A business leader, a university president, and a teacher walk into Iowa....

Interesting news out of Iowa today as Governor Branstad prepares for his July 25-26 Education Summit. Today's roundtable discussions with business leaders, college and university presidents, and teachers were made available for live streaming and the videos of each roundtable are to be posted after the events. It looks like the Iowa Department of education will also make the summit presentations widely available during that event in a couple of weeks.

Just one comment for now, about integrating a few of these ideas. Business leaders rightly pointed out that teachers need to be appropriately compensated for their work, just as employees in the private sector are. The group focused on increasing pay for teachers in higher-demand positions (challenging schools, math and science instruction, special education) as well as performance-based pay. Later, in the teacher roundtable, teachers pointed out that one stellar teacher in a mediocre school cannot independently raise the field of education or the even the function of the school where they teach; great schools are the result of great coordination.

This is why any serious performance-based pay system must be implemented at the school level, rather than at the level of individual teachers. Whole schools must be accountable for rising or sinking together, just as whole businesses are. John Bloomhall, president and CEO of Diamond Mills (an animal feed company) suggested during the business leaders' roundtable, "If I had a classroom, I'd put the [students] in charge of being successful: 'Your job is to make sure every kid gets a passing grade." This is the strategy we need for schools: we need to tell school communities that it is their responsibility to make sure every teacher succeeds, and we need to give them the resources to do it.

You can access the videos here: https://educateiowa.eduvision.tv/default.aspx