Getting Great People in Schools

So I went to my first educational conference last week. On the whole a positive and inspiring experience. The keynote speakers were a who's who of educational reformers (or, depending on your point of view, loud-mouth-know-it-all's-trying-to-foist-their-unproven-ideas-on-hard-working-school-employees-everywhere.) The focus of this particular group was managing the people side of schools. It wasn't about curriculum or educational theory, but rather about what it takes to attract, retain and support talented folks who want to make a career in our public schools.

Many organizations, and schools in particular, struggle to align the various aspects of how they manage people with their overall objectives. If we want to get a great teacher in every classroom and a great principal in every building, than wouldn't it be cool if our hiring, retention and developmental practices align with that fundamental purpose? In fact, how we do all of those things currently is often at odds with creating that quality. In broad brush strokes, here is the current state of affairs for how we manage people in most public school districts:

Budget timing and dollars are completely separate from the recruiting and academic functions. Schools often don't know how much money they will have until late in the hiring cycle.
Recruiting is done at a blanket, district level where the evaluation criteria is nearly all credentials based rather than quality based. Due to budget timing noted above, many schools start the school year without proper staff and then scramble to find someone, anyone with a license, to fill gaps in their staffing.
Retention allows little opportunity for quality to be evaluated. In the case of teachers, school districts do a poor job of managing tenure and, once tenured, there is little opportunity to improve performance.
Promotion essentially doesn't exist. There are few rewards (rank, financial, responsibilities or otherwise) to offer individuals who are demonstrating great quality. A great teacher may choose to move on to become an administrator, which, while financially beneficial to the teacher, may be a net loss for the district as it removes talent from the classroom.
Professional Development is often driven by vendors/third-party providers with little alignment to overall goals and little rigor. We perpetuate a culture that says: by taking a class, you will get better at your job.
Salaries reward longevity and credentials--which have no correlation to quality. On the whole, salaries are generally low in comparison to other career options. (As a sidebar, it should be noted that there are many examples and studies showing that salaries are not the sole barrier to attracting highly talented individuals to schools. Many would consider a career in teaching with the existing salary rates. Yes, it's important to see salaries rise, but that is by no means the only or even most important action required to attracting talent to our schools.)
Staffing of individual schools is usually based on seniority. The foundation of our staffing decisions is not matching skills and talents with the needs of a building (a great suburban principal may be a disaster in the inner city and vice versa) but instead is based on seniority or administrative assignment.

And on the list goes. What we say is that we want to create a school system dedicated to getting a great teacher in every classroom. What we do is quite different. It's important to note as well that these problems are a shared responsibility. Some of them have to do with rigid contracts, but many of them have to do with administrative management as well. An integrated, comprehesive approach to attracting talent requires a comprehensive overhaul of how we do our work.