No Easy Answers in Education Policy Reform
This summer I worked for the non-profit organization The New Teacher Project (TNTP), which is in the middle of a five-year contract with the Houston Independent School District to reform the human capital system of HISD. The changes happening at HISD quietly place the district in the center of the most controversial debates in education policy – the use of value-added modeling to evaluate teachers and paying teachers in part based on how well their students perform. After studying the theories and reading all sides of the debate surrounding education policy, I hoped that working in a reform-minded district like HISD would help me settle my internal conflicts about education policy reform and come to a conclusion about the benefits and harms of these policies. I’m still searching for that answer, but I did learn some important general lessons about the difficulties of policy implementation. How to implement policy is the $64,000 question. Most of what we learn at LBJ falls into the buckets of policy analysis and policy development. But the truth is, at some point policy analysts must hand off their policies to a group of people to implement. This is a crucial stage and one I expect most policy graduate students are unprepared for. A policy analyst would like to think that a smart, well-designed policy will be implemented smoothly and faithfully. But even small changes...
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