Over at NCLB: Act II, my colleague David Hoff makes a great point about the new Century Foundation volume on reforming NCLB. With all the focus on accountability, there's not much discussion of the law's teacher-quality provisions, he writes. And they are important: NCLB was the first version of ESEA to set a minimum teacher-qualification standard for poor schools. Here's a list of what will likely be the big teacher issues to be hammered out in the NCLB reauthorization. 1. The "Highly Qualified" Designation: Most teachers are now highly qualified. However, there was a brief controversy in 2006 when the ...

So John McCain wants to cut back on teacher-certification standards. And then he wants to weed out the bad teachers. Here's his quote from last night's debate: "We need to encourage programs such as Teach For America and Troops to Teachers where people, after having served in the military, can go right to teaching and not have to take these examinations which — or have the certification that some are required in some states." At another point he said, "We need to find bad teachers another line of work." So what he's saying is that we admit anyone without checks and...

I went to a roundtable discussion last week on performance-pay programs hosted by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. In attendance were representatives from a variety of programs, including several of the Teacher Incentive Fund grants. The attendees brought up a number of interesting challenges they face as they implement their programs. I've listed several of the key themes below. 1. Transitions. Mark Bounds, the teacher-quality leader for South Carolina, noted that a new pay structure can be hard to swallow for teachers who have put in 20 or 30 years under an old system. The systems must allow for some ...

An Associated Press story this week said the Tucson school district has launched a $550,000 effort to recruit more minority teachers with the hope of diversifying its staff and giving minority students a better chance of seeing themselves as part of the education system. Not surprisingly, the move is spurred by the fact that the district sees a disconnect between the numbers of teachers belonging to racial and ethnic minority groups and students from these groups. Districts have for decades worried about the difficulties of attracting minority teachers, and some have launched aggressive efforts to do so. Many observers ...

A teachers' association that calls itself nonpartisan says it is organizing thousands of teachers to march to the nation's capital this Saturday to protest "teacher abuse" by administrators. Myra Sawyers, who heads the Virginia-based Educators for Progressive Instructional Change, says that teachers are tired of being "not respected and the poor compensation." With the elections around the corner, this appeared to be a good time to draw attention to the topic, she said. "Teachers are being harassed, demeaned, and they are never given serious attention because the powers-that-be shut them down," she said. Now while none of those sound like ...

It seemed inevitable that these tough economic times would eventually affect teachers in cash-strapped school districts. Now comes news that the Dallas school district, facing an $84 million shortfall this fiscal year, has decided to lay off nearly 1,100 employees, including about 550 teachers. More than 400 of the lost jobs, according to the Associated Press, include teachers in the core-subject areas of mathematics, science, social studies, and English. An additional 500 employees—such as teacher aides, hall monitors, and clerks—will also be cut. Superintendent Michael Hinojosa has promised a "deliberate and thoughtful" process in determining which teachers ...

New York City teachers have taken to federal court their fight against a school district policy that bans teachers from wearing campaign pins in schools, saying it violates their rights to free speech and political expression. The United Federation of Teachers today filed the complaint in U.S. District Court in Manhattan seeking a temporary restraining order against the policy, which, according to the UFT, has been on the books but has not been followed for decades. But on Oct. 1, city schools Chancellor Joel Klein asked principals in an e-mail to enforce it. UFT President Randi Weingarten told reporters ...

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is not too happy about a recent New York Times article on D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee's proposed performance-pay plan for teachers, which she says falls way short of a merit-pay plan Weingarten signed off on in New York City earlier this year. In a letter to the newspaper that appeared this morning, Weingarten, who also heads the United Federation of Teachers in New York, says the plan "that you applaud is one that Chancellor Rhee intends to impose upon teachers, not one that she hopes to develop with teachers." Rhee's plan, she ...

Eduwonkette has an interesting post up about the dismissal of a popular Wilson High School teacher. She suggests that this situation shows the weakness in D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee's strategy to permit principals more say over the hiring, firing, and remediation of teachers. If principals can't be trusted to make evaluative decisions about teachers, or if those decisions are too subjective, then what should these evaluations be based on? Teachers have some real concerns with supposedly objective measures of their performance, too. For good reason: Researchers are still trying to figure out the best methodologies for using standardized ...

It's a frequent complaint by Washington policy types: Too little is known about local collective bargaining processes and local media don't pay enough attention to negotations until contracts are finalized. In Philadelphia, students are protesting in an attempt to bring attention to the contract's effects on teacher distribution, according to this story. The students say the district and union are not paying enough attention to equitably distributing "highly qualified," experienced teachers across the district. "I've seen students cut class and come to my classroom to avoid bad teachers," the Philadelphia Inquirer article quotes one student as saying. "The system of ...