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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.

With all the recent coverage of Occupy Wall Street and President Obama's jobs bill, we've heard a lot of polling results showing that a large plurality of Americans supports raising taxes on high earners, and that this support is strong among both Democrats and Republicans.

Elementary and high schools are receiving less state funding than last year in at least 37 states, and in at least 30 states school funding now stands below 2008 levels - often far below. These cuts are attributable, in part, to the failure of the federal government to extend emergency fiscal aid to states and school districts and the failure of most states to enact needed revenue increases and instead to balance their budgets solely through spending cuts. The cuts have significant consequences, both now and in the future: They are causing immediate public- and private-sector job loss, and in the long term are likely to reduce student achievement and economic growth.

This week a critically important new report was jointly released by the National Education Association and Campaign for America's Future. It was written by our own Jeff Bryant, who isalso  a Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, and who led a panel (on which I participated) at that organization's recent Take Back the American Dream Conference.  Jeff's most recent post here, If We Want 'Great Teachers,' Don't We Need To Give Them Jobs?, refers to the report he authored.

A Bronx charter school has reached an agreement with the city's teachers union, signing a contract that would grant the teachers and staff at the school modest wage increases and expanded job protection, but unlike their counterparts in unionized city schools, no provision for tenure.

New education reforms often translate into big money for private groups. Following the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, states paid millions of dollars annually for companies to develop and administer the standardized tests required under the law. Companies also cashed in on a provision mandating tutoring for students at struggling schools. Now, a movement to overhaul the teaching profession is creating another source of revenue for those in the business of education. More than half of states are changing their laws to factor student test scores into teacher evaluations and adding requirements for the classroom observations used to rate teachers. The main intent of the new laws is to identify which teachers are doing a good, bad, or mediocre job and to help them improve. One early outcome of such recent legislation, however, is a booming market that sells services and products to help states and school districts scrambling to meet the new standards.

As education lawyers who work with states and school districts on federal education programs, part of our job is to advise clients on those programs' fiscal and administrative compliance rules. For the most part these compliance rules are largely unknown and rarely discussed among the education policy crowd and other important stakeholders, like parents and teachers. Federal compliance requirements like supplement not supplant or time distribution (also known as time and effort) are not exactly hot topics of conversation. They should be.

No, the headline is not a typo. It's the conclusion of a new study "Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers" by Jason Richwine, senior policy analyst in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation, and Andrew Biggs, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They attempt to show that public school teachers receive compensation far more generous than is widely believed. They cite summers off, job security, and fringe benefits (health insurance etc.) that make "total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels, equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year." Ordinarily, I wouldn't bother to comment about the study because none of it says anything that is really new. But because the media is giving it big play, I can't let the facts cited slide by.

"John King is leaving his job as commissioner of New York State schools commissioner to become a senior adviser to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with the "roles and responsibilities of the deputy secretary," according to the Education Department, which issued a statement giving King high praise for his work in New York. Some in New York think otherwise. Here's a piece by award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, who was named New York's 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010, tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. Burris has been exposing on this blog King's troubling record in implementing school reform program in New York."

"Overall, then, teacher turnover, in both its attrition and mobility "forms," was quite stable between 2007-08 and 2012-13, although, as usual, there is a great deal of variation underlying the national estimates. And, although it is very difficult to determine the extent to which economic circumstances-the Great Recession in particular-influenced this trend, weakness in the general job market during this period is likely to have played a role."

"So, where should that finger of blame point here?  Or is this just how things work these days - slash the funding of the highest need districts - call them failing - close their schools - give their property and their teacher's jobs to someone else - and claim victory - leaving others, years down the line to clean up your mess? Angry Andy - this is your mess. Now do the right thing and fix it!"

"A judge said the state discriminates against poor and minority students by protecting the jobs of ineffective instructors. What will this mean for education?"

"American public education desperately needs to be improved, especially for the most disadvantaged children. But eliminating teachers' job security and due-process rights is not going to attract better educators - or do much to improve school quality."

Has the term "education" become a code word? And if so, a code word for what?

"A teacher in Massachusetts spoke up when his students' rights were being violated. Here's how he paid the price"

As a growing number of states move toward legislation that would institute teacher merit pay, the debate around whether and how to use student test scores in high-stakes staffing decisions has become even more hotly contested. The majority of merit pay initiatives, such as those recently proposed in Ohio and Florida, rely to some extent on value-added estimation, the method of measuring a teacher's impact by tracking student growth on test scores from year to year. We recently exchanged e-mails with Steven Glazerman, a Senior Fellow at the policy research group Mathematica. Glazerman specializes in teacher recruitment, performance management, professional development, and compensation. According to Glazerman, a strong understanding of the constructive uses and limitations of value-added data can prove beneficial for district-level human resources practitioners.

The state of New Jersey is hoping to draw a new breed of school superintendents by changing and relaxing the qualifications required for hiring

Folwell Dunbar, a state education official who warned of problems at Abramson Science and Technology Charter School more than a year ago, confirmed Thursday that he was fired this week along with his boss at the department, Jacob Landry.

The weekend New York Times brought a special supplement, "Learn Something NEW: The New York Times Knowledge Network Fall 2011 Online Course Catalog." I saw it at a friend's house, because, as readers know from an earlier blog, I had canceled my subscription because of what I consider the company's unscrupulous educational practices. Apparently, the Times decided to continue marketing its brand in any way it can, despite my objections.