Detroit schools financial manager is requiring 2,600 teachers at 41 schools being reconstituted to re-apply for their jobs—and gave them less than a week to do so.

Teacher Beat is now on the Twitterverse @TeacherBeat...

There are times when you know a story is going to upset a lot of people, such as this one I wrote this week on the cost of paying teachers more for earning master's degrees in education. Read the comments for a taste of the reaction, which ranges from anger (i.e., "The studies that show this are bunk because they're based on test scores"), to defensiveness, (i.e., "I paid for this degree and it made me a better teacher"), to frustration, (i.e., "OK, if ED master's don't correlate to improved student achievement, what does?!"). And it's true ...

The Baltimore Sun has an important story up about a dispute over teachers' pay and working hours in one of its Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools. In essence, the story examines a conflict between local law and the KIPP culture. In Baltimore, teachers in charter schools must belong to the local collective-bargaining unit. KIPP teachers, though they made about 18 percent more than other teachers, were working enough hours that they were eligible for about 33 percent more than their peers under the terms of the district contract. Now, the Baltimore Teachers Union is demanding that the district pony ...

Some interesting staffing changes out there in the many Washington-based teacher organizations. Over at the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which administers the National Board Certification program, former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise (now of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a high school reform organization) will serve as the chairman of the board of directors. According to the release, Wise supported bonus pay for teachers who earn the advanced credential from the National Board, so this appointment makes some sense given that states are scaling back on such bonuses as a result of the financial crisis. And at the ...

Kansas is one of just a handful of states that have begun to create formal standards for "teacher leaders," pathways for such teachers to earn teacher-leader certification, and preparation programs in its teachers' colleges. Now, the state is pioneering another step in the process: a teacher-leader exam. The state will be working with Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service to develop the exam. It envisions using the test as a capstone of its teacher-leader-certification system. No details yet on what the test might look like, but one suspects it will probably take some cues from the performance-based teacher assessments ...

In this clip, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel gives his take on Education Secretary Arne Duncan's teacher-quality address....

from guest blogger Lesli A. Maxwell Leaders at California State University, which trains a whopping 70 percent of the state's teachers, are launching a new effort to prepare their teacher candidates to work in the most challenging school environments. To do that, the ambitiously-named CSU Center to Close the Achievement Gap, has identified nearly 250 high-poverty, high-performing elementary, middle, and high schools around the state that are achieving solid academic results. Some teacher candidates will be placed in those schools for their student teaching experience to see and try firsthand how to deliver instruction and manage classrooms filled with students, ...

Here's a clip from the National Education Association convention of President Dennis Van Roekel talking about what he thinks accounted for the varied reaction to charter schools among the delegates. (See here for details.) A couple of caveats about the video. First, Dennis' office at the RA was behind the stage and the lighting back there was terrible. Second, you'll have to ignore the "mood music"—a musician somewhere in the hall was playing Michael Jackson's "Thriller" on the piano throughout the interview....

If unions are going to be challenged to consider uncomfortable ideas like reforms to teacher evaluation and pay, then Obama and Duncan must make good on their promise to involve unions in any school reforms, the AFT president says.