Education legislation has taken a central role in this year’s General Assembly. It is a critical issue.  How we educate children has an enormous impact on the future of our state.

Governor Daniels and legislators have introduced multiple bills that seek to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for Hoosier students. One component of the bold approach to transforming education in Indiana is merit pay.  And while opponents have derided the idea as some mechanism to divide teachers and inhibit collaboration, it turns out merit pay is already being used in teaching and is proving to be effective.

The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) is the largest performance-based pay intervention in the United States. Eleven states, including Indiana, currently use the TAP models in some schools. Sally Hudson of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research authored a study in 2010 examining how performance-based teacher pay affected student achievement. The key findings:

•  “Performance-based pay can have positive effects on teacher productivity in a variety of different cultural and economic settings.”
• “TAP’s effects on student achievement is large relative to other education interventions in the U.S…The estimated effect of TAP on mathematics achievement is more than twice as large” as the effect of class size reductions.
• “TAP is inexpensive relative to class size reductions…TAP offers more than twice the effect of class size reductions at roughly 40 percent of the cost per pupil.”

Other states have taken the lead on issues like merit pay. Governor Rick Scott of Florida, for example, recently signed into law a piece of legislation that aims to reward the best teachers through a merit pay system and places teachers hired after a certain date under annual contracts instead of receiving tenure after just three years.

Indiana seeks to lead the nation in the bold transformation of K-12 education in 2011, and paying teachers based on their performance is a part of that effort.  SB 1 contains the language that will reward and protect our best teachers.  It has already passed the Senate and is being heard in the House.

Contact your legislators and tell them you support rewarding our best teachers based on effectiveness, and not just longevity and how many degrees they have.

Check out this recent editorial from the Indianapolis Star that supports changing the way in which teachers are evaluated and compensated.

Governor Daniels’ transformative education proposal includes basing teacher pay and tenure on performance and not just seniority!  Aiming Higher has launched a new round of TV commercials in support of teachers.  The ads are airing all across the state.

Watch what award-winning teachers Pam Heuer and LaNier Echols have to say about how existing union rules disadvantage them and other successful teachers like them.

States and cities nationwide are experiencing budget cuts that, in some cases, cause schools to have to fire teachers. While nobody wants teachers to lose jobs, when it must occur students would be better served if the most effective teachers are retained and ineffective teachers are the ones who are let go.

Under the status quo in education policy, however, a policy known as “last in, first out” (LIFO) means that in some cases, the most recently hired teachers  are the first to be let go. This is done without regard to their effectiveness and it serves to protect more senior teachers whether they deliver better student outcomes or not.  Indianapolis Public Schools recently announced some teacher layoffs due to the continued declining enrolloment that the district is experiencing.  According to the Indianapolis Star, “Because layoffs are by seniority under union rules, the bulk of the cuts affects those with two years of experience or less, with some impact on teachers with three to five years of experience.”

Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the public school system in Washinton, D.C. who was featured in the documentary Waiting for “Superman”, and Joel Klein, former New York City schools chancellor, penned a recent editorial in the  New York Daily News about this issue. They suggest that seniority alone should not be enough to protect teachers and undue focus on this factor is to the detriment of students. When cuts do become necessary, there is a growing call for the end of “seniority-based layoffs” in favor of “quality-based layoffs.” Read the article here http://nydn.us/fQUDyn

Below is a guest post by Robert Enlow, President and CEO of The Foundation for Educational Choice:

Lots of people have been talking about the philosophy of school choice or the benefits of school choice or why people should support the school choice proposal in front of the Indiana legislature.

What I want to do is focus on a time ten years from now – after Indiana has passed school choice.

Predicting the future, of course, is always a risky business. I remember when Dr. Milton Friedman, our Foundation’s founder, was alive. People would come up to him and earnestly ask him to predict what the market would do in the next year. He would always respond with a simple answer, “I predict that the market will go up and I predict it will go down.”

So, with that note of caution in mind, here is what my 16 years of experience tells me will happen in ten years if the scholarship bill that is currently in front of the legislature passes this year.

1. The sky will not have fallen on public education. There won’t have been massive layoffs nor huge spending cuts in public schools. Dogs and cats aren’t living together and our communities haven’t fallen apart as some predict. Instead, we are more likely to see public and private school teachers working together to meet the needs of individual children and more likely to see greater accountability for poorer quality teachers in both public and private schools.
2. If the same trend holds true in Indiana as it does around the rest of the country, the vast majority of legislators who supported school choice will have retained their seats in the legislature, and the few that have lost will probably have been replaced for reasons other than school choice. Moreover, there will have been an increase in support for school choice among Democrat legislators. In 1999, when Jeb Bush’s reforms passed in Florida, not a single Democrat legislator supported school choice. Today, half the black caucus and all of the Hispanic caucus support school choice. Those who were opposed at the start have now changed course and support the program because they realize it disproportionately helps their community.
3. The opponents who said that school choice was going to drain millions of dollars from cash-starved public schools are eating some crow. In ten years, the scholarship program will have created millions in savings to the state and taxpayers. If the programs in Milwaukee and Florida are any guide, Indiana will have saved around 40 million a year as a result of the program, and it will have become accepted wisdom at the state legislature that every child who takes a scholarship saves money.
4. Existing private schools will be growing again and serving a population of low-and-middle income children. This is particularly true in urban areas where the mix of public, charter and private schools is creating a more vibrant education marketplace.
5. Researchers have found data showing that public schools, particularly urban public schools, are beginning to respond to shifts in enrollment patterns caused by the growth in private and charter schools. Public schools in areas more exposed to scholarship students are making improvements greater than public schools less exposed to scholarship students, and public schools that are graded D or F under the state’s new accountability system are improving twice as fast as public schools rated C or higher. Public schools are shifting their focus entirely to achievement and school board discussions center more on increasing academic achievement instead of increasing the budget to go after truants.
6. Most important, while the program started off slowly in year one and two, there are now between 20-40,000 children using scholarships to attend a private school of their choice. These children are overwhelmingly from low-income families. The graduation rate for these children has increased by 17-21% and the data shows significant improvements in their scores on standardized tests.

These are just a few of the things that I am confident will happen if the bill currently before the Indiana legislature passes this year.

However, if the bill allowed everyone to participate and increased the amount of the scholarships, I predict that two additional and crucial things will happen.

1. Everything I predicted above will have happened at a much faster pace, particularly the focus on outcomes and achievement.
2. Instead of slow but steady growth in the existing private school marketplace, we will see dramatic growth in the number of new school and educational models. Universities will double their efforts to educate K-12 students, thus reducing the need for college remediation.  Existing private schools will be forced to reform their educational models faster in order to remain relevant. Entrepreneurs will introduce new and innovative educational models showing that costs can go down while quality can go up.

In the end, these changes along with the other reforms proposed by Governor Daniels and Dr.  Bennett, will fix the system faster and avoid losing another generation of children.

Last week was a big week week for the Governor’s education agenda. The Indiana House passed the school vouchers bill and education reformer Michelle Rhee attended a rally at the Statehouse. What does all this mean for education in Indiana? Check out the video below to learn more about school choice:

School Choice Indiana from School Choice on Vimeo.