Friday, November 6, 2009

Pawlenty On The 'People Side' Of School Reform

By Eliza Krigman  

Tim Pawlenty

Governor of Minnesota (R)

The Strategic Management of Human Capital, an education initiative seeking to boost student achievement through improved use of human resources, met in Washington this week for a two-day conference centered on the release of its new report. Taking Human Capital Seriously: Talented Teachers in Every Classroom, Talented Principals in Every School is a direct response to Education Secretary Arne Duncan's call to action last summer to improve the quality of the education workforce. Founded in 2008, SMHC seeks to bring attention to the "people side" of education reform. This week marks the end of SMHC's task force, a blue-ribbon panel chaired by Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

National Journal caught up with Pawlenty right before the conference began.

NJ: What inspired you to get involved with the SMHC?

Pawlenty: Well, these are issues that I've been interested and involved in over the years. I've been on the board of the National Governors Association, I've been on the board of the Hunt Institute, I've been the co-chair of Achieve Inc., and then I got involved in the Milken Institute and teacher improvement. I've also proposed many of these things [recommendations from the report] in Minnesota, so I thought I could lend my experience and insight from those activities and crystallize it into a national report.

NJ: Out of the work done by the task force, what is the most important thing we need to do for education reform?

Pawlenty: If I was going to sum it up, I would say to align the money we spend to the expectations we desire. That's not what the current system does. We know that having effective and tactful teachers in classrooms makes a huge difference in student performance. We have a system now that is quite out of date. It's an infusion from the 1940s, it reflects an industrial approach, or an industrial model, and we live in a high-tech world. So, we need more rigor and more entrepreneurial elements and more accountability for results. Rather than aligning things to outdated systems and outdated structures, we need to align money and expectations to performance, and this report tries to carve that out.

NJ: Are you happy with Minnesota's teacher tenure laws at the moment? If not, how should they be changed?

Pawlenty: No. Our teacher tenure laws in Minnesota are like they are in the rest of the country: a relic of the past. They grant tenure to teachers after three years of work. Then you have, essentially, a job for life unless you do something really awful. There's no other profession, there's no other walk of life that operates like that. I mean, it's really quite outdated. I would like to see Minnesota move to a graduated tenure system and a tenure renewal system so you don't get a college degree, work for three years, and then have a job for life. It's not the way the world works anymore.

NJ: Are you going to be working to get other governors on board with this education report?

Pawlenty: Yes. You know, there is a lot of activity going on around the country. This piece of it, the human resources management piece of it, is getting more and more attention, more and more momentum. If you look at the reforms that the CAP program envisioned 10 years ago -- if you looked at the reforms that have been successful in New York City -- there's a little bit of a brush fire starting. We need to do teacher performance, teacher training, teacher compensation, teacher retention and teacher development differently. So there is momentum building. Not just here, but in many other education circles around the country. I hope that can become a brush fire.