Research has shown that great teachers make a huge difference in the lives of their students. Great teachers help their students learn more, grow more, and blossom as individuals.
World class schools recognize the value of great teachers by carefully hiring the best, helping teachers improve their craft through regular peer and expert feedback, thoughtfully measuring teacher performance, recognizing excellent teachers, and rewarding teachers for the positive outcomes they produce in students.
The same applies to principals and senior leaders in administration. We need to hire great leaders, and provide them the resources to succeed and innovate, hold them accountable to achieve district goals, and recognize and reward them when they do.
For both teachers and administrators, we should adjust our human resource systems and pay practices so that we attract, retain, and reward top educators. This is a critical issue for the district in the next several years, because a significant proportion of our teachers will retire in the next 10 years. If we put in place the right practices, UCF will become the employer of choice for great teachers and administrators, and we will see the results in improved student learning.
Measures of Success: Retention of top teachers, hiring selectivity, and overall teacher quality.
Key Next Steps: Modify human resource practices to enhance our ability to identify, attract, retain, and recognize great teachers.
Bob Sage 
I believe the school board members should have a background in education to be seated on the board. It is nice for one to have verbose, grandiose ideas of education but it you don’t know the craft you can’t draft policy adequately
Interesting point of view, but I think UCF benefits from the different perspectives and experiences of our Board members. The administration runs the schools, and they bring the expertise in education to the table. That’s not the job of the board. Our board members come from diverse professions (two educators, one of which is also an economist, a medical doctor, a couple of corporate executives, an engineer, a policy advisor). Some board members are parents of current students, some are parents of students who graduated, and some who are tax payers without kids in the district at all. I find these different perspectives are quite valuable when addressing school policy — for example, our recently redrafted policy on concussion management greatly benefited from the expertise of our medical doctor. Boards everywhere (corporations, universities, non-profits) all seem to embrace this principle that diverse experience is better than drawing only on expertise from within the industry/segment in which the organization operates.