While corporations have been striving to perfect the “people side” of their operations for decades, school districts have struggled with organizational problems that undermine their ability to assemble top-notch teaching, administrative, and central office staffs.
Most businesses hunt aggressively for the right talent, train their workers to produce at high levels, and reward top performers with promotions and higher pay. Public education, on the other hand, has been more passive in managing this vital asset, now being referred to as “human capital.” Most districts rely on colleges and universities to supply workers, then pay and promote their employees for experience and education levels rather than for success in raising student achievement.
With the pressure to improve schools continuing to mount—and reform efforts falling short—a group of school district leaders, funders, advocates, education thinkers, and policymakers are focusing on developing human capital as the key strategy to improve student learning.
The new Strategic Management of Human Capital (SMHC) project held a three-day national conference in November that drew representatives from 40 large school districts, teachers’ unions, state education departments, and executives of nonprofit education organizations. Leaders of the initiative argued that “strategic management” of teachers, principals and central office workers includes recruiting and developing people and using the system’s performance as a guide to evaluating and paying them. Even though some urban districts have overhauled their HR operations and made progress in staffing classrooms, the diagnosis by the speakers was largely grim.
Strategic Management of Human Capital 
, which is guided by a 35-member national task force, was recently formed to help the nation’s 100 largest districts figure out how to attract the most promising teachers and principals and manage them effectively. Dysfunctional human-resource systems and shortages of strong teachers and principals are legendary bumps in the road to good schools. To smooth that road, districts must develop a clear educational improvement strategy, and carefully tailor recruitment, hiring, training, placement, evaluation, promotion, and pay systems to make that strategy work, said Allan R. Odden, a professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an SMHC codirector.
In a bid to illuminate solutions, the project released 10 case studies detailing promising new approaches to recruiting, hiring, and training education personnel. The 10 studies mark a key early step by Strategic Management of Human Capital to reshape the national dialogue on how districts can improve student achievement by getting better talent and managing it more effectively.
What’s been missing, experts say, are broad, thoughtful strategies that link the major components of school districts’ HR systems—recruitment, hiring, placement, induction, professional development, evaluation, compensation, and termination—to their bottom-line goals for students. “Districts have got to be the kind of organizations that smart, reasonable people want to work for,” according to Mr. Daly.
To work toward that goal, the next phase of the SMHC group’s work will involve spearheading an operation to persuade more urban districts to plan and initiate teacher- and principal-recruitment strategies. Additional “action steps” for this year include developing and piloting a teacher-assessment system that measures instructional practices and uses the information to drive the way personnel are managed; studying human-capital practices in schools that have made large gains in achievement; identifying how state policies can be shaped to help district leaders manage education personnel; and establishing new partnerships between urban districts, universities, and nontraditional “talent providers” to train people with college degrees who want to enter teaching or school leadership.
“Talent management in education is the critical issue,” according to Edward E. Lawler III, a University of Southern California business professor who is an expert on human-resources management and organizational effectiveness, and serves on SMHC’s task force. “It is a business where talent makes all the difference.”
—“Human Capital Key Worry for Reformers,” by Lesli A. Maxwell, Education Week, Dec. 3, 2008.
