Developing the Educational-
Economic Connection

The efforts of the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy to explore the link between education and the economy, and to develop education policies aimed at strengthening the nation’s capacity to compete economically in the global arena, broke new ground by identifying quality teaching as the essential guarantor of student achievement. Important work, however, remained to be done. In 1989, with support from the Corporation, a successor to the Forum was established to attend to this unfinished business. The new organization, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), appointed a Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce to lead the charge. In 1990, the Commission issued a report on its findings, America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages. Declaring that “America is heading toward an economic cliff,” the Commission offered a set of recommendations that provided a “framework for developing a high-quality American education and training system, closely linked to high-performance work organization.”

NCEE’s efforts in this area have continued over the past decade and most recently have focused on the important role that the leadership of principals plays in school reform. A 2002 report, based on two years of research supported by the Corporation, The Broad Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund, entitled The Principal Challenge: Leading and Managing Schools in an Era of Accountability, focused on the central issue of school leadership.

Along with these promising ideas for reform, it became clear that only political will and national commitment on the part of public and private sector leaders could transform these ideas and move them from the educational arena to the national agenda.

Teaching as a Critical
Business Investment

In 1989, a National Education Summit was convened by President George Bush and the National Governors Association, led by then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and attended by the nation’s governors, business leaders and educators. This group began to work with the federal government to articulate specific national academic goals as a vital first step in ensuring that the nation’s schools prepare students for jobs in the global marketplace—dramatically setting in motion the national standards-based reform movement. A second summit was held in 1996; in September 1999, governors, business leaders and educators convened in Palisades, New York, to attend the Third National Education Summit, where they reaffirmed earlier commitments to establish rigorous academic standards for all students and expanded their commitment to standards by achieving consensus on the need to improve teaching as the vital element in upgrading public education. Following the summit, the National Alliance of Business, in partnership with other business organizations, and with support from Carnegie Corporation and a consortium of other foundations and corporations, set out to conduct a year-long review of issues related to teacher quality. The report resulting from that review, Investing in Teaching: A Common Agenda, affirmed the commitment of business leaders to improving public education and proposed a comprehensive agenda for improving the quality of teaching.

The agenda included three key recommendations: (1) the creation of a new model of teacher preparation and professional development, one that would require higher admissions standards at the nation’s schools of education, close collaboration with arts and sciences faculties and National Board Certification; (2) the creation of a new model of compensation, including salaries competitive with other professions; and (3) the creation of a “professional environment that respects [teachers’] expertise,” allows teachers “the flexibility and freedom to achieve results,” and provides a system of “portable” credentials and pensions. The Investment in Teaching Databook, a companion piece to the report and a resource of data on issues related to teacher quality, was made available for use by states and local communities to inform and guide their efforts to achieve this ambitious agenda.

A Blueprint for Preparing
Excellent Teachers

By the 1990s, a growing consensus among political, business and education leaders that quality teaching was the key to successful educational reform inevitably led to the question: What can we as a nation do to ensure the preparation of excellent teachers? Conversations about teaching between Hugh Price of the Rockefeller Foundation (Price subsequently headed the Urban League) and Linda Darling-Hammond, then with Teachers College, Columbia University, gradually led to the idea of establishing a national commission that would address the “what can we do” question. A meeting of potential funders was attended by Program Officer Karin Egan, representing Carnegie Corporation of New York, which quickly added its support.

In 1994, an extraordinary array of leaders in education, government and business came together to form the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF). The NCTAF’s task was nothing less than to design what essentially amounted to a blueprint for preparing excellent teachers, i.e., teachers who would have the requisite knowledge, skills and commitment to help all students achieve higher academic standards. Among NCTAF members were Governor Hunt, who chaired the commission; James A. Kelly, president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards; and Anthony Alvarado, superintendent of New York City Community School District 2.

The NCTAF report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future, was published in September 1996. In his preface to the report, Governor Hunt captured the Commission members’ commitment to the transformational power of a good teacher: “. . .[G]ood teachers literally save lives,” he wrote. “ However they do it—by loving students, helping them imagine the future and insisting that they meet high expectations and standards—the best of them are magic weavers. Many of us can remember such a teacher—one who changed our lives, so gifted that he or she transported us out of our own time and place and circumstances and jump-started the dreams and possibilities that lie within us all.”

What Matters Most placed the notion of teacher quality at the center of the nation’s educational agenda. Indeed, according to Daniel Fallon, chair of the Education Division of Carnegie Corporation, during its tenure, NCTAF “has produced seminal reports that have helped maintain momentum in the country for educational reform.” NCTAF’s recommendations called for systemic, sweeping changes in the recruitment, preparation and support of excellent teachers. Moreover, it set for itself “an audacious goal”: to provide—by 2006— every child in America with “access to competent, caring, qualified teachers in schools organized for success.” The Commission identified certain research-based benchmarks for teacher preparation, licensing and hiring that would ensure teachers were prepared to meet high standards. Included among these benchmarks: a deep understanding of the subject taught and how children learn, a knowledge of technology and demonstrated teaching skills necessary to help children achieve high standards, professional growth in pedagogy and content and the ability to instill “a passion for learning in their students.”

NCTAF’s progress toward achieving this “audacious goal” is impressive. Its partnership network has grown to include 20 states and its research-based reports and subsequent work with states and school districts have stimulated many initiatives to improve teaching, dozens of pieces of legislation and thousands of news articles on these activities. Moreover, unlike the U.S. Department of Education’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, which folded its tent after the publication of A Nation at Risk, NCTAF has chosen to recreate itself as an independent, nonprofit organization. In January 2003, NCTAF published No Dream Denied: A Pledge to America’s Children, which calls for a national effort to improve teacher retention by 2006.

Summing up the educational challenge facing America, NCTAF Chair James Hunt wrote, “Standards for students and teachers are the key to reforming American education. Access to competent teaching must become a new student right. Access to high-quality preparation, induction, and professional development must become a new teacher right.” Indeed, he added, “The reform movement. . .cannot succeed unless it attends to the improvement of teaching.”

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