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Stand For Children plans to mount a drive for a 2012 ballot law that would force schools to prioritize teacher effectiveness over seniority when it comes to hiring, placement, layoff and transfer policies, an effort that appears likely to encounter resistance from teachers unions and a skeptical Patrick administration.

As students prepare to begin another school year, their teachers are hopping mad. They're facing layoffs and deep budget cuts and many say they're tired of being blamed unfairly for just about everything that's wrong in public education. They're so mad that many are bypassing their unions and mounting a campaign of their own to restore the public's faith in their profession.

Nearly 780 employees of the New York City Education Department will lose their jobs by October, in the largest single-agency layoff since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took office in 2002.

Most say the hardest job in Michigan doesn't belong to the governor, not even Detroit's mayor, but the new emergency manager for Detroit Public Schools. So far, Roy Roberts has asked teachers, students and parents to share in some deep cuts, but tonight Action News Investigator Ross Jones has details on a costly new perk that's raising eyebrows

Times are tough at school districts across the country, but they're especially bad in California, where a multibillion-dollar budget deficit has educators protesting and scrambling for ways to avoid layoffs. Larry Powell, superintendent of the Fresno County school district, empathizes with his teachers' pain, which is why he's literally putting his money where his mouth is to help alleviate some of the pressures of this coming school year.

After a long summer involving layoff notices and late placements, Detroit Public School teachers are now faced with improper classroom assignments. In addition to the previous assignment of special education students to general classrooms, Emergency Manager Roy Roberts has placed special needs teachers in general education classes, where they are forced to provide instruction in areas where they don't have any experience.

More than 1 million city students returned to class full of excitement about starting a new year, but parents and teachers yesterday worried over the cuts to public schools. The city has slashed more than 10% from school budgets since 2007, and this year the city expects to enroll nearly 10,000 more students while employing 2,600 fewer teachers.

As millions of students prepare to go back to school, budget cuts are resulting in teacher layoffs and larger classes across the country. This comes as the drive towards more standardized testing increases despite a string of cheating scandals in New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also recently unveiled a controversial plan to use waivers to rewrite parts of the nation's signature federal education law, No Child Left Behind. We speak to New York City public school teacher Brian Jones and Diane Ravitch, the former Assistant Secretary of Education and counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H. W. Bush, who has since this post dramatically changed her position on education policy. She is the author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."

Calls to reform teacher layoff policies have begun to appear with regularity in newspaper editorials, policy briefs, and statehouses-and for good reason. A growing body of research confirms that teacher quality is the most influential in-school factor driv­ing student achievement. That being the case, teacher dismissal policies and procedures can have profound implications for how much students learn.

I did a bit of digging to find out more about the role Teach Plus played supporting Senate Bill 1, passed this spring in Indiana. I found out that Stand For Children was responsible for active support of the law, including sponsoring polls that showed public support for the idea of basing teacher pay and layoffs primarily on "student academic growth."

When Hector Leon arrived at Urban Assembly Academy of History and Citizenship for Young Men four years ago to be the high school's college advisor, he found himself in an "emergency" situation. "When I got there, there was no college office in place," said Leon, 41. "It's a difficult position, because you have a lot of need in the population. I mean, you become a brother, father, uncle." Last week, Leon became one of the nearly 700 school employees laid off in a sweeping single-agency cut, the largest since Mayor Bloomberg took office. His position was eliminated during a crucial time when students start working on their college applications and financial aid packages. Leon was helping one student apply to Harvard and Yale.

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.

"The so-called Vergara trial in California, in which the state's tenure and layoff statutes were deemed unconstitutional, already has its first "spin-off," this time in New York, where a newly-formed organization, the Partnership for Educational Justice (PEJ), is among the organizations and entities spearheading the effort. Upon first visiting PEJ's new website, I was immediately (and predictably) drawn to the "Research" tab. It contains five statements (which, I guess, PEJ would characterize as "facts"). Each argument is presented in the most accessible form possible, typically accompanied by one citation (or two at most). I assume that the presentation of evidence in the actual trial will be a lot more thorough than that offered on this webpage, which seems geared toward the public rather than the more extensive evidentiary requirements of the courtroom (also see Bruce Baker's comments on many of these same issues surrounding the New York situation). That said, I thought it might be useful to review the basic arguments and evidence PEJ presents, not really in the context of whether they will "work" in the lawsuit (a judgment I am unqualified to make), but rather because they're very common, and also because it's been my observation that advocates, on both "sides" of the education debate, tend to be fairly good at using data and research to describe problems and/or situations, yet sometimes fall a bit short when it comes to evidence-based discussions of what to do about them (including the essential task of acknowledging when the evidence is still undeveloped). PEJ's five bullet points, discussed below, are pretty good examples of what I mean."

As students across the country stage a national day of action to defend public education, we look at the nation's largest school systems - Chicago and New York City - and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In Chicago, the city's unelected school board voted last week to shut down seven schools and fire all of the teachers at 10 other schools. In New York City, many educators are criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration after the release of the names of 18,000 city teachers, along with a ranking system that claims to quantify each teacher's impact on the reading and math scores of their pupils on statewide tests. "The danger is that if teachers and schools are held accountable just for relatively narrow measures of what it is students are doing in class, that will become what drives the education system," says Columbia University's Aaron Pallas, who studies the efficiency of teacher-evaluation systems. "The effects of school closings in [New York City] is one of the great untold stories today," says Democracy Now! education correspondent Jaisal Noor. "The bedrock of these communities [has been] neighborhood schools and now they're being destroyed." Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union says, "When you have a CEO in charge of a school system as opposed to a superintendent - a real educator - what ends up happening is that they literally have no clue how to run the schools." Lewis recounts a meeting where she says Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told her that, "25 percent of these kids are never going to amount to anything."