Getting the Best People Into the Toughest Jobs

Teachers and principals have the greatest impact on student learning. Unfortunately, our public education system, until recently, selected and tenured thousands of ineffective teachers and principals particularly in high-poverty urban school and rural schools. But the landscape of how teachers and principals—the education talent—are managed is dramatically changing. A comprehensive and holistic view of strategic talent management in education is developing, supported by new and ambitious federal and state policies and rapidly changing local practices. Strategic talent management is an approach that manages all human resource programs—recruitment, selection, placement, development, evaluation, tenure, promotion, dismissal, and compensation—around a set of effectiveness metrics that capture instructional practice and student-learning growth. This brief is derived from Getting the Best People into the Toughest Jobs: Changes in Talent Management in Education written by Allan Odden (published by the Center for American Progress), which examined the evolving landscape of talent management in education.