COVERITLIVE.COM

12:15

Fred Barbash - We're getting ready to start the chat...please stay tuned.

12:29

Fred Barbash-Moderator - Welcome readers.

As students across the country head back to school, it’s time to focus on persistent challenges facing education in the United States: teacher quality and standards, the efficacy of charter schools, school underfunding and evaluating how the United States measures up to international standards. These will be key topics when Congress returns from recess and as the Obama administration lays out its priorities for education policy in the coming year. Our guest today is Russ Whitehurst, who directs the Brown Center for Education at Brookings. Russ is the former director of the Institute of Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education, is an expert on reading, teacher quality, student assessment, learning and instruction, education technology, and preschool programs.

Welcome Russ.

Let me start with a question about the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. I think we get more comments on that in POLITICO’s Arena than on any other education-related topic. Can you update us on the status of that program?

12:29

Russ Whitehurst -

Congress has agreed to continue the program for students who are currently recipients of DC opportunity scholarships. Currently there is no authorization to extend the program to new enrollees. This is still a political issue in Congress and there are ongoing bipartisan efforts to save the program.

12:29

[Comment From Michael Podgursky]
The salary of the vast majority of teachers in America is determined by the number of years they've been teaching continuously in the same district or state, and their accumulation of graduate level course credits. Is this the compensation system we need to get the teachers students need?

12:30

Russ Whitehurst -

No, we need market based reforms in the compensation of teachers that allow schools to offer teachers in hard to fill positions such as math or special ed the salary that is necessary to fill the position. Ditto for differential pay for highly effective teachers.

12:30

[Comment From Dan Goldhaber]
Do you think that changes in career patterns, the fact that individuals today are much more likely to have multiple switches of jobs or occupations than in the past and are also likely to be more mobile, suggest a need to move away from teacher credentialing and pay systems that are so state based?

12:31

Russ Whitehurst - Yes. We need an easy way for accomplished teachers to have a nationally portable teacher certificate, and we need defined contribution, portable pension systems. It should be no more difficult for a k-12 teacher to move from a job in California to a job in New York than it is for a college professor.

12:31

[Comment From Bentley MacLeod]
he administration seems to favor expanding competition in public education through introducing more charter schools and giving parents more choice in the school their child will attend. Are parents currently receiving enough information about school performance to empower them to choose the best school for their child?

12:32

Russ Whitehurst -

No. School report cards under NCLB do not include sufficient information and they are not designed to be easily consumable. We need a number of measures that are linked to student outcomes, as well as student value-added achievement scores. We need guidance to users on which measures to attend to and why they are important. And we need to design-in ways to prevent these measures from being gamed.

12:33

[Comment From Elena]
What do you think about the work Michelle Rhee is doing in the DC school system? She's been making big changes, not all well-received.

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