Department of Education Director: 'I have some things to prove here.”

DES MOINES - Jason Glass was about six months into a new job as an education consultant in Ohio when he got a call asking him if he would be interested in shaping the future of public education in Iowa.

Glass had been gaining some attention in education circles for spearheading a teacher pay-for-performance system in Colorado and for his success in getting federal grant dollars.

But the phone call caught him completely off guard.

“I'm as surprised to be here as most people are to see me,” says Glass, who interviewed, was offered and took the $140,000-a-year job as Department of Education director. “I came out of nowhere; I'm the black sheep. So, I have some things to prove here.”

Shortly after his appointment, the Christian Science Monitor put the 39-year-old Glass in the top spot on its list, “Education reform: eight school chiefs to watch in 2011.” It's a bipartisan mix of education leaders from across the country who have promised to reform public school systems.

But Glass bristles at the label “education reformer” because, he says, too often those are code words for someone with a plan to build charter schools and pass out pink slips to teachers.

“I don't think that's the complete solution,” Glass says. “To really transform public education, you have to have a much more ambitious view than ‘charter schools are the answer' and ‘firing people is the answer.'”

Pay for performance

Glass made his name known during his tenure at the Eagle County School District, which serves an area in Colorado that includes the ski resort town of Vail. The school board had adopted a pay-for-performance model for teachers before he arrived in 2007, but acceptance of the program wasn't going well.

“What Jason did was help people understand (the model) and developed it further,” says Connie Kincaid-Strahan, who was president of the Eagle County Board of Education during Glass's four years there, just more than three of which he served as head of human resources. “He was very good at working with everybody to make sure they were all involved.”

Todd Huck, who was president of the Eagle County teachers union at the time, also speaks highly of Glass and his ability to bring people together. Huck also is a fan of the pay model in Eagle County Schools that eliminates pay raises based on years of service and education background, or, as they are commonly referred to, steps and lanes.

“That's a system whose time has come,” Huck says. “I'm not surprised that Jason is where he is now; he was one of those people who you knew was going places.”

Gov. Terry Branstad first heard of Glass through Jim Guthrie, director of education policy studies at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas, Branstad spokesman Tim Albrecht said. The institute is a policy think tank that lists education reform among its top issues.

“I brought Jason here because he has a reputation as a reformer,” Branstad told the Iowa Board of Education members Thursday during a visit where the board outlined its education priorities for the governor. “He is the type of leader who can bring people to consensus.”

Glass says the key to the district getting everyone on board with the new pay plan in Colorado was simple: He got everyone on board.

“We did it by sharing power with the union … The fear in performance-based compensation is the administration will use pay as a way to retaliate or be punitive against employees,” Glass says. “The way you have to navigate that is you have to involve (teachers) in the development of the system. Our system used evaluation as a major factor in how your pay was determined, and we used teachers in the evaluation process.”

Three goals

Glass said there are three priorities he hopes will mark his tenure in Iowa:

• He wants to continue merging the Iowa core standards to the national core standards.

• He wants to work on what he calls “human capital systems,” which is a catch-all phrase for how teachers and administrators are trained, hired, supported, paid and dismissed.

• “Third one, the most difficult one, is how we get off the industrial education model, this assembly line,” he says. “We're trying to make kids fit the school, we need to try to make schools fit the kid.”

This is where charter schools, home schooling, virtual schools and other nontraditional education models would be introduced, like a competency-based education model that forgoes traditional letter grades.

“If you have a kid who is a sophomore in high school who says, ‘I can show you I can do the math, I can show you I can master the core competency. I want to start a business.' Then let's help a kid start a business, get a business teacher, get a business license and start business in a business incubator program right in the school,” he says.

Asked for their impressions of the new education director, officials at the Iowa State Education Association would send an email through public relations director Jean Hessburg that said only, “We look forward to working with Mr. Glass.”

The formality of the response didn't surprise Glass, who nonetheless insists that he needs the union to move forward with reform efforts.

It's an approach he says goes back to his upbringing in rural Brandenburg, Ky., where he was raised by a father who was a science teacher-turned-principal and a mother who was a home economics teacher.

Glass went to the University of Kentucky and worked as a social studies teacher before moving on as a research assistant at the Colorado Department of Education for four years before he went to Eagle County.

When he got the call from Iowa, he was working for Battelle for Kids in Columbus, Ohio, trying to help districts in Tennessee and Ohio come up with successful, nontraditional education models so they could get federal Race to the Top grant funds.

He's a technophile who is rarely spotted without his iPad on which he keeps talking points, policy briefs and who knows what else. He's a serial Twitter user, keeps a LinkedIn page, runs his own WordPress blog and has been known to engage in online debates with newspaper story commenters.

Glass has two master's degrees and is pursuing his doctorate in education through Seton Hall University in New Jersey. His thesis topic is “Teacher Motivation: Are teachers motivated to help kids or are teachers motivated for money?”

“The answer is ‘yes,' ” he says. “Teachers are primarily motivated to help kids, but teachers also respond to financial incentives.”

Low profile

But for all his ideas, the new director has kept a fairly low public profile considering he's expected to change public education in Iowa.

He has been at a few news conferences with the governor - most notably when Gov. Terry Branstad unveiled his pay-to-participate preschool program - and he makes time each month to visit school districts in the state.

But there has been a lot of work behind the scenes. He regularly meets with Brandstad and Branstad's special assistant for education, former Des Moines Register editorial page editor Linda Fandel.

And he's had his hand in some legislative initiatives.

“We met with (Glass) to discuss the charter school bill,” says Rep. Greg Forristall, R-Macedonia, chairman of the House education committee. “He gave us some advice on the legislation and advice on how to present it.”

The bill changed some language in the statute that allows charter schools. Proponents say it will allow more innovative approaches for charters while opponents say it makes the rules too flexible. The bill passed the Republican-controlled House but has not made it to the Senate floor, and it's unlikely it will move this legislative session.

Rep. Nate Willems, D-Lisbon, the ranking Democrat on the education committee, says his meetings with the new director haven't been as in-depth.

“I hope he's able to speak his mind, instead of having to toe the line that seems to be developing here with cutting funding for preschool and zero (allowable) growth,” Willems says. “We'll have to see.”

Glass says he hopes to incorporate the three priorities he's outlined into a piece of education reform legislation that will move sometime in the near future. It almost certainly will come after this July's Iowa Education Summit when Branstad and Lt. Kim Reynolds host U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan during a two-day symposium.

“Maybe it will be during the next legislative session, or it could be during a special session called just to focus on education. Right now, I'm still meeting with people and listening to ideas,” Glass says. “One thing I want people to know about me is I'm not trying to dismantle public schools. I love public schools, and I believe in public education, but I also know that it's got to change.”