Postings have been a bit lean these days as I focus on a larger project about teachers’ professional development. But my able colleagues have a lot of really important teacher news covered this week. Make sure to check them out.
At Curriculum Matters, Erik Robelen reports on the Obama administration’s goal of bringing 10,000 new teacher candidates into the profession to instruct in the science, technology, engineering and math fields, while Politics K-12’s Alyson Klein writes about the U.S. Department of Education’s larger teacher-recruitment initiative.
Our new research reporter (and my longtime colleague) Sarah Sparks has really hit the ground running with a ton of great items at Inside School Research. One of her latest is this analysis of a proposed tweak to the Teacher Incentive Fund performance-pay competition. It turns out, she reports, that the Education Department had a lot of problems getting folks to apply to be in the voluntary evaluation sub-competition. Read her item to figure out how it’s proposing to solve the problem.
Sean Cavanagh reports on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s education plans, which include establishing a new commission that will make recommendations on teacher effectiveness issues. Among other things, the governor wants at least half of teacher tenure and promotion decisions to be based on student academic growth.