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Detroit teachers could go out on strike this fall as the result of a new contract imposed on the union Sunday by Detroit Public Schools Emergency Manager Roy Roberts. Although contracts are usually negotiated between DPS and the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT), the emergency manager law, Public Act 4, allows Roberts to bypass the collective bargaining process, unilaterally determining the terms of employment for DPS teachers. The union's previous contract expired at the end of June. Roberts is waiting for DFT to inform its membership before he makes details of the new contract public.

"On Monday, the city's 4,700 union members are scheduled to vote on the contract. Both sides say they cannot predict the outcome, but either way, what happens here will echo among teachers' unions across the country. If the contract is approved, it could prompt other districts to push for pay-for-performance, by suggesting that merit pay is no longer so symbolic a fight among the rank and file. Newark's deal itself was prompted by recent changes to the state's tenure laws that were once considered unthinkable. And both sides insist that this deal could be a model for union-management collaboration, giving teachers a voice they have often felt was denied in reform. If it fails, beleaguered union leaders could take it as a new sign of strength in contract negotiations - similar, some teachers said, to the example of the Chicago teachers' strike last month."

A company run by a former city schools boss is in line for a nearly $10 million no-bid contract to track student test scores - and critics are giving the move a big fat "F." City Controller John Liu slammed the Education Department's move to hand the contract to ex- Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's Wireless Generation company. The firm is an affiliate of News Corp., which is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Klein is a close confidant. Klein's company is getting the contract under a little-used legal maneuver.

Increased spending and decreased student performance have been attributed in part to teachers' unions and to the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) they negotiate with school boards. However, only recently have researchers begun to examine impacts of specific aspects of CBAs on student and district outcomes. This article uses a unique measure of contract restrictiveness generated through the use of a partial independence item response model to examine the relationships between CBA strength and district spending on multiple areas and district-level student performance in California. I find that districts with more restrictive contracts have higher spending overall, but that this spending appears not to be driven by greater compensation for teachers but by greater expenditures on administrators' compensation and instruction-related spending. Although districts with stronger CBAs spend more overall and on these categories, they spend less on books and supplies and on school board-related expenditures. In addition, I find that contract restrictiveness is associated with lower average student performance, although not with decreased achievement growth.

On Wednesday, members of the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on several controversial Department of Education contracts totaling millions of dollars. But the panel's 13 members won't be able to see the details of the contracts, which the DOE cannot finalize without their approval.

The Rupert Murdoch phone hacking scandal has prompted the state to kill a controversial $27 million contract with one of the media mogul's subsidiary companies. State Controller Thomas DiNapoli this week quietly rejected the Education Department's contract with Wireless Generation, a News Corp. affiliate.

Teachers at Green Dot New York Charter School are getting a raise, a bonus, and a little less job security. These are some of the modifications that are set to appear in a two-year renewal of Green Dot's landmark contract with the United Federation of Teachers. Green Dot offered its teachers a 28-page "thin contract" a year after the school opened in 2008, leaving out many of the work rules and policies - including tenure and seniority-based layoffs - that are found in the bulky union deal with the Department of Education.

"An examination of the contract shows that some of the most controversial issues at stake in the strike have yet to be completely decided, with some issues relegated to committees. Partially because of teachers' new raises, the contract will cost the cash-strapped district $295 million over four years, a reality many believe will cause layoffs. Factions of teachers' unions in other cities inspired by the strike are seeking to fan the flames. Already, teachers in nearby Lake Forest and Evergreen Park have walked out. These fights represent a broader question the American populace is still grappling with: who owns our public schools?"

The Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers union have agreed to a new pact granting local schools more autonomy over hiring, curriculum and work conditions and virtually ending a 2-year-old policy that allowed charter operators and others to take over low-performing and new campuses. The agreement, tentative until union members vote on it, doesn't resolve key contract disputes, including whether teacher evaluations should include students' standardized test scores, a provision L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy is seeking. And teachers will continue to work under the terms of the larger labor contract that expired July 1.

Two education companies are in a battle over the right to provide testing items to the Florida Department of Education under a Race to the Top contract worth tens of millions of dollars. A subsidiary of McGraw-Hill, which is based in New York, filed a bid protest earlier this week to block a contract between the DOE and Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The filing with the Department of Administrative Hearings argues that the department used the wrong criteria in weighing the offers of McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the final round of bid consideration.

Public school teachers have voted overwhelmingly against a six-year contract that proposed the transition to performance-based raises starting in July 2013. Sixty-seven percent of teachers voted against the contract, the Hawaii State Teachers Association announced tonight.

On Wednesday, August 17, the Department of Education's Panel for Education Policy will vote on a $120 million two year contract with telecom giant Verizon to wire our schools.   There are at least five good reasons to oppose this contract ( see below.)

After thousands of striking Verizon workers and city teachers held a rally in Lower Manhattan, the mostly mayor-appointed Panel for Educational Policy voted 9-4 on the Department of Education's $120 million contract with the wireless communications giant.

The owners of a scandal-plagued consulting business defrauded the city of millions of dollars, flagrantly violated contracts and lied about its dealings, probers charged Wednesday. The city's special schools investigator, which launched its probe of Future Technology Associates after Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote a series of articles on the computer-services firm, found serious violations of contracting rules:

The mayor wants to give his hand-picked superintendent the power to reassign bad teachers, reshape failing schools and stagger class times without union contract barriers. Mayor Frank Jackson, the only Ohio mayor who controls schools through an appointed board, angered fellow Democrats and the party's labor allies by challenging timeworn teacher union contracts. "What we will not accept is incremental change or the belief that everything is OK and we should continue down the same path," he said in a city hall interview. "That is not acceptable to us."

Wielding power under a new state law to modify union contracts, Detroit Public Schools emergency manager Roy Roberts this morning imposed a 10 percent wage cut on all employees and moved the district to a less costly benefits plan.

New York should drop a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation, a Rupert Murdoch-owned student data tracking company, in light of News Corporation's alleged wrongdoings, teachers' union leaders wrote in a Thursday evening letter to state officials.

Last night's meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy meeting was exhilarating, stirring, and depressing all at once.   Over a thousand parents, teachers, and striking Verizon workers showed up for the pre-meeting rally, and hundreds more filled the auditorium afterwards at Murry Bergtraum HS, chanting, booing Walcott and the DOE, and speaking up passionately for the need for more caring education priorities, and against the $120 million Verizon contract, which will steal even more resources from our children and the company's workers.

Standardized tests in English and math taken by students in New York State are about to become slightly less tricky. Beginning next spring, a new company, Pearson, will write the standardized tests that the Education Department gives to nearly all third through eighth graders. The department switched to Pearson this year after its contract with another company, CTB/McGraw-Hill, expired.

State Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. today announced that American Institutes for Research (AIR) has been awarded a contract to develop methodologies and measures for the student growth component of the State's new teacher and principal evaluation system.  The goal, according to Commissioner King, is to ensure New York has a state-of-the-art approach to developing fair and reliable assessments of educators' contributions to their students' growth in learning.