In schools and districts that use the Miller Guidance System, teachers are catalysts of change in the collaborative grade level team process.

Foundational policy, procedure and infrastructure decisions are made by district administrators and are communicated throughout the system. Principals facilitate the communication and individualization of district decisions at the building level through their school leadership team. The district creates a blueprint and schools make it their own by filling in details. But teachers are the direct link to student learning.  Just as the district decisions flow down, so does teacher feedback flow up! Changes are made to the system based on feedback from teachers. 

The backbone of the Miller Guidance System is professional development. At all levels, teachers, administrators and support staffs think critically about the information before them. They form hypotheses and agree to act upon the hypotheses. The work of planning instruction is done with grade level teachers so that all children at a grade level are guaranteed an instructional program aligned to college and career ready standards. Clive Coleman in his 2005 dissertation at the University of New Orleans referred to this as “profound teamwork”.  As teachers work in this system they become aware of gaps in their own knowledge and skills and request professional development through the principal and school leadership team.  This is arranged at the building level by the principal who is able to directly allocate funds. Teachers are in charge of their own learning and as a result of their proximity to student learning serve an important role in determining district actions and resource allocation

Now to the point—teacher leadership is not only an option but a necessity. Listed below are a few examples:

• Providing feedback to district leadership on needed adjustments to the infrastructure, policies or procedures
• Serving on the school leadership team to finalize building specific processes
• Encouraging collaborative discussion and action at the grade level specific teams (Grade levels that lack a teacher leader are dysfunctional in the Miller Guidance System since principals facilitate but teachers must decide the actions to take.)
• Assuming an additional role on the grade level team
• Working with grade level colleagues to ensure that actions are carried out with integrity
• Volunteering to provide professional learning opportunities to colleagues (site visits, observations, modeling, presentations, etc.)

There are numerous paradigms that shift as a system such as this is implemented. Clear, committed leadership at all levels is required. The result is empowered teachers and improved student learning.

Source: Teacher's Perceptions of Administrative Leadership Styles and Schools as Professional Learning Communities ( http://scholarworks.uno.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1290&context=td )

I will not restate this research. 

As I have worked to define how school reform can be integrated into existing public schools, I realized that a core issue is the absense of a mentality of continuous study for the improvement of student learning is absent from many schools.  Instruction is delivered passively 

Authors have pointed out the profound effect that poverty has on student performance (Cody, 2012), and argue that the emphasis of school reform should be on relieving the pressures that children living in poverty experience daily.

While programs to address poverty need to be part of a district's strategic plan, relatively speaking, these are not the factors that educators have the greatest ability to change. Poverty and related stressors are important and deserve serious attention. I would argue that a highly effective education system is equally important to students living in poverty and an equal contributor to their academic performance.

Is it possible to do a good job of addressing poverty related influences and a great job of creating highly effective education systems?

Yes it is. The next question then is, "What are the factors that contribute to a highly effective education system?" Research on student performance has reinforced the widely known conclusion that the quality of the teacher is the single most influential factor in increasing student achievement (Darling-Hammond & Youngs, 2002). The quality of the teacher is the primary factor but not the only factor.

Much has been written about the importance of district and school leadership, of school cultures based on "doing what it takes," targeted collaboration time for educators, assessment literacy and data based decision making. Yet, these key elements can make a teachers job relatively easy or extremely challenging.

Can a good teacher produce results in a dysfunctional system? Yes, absolutely, sometimes. Do the results of a teacher evaluation conducted in a dysfunctional system accurately reflect a teachers' ability to create student growth? Or instead, does this evaluation simply measure her ability to impact student growth in a dysfunctional system that often pulls her in various, unrelated directions?

When a system has routines, policies and processes that equip teachers to manage the academic growth of their students, then teacher evaluation systems will naturally present themselves. First things first.

What follows is a broad overview of a unifying system that includes the routines, policies and processes that empower teachers to manage the academic growth of all of their students. Public educators have the most control over curriculum, what we teach, instruction, how we teach it, and environment, the conditions under which it is taught. These three factors are the most powerful tools teachers possess. They are also the foundation for action research.

Action research is rooted in the concerns of practitioners in real-world settings and in disciplined self-evaluation and reflection.

Here's how it works. In a very organized system of practice with specific routines, policies and processes, instructional programs are designed by systematically manipulating factors. Multiple data sources are used to form hypotheses about the factors contributing to student achievement. Instructional responses are matched to these factors because they are likely to produce growth. The factors that are most frequently manipulated are those within the areas listed above, curriculum, instruction and environment. However, instructional programs sometimes need to include secondary components designed to minimize the influence of other factors. This process of hypothesis testing is conducted with students who possess strong, average, or deficient academic and behavioral skills.

Next, student performance and the integrity of implementation are closely monitored. When sufficient data has been collected, the results are analyzed and are used to determine whether adequate progress has been made. Rules for judging "adequate progress" must be in place and be based on technically sound assumptions. Instructional programs are either found to benefit the student (i.e. the hypothesis is confirmed) and are continued, or are modified according to a new hypothesis.

To create the unifying system described above, there are numerous critical decisions that must be made, unilaterally agreed upon and clearly communicated. A supportive infrastructure that includes the necessary tools and training must precede implementation of the system.

The creation of this type of unifying system is without doubt hard work that challenges the beliefs and commitment of professional educators. The benefits of commiting to this process are empowered teachers who confidently manage the needs of all students.

Now it is time to talk about teacher evaluation.

Source: Dialogue with the Gates Foundation: Can Schools Defeat Poverty By Ignoring It? (http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/can_schools_defeat.html) by Anthony Cody
Source: Defining "Highly Qualified Teachers": What Does"Scientifically Research Based" Really Tell Us? (http://www.doi.org/) by Linda Darling-Hammond & P. Youngs