State lawmakers to hold education reform informational briefing

HONOLULU—The Senate and House Committees on Education will be holding a joint informational briefing to learn about education reform happening around the country. The committees will also hear recommendations on how to improve Hawaii’s education system.

The informational briefing will be held on Thursday, July 21 at 2:30 p.m. in conference room 309, at the State Capitol.

Dr. Laura Goe, a national expert and researcher on teacher evaluation and education reform, will be the presenting to the committees.

“Teacher evaluation, as a means of supporting our professionals and increasing student achievement, has been a vital component of many of the educational reform discussions locally and nationally,” said Sen. Jill Tokuda, chair of the Senate Committee on Education. “It is our hope that we can learn from Dr. Goe and engage her in discussions as Hawaii continues to move forward in this area.”

Goe completed her undergraduate studies in Language and Learning Theory in Social Context at UC San Diego before going to the Mississippi Delta with Teach for America, where she taught 7th grade special education for three years. She completed her M.S. in Educational Policy and Leadership at the University of Memphis while teaching at-risk middle school students in an urban school, and received her doctorate from UC Berkeley’s Policy, Organizations, Measurement, and Evaluation program. She is currently a Research Scientist in the Performance Research Group at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ, and is Principal Investigator for Research and Dissemination for The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality.

In 2009, she completed a three-year term as co-editor of the AERA Journal: Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. She has served as a visiting scholar to the NEA and advisor on their teacher evaluation work, advises the AFT as a member of their expert panel on teacher evaluation, and serves as a consultant to the AFTs Innovation Grant sites in New York and Rhode Island as they design innovative, comprehensive teacher evaluation systems. She is also advising numerous states, including Delaware and Tennessee, as they design and implement rigorous teacher evaluation systems.

In her five years with The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, she has provided technical assistance to states and regional comprehensive centers and produced numerous research syntheses and policy guides. Her research at Berkeley and at ETS has focused on using both quantitative and qualitative approaches to examine school improvement, the distribution of teachers, formative assessment, and teacher evaluation.