Strategic Management of Human Capital in Education

Improving Instructional Practice and Student Learning in Schools

Allan R. Odden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415886659
• eBook ISBN: 9781136858253
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Strategic Management of Human Capital in Education offers a comprehensive and strategic approach to address what has become labeled as "talent and human capital." Grounded in extensive research and examples of leading edge districts, this book shows how the entire human resource system in schools—from recruitment, to selection/placement, induction, professional development, performance management and evaluation, compensation, and career progression—can be reformed and restructured to boost teacher and principal effectiveness in ways that dramatically improve instructional practice and student learning. Strategic Management of Human Capital in Education guides educators towards putting more effective teachers, teacher leaders, and principals in the country's schools—especially in poverty-impacted urban and rural communities—equipping those teacher and principals with instructional and leadership expertise, and rewarding and retaining those who are successful in attaining these objectives. Drawing from cases, experiences, and deliberations from a national task force, this book outlines a comprehensive framework for how to transform current human resource management practices into authentic, strategic talent management systems in order to improve student achievement.

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STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT OF HUMAN CAPITAL IN EDUCATION
A Framework

The strategic management of human capital (SMHC) in public education is about recruiting effective teachers and principals for all classrooms and schools in the country, particularly high-need schools with concentrations of students from poverty and minority backgrounds; equipping those teachers and principals with the instructional and leadership expertise needed to dramatically improve student achievement and close the achievement gaps linked to poverty and race; and rewarding and retaining those who are successful in attaining these objectives and letting go those who are not.

As such, the strategic management of human capital in public education is complex and wide-reaching. It touches nearly all operating aspects of schools, districts, as well as state education policy. Furthermore, it has not been a central focus for the education system until very recently (and only in some districts and a handful of states). But talent and human capital management are central themes of the new federal education agenda and likely will influence education policy and practice agendas for several years.

In this book, we define SMHC, explain its operational details, and identify the primary local and state policy and practice implications of the strategic management of talent, or human capital, in public education.

1. An Overview of Strategic Talent Management

Two key ingredients are required for the kind of strategic management of human capital needed to dramatically improve the performance of the country’s schools. The first is talented people. All school systems, particularly poverty-impacted urban and rural districts, need smart and talented people at all levels. Everyone, from teachers to top district leadership, to positions in the central office including the human resource management office, to leadership positions in schools, and to instructional leadership for every classroom and teaching context, must be capable and effective. Strategies to recruit, place, develop, and retain top talent should be the prime emphasis of district human capital management strategies. As the book chapters address these issues, they will reference specific initiatives that have been created by districts and states already moving forward on this agenda, including Atlanta (GA), Boston, Chicago, Colorado, Denver (CO), Fairfax County (VA), Long Beach (CA), Minnesota, New York City, and Ohio, including the roles played by new, national talent recruiting organizations, such as Teach For America (TFA), The New Teacher Project (TNTP), New Leaders for New Schools (NLNS), and the National Institute for School Leaders (NISL).¹

The second ingredient is strategic management of that talent. It is not sufficient for districts just to find top talent and turn them loose. As other sectors have learned over the past decades, the highest performance organizations not only recruit and retain top talent, but also manage them in ways that support the strategic directions of the organization. Thus, this book also addresses what strategic management of talent, or human capital, looks like in public education. As we describe further in this book, strategic talent management requires aligning all aspects of the human resource management system (much broader than just personnel administration or the human resource office per se). This includes recruitment, screening, selection, placement, induction, professional development, evaluation, performance management, compensation, and promotion into instructional leadership. The goal is to redesign the entire human capital management system so that effective talent is acquired, strategically placed and equitably distributed in schools and districts, developed to the district’s vision of instructional effectiveness and student performance, and retained over time.

Our view of strategic talent management has two results on which progress can be measured: student performance and teaching performance/effectiveness.² Although more work needs to be done, the country has the knowledge, tools, and instruments for measuring student outcomes. Furthermore, we are optimistic that with the $350 million set-aside from the 2009 Race to the Top funds, states and districts in the near future not only will adopt more rigorous curriculum standards but also will develop and use new and more authentic measures of student learning, including formative and benchmark assessments, and make sure that they cover almost all core courses and students, in order to assess capacities of students to use content to solve problems.

On the other hand, measuring teaching performance and effectiveness, and using the measures as a management tool, are only at the beginning stages although there are important new developments in this area as well (see Chapter 5 and Milanowski, Heneman, & Kimball, 2009). If one objective of strategically managing human capital in education is to produce better classroom instruction, then a related objective is to create and use valid ways to measure teaching practice, and to redesign human capital management systems to insure that the most effective instruction is provided in all classrooms. Further, to be considered valid, the measured elements of instructional practice must be statistically linked to improvements in student performance.

The overall management challenge of the strategic management of human capital is to use data from the measurement of both teaching and student performance, at times just called measures of teaching effectiveness, to guide human capital management decisions over time, from recruitment, to development and motivation, and compensation and retention. Though conceptually straightforward, such actions require deep-seated changes in the ways most districts have operated. The changes will likely generate controversy and will require strong, aggressive educational leadership as well as broader political support to move forward successfully.

Being Strategic

To be strategic, human capital management practices must devolve from a district’s educational improvement strategy and align with the view of effective instructional practice embedded in that strategy and its goals for student achievement. Education systems must have a powerful and coherent educational improvement strategy in order to improve student academic achievement (Childress, Elmore, & Grossman, 2006; Childress, Elmore, Grossman, & Johnson, 2007).³ But education systems cannot implement a powerful educational improvement strategy unless they have both the management and teaching talent to execute the complex actions such comprehensive improvement strategies require. Conversely, top management cannot improve student academic achievement just with talented people, high expectations, and random acts of good practice. To be effective, top talent must be systemically managed around a well-designed educational improvement strategy, including effective instructional practice, so that smart and capable educators turn their aspirations and talents in all classrooms into effective instructional practices that boost the learning of all students to high levels.

This view of strategic as it applies to the management of human capital in public education draws from emerging approaches to talent management in the private sector (Lawler, 2008a, 2008b); this chapter provides a conceptual framework for how these strategic human resource management practices translate to the education system. Current thinking in the private sector emphasizes the importance of (a) organizational strategy as a basis for a human capital management program design; and (b) the strategic management of human capital in carrying out organizational strategies to improve performance (Becker, Huselid, & Ulrich, 2001; Boudreau & Ramstad, 2007; Bowen & Ostroff, 2004; Lawler, Boudreau, & Mohrman, 2006; Wright & McMahan, 1992). During the past decade and a half, many organizations concluded that people, talent, and human capital per se needed to be placed on their strategic agendas (Wright, Dunford, & Snell, 2001). They further found that strategic human resource management strategies should be formally linked vertically to their organizational improvement programs as well as linked horizontally across all the specific HR elements (Gratton & Truss, 2003). Multiple analysts also have shown empirical links between these kinds of aligned human capital management practices and improved organizational performance in private sector organizations (e.g., Arthur, 1994; Huselid, 1995; MacDuffie, 1995; Ulrich, 2001; Wright, Gardner, Moynihan, & Allen, 2005).

The relationship between these practices and the performance of educational organizations has not been given much attention. However, a 2007 study of the recruitment strategies in New York City, which showed that those strategies had indeed improved the quality of teachers as well as the performance of students in the schools where those teachers had been placed, is an example of the kind of research that is needed to document the efficacy of the strategic management of human capital in education (Boyd et al., 2008). As districts implement broader and deeper versions of the strategic management of human capital, beyond recruitment, studies like these should be conducted to document empirically the power of such practices to improve the performance of students and teachers.

This chapter is organized into six sections. Section 2 identifies the problems addressed by the strategic management of human capital in public education. Section 3 argues that a set of strategic human capital management systems can be developed based on state or district strategies to dramatically improve student academic achievement. Section 4 describes strategic human capital management in more detail and shows how multiple measures of teaching effectiveness inform the substance of all human resource management programs. Section 5 discusses several contextual issues impacting strategic talent management in education. Section 6 is a brief summary of the key issues.

2. The Need for Strategic Management of Human Capital in Education

The United States is engaged in an ambitious and far-reaching education reform agenda. The goal is to educate all children, and especially low-income and minority children, to world-class performance standards, enabling them to know, think, problem-solve, and communicate at high levels in core subjects (i.e., mathematics, science, reading/English/language arts, history, geography). In 2010, this is known as preparing students to be “ready for college.” Most K-12 leaders accept the need for improvement and reform; many have already produced impressive performance gains.

To achieve such major improvements in the education system, schools need talented and well-prepared professionals—teachers and leaders. But the current system does not recruit, train, hire, induct, deploy, develop, retain, or strategically manage the top talent human capital needed to accomplish these goals. And these problems are most acute in the largest urban and many rural districts.

Over the past 10–15 years, however, several leaders of urban school districts across America as well as young graduates from some of the nation’s top colleges and universities⁴ concluded that many aspects of the human capital systems in urban school districts were broken. Research, as well as these leaders’ own experiences, documented multiple problems with typical human capital management systems:

• Lack of both a human capital management strategy and alignment of human resource management practices to that strategy. Since research convincingly demonstrates the impact of teacher effectiveness on student achievement, district human capital management programs should be designed to focus on the teacher competencies (knowledge and skills) that contribute to improved student achievement (Heneman & Milanowski, 2004, 2007), with the goal of attaining alignment between the content of the human capital development practices and teacher competencies, including compensation policies (Odden, 2008). Unfortunately, HR practices seem to be based on convenience, imitation, contract constraints, and administrative whim, particularly in urban districts (e.g., Campbell, DeArmond, & Schumwinger, 2004).
• Difficulty in staffing high-need (e.g., high-poverty, low-achieving) schools with quality teachers particularly in urban districts (Ingersoll, 2003; Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2002; Murphy & DeArmond, 2003). Most teachers prefer to work close to where they grew up, generally not urban areas (Boyd et al., 2008). Those hired tend to move from low-achieving, high-poverty schools to less challenging assignments within their districts (Guarino, Santibanez, Daley, & Brewer, 2004). Too often, district HR practices, such as collectively bargained, seniority-based transfer provisions and inefficient selection processes, channel more experienced teachers out of, and less qualified teachers into, high-needs schools (Neild, Useem, Travers, & Lesnick, 2003; Useem & Neild, 2001).
• High teacher turnover, particularly in urban districts (Ingersoll, 2001, 2003). High turnover, in turn, inhibits the development of faculty learning communities, wastes resources on repeated filling of the same position, and, together with seniority-based transfer and assignment provisions, often results in the least experienced teachers teaching the highest-need students. The full costs of teacher turnover are not trivial (Milanowski & Odden, 2008).
• Chronic shortages of qualified math, science, and technology teachers, particularly in urban and rural districts (Blank & Langesen, 2001; Murphy & DeArmond, 2003; Schorling, 1947). These shortages are exacerbated by (a) salary systems that do not allow pay to vary by subject (Goldhaber & Player, 2005; Milanowski, 2003); (b) licensing requirements that add to the cost of career preparation and discourage initial entry for those with the needed subject knowledge; (c) unsophisticated district HR systems designed for labor surpluses rather than shortages; and (d) working conditions that are not appealing to people highly trained in technical fields (Milanowski, 2003).
• The difficulty nationwide some districts have in attracting the “best and brightest” to teaching and using nontraditional sources of teacher supply (e.g., career changers; people wanting only a partial career in teaching, such as those in TFA; young, smart adults disillusioned with the bottom-line focus of private sector employment, like many recruited by TNTP). Barriers include bureaucratized work environments, pay systems that reward seniority and not performance, and district HR systems that slow down the hiring process (Levin & Quinn, 2003) and appear to discount high academic ability as a criterion for teacher selection.
• Professional development systems that spend upwards of $6,000–8,000 per teacher per year, with little impact on instructional practice, and very little focus on the core subjects of mathematics, science, reading, and writing (Miles, Odden, Archibald, & Fermanich, 2004).
• Compensation systems that pay for factors not linked to student learning gains—years of experience and miscellaneous education units, no differentiation for areas experiencing teacher shortages, and few elements linked to the core goal of the system–student performance (see Milanowski & Odden, 2008; Odden & Kelley, [1997] 2002; Odden, 2008).

Identification of these problems has called forth some promising responses. Districts like Chicago actively recruit teachers from the best colleges and universities, particularly those within a one day’s drive from the city. Simultaneously, these districts began to reduce the intake from lower quality local colleges that historically had been the major sources of teacher and principal supply, and to actively partner with stronger local and regional colleges to improve their supply of qualified applicants. Talented college graduates, committed to education reforms, created organizations such as TFA, TNTP, and NLNS, national organizations that began to recruit individuals educated in the country’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Strategic Management of Human Capital In Education: A Framework
• 2. A Powerful Education Improvement Strategy
• 3. Staffing and Recruiting Top Talent
• 4. Performance Management In Education
• 5. Measuring Teacher Performance for Strategic Human Capital Management
• 6. Induction and Professional Development
• 7. New Policies for Licensure, Tenure, Evaluation, and Dismissal
• 8. The Compensation Side of Strategic Talent Management
• 9. Strategic Talent Management for Principals
• 10. Organizing to Implement Strategic Human Capital Management In Education
• 11. The State Role In Strategic Management of Education Talent
• 12. The Policy and Political Environment for Change
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Notes On Contributors