The Policy Innovators in Education Network brings together leading national policy thinkers with leading state-based education advocacy organizations (EAOs) working to advance education reforms in their respective states. PIE Network members are nonpartisan in ideas and bipartisan in approach, providing a consistent, evidence-based, and credible public voice in the cauldron of education policy-making. They share some common characteristics and play unique roles in their states.
While members of the PIE Network may not always agree on issues unique to their states, they share a common commitment to core policy goals that define education reform. They know there are no “silver bullets” for improving schools; that comprehensive policy solutions are needed to reorient public schools for success and prepare students for their futures. They recognize the valuable synergy between reforms that target system-level change via clear goals, performance measures, and institutional improvement strategies and reforms that create alternatives, build pressure and encourage innovation.
Network Commitments and Objectives
Network members work to advance and defend the following policy goals at the state level, dedicating their resources to advancing at least a few of these issues each year and protecting policy gains already made.
All are committed to pursuing and protecting state-level policies that:
Close achievement gaps and help all students graduate from high school world-ready.
Advancing college and career-ready standards that are at least as rigorous as the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
Accurately assessing performance of students, educators and schools (including sub-sets of students within a school)
Increase teacher effectiveness and school accountability.
Modernize policies for recruiting, compensating, retaining and rewarding, and evaluating teachers and principals.
Press for more equitable distribution of talent and instructional resources.
Remove barriers that keep talented people out of the classroom and get talented teachers and principals where they are needed most.
Restructure incentives to encourage and reward excellence in teaching and leadership.
Simplify credentialing—including “alternate” routes into the classroom and principal’s office—and relate it to proven indicators of effectiveness.
Strengthen accountability for schools of education by ensuring that theirurgency to improve low-performing schools and school districts. graduates are truly prepared to help all students acquire the requisite knowledge and skills.
Develop powerful accountability systems that include students, teachers, schools, districts, and states.
Press for transparent systems of data and public reporting that enable comparisons of schools and classrooms.
Ensure that responsible agencies at the state, district, and school level take action to address clear patterns of low performance.
Press for consistent use of evidence and proven methods in resource acquisition and distribution and in making judgments about performance.
Remove barriers that prevent intervention in cases of non-performance of individuals, schools, and districts.
Create urgency to improve low-performing schools and school districts.
Advance policies that replace leadership and staff at chronically underperforming schools.
Push for dramatic reinvention of schools by reallocating resources to extend learning time, identify and reward performance; develop promising talent, and remove persistently poor performers.
Increase the autonomy of site leaders to organize and manage their schools for effectiveness.
Refocus or close schools with a long history of low performance, including restarting such schools under new management such as CMO’s.
Modernize operating systems using technology and data to improve results.
Advance and protect quality charter schools and other options for parent choice.
Ensuring that both halves of the “operational freedom in return for academic results” charter-school bargain are fulfilled.
Increasing the supply of quality schools, especially in underserved communities.
Promoting lessons learned from the successes and challenges of charter school policies.
Ensuring sufficient data and transparency for parents to make sound judgments about school performance and wise choices among schools.
Taking firm action to repair or close poorly-performing charters
Fostering other promising forms of education delivery (including quality virtual and “hybrid” options) and school choice.
Improve transparency, equity, and productivity of educational funding systems.
- Ensuring that education resources align with goals and improvement needs
Funding students, not programs or institutions, via need-weighted and portable student-based funding that ensures transparency, equity, and accountability.
Trimming unproductive or low-priority education spending in favor of improved efficiency, effectiveness and productivity.
Ensuring that local leaders have adequate resource flexibility to determine the mix of resources needed to get the job done.
