Their letter to President Obama is less than three pages long, but their message is very clear: when it comes to education reform, these senators are ready for action.

Ten members of the Moderate Democrats Working Group in the United States Senate pledged their support for President Obama’s reform agenda, and conveyed a sense of urgency in the need to address our nation’s achievement gap, solve our dropout crisis, and ultimately secure the future of our global economic leadership.

Specifically, they propose to take action on the following four key reform proposals:

1.Teacher Quality. My personal favorite, and where I always place my school reform bet, is on teacher quality. Excellent teachers have the most potential to directly impact the quality of education happening in our nation’s classrooms. Apparently, these 10 senators agree. They call for the Teacher Incentive Fund to be used to encourage states to find new ways to recruit, prepare and reward excellent teachers, and especially to tie teacher compensation to student outcomes.

It’s a tricky business this pay for performance idea, especially when you get down to the nitty gritty details. (What’s a fair and accurate way to evaluate teacher performance? How many different levels of pay do you have? Do you ignore years of service?) Not that I’m against it, but when I think of improving teacher quality, overhauling compensation methods isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. How about improving teacher training and professional development programs? Forming instructional leadership teams?  Peer review?  And isn’t it time to reevaluate our current definition of tenure? (Great recommendations on that subject here.)

2. Charter Schools. The senators affirm their support for expanding the number of successful charter schools, while emphasizing the need for oversight and shutting down ineffective ones.

Nothing new here—that’s exactly what Education Secretary Arne Duncan has recently pledged to encourage states to do using stimulus dollars as an incentive.  (I’m surprised the letter makes no mention of the $5 billion fund that President Obama will use to shut down 5,000 failing public schools in the next 10 years and reopen newly transformed ones.)

3. Extended school calendar. Looks like the senators want to put an end to “the summer slide” where students lose skills over the summer while their counterparts in China, who spend an extra 40 days per year in school, gain them.

While I know that giving kids more time in school is a popular reform strategy often used by charter schools (successfully) to help students catch up and bridge the achievement gap, I don’t think an extended year should be implemented as a blanket policy across all public schools in all states and districts, but rather on an as needed basis. (More on that here.)

4. Data! Data! Data! The letter calls for school reform to be driven by accurate education data, which is to be culled from state-of-the-art data collection systems. Specifically, the senators write:

Our goal is to achieve the capacity to view, with the click of a button, the path every child has taken through their academic life, linking their achievements and setbacks to every school and classroom they pass through.

Wow! That’s a lot of data. I just wonder if it’s all really necessary. Do any other countries with successful education systems do this? Assessment of student achievement is clearly necessary, and I’m all for coming up with new and more sophisticated methods. (Especially more authentic forms of assessment that go beyond skimming-the-surface standardized tests  and actually help improve learning.) But what will all this (presumably expensive) data collection show? Who the most successful schools and teachers are? Which students need the most help? I’ll bet most administrators can already answer those questions without having to pour over all that extra data. And as far as improving our public education system goes, I don’t see how collecting more data is going to result in better education outcomes for students.

Conspicuously absent in the letter was any mention of early childhood education, national standards, or affordable higher education—all of which are part of President Obama’s broader school reform agenda.

This group of senators could prove to be an important voting block as President Obama’s reform agenda progresses towards becoming legislation, and the No Child Left Behind Act is reauthorized. (Am I still allowed to call it that? Maybe not.)

Going forward, it will be interesting to see which reforms get passed during this administration, which do not, and what the trickle-down impact will be on the actual quality of teaching and learning going on in classrooms across the country.

(Photo: Image Editor’s flickr photostream/Creative Commons)