Tom is Director of Policy & Advocacy with Montgomery County ESC and is a member of the Policy and TREW committees
Why is the Compact’s work to expand representation in Ohio’s educator workforce important?
To be truly competitive in the national and international marketplace, the educator workforce needs to LOOK like the population that it serves. Such representation not only is essential for our economy and economic competitiveness, but it is also a critical dynamic in terms of student educational outcomes. We know that students who have at least a couple of teachers who reflect their race and ethnicity perform better and attain higher levels of education.
Share an example of how the Compact’s work through the TREW Committee and TREW Incentive Grants are having an impact on Ohio’s educator workforce?
The focus on specific problems of practice (e.g., the Science of Reading or the number of teachers of color in K-12 classrooms) is essential to the success of all students. The TREW Committee’s efforts help focus the attention of educators on how best to use evidence-based practices to ground the work that they are doing in schools and with students. Ideology has often been the driver for how to educate students at all levels, whether college-aged or pre-kindergarten. The TREW Committee is placing an emphasis on what works based on the best available research, which is so important. That is what we expect in other fields like medicine and engineering), and it is what should occur in education.
What do you see as the next steps for the TREW Committee’s work in advancing workforce readiness in Ohio?
The next step is to help shape the policies that impact and guide the practices occurring in schools. The only way to truly impact the unevenness of preparation and educational experiences is to shape public and educational policies that effectively guide the preparation experiences that are provided. When I first started in education, I was focused on instructional practices—What constituted effective practice in a classroom? After 50 years, I now realize that it is the policy dimension that can really make a difference. Good public policy does not prevent educational mediocrity, but it can mitigate the likelihood that students will be in classrooms with teachers who are using ineffective or poorly delivered academic activities and opportunities.
What excites you most about the Compact’s work?
The Compact is not looking for one-off efforts—the Compact is exploring how best to make evidenced-based practices the grounding for all that occurs through the work of Ohio higher education institutions. What has frustrated me throughout my career is the unevenness of the preparation experiences that occur across Ohio’s colleges and universities. In essence, where students attended school mattered in terms of the quality of the different types of preparation work that they experienced. The efforts by the Deans Compact to focus first on quality and well-grounded practices and then on scaling is and will continue to make a real difference.