Federal and state government recommendations…
States should grant SEAs more flexibility on hiring, staffing, and salary decisions. “Without greater autonomy, SEAs will continue to find it difficult to attract and retain talented employees,” the authors note. This will limit states’ potential for reform. State hiring rules, salary scales and caps, and civil service guidelines slow down this process.
“At the state level, one thing that came through repeatedly was just how hamstrung SEAs are when it comes to staffing and compensation,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and one of the report’s authors.
“We seem to have come to a consensus that we want SEAs to play a larger role in driving school reform,” Hess said. “Unfortunately, SEAs are … asked to operate within byzantine state staffing requirements” and other salary limitations.
States should weigh giving SEAs authority to take over abysmally performing schools and school districts. States sometimes clash with local figures or unions when it comes to chronically underperforming schools, but they should consider giving SEAs the authority to take over those failing schools or districts in an attempt to provoke change at the local level. This is not “an easy solution,” the authors warn, and states “must carefully assess their capacity before setting foot in a school.”
The federal government should provide political cover to states to drive improvement. At the federal level, the government can use funding and rules to promote change in SEAs. “It can also provide political cover to SEAs to move forward an agenda that governors, state legislators, and state school board members would not have agreed to on their own,” according to the report. Reformers However, school reformers must keep in mind that the federal government can’t force states to take actions they don’t want to take.
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