Secretary of Education outlines reform to nation’s school system

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan testified before congress today on President Obama's education budget for 2011.

Details of the plan, called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, were released last Saturday. The Act requires states to verify that all students are on a path toward "college and career readiness" by the year 2020. It also seeks to make a break from the No Child Left Behind Act, by adopting individualized, rather than broad, measures of student performance. But some teacher unions criticized the plan, saying that it placed too much of a burden on educators without giving them authority.

Today Duncan addressed teacher performance by saying that the plan includes an increase of money for training and incentives for educators. And that teachers would be evaluated on a variety of factors.

"I'm a big believer in peer review and having teachers look at other teachers and how they are doing. No teacher wants to work next door to a teacher that's not pulling their weight. And so there are multiple ways to get at it, through goals through leadership, again if a teacher is volunteering on the yearbook team or the debate team or academic decathlon and there are a series of districts who have put in place very robust, comprehensive evaluation systems that look at many many things beyond just a student's test score. And that's the way it should be. No one should be evaluated by one test, it doesn't make sense."

Duncan also said that the government has previously underinvested in principals and that the plan would recognize the administrators’ contributions to the quality of schools.