Editor’s Note: Team Pennsylvania sat down recently to discuss education in Pennsylvania with Acting Education Secretary Ron Tomalis. The interview is another in a series of discussions with Corbett officials who serve on the Foundation’s Board of Directors.
Acting Education Secretary Ron Tomalis at his desk at PDE headquarters in Harrisburg.
Acting Education Secretary Ron Tomalis is approaching his new job not as a state official, but as a parent.
And just like his own daughters who attend public school, he believes every child in Pennsylvania should have the opportunity to receive a quality education.
“When government goes to the parent and says, ‘give us your most precious possession,’ we have a duty, first and foremost, to the student, and second, to the parent, to give them every opportunity for a quality education,” said Tomalis.
He said the governor has many education goals for Pennsylvania’s public school students, but noted there are two top priorities of the administration.
“The governor strongly believes our children can be productive members of our communities by giving them the academic tools they need to be successful in life,” Tomalis said. “And secondly, education is an economic driver. Fifteen years ago we talked about competition among states; now we talk about competition among nations. So, the prosperity of Pennsylvania is directly linked to our ability to deliver high-quality educational opportunities to our children.”
Tomalis said the single most important factor in raising achievement is to ensure students are being taught by effective teachers since most people in education agree that the biggest predictor is teacher performance.
He said he is interested in the specifics that will come out of the Team PA Teacher/Principal Evaluation pilot program currently being tested in several districts across the commonwealth. He added that he is happy to see that initiative, which is being funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is moving forward well. (Read more on Team PA’s initiative here.)
Tomalis noted Pennsylvania is overdue for a program that accurately pinpoints teacher and principal effectiveness and added the model that eventually will be adopted by the state must achieve numerous goals.
“I want it to be an honest and robust system that is driven by student achievement and data that shows how well a student is doing,” he said. “But that can’t be the sole indicator, to be fair to our teachers, because there are a lot of things that go into the profile of what makes a great teacher.”
For that reason, the evaluation system must utilize multiple measures of teacher and principal effectiveness, according to Tomalis.
“The system should demonstrate usefulness for building level management and district level personnel and enough credibility to be useful across buildings and across districts so we have statewide information that helps drive the discussion (about teacher/principal performance),” he said.
Another goal is to make test score data readily available to parents and taxpayers so objective information is easy to access. Schools would be given a grade based on numerous indicators including increasing student performance.
Tomalis knows the challenges in accessing school performance data first-hand as he plans to move his family back to Pennsylvania at the end of the current school year.
“Do you know how frustrating it is to find data on schools?” Tomalis asked. “It’s hard and it shouldn’t be that way. We should be very proud of schools that perform well and we should also recognize that certain schools have greater challenges than others. That is why the governor wants to implement a school grading system so parents and taxpayers can know how well schools are doing.”
Recognizing that a competitive workforce must include an ongoing pipeline of workers with college degrees, Tomalis expressed concern that many high school graduates are not immediately able to enter credit-bearing courses once they are admitted to college.
“A four-year degree is not a four-year degree anymore,” said Tomalis. “The first-thing many students need to do is pay for a math course for non-credit while paying tuition, room and board.”
On the subject of school choice, the administration supports it and Tomalis added this would include expanding charter schools around the commonwealth.
“Given the rich diversity of opportunities available to students, we want to expand the number of charter schools in the commonwealth even further,” Tomalis said. “But we also must make sure those charter schools are high-quality schools, so we want to examine the authorization methods that are already in place.”
On the flip side of quality schools are those that underachieve, which Tomalis said is an issue the administration must address.
“There is something fundamentally troubling when a government official goes to a parent and says, ‘we know there are problems in that school and that that school may be failing to do the job, but we want you to send your child there nonetheless’,” Tomalis said. “We wouldn’t tolerate that if it were a restaurant, we wouldn’t tolerate that if it were a hospital, we wouldn’t tolerate that if it were rides at an amusement park. But why do we tolerate it – and indeed promote it – in education? That is something I have never been able to put my arms around.”
Tomalis said this can be frustrating for parents who want their children to excel, but keep getting repeatedly told their school is “attempting to turn itself around.”
“That mom has probably been told two or three times about a five-year plan to turn that school around,” Tomalis said. “I appreciate the fact that our superintendents and school administrators are working very hard to turn those schools around, but that 5th grade girl is only a 5th grade girl once. I am not sure, if I were her parent or if I were in her shoes, that I would have the patience to wait for the five-year plan to be put into effect.”
Tomalis said the governor wants to help troubled schools and added the administration will review state and federal initiatives and funding already in place to promote turn-around strategies to aid those that are failing.
Given the state budget deficit of $4 billion, Pennsylvania will need to work toward its goals with less funding.
“We have to be very cautious about our budgets,” Tomalis said. “I tell people who come to this office that they should take a look at their budget, budget conservatively, and go back and look at it a second time with an even more conservative lens. There are a lot of ways to drive student achievement other than money.”
Tomalis said the state needs to treat differently those exceptional teachers whose students “make the grade” – especially despite the many obstacles they face on a daily basis.
“We have a lot of great teachers in this system,” Tomalis said. “It is hard work, they’re there for all the right reasons and, in too many cases, they succeed in spite of the system and not because of the system.”
Tomalis said the same is true for school administrators.
“There are principals who have dynamic leadership and forward-thinking superintendents who don’t get bogged down in the reasons why things shouldn’t happen, they find reasons to make things happen,” Tomalis said, “and we need to treat those people differently and in a way that recognizes that they are exceptional. ”
Tomalis said the current teacher compensation and job protection systems are archaic and added there will be robust discussions on those two subjects within the Corbett administration.
As far as the future of education in Pennsylvania and across the nation, Tomalis said there is a paradigm shift occurring.
“I think the challenge the public education system is going to have is how to address the expectation of the new parent with a delivery model that is based on past generations – and I think we are going to have a big clash (between those two ideologies),” Tomalis said. “As a public educator, I want to make sure we are ahead of the curve and that we provide greater opportunities for students and their parents. If we get in a reactionary mode that says, ‘this is how we have always done things,’ then I think there will be even greater and greater discontent for our public education system.”
When asked what the business community can do to further the education of Pennsylvania’s children, Tomalis encouraged business leaders to become very engaged in education initiatives since there is no better economic policy than one that produces more graduates with the skills they need to succeed.
