With a grant to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Joyce Foundation is supporting meetings among policy makers, educators, and researchers to determine what research is needed to make sure new teacher quality policies result in genuine improvements to the education system.

“Because laws and policies tend to be sticky and hard to change, reforms done thoughtlessly can too easily become tomorrow’s obstacles,” said Rick Hess, AEI director of Education Policy Studies. “What we need most is that policy makers, practitioners, and reformers take care to pursue changes that neither foment backlash nor stifle efforts to get smarter about how we deploy, gauge, and support teachers in the years to come.”

AEI will convene experts to consider more subtle ways to understand the teaching job itself and gauge talent. The project will seek to help policy makers avoid quick fixes that can lead to ineffective solutions, help researchers think through current teacher quality challenges, and develop smart policies that are adaptable to contemporary teaching techniques. AEI will produce two papers as a result of these meetings. The first will focus on the latest policy trends in reforming evaluation, tenure, dismissal, and layoff policies, and the second report will be a future-oriented paper on policy implementation lessons learned.

“Where we are today represents a major sea change in the way we talk about teacher quality, tenure, and evaluation from where we were a decade ago,” added Hess. “Right now, states seeking to remake tenure and evaluation with attention to performance are leaning heavily on student growth measures that are a step in the right direction, but that are also crude and limited. In particular, even as they push forward, policy writers must be sensitive to emerging approaches to staffing and teaching like hybrid models to New York City’s School of One that don’t fit cleanly into the one teacher, one class evaluation model.”

More information on Joyce’s Education Program.