14 Mar Hope Street Group Teachers Ask President Obama for Bold Changes in Teacher Evaluation
Monday, March 14th, 2011
Teachers from Hope Street Group hand-delivered a set of recommendations to the President today that include making student achievement gains a major component of teacher evaluation systems. The teachers attended President Obama’s policy address at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Virginia.
Leaders of Hope Street Group’s national teacher network – led by expert practitioners Doug Clark, Lisa Mills, Darcy Moody, Dina Rock and Sam Roe – applauded the President’s call for Congress to expand the Race to the Top program, including opening up the competition to school districts.
“Hope Street Group fully supports the President’s proposal to expand Race to the Top to school districts – including rural districts – that want to lead the way in adopting bold reforms. We encourage lawmakers to reach out to teachers in Race to the Top states for valuable insights that should be considered in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” said Monique Nadeau, President and CEO of Hope Street Group.
Hope Street Group is partnering with several states – including four of the Race to the Top winners – to facilitate teacher participation in the development of better teacher evaluation systems. Race to the Top has been a critical lever for improving the nation’s schools and increasing our competitive edge in the global economy.
Hope Street Group’s education agenda is driven by the national teacher network’s recommendations found in “Policy 2.0: Using Open Innovation to Reform Teacher Evaluation Systems.” The teachers’ recommendations include the following:
* Including objective measures of student achievement gains as a major component of teacher evaluations;
* Ensuring that information from teacher evaluations is comparable across schools and districts, and is used to address equity in the distribution of teaching talent;
* Ensuring that evaluators are instructional leaders who have sufficient expertise, training and capacity;
* Differentiating levels of teaching efficacy to identify opportunities for professional growth and to drive rewards and consequences.
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Hope Street Group is a national nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to expanding economic opportunity for all Americans.
Hope Street Group Teacher Leaders at President Obama’s Education Speech March 14, 2011
Doug Clark
Bastrop Independent School District, Texas
Doug is a special education teacher of grades K through 4 at Mina Elementary School in Bastrop, Texas. He advocates for world-class public education with a special emphasis on special needs learners. He wrote and produced a documentary for PBS that presented the challenges and opportunities working with special needs children who are deaf and blind. Doug is a strong supporter of the tools for continuous quality improvement as applied in an educational setting.
Lisa Mills
Calvert County School District, Maryland
Lisa has been a Speech Language Pathologist for more than 17 years and currently works at Barstow Elementary School in southern Maryland. She has worked in public school systems across the country primarily with low-income students. Lisa has pursued her passion for education reform by volunteering with Hope Street Group, where she led one of the teams that developed recommendations for teacher evaluation systems designed to define the best teaching for student growth and promote teaching as an iconic profession.
Darcy Moody
Maricopa County School District, Arizona
Darcy is the Director of STEM Instruction for the Maricopa County Education Service Agency where she designs and implements professional development programs for science and mathematics at the district, state and regional levels. She teaches 7th grade math to three rural schools as part of a pilot with the interactive video learning lab. She is also an instructor at Arizona State University West. She has worked in elementary education since 1996 as a teacher, instructional coach, and staff development trainer.
Dina Rock
Beachwood, Ohio
Dina, who teaches 5th and 6th grade at the Agnon School in Beachwood, Ohio, has taught 1st through 6th grade for 22 years. She has designed curriculum for The Los Angeles Unified School District in California and for the Orange School District in Cleveland, Ohio. Dina previously worked as an educational consultant for the Disney Corporation, where she designed teaching guides to accompany educational movies produced by Disney. Dina serves as a mentor teacher for graduate students pursuing a degree in education. She holds a Masters in Education from John Carroll University and Bachelor of Science from The Ohio State University with concentration on child development and family relations.
Sam Roe
Charter School Advisor, New Jersey
Sam Roe is an educator who provides strategic advice and technical assistance to Democracy Prep and other high-performing charter schools, charter management organizations, and urban education organizations. Previously, Sam worked with the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, where he developed expertise on the status of Native Americans. He holds an MPP in Business and Government Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BS in Diplomacy and International Relations magna cum laude from Seton Hall University where he was a Harry S. Truman Scholar.