ diverse learning needs.