This fall, Brevard Public Schools in Florida will join a handful of other districts nationwide that have adopted peer reviews as part of their teacher evaluation system. The change comes after Florida approved a bill this past spring that did away with tenure for new teachers, and requires 50 percen...
These days it seems like every politician and pundit has a strong opinion about how to improve the teaching profession. But, in a piece for Time, Andrew J. Rotherham points to some recent research to show that we're actually a long way off from easy or one-size-fits-all solutions: [T]he reality is...
While the Flip cam may be on its way out, a new kind of camera is debuting in classrooms, according to California Watch, an investigative reporting news site. Teachscape Reflect is a panoramic camera that takes 360-degree video images of a classroom. It was invented by Teachscape, a San Francisco-ba...
Amid the ongoing debates over collective bargaining and the power of unions, teachers were (yet again) a focus of major newspaper op-ed pages yesterday: In the New York Times, columnist Nicholas Kristof (apparently taking a breather from the revolutions in the Mideast), blasted the "pernicious f...
Michael Winerip at The New York Times has a detailed yet intelligible explanation of the failures of the value-added assessment model. He uses a persuasive example: Stacey Isaacson, a University of Pennsylvania and Columbia-educated third-year teacher who works 10 ½ hour school days and gets rave...
In an op-ed published in the Washington Post this morning—and addressed to the nation's governors, who are gathering in D.C. this week for their annual meeting—Bill Gates points to the impact that excellent teachers have on student achievement and argues that tight education budgets would ...
On Feb. 7, a Washington, D.C., arbitrator ruled that 75 public school teachers with probationary status were wrongly terminated under former school chancellor Michelle Rhee in 2008 and should be reinstated, reports The Washington Post. According to the ruling by Charles Feigenbaum, "The glaring and...
Two months after AFT President Randi Weingarten commented that education can learn a lesson about performance evaluations from National Football League teams, Eduwonk Andrew Rotherham checks in with a couple of experts on the validity of the comparison. In a piece on Time.com, Rotherham interviews T...
Several weeks ago, we reported on a wonkish panel discussion in D.C. in which Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in proping up the performance pay idea, lamented that school systems currently treat teachers like "interchangeble widgets."
In an Op-Ed in the Washington Post, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan highlights several areas where Democrat and Republican lawmakers should be able to agree when it comes to revamping the No Child Left Behind Act.
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