Rider Model May Help K-12 Teachers

Education is on the front burner, as New Jersey struggles to make tough choices with budgets, and helping our kids.

On Friday, leaders from all over the country gathered at Rider University in Lawrenceville for an education summit.

The focus was on improving teacher and student performance, an issue that states are trying to tackle this issue and fast.

While the best minds came in to discuss this topic, it turns out the host university has a really innovative plan already in place that could be a great model for others to follow.

Study after study shows, it all comes down to teachers and good teachers are the key to students learning.

So how can we evaluate our teachers?

The goal is to reward good teachers, mentor and help struggling teachers, and gracefully show the door to failing teachers.

Rider has created a model at the college level that could revolutionize k-12.

Education dean Sharon Sherman showed Fox 29 her brainchild- a new online assessment system Rider launched just launched a year and half ago.

They've got measures for every subject, every class, students upload work, where it's evaluated against recognized standards, and professors can be evaluated by how their students perform.

It is performance based, and she says, it's working.

Starting students in college with this kind of system will make it an easier transition when these kinds of performance models are rolled out at the state level.

It'll be the expectation, not the exception, for the teachers of tomorrow.

Of course this is at the college level, but the point of the conference was coming up with ways of creating systems like this in primary and secondary education.