Teacher test

In 1966, the federal government released a seminal report titled Equality of Educational Opportunity. Written by James Coleman, a prominent sociologist, the report attempted to get at the various influences on student performance in American schools. The study, widely known simply as the Coleman Report, concluded that “only a small part of [student achievement] is the result of school factors, in contrast to family background differences between communities.”

Since then, study after study has shown the strong connection between forces outside schools — parenting, family stability, socioeconomic background — and achievement levels. Students in wealthier communities almost invariably score higher on standardized tests than those from lower-income communities.

But these broad patterns, which receive so much attention, mask something very important that is going on when student achievement data are broken down more finely at the level of individual students and classrooms. There, according to a growing body of research, clear differences are apparent in student achievement between classes in a given school made up of students of similar background. The conclusion the studies point to is that there are substantial differences among teachers in their ability to drive student learning.

The notion that teachers are the linchpin of student success is easy for many people to accept, since almost everyone can recall an extraordinary teacher who lit their passion for a particular subject or whose classes were universally regarded as among the best in their school. “That seems to be stipulated common knowledge now. People accept that,” says Paul Reville, the Massachusetts secretary of education. The issue, he says, becomes, “What do you do about it?”

“What do you do about it?”

It turns out, that is a very loaded question. There may be a growing recognition that the effectiveness of a teacher is the key school-based variable we can control, but almost none of the structures that have evolved over decades to govern how we hire, evaluate, pay, or assign teachers to classrooms are designed to operate with that in mind.

We base hiring decisions on certification credentials that don’t seem to correlate highly with teacher quality. Most teachers receive only cursory performance evaluations, with virtually every teacher graded highly. We use a one-size-for-all salary structure, in which the only factors used in raises are a teacher’s higher education credentials and number of years in the system, neither of which is strongly linked to teacher effectiveness. And we often let seniority, rather than merit, drive decisions about where a teacher is placed.

It is in many ways an industrial model that treats teachers as identical, interchangeable parts, when we increasingly know that they are not. The consequences of that mismatch are as far-reaching as the changes in teacher policy that many say are urgently needed.

“Teacher evaluation in this country is fundamentally broken,” says Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s education secretary, in an interview in Boston. “We don’t live in Lake Wobegon [where everyone is “above average”], but we have a system that pretends that we do. It hurts adults and it hurts children. It means, by definition, that the great teachers don’t get recognized and don’t get rewarded, and we don’t learn from them. The teachers in the middle don’t get the support they need to improve, and the teachers at the bottom — who, frankly, need to find another profession — don’t get moved out. For us to continue to do what we’re doing, or to just tinker around the edges, is crazy.”

Measuring up

Eric Hanushek was a Harvard graduate student in economics when he was selected, in 1966, to join a yearlong seminar with many leading social scientists of the day to help formulate policy recommendations based on the Coleman Report. Though he agreed with the overarching finding that family background has a huge effect on student achievement, Hanushek says the idea that schools and teachers were not an important variable struck him as off-base.

“I thought that sounded kind of crazy, and it launched me into all this work,” says Hanushek, now a Stanford University researcher who has spent the ensuing four decades studying American schools. As he dug into student achievement data, Hanushek says, it became clear to him that “the kids in some classrooms tended to learn a lot more in a year than the kids in another classroom. I started saying at the time, ‘It looks like teacher differences are really important.’”

Hanushek became one of the first researchers to try to quantify the impact of teachers on student learning. Since student achievement tends to rise along with family income and other non-school factors, the challenge was to try to isolate the actual effect of teachers on learning. Hanushek and a North Carolina statistician named William Sanders were early developers of what has become known as the “value-added” model for assessing teacher effectiveness. Under this approach, researchers do not measure a teacher’s effectiveness based simply on student achievement scores, which are often correlated with “family background differences” and might or might not reflect any impact the teacher had. Instead, they try to gauge the growth in student achievement during a given school year. By looking at how much a student has progressed, regardless of where he or she started from, the model claims to capture the true effect of a given teacher. “You take most, if not all, the socioeconomic issues off the table,” says Sanders.

Hanushek conducted one such study in schools in Gary, Indiana. He ranked teachers based on the average growth in achievement shown by students in their classes, and then he compared the difference in achievement progress over a school year in classes taught by teachers ranked the most effective (the 95th percentile or higher of all teachers) with those in classes of the lowest ranked teachers (the 5th percentile or lower). The difference amounted to a full year of learning, with students of the lowest performing teachers gaining half a year (compared with average achievement growth) while those taught by the highly effective teachers made one-and-a-half-year’s worth of progress.

Another leading teacher effectiveness researcher, Harvard professor Tom Kane, has found that students assigned for a single year to a teacher in the top 25 percent of classrooms ranked by student achievement move ahead 10 percentile points more on achievement tests than similar students assigned a teacher in the bottom 25 percent of classrooms. “That’s a quarter of the black-white achievement gap,” says Kane. “That’s a big difference.”

To Kane such findings have profound implications for public education, particularly in districts serving lots of poor and minority children who sit on the bottom end of the achievement gap. When it comes to the search for a proven strategy to substantially improve their achievement levels, “we don’t have to wish for it to exist,” says Kane. “It does exist in about a quarter of our classrooms. What these data are telling us is that the solution to the problem is right in front of us, if we could just get much more serious about identifying and rewarding effective teaching.”

Not everyone thinks it is nearly that simple. Critics of value-added assessments contend that there is far too much room for these studies to miss important factors that might account for apparent teacher-effectiveness differences but actually have nothing to do with the teacher. Jesse Rothstein, a University of California–Berkeley economist, wrote a paper earlier this year based on student data from North Carolina schools that suggested that principals do not randomly assign students to classes. He concluded that principals consciously or unconsciously assign some teachers students capable of making larger gains, while other teachers tend to be assigned students who struggle more. If the researchers cannot identify such practices and adjust for them statistically, Rothstein says, value-added assessments could capture differences that have nothing to do with actual teacher effectiveness.

Kane recently completed one of the first value-added studies carried out using a true experimental design, in which the researchers were allowed to randomly make the student assignments. Since the results did not differ markedly from studies in which the principals made assignments, Kane says the findings suggest principals are not introducing unaccounted-for effects in their assignment of students. Like everyone involved in value-added research of teachers, he says more studies should be done to confirm the accuracy of assessments and improve the ability of the models to tease out the true teacher effects in student outcomes.

There are plenty of grounds for caution about the haphazard use of value-added assessments. The potential pitfalls are everywhere — from those Rothstein has raised to basing estimates on inadequate sample sizes or failing to use enough assessments of student achievement to account for random fluctuations in scores.

But there is also a price to pay, say some, for holding back indefinitely from judging teachers based on what is, at the end of the day, the job at hand. “The profession has resisted the idea that they should be held accountable for what students learn,” says Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, DC, policy organization. As with any measurement instrument, value-added assessments “may not always be perfectly fair,” she says. “But you have to compare it to what we have now.”

Straight ‘A” teachers

While nearly everyone agrees that there are clear differences in teachers’ effectiveness, you would never know that by looking at the evaluation systems used in most public school districts. Formal review of tenured teachers is typically done every two or three years, but evaluations often provide no meaningful information on teacher performance. That is because, in an example of grade inflation that would make even the most generous teacher blush, virtually all teachers are routinely awarded high marks.

“In many of our districts across the country, we are still operating in the old mindset where you’re either excellent or you’re nothing, so it puts a lot of pressure on principals and headmasters to rate people higher,” says Carol Johnson, the superintendent of Boston schools.

In June, the New Teacher Project, a New York–based nonprofit, released a report titled The Widget Effect, which looked at teacher evaluation data from 12 districts in Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, and Ohio. In districts that use a so-called binary evaluation system with just two categories (usually “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory,” or some variant of those) more than 99 percent of teachers were judged satisfactory over the four-year period from 2003 to 2006. In districts with more categories, 94 percent of teachers were in one of the top two rating categories, while less than 1 percent were rated unsatisfactory.

The pattern of almost uniformly high rating extends to teachers in schools making little progress in advancing student leaning. An earlier 2007 study from the New Teacher Project reported that 87 percent of Chicago’s 600 public schools didn’t give a single unsatisfactory rating to a teacher from 2003 to 2005. Of these, 69 were schools that the city had declared to be failing.

Data on teacher evaluation in Boston, which uses a satisfactory/unsatisfactory rating system, show much the same pattern. Over the five-year period from 2003 through 2008, 97 percent of all evaluated teachers received a satisfactory designation, while just 3 percent received unsatisfactory reviews. At 72 of the district’s 135 schools, not a single teacher was given an unsatisfactory evaluation. Fifteen of these are on the state’s list of chronically underperforming schools.

“This phenomenon where you get schools where year after year the kids are failing, and the teachers are all deemed to be great — that’s not a recipe for improving learning for kids in poor neighborhoods,” says Dan Weisberg, the policy director at the New Teacher Project and a co-author of The Widget Effect.

In Worcester, district officials over the last several years have recommended more teachers for professional development programs to improve their instruction, but data for the last five school years nonetheless show that 98 percent of all tenured teachers were in the top two evaluation categories (satisfactory or “special acknowledgement”).

Some districts appear to pay no attention at all to how their teachers are rated. Public records requests for such data from the school systems in Lawrence and Fall River, two of the state’s lowest performing districts, were turned down because officials in both communities said they simply don’t maintain statistics on aggregate performance levels of their teachers.

Among the reasons for the uniformly high evaluations in most districts, say those who study the issue, is that principals often have little training in how to review teacher performance, they allot minimal time for evaluations in already overworked days, and there is often so little riding on the outcome that negative evaluations may only sow ill will among a school’s teaching staff, while doing little to improve teacher performance.

Pointing out substandard performance is “a starting point,” says Morgaen Donaldson, an education policy professor at the University of Connecticut. “In and of itself, it isn’t going to improve teaching and learning.” That would require evaluations to be part of a more robust system than exists in most districts, with the potential for excellent teachers to gain special recognition — and perhaps added pay — and for those identified as having shortcomings to be steered to meaningful professional development, with rigorous follow-up of their progress and dismissal of those not showing enough improvement.

“I don’t know if it’s that the system is broken or [that it’s] the people at the head of the system,” says Anne Wass, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union. “There’s tremendous need for principal education,” she says of the evaluation process. “There are many who don’t want to make people feel bad. They kind of look the other way.”

One thing union leaders are clear about in discussions of how to improve teacher evaluations is that they should not be based on student achievement results. “We are completely opposed to tying teacher evaluations to test scores,” says Thomas Gosnell, president of the American Federation of Teachers–Massachusetts. “We believe that is an absolutely imperfect measure of whether a teacher is a qualified teacher or not.”

Teacher effectiveness “isn’t something that’s easily quantified,” says Wass. “It is somebody who is able to relate to and connect with their students and the parents of their students, and is able to educate them to the fullest potential. One thing it is not is whether your kids get the highest test scores.”

Wass and Gosnell’s position, however, is running head-on into growing support for incorporating measures of student achievement into the teacher evaluation system. “At the end of the day, results do matter,” says Johnson, the Boston schools superintendent. “I don’t think we can say we’re doing a good job if we continue to see the large achievement gaps we see in urban districts.”

No one is advocating that student test scores be used as the sole basis for teacher evaluation. But reform advocates say firm measures of student learning must be part of what teachers are judged on, along with things like portfolios of teacher lesson materials and direct classroom observations that assess performance against standards regarded as effective teaching practices.

Value-added assessments couldn’t serve as the only basis for teacher evaluations even if there were agreement to do so. That’s because only about one-quarter of US public school instructors teach subjects or grade levels in which students take standardized tests used to make value-added assessments. One area of research Harvard’s Tom Kane is now pursuing is to see how consistently classroom-based observations and other types of evaluations line up with the results of value-added assessments of a teacher’s effectiveness. The more they do correspond, he says, the greater the confidence we can have that teachers who rate highly in these non-quantitative assessments are also succeeding in promoting growth in student achievement.

For his part, Secretary of Education Duncan has been unambiguous in his call for student outcomes to matter a lot more in every aspect of a teacher’s career. “Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation, or tenure decisions,” he said in a speech in July to a convention of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union. “But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.”

The teacher-quality gap

Nowhere are stakes higher in the push for greater attention to teacher effectiveness than in urban districts with lots of poor and minority children performing well below their grade levels. These students arrive with all the impacts of poverty that have been highlighted in studies going back to the Coleman Report of the mid-1960s. However, instead of trying to make up for some of the deficits they bring to school by putting our best teachers in their classrooms, we often saddle these students with the least experienced teachers.

There is no good evidence that a teacher with, say, 15 years of experience is more effective than one who has taught for eight or 10 years, but there is a clear learning curve for those in their first few years in the classroom. Large urban districts like Boston’s have been losing as many as half of all new teachers within the first three years, a turnover rate that ensures that lots of classrooms in the most troubled schools remain continually staffed with teachers in their first few years in the profession.

“Every time we turn our backs on this practice of assigning our weakest teachers to the kids who need the best, our kids pay a horrible price and our country pays a horrible price,” says Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a Washington, DC, policy organization. “You cannot close the achievement gap without closing the teacher-quality gap.”

That premise is the driving force behind a small Boston nonprofit called Teach Plus. Launched two years ago, the organization is focused on developing policies to retain experienced, effective teachers in urban schools. To help develop strategies to do that, the group enlisted those who know the challenges of urban teaching best: accomplished, but still relatively young, urban educators with three to 10 years of teaching experience. These teachers are often themselves wrestling with whether to remain in a profession where, particularly in urban districts, the challenges are unending and the standards and rewards that characterize other professions are largely absent. Teach Plus founder Celine Coggins, a former middle school teacher who left the classroom in order to try to drive broader policy change, recruited a cohort of “teaching policy fellows” from the ranks of young teachers in district schools or charter schools in Boston and other area urban systems.

The group met one evening a month for a year and a half, reviewing research on teacher policies, hearing from leading policymakers, and sharing thoughts from their own experiences in urban schools. The policy proposal they issued in April challenges many of the bedrock industrial-model policies that have governed the teaching profession for decades. It calls for districts to identify effective teachers using rigorous evaluation criteria, which could include student achievement data among other factors. These teachers would be designated as members of an Excellence Corps. Based on a belief in the “tipping point” concept that a critical mass of effective teachers is needed to drive a change in the culture of a struggling school, the proposal calls for Excellence Corps teachers to make up no less than one-third of the teaching staff at a school. To recognize their demonstrated success with urban students, such teachers would receive a base salary increase of 10 percent — with other staff at the school eligible for bonuses if they meet individual improvement goals and the building meets schoolwide achievement goals that would be established.

“We think we’ll be able to demonstrate that you can improve student achievement because you’ve got the right people in place and you’ve got the right working conditions in place,” says Coggins.

Teachers unions, with only a few exceptions, have opposed any type of merit or bonus pay that doesn’t go to all teachers in a school, arguing that it would damage collegiality and collaboration. “The business model of competition, I guess it works in the business world, but it won’t work in a school,” says Wass, the Massachusetts Teachers Association president. “Do you think people are going to want to give their good ideas to others? Do you think they’re going to want any kids who aren’t going to test as well? It would be a total disaster.”

Maria Fenwick, a fourth-grade teacher in the Boston schools and one of the Teach Plus fellows who helped draft the report, is passionate about urban education and knows that no one goes into the field for the money. But the 28-year-old Kingston native says it’s only natural to want to be recognized and rewarded for hard work and results. “It’s very hard to see your colleagues who have many more years of experience getting paid much more and not working as hard,” says Fenwick. “It’s just so nonsensical to me that there’s no connection between performance and pay.”

Donaldson, the University of Connecticut researcher who studies teacher evaluation and compensation systems, sees a generational shift in teacher attitudes, with younger teachers more interested in seeing their work evaluated rigorously and their pay adjusted accordingly. “These people expect to be assessed based on their performance and receive rewards, if they perform well, or sanctions if they do not,” she wrote in a report released earlier this year by the Center for American Progress, a Washington, DC, think tank.

Fenwick transferred to another Boston school this year after growing disillusioned with the leadership at her former school, where she says the principal’s evaluations of teachers were perfunctory and where a sense of professional accountability for student learning was absent. She’s hoping for a better year at her new school, one of the district’s innovative pilot schools, which has greater autonomy in staffing decisions. But Fenwick is convinced that wholesale reforms like those in the Teach Plus proposal are needed if urban schools are going to be able to consistently attract and retain effective teachers. “A lot of people my age know if you’re talented and bright, you can leave and go do a lot of things,” she says.

Pushing the envelope

If there are big differences in teacher effectiveness, it might stand to reason that such factors, along with other qualities that could make a teacher a good fit for a particular position, should be the driving force in determining where someone teaches. In many districts, however, seniority rules can often tie the hands of school administrators and force them to accept teachers in a slot regardless of whether they believe they are the best candidate for the position.

A 2005 study of four large US urban school systems by the New Teacher Project reported that 40 percent of teacher vacancies in the districts were filled by teachers already in the system through procedures that administrators and principals had little or no say over. If teachers are regarded as interchangeable, seniority may be as good a system as any for deciding who has first claims on a job. But such systems are coming under scrutiny in an era when that premise is under question and underperforming schools are receiving heightened attention.

In Feburary, Rhode Island’s state education commissioner pointed to the seven straight years in which the Providence schools failed to meet federal benchmarks for improved student achievement and ordered the state’s largest school system to develop teacher hiring and transfer procedures that ignore the seniority provisions in its contract with teachers. The commissioner claimed to have such authority under state education law. In August the city’s teachers union filed suit challenging the order. But with the court case pending, the district has moved ahead and ignored seniority rights in filling slots in six schools this fall, with plans to implement the change citywide next year.

“It will allow us as a district to choose the best candidates,” says Tom Brady, the Providence schools superintendent. “Isn’t that real life? I’m being held accountable and I’m holding principals accountable as school building leaders for educational performance. If they can’t pick their team, how can you hold someone accountable for the results?”

In the Bay State’s biggest district, administrators have sought to gain more control over hiring decisions through negotiation, not unilateral intervention. In 1995, Boston opened its first pilot schools, which grant school leaders wide latitude over hiring, budget, and curriculum decisions. In 1998, the Boston Arts Academy, the city’s first high school for the visual and performing arts, opened as a pilot school. “I couldn’t do it without it,” founding principal Linda Nathan says of the hiring autonomy she has as leader of one of the city’s 21 pilot schools. “We are a mission-driven school, we have a very particular focus, and I need to be able to recruit faculty completely unfettered, based on how they will work toward the mission of the school.”

The administrators at Boston’s 114 regular district schools, however, don’t enjoy that unfettered ability to assemble a teaching team. At the end of each school year, because of changes in student population and shifts in the curriculum at particular schools, 100 to 200 tenured teachers end up in an “excess pool” without an assigned slot for the following year and need to be matched with open positions elsewhere in the system. If there are more open positions than teachers in the excess pool for any given subject area, the school department allows principals to open up hiring for positions at their school to outside candidates, as well as those in the excess pool, and select whomever they want. But if there are fewer vacancies than teachers in the pool, principals must choose teachers from the pool. What’s more, those with the most seniority get the first crack, and once three teachers have bid on a position, the building principal must make a hire from that group, regardless of whether he or she thinks any one of them is an ideal candidate to fill the job.

“You can tell they’re frustrated when they want to have the ability to really move the school and hire a quality person but we’re restricting them from hiring who they want,” says Bill Horwath, the district’s human resources director.

Many of the structures governing teaching policies were the sensible response to bad conditions. They developed at a time when teachers, overwhelmingly women and minorities for whom other professional doors were closed, were paid horribly and subject to arbitrary dismissal by administrators prone to handing jobs to friends and family. But policies that treat teachers as interchangeable parts seem ill-suited to the task of driving big improvements in student achievement, especially at a time when success in school has become a prerequisite for making it in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.

“People ask us, ‘Whose fault is it?’” says Daly, the New Teacher Project president, of policies that don’t seem aligned with today’s needs. “What we say is, if there’s a conspiracy, it’s a conspiracy of dysfunction, not a conspiracy of ill will.”

That doesn’t, however, make the kind of the sea change in teacher policy being pushed from the highest levels on down any less profound. “You’re trying to make performance matter, and it’s never mattered before,” says Haycock, the Education Trust president. “If you believe it has to matter, like it does in practically every field, that’s a huge change in the tools that people have to have, and it’s a huge change in culture.”

Push from the top

On a Thursday morning in mid-July, Arne Duncan stood next to Gov. Deval Patrick on a stage at Boston’s Museum of Science. It was a fitting location, surrounded by exhibits on innovative engineers and engineering design, because the US education secretary was in Boston to lend support to a proposal Patrick was unveiling to revamp the Commonwealth’s system for dealing with failing schools. Patrick announced that he would be filing legislation to double the number of charter school seats allowed in the state’s lowest-performing districts. He also proposed the creation of “readiness schools,” which would remain part of local districts but which would have the sort of latitude in hiring, budgeting, and school-day length that are hallmarks of charter schools and Boston’s pilot school model.

Proposals like the one offered by Patrick are exactly the sort of moves Duncan says are needed to meet the urgent challenge of improving US schools, especially in districts serving low-income children. And he is offering more than just words of praise for such efforts. Duncan is overseeing a $4.3 billion fund, dubbed the Race to the Top program, which will make competitive grants to states that are pursuing innovative school reform strategies in four big areas — one of which is developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers. Massachusetts is one of many states hoping to land in the money.

Obama and Duncan have been aggressive in calling for big changes in US schools, and they are using the powers of their substantial purse strings, along with the bully pulpit, to get states to get on board. The guidelines for Race to the Top funding say that any state with a legal ban on the use of student achievement data in teacher evaluations is automatically ineligible for an award — a condition that does not apply to Massachusetts but does to a handful of states, including California and New York. The Department of Education is further requiring applicants to describe what their state is doing to make it possible to link teacher evaluations to student achievement data.

In March, state education officials announced that Massachusetts would begin to use student achievement scores to build a valued-added data system that can track individual students’ growth from year to year. State officials have not laid out any formal plans to utilize the system to assess teacher effectiveness, but it seems clear that there is interest in moving in that direction, and the state will cite the new database in its application for Race to the Top funds.

Mitchell Chester, the state education commissioner, says the value-added approach gets beyond the discussions that explain away poor performance among poor kids because of their disadvantaged background. “It takes away the excuse-making,” he says. “It takes into account where the child started from. It’s not asking the teacher whether the child was able to jump over the high bar the first time out. It’s asking, ‘Based on where the child was able to jump previously, have you helped the child vault higher?’ We cannot shy away from using evidence of student learning as part of our evaluation and feedback mechanism.”

Chester says he’s also interested in “seeding” efforts across the state to try different approaches to teacher compensation and evaluation. The Obama administration is proposing a substantial increase, from $97 million to $487 million, in another federal program called the Teacher Incentive Fund, which underwrites performance-based teacher and principal compensation programs and other efforts aimed at promoting and rewarding teacher effectiveness.

Meanwhile, as a condition of receiving federal aid earlier in the year as part of the fiscal stabilization aid to state governments, Massachusetts officials, like those in all states receiving help, have been told by Duncan’s office that they will have to gather and submit evaluation data on how teachers are rated in each school district.

“Trust me, the secretary knows what the answers are going to be,” says Weisberg, the policy director at the New Teacher Project. “The ratings are all going to be good or great. Nobody bases this on student achievement. So he’s doing what any good lawyer does: Asking questions to which he already knows the answer to prove a point.”

The federal education department isn’t the only place staking lots of money on the idea that teacher effectiveness is a key to improving schools. Last year, the Gates Foundation announced that it would commit $500 million over five years to research and implement strategies to identify effective teachers and increase their numbers in schools. The foundation has hired Harvard’s Tom Kane to oversee the research, which will include efforts to identify different forms of teacher evaluation that correlate highly with quantitative assessments linked to student achievement.

The foundation is also planning to invest heavily in a handful of school districts that have pledged to comprehensively rework teacher policies covering everything from evaluation to compensation and promotion. “We have a belief that if we can make it work some places, those things can ultimately go to scale across the country,” says Chris Williams, a deputy director in the foundation’s education program.

Any effort to take new teacher policies fully to scale in the country will involve incorporating them into reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Law, the landmark 2002 legislation that set new accountability standards for US schools. Although Race to the Top is a one-time program, its main principles, including the emphasis on teacher effectiveness, are likely to form the framework over the coming months for the debate over reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind statute.

US Rep. George Miller and the late Ted Kennedy were the chief Democratic authors of the law, and the veteran California lawmaker will now be one of the most influential congressional voices in the reauthorization process. “Race to the Top will tell us a lot,” says Miller, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. As for its focus on teacher effectiveness and the call for more rigorous evaluation of teachers tied directly to measures of student learning, Miller can’t see how we wouldn’t move in that direction. “I don’t know how you achieve what we say as a nation we want to and must achieve if we don’t make these changes,” he says. “Every other major institution in the world has adapted to the information age and said, ‘Information makes me smarter.’”