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"Given the magnitude of the recent recession, and the high-stakes testing the U.S. has implemented under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it is important to understand the effects of large-scale job losses on student achievement. We examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a state's working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state's eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB. "

The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst recently released a report detailing the number of jobs created based on investments in both domestic programs and the military. Contrary to the beliefs of many, investments in consumer tax cuts, clean energy, health care, and education all result in more jobs than military spending. According to the study, investments in education are the clear cut winners in job creation with approximately 26,700 jobs created per billion dollars spent. As a contrast, military spending only creates 11,200 jobs per billion spent.

Everyone knows that today every American's job is on the line, and that better schools mean better jobs. Schools and jobs are alike in this sense: Washington can't create good jobs, and Washington can't create good schools. What Washington can do, though, is shape an environment in which businesses and entrepreneurs can create jobs. It can do the same thing in education, by creating an environment in which teachers, parents and communities can build better schools. Last week President Obama, citing a failure by Congress to act, announced a procedure for handing out waivers for the federal mandates under the No Child Left Behind law. Unfortunately, these waivers come with a series of new federal rules, this time without congressional approval, and would make the secretary of education the equivalent of a national school board.

Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual utility. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Our information treatment doubles the fraction of employees using the website, with the vast majority of new users accessing data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. We find an asymmetric response to the information treatment: workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. Our findings indicate that utility depends directly on relative pay comparisons, and that this relationship is non-linear.

It cannot be accidental that the sharp drop in teacher morale coincides with the efforts of people such as Michelle Rhee and organizations such as Education Reform Now and Stand for Children to end teacher tenure and seniority. Millions have been spent to end what is called "LIFO" (last in, first out) and to make the case that teachers should not have job security. Many states led by very conservative governors have responded to this campaign by wiping out any job security for teachers. So, if teachers feel less secure in their jobs, they are reacting quite legitimately to the legislation that is now sweeping the country to remove any and all job protections. Their futures will depend on their students' test scores (thanks to Arne Duncan), even though there is no experience from any district or state in which this strategy has actually improved education. Its main effect, as we see in the survey, is to demoralize teachers and make them feel less professional and less respected. Yes, there will be more teaching to the test: Both NCLB and the Race to the Top demand it. And yes, there will be teachers who are wrongly fired. And yes, teachers will leave for other lines of work that are less stressful.

You're Fired! What prevents an unpopular teacher from losing their job for holding firm on class standards, procedures and/or guidelines: Teacher Tenure. It is in many ways vital to the educators ability to work effectively in much the same manner to that of a Justice on the US Supreme Court. The main purpose of life appointments or terms for Supreme Court Justices is to allow them to make decisions based on moral and ethical reasoning regardless of whether it is popular or unpopular publicly. The object of job security is to allow for "politics" to not influence the management of a situation. Educators, while their work does not impact the entire judicial system as that of the US Supreme Court, it does impact the lives of those involved. Many times teachers are faced with having to address or confront others with observations that may be unfavorable. As professionals they cannot avoid confronting these individuals for fear of losing their job. Truthfulness, honesty and accountability in a profession can often times be interpreted in alternative ways that result in retribution toward the educator. Teacher tenure allows instructors to do what is morally correct even when it's results or outcomes are not enjoyable. The other area that is upsetting to the vast majority of the public is the belief that tenure safe guards bad teachers from losing their jobs.

Friday's jobs report could kick off the worst quarter for state and local government jobs on record. And teachers are at the center of the bullseye.

The American political discussion has finally turned to the right target: jobs.

"As American public education arrives at the summer of its discontent, we have to contemplate how a system that has already had over 201,600 jobs wrung from its payrolls since August 2008 will handle the prospect of having to shed nearly a quarter of a million more jobs."

Teachers often say they don't do their jobs for the money, but surely financial incentives are a factor in just about any career decision. Would you work harder at your job if there was a cash bonus on the line? More importantly, would the extra money alone somehow make you a more effective employee? Under a new law being implemented over the next several years in Indiana, student test scores will now be used as a factor in whether a teacher receives a pay increase. The Indianapolis Star, in partnership with The Hechinger Report, is closely monitoring the state's reform measures aimed at boosting teacher effectiveness. The state's teachers are questioning whether the law can be fairly applied, and whether merit raises will ultimately result in students learning more, according to the recent entry in the newspaper's series. There are also fears among educators that the unpredictability of the pay scale will discourage people from considering teaching as a career.

Now that I have a blog where I can write what I want, when I want, I have the luxury of revisiting some good and bad ideas. In this post, I will revisit a really pernicious idea that appeared about a month ago in The New Republic. You see, the odd thing about our culture is that it is so attached to the present moment that anything that happened or was written about a month ago tends to disappear in the ether. But this editorial was so outrageous that it still annoys me, and I want to explain why. In an editorial called "Making the Grade: The Case Against Tenure in Public Schools," the editors argued that it was a fine idea to remove any job protections from public school teachers because they don't need them. In making this assertion, the editors of this once-liberal magazine were giving support to the far-right Virginia legislature, which was at that moment not only trying to strip teachers of tenure but to require women to have "a trans-vaginal ultrasound before having an abortion." The editorial of course condemned the latter as harsh, but thought that the far-right effort to remove job protection from public school teachers as a "halfway decent idea." Indeed, the editorial went on to decry teacher tenure as "the least sane element" in our country's education system.

This piece was inspired by a heated discussion I had with a man who believes that teachers have an easy job. Please feel free to share it with others if you agree with the message.

The findings are also a reminder not to make assumptions about who are the unhappiest educators. It's not necessarily the burned-out veteran, or those working with the most challenging student populations. In reality, when comparing teachers with higher and lower job satisfaction, the survey shows no real difference in their years of experience, the grades they taught or the proportions of their students from low-income households.  However, there were real differences in the day-to-day experiences of the less satisified and the more satisified teachers. The unhappier teachers were more likely to have had increase in average class sizes, and to have experienced layoffs in their district. They also had more students coming to class hungry, and had more families needing help with basic social services. There was also a marked gap among the teachers when it came to how much they believed they were viewed as professionals by their peers. Among the unsatisfied teachers that rate was 68 percent, compared with nearly 90 percent of the satisfied teachers.  The survey also found a connection between the satisfied teachers and their relationships with their students' families. Happier teachers work at schools where they say there's a better plan in place for engaging parents in their children's learning. 

By now, you have seen the latest Metlife Survey of the American Teacher. It shows that teachers' satisfaction with their job has plummeted since 2009, from 59 percent to 44 percent. It is the lowest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of teachers who are likely to leave the profession has grown from 17 percent to 29 percent since 2009. The reasons are obvious: The most satisfied teachers feel their jobs are secure, and they are treated as professionals by the community. Compared with dissatisfied teachers, they are more likely to have opportunities for professional development, time to collaborate with other teachers, and greater parental involvement in their schools. These are teachers working in an atmosphere of professionalism and collaboration.

"New York state published a list of schools based on measures like test scores and graduation rates. At the top are "reward" schools. At the bottom are "priority" schools. This is the amazing discovery. The schools that enroll mostly white and Asian students in affluent neighborhoods are doing a great job; they get a reward. The schools that enroll mostly black and Hispanic students in poor neighborhoods are doing a bad job; they are in line to get sanctions, interventions."

Maybe we can all agree on a basic starting point: no one is perfect, and every individual and organization should strive for growth and improvement. To go a step further, perhaps we can all agree that it is our shared responsibility to monitor public institutions - including schools, school districts, state and federal governments - and hold them to high standards. What happens when we fall short?  Or when "they" fall short?  How do we respond?  What do we want to see happen?  Too often in this culture, I think we assign blame.  Someone must be held accountable - and if it wasn't my job, then I certainly can't be blamed for the results.  By shaming or punishing those responsible, we feel like we've done our job as monitors or guardians of whatever values we uphold and whatever institutions have let us down.  It feels good, doesn't it - seeing the scandal hit home, the lies revealed, the hypocrites exposed, the inept upbraided and the corrupt brought low?

Voters have gotten to know city schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott since he assumed the important post last spring, but a new poll shows many haven't liked what they've seen. The Quinnipiac University poll, released Wednesday, showed that 34% of those who were questioned disapproved of the way Walcott is handling the job, up from 21% last May, the month after he took the job.

I would also ask you to please stop promoting the myth that unions are abusive and make it impossible to fire bad teachers. Unions only ensure that all teachers have due process to protect them from abusive admin. (And no, I am not saying that admin. is abusive, but just as there are poor teachers out there… there are poor administrators.) It is not the unions job to evaluate teacher performance. But it is the unions job to be be sure that disciplinary action is justified by requiring proper steps to be taken.

Now, as I ponder a recent CSA member survey, I see how many of you have lost your optimism.   Whether Principals, Assistant Principals or Education Administrators, 48 percent of you were dissatisfied with your jobs in 2009 compared to 59 percent today. Among Principals the rate of dissatisfaction was 68 percent in 2009, which was when the city and state budget cuts began but we were cushioned by President Obama's American Recovery Act. Today, 73 percent of Principals are dissatisfied with their workload, their wages and their job security. As demands on Principals continue to rise and budgets shrink, we better think about how we'll recruit and retain APs, EAs and teachers to fill the Principal pipeline. Back in 2006, when The New York Times reported that a startling number of experienced Principals were fleeing the Bloomberg/Klein school system, the DOE seemed to think the attrition was a normal result of baby boomer burn-out or fear of accountability. Experienced educators were often viewed as enemies of change.

...Now ask yourselves, What can I do? If your answer is Nothing, then you need to read teacher-turned-newspaper-reporter Kelly Flynn's piece about why we are complicit in the systemic destruction of public education across this state and the nation. Yes, teachers are partly to blame. Why? Because we don't speak out enough; we don't want to make waves; we're not political; we don't want to offend anyone. But, my friends, we are in the political fight of our lives. Our profession was, is and always will be political so long as politicians have a say in how we do our job. It's time to pull our collective heads out of the sand and make our voices heard outside the lunchroom and Facebook feed. To paraphrase JFK, we cannot continually ask what our association is doing for us; we have to ask what we can do not only for our association, but for public education and our students. If we don't, not only will many of us be out of a job, but our students will suffer as the racially and economically lopsided education 'reform' freight train rolls over us.