Eeucation reform leader says state must see improvement in 20-3 years, 'or we're not doing our job.'Arizona must improve its public educational system in two to three years, and a number of initiatives could help bring those results, says the chairman of the governor's reform task force.
"There's some very positive things going on in Arizona, even with a bottom-line result that currently is very unacceptable," Craig Barrett said in an interview for Friday's Arizona Week.
Barrett is former CEO of Intel Corp., and was appointed late last year by Gov. Jan Brewer to head her Arizona Ready Education Council. The council is driving Brewer's initiatives at reforming public education.
Barrett said positive signs include the state's adoption of common core curriculum standards, an assessment tool to replace the decade-old AIMS test and the competition that school choice brings to public schools.
"All of those things give me hope for the future, but it's really too early to say things are changing," Barrett said. "The lifetime of a student is roughly 12 years, and to turn something around in a few months is really difficult."
But the state can't wait that long to improve schools and he wants to see "really positive results in the next two to three years, or we're not doing our job."
Barrett said another change that can help is paying teachers based on their performances as measured by testing gains among students, something that the governor has called for implementing as early as next fall.
That idea is a good one as long as the state maintains a set rate of base pay for teachers as a stabilizing factor, a teachers' representative said.
Andrew Morrill, president of the Arizona Education Association, said in an Arizona Week interview that he and his 31,000-member organization look forward to participating in implementation of the pay-for-performance system. He said it will logically follow recent adoption of a new teacher evaluation system.
"We believe that a good solid base pay ought to be a portion of the compensation," Morrill said. "That creates stability. That's very much attached to the value of teaching ... Performance-based pay is an important strategy in compensation structures."
At the same time, there is little data to show that performance-based pay for teachers "directly enhances student learning." He said state policymakers are ahead of the data in this regard.
Reporter Michael Chihak further explores education reform on Arizona Week. Watch here:
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