Speaking Educational Personnel Policies

Jason Kamras and Andrew Rotherham argue:

The nation needs a fundamental redesign of how we approach education's most important asset—its people. Policymakers and educators must develop a broad array of new initiatives to support four essential goals: higher aggregate quality in the teaching-candidate pool, more opportunities for educator-driven innovation and professional growth, better measurement of teacher effectiveness, and new forms of compensation and promotion based on skills and performance. Like other trends in education, human-capital strategies must move from being process- and compliance-oriented with little attention to performance, to being flexible, customized, and directly tied to results.

In my little area of hte country some eighty five percent of the school budget goes to pay and compensation for school employees. While I have no doubt that some of these employees are not simply "the best we could get" but actually the "best," it stills leaves the question unasked and underappreciated, what--besides more money, can we do to get better school workers?