"This week The New Teacher Project (TNTP) unveiled its Cincinnati-focused report on human capital reform. The report’s recommendations for Cincinnati Public Schools and the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers (CFT) are similar (predictably so) to client reports for other districts, like Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago. That’s because problems related to teacher quality are ubiquitous in American urban education."
Read the Cincinnati findings as well as the defensive reaction of the CFT, and you’ll swear you could be reading a narrative of any city’s human capital challenges: late hiring timelines prevent districts from snagging the best teacher candidates; evaluating teachers once every five years is meaningless; single step salary structures aren’t the best way to recruit and reward excellence. It’s chocked full of a lot of common sense. But common sense doesn’t always translate into political action and policy reform.
Where TNTP’s client cities part ways is in their willingness to truly make “teacher effectiveness” the helm of the human capital ship, and to measure this with student performance data. (There are other ways that districts/states can improve teacher quality but whether they place “effectiveness” at the core of their human capital philosophy says volumes.)