01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 23, 2006

Paul Freeman is a lucky man. He's the proud principal of East Lyme Middle School in Connecticut, a Blue Ribbon School and a Spotlight School, according to the New England League of Middle Schools.

There's a ton to like about this school, not the least of which is its stunning new building, designed to enhance and support the unusually rich variety of programs in this 1,000-student school. But I found myself envying the building far less than I envied its hiring policy.

Policy is a boring topic until you realize how much bad policies can hamper progress, waste money, encourage mediocrity or worse. While Rhode Island certainly has its share of creative and dynamic individual teachers, for the most part, the policies that govern the getting and maintaining of good teachers tend actually to sabotage our efforts to improve school quality.

Not so at East Lyme.

Freeman says, "I think that what this school does right is build curricula on the Connecticut standards and the CMT [Connecticut Mastery Test]."

Yes, of course, teachers and principals have a responsibility to meet state and district-level academic targets. "But then the teachers are the designers of what goes on in their own classrooms. We care deeply about student outcomes, but we achieve those outcomes with flexibility and creativity. I can't tell you on a given Wednesday, for example, what any teacher in this building is doing. We are not a textbook-based school. Our materials are trade books, primary texts or teacher-generated. To do that, you need really talented teachers."

Most powerful is what Freeman calls "a good, healthy hiring practice." The district advertises for a vacancy at the school. A group -- mainly teachers, but also including parents and students -- does an initial paper screening. The group members come up with a list of prospective teachers whom they call for "snapshot interviews," 15-minute chats, back-to-back during which the hiring team meets a lot of people. The team gets back together and selects the best for a short list.

"Those are the ones," says Freeman, "that we invite to come back and teach a class." This school hires no one who hasn't been observed teaching in a classroom with actual squirmy, distracted, mixed-ability pubescents.

"If we have to hire in the summer, we bribe kids with pizza and soda to come in and be part of an artificial class, so we always see what these teachers do when they get in front of a class. You can spend two hours over coffee and the prospective teacher looks great. But unless you put them in front of kids, you really don't know enough about them. One of the side effects is that the students involved in the hiring -- including kids in the teacher's classroom audition -- have an investment in that teacher. The kids are excited and reach out to them because they want that teacher's success.

"You can know design and pedagogy, but I want to see you laugh with the kids. If you can't laugh, I can't afford to have you on my staff." There. That's how to hire teachers. "As a result, we've got a really creative staff."

"Laughing" has to be one of the most important hiring criteria I've ever heard of. Yes, of course, teachers need excellent content knowledge, but if they can't laugh with the kids, transferring their erudition is going to be an uphill climb.

Furthermore, at East Lyme, the courses are not driven by textbooks. Textbooks are themselves a curriculum. You know what to do next because you turn the page. That same lock-step predictability quickly becomes stifling, not to mention the fact that in science and history, textbooks are often obsolete the day they are printed.

Instead, the East Lyme teachers focus on big questions -- water quality in science, solutions to world conflict in history, the role of hope in literature. Tackling big issues with no objectively right answers is a far more compelling way to engage early adolescents, who are vitally interested in fashioning ideas that feel like their own and not Mom's or even the teacher's. But the preparation for such a class is trickier.

To boot, East Lyme's kids are heterogeneously grouped, so you'll rarely find a whole class of 22 students reading the same material. Teachers collect books and articles on the same topic, but at different reading levels. It's common to have six different novels circulating the same English classroom, offering different details and perspectives to the classroom discussions. In such an environment, a principal has to trust the skills of the teachers and only takes on a supervisory role when a teacher is not getting results.

Freeman says, "I often describe my job as staying out of the teachers' way."

Well, yeah.

I marvel that out of the nearly 1,200 pages of the No Child Left Behind act, they couldn't have made a little room for a paragraph about professional hiring. They could have mandated that the only way to get a teaching job was to apply and be selected on the basis of merit and qualifications for that particular job, just like any other professional -- no more seniority, bumping or job fair. That would have made a much more positive difference to student achievement than spending so much money on testing. In 1993, Massachusetts made the principals responsible for hiring. The good ones delegate much of the screening and selections to committees, as does East Lyme. Let's do that too.

No Child Left Behind does demand that schools be made up of only "highly qualified teachers," which has mainly resulted in endless bureaucratic shell games with credentialing, testing, data collection and little pieces of paper certifying this and that. But no test, credential or paper can credibly tell me if the teacher has a creative spirit or can "laugh with my kids." If we're going to be so outcomes-driven, why can't we give teachers the chance to teach and determine their quality by how they perform. God knows we have enough tests and data to figure out if they moved their kids academically or not.

East Lyme has all sorts of respectful support for teachers, so hiring is not everything. But it is the first, critical step. Rhode Island's legislature should learn from Massachusetts' experience and be done with 1930s factory-labor hiring and seniority practices. Otherwise, Rhode Island has little hope of seeing much of a return on its top-dollar investment in education.

Next week, we'll take a closer look at East Lyme itself.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.