Bartholomew Sullivan - The Commercial Appeal -

WASHINGTON — Sherwood Middle School special education teacher Charles Seaton told a U.S. Senate panel reviewing the No Child Left Behind program today that Memphis is setting higher standards by constantly evaluating “what we want to accomplish.”

Seaton, a Clarksdale, Miss., native who came to teaching after years in the military, with the Boy Scouts and in juvenile justice, was one of nine witnesses at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee roundtable discussion of what’s good and what needs improvement in NCLB.

“In the military, you inspect what you expect … so evaluation will cause us to look at how we want to accomplish what we want to accomplish,” said Seaton, who was introduced to the committee by Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. “We’re willing to change and update our strategy on a regular basis.”

The committee passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, overhauling NCLB, last month on a 15-7 vote. It may be subject to floor amendments and the discussion today was intended to fine-tune any such measures.

Seaton, who has been with the Memphis City Schools for four years, said the law should look at the top 5 percent of schools as well as the lowest 5 percent, which he called “dropout factories.”

Much of the discussion today dealt with teacher and principal evaluations and the difficulty in getting them right. Terry Grier, superintendent of the Houston, Texas, Independent School District, the nation’s seventh largest, said his system retained 92 percent of its high-performing teachers last year while replacing 55 percent of the lowest-performing.

Grier said 2,500 teachers were involved in developing the evaluation, which makes student performance less than 50 percent of what’s taken into consideration and focuses on pedagogy and classroom management.

“Teachers know who the good teachers are,” he said.

Pam Geisselhardt, the Gifted and Talented coordinator for the Adair County, Ky., public schools, said teachers actually want to be evaluated “because teachers want to improve.” But she said the evaluation process should avoid “anything that starts a competition between teachers.”

Geisselhardt also said too much time is wasted practicing to take tests. “There’s so much time focused on testing, testing, testing, that we have no time to teach,” she said.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said much of what’s at issue with NCLB is philosophical and deals with the role of the federal government in local schools. He said the standing-room-only crowd in the large Dirksen hearing room was a testament to how important it is.

But Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said the federal government has been involved in education policy since passage of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance and more recently with the 1958 National Defense Education Act. Hess said his concern was that the law would produce more regulation and case law, and not local innovation.

Several witnesses talked about alternative assessment standards for students not working at grade level. Elmer Thomas, Kentucky’s Principal of the Year, said limiting alternative assessments to just one percent of school populations appeared arbitrary.

After the hearing, Seaton, who had never before testified before a congressional committee, said he hoped he communicated to the panel that “accountability is important but we need the funds that go with the oversight.”

“And the teacher evaluation is going to be the genesis of moving to the next level as far as raising student achievement and closing the achievement gaps,” he said.

When he gets back to Memphis, he knows what he wants to tell his students.

“I’m going to make sure they understand how important it is to be able to articulate your thoughts and your feelings both verbally and written,” he said, “and how important it is to be a reader, to make sure that you’re abreast of not only what’s going on locally but what’s going on nationally.”