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Sherrie Martin, former teacher of the year at a Metro school, is questioning whether she really belongs in the classroom after scoring low on the state's new teacher evaluation. In Sumner County, Summer Naylor left her third-graders behind last month, resigning after eight years teaching. Too many mandates and evaluations made her job no longer fun. New evaluations pushed Robert "Bud" Raikes - the Smyrna High School principal who has a stadium named after him - into retiring early.

Now another Michigan lawmaker has doubled down on the GOP attack on public school teachers. In an interview with the Gongwer News Service, state Sen. Randy Richardville, the majority leader, slammed the MEA-the state's main teachers' union-as focused on "big-paid, high-honcho people." Then he claimed that teachers are "more than greedy," presumably for demanding health insurance, retirement benefits, and modest increases in their even more modest salaries. (The average teacher in Michigan made $54,088 a year in 2009, the highest in the nation.)

School board elections are supposed to be quintessential America contests. Moms and Main Street small-business owners and retired teachers campaign by knocking on doors, writing letters to the editor and debating at elementary schools. Then friends and neighbors troop to the polls and make their choices. But what happens when all the pathologies of national politics-over-the-top spending by wealthy elites and corporate interests, partisan consultants jetting in to shape big-lie messaging, media outlets that cover spin rather than substance-are visited on a local school board contest? Emily Sirota is finding out.

Lowering the the costs of state pension programs for teachers and other public workers is highly desirable, but it's also messy, and the savings are not immediate, notes a new report, which highlights state and local attempts-many of them controversial-to change those retirement plans. Published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the report also looks at charter schools' often-complicated efforts to create low-cost pension systems.