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This focus on improving teaching is evident in recent grants. A new report on foundation activity, Critical Contributions: Philanthropic Investment in Teachers and Teaching (www.criticalcontributions.org), released today by the University of Georgia and Kronley & Associates, found that foundations directed $684 million to teachers and teaching between 2000 and 2008.

"Teachers are one of the most important resources a nation has for providing the skills, values and knowledge that prepare young people for productive citizenship - but more than this, to give sanctuary to their dreams and aspirations for a future of hope, dignity and justice. It is indeed ironic, in the unfolding nightmare in Newtown, that only in the midst of such a shocking tragedy are teachers celebrated in ways that justly acknowledge - albeit briefly and inadequately - the vital role they play every day in both protecting and educating our children.  What is repressed in these jarring historical moments is that teachers have been under vicious and sustained attack by right-wing conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and centrist democrats since the beginning of the 1980s. Depicted as the new "welfare queens," their labor and their care has been instrumentalized and infantilized; [1] they have been fired en masse under calls for austerity; they have seen rollbacks in their pensions, and have been derided because they teach in so-called "government schools."  Public school teachers too readily and far too pervasively have been relegated to zones of humiliation and denigration.  The importance of what teachers actually do, the crucial and highly differentiated nature of the work they perform and their value as guardians, role models and trustees only appears in the midst of such a tragic event. If the United States is to prevent its slide into a deeply violent and anti-democratic state, it will, among other things, be required fundamentally to rethink not merely the relationship between education and democracy, but also the very nature of teaching, the role of teachers as engaged citizens and public intellectuals and the relationship between teaching and social responsibility.  This essay makes one small contribution to that effort."

I chose to teach so I could make a difference. When I came to teaching in my late 40s, America's schools were already under siege, but I believed then and I believe now that dedicated teachers - if given the necessary support - could provide an exciting and effective learning environment for our young people, better preparing them to pursue their dreams and thereby enrich us all. I also believed that by modeling being a lifelong learner I could empower my students to take control of their own learning as a necessary step toward taking control of their lives. I also became a teacher because of what other teachers had done for me. Those wonderful human beings provided the support a troubled young man from an exceedingly dysfunctional family needed to help him sort through the difficulties of living. They made a difference for me, and I felt an obligation to try to do the same for others.

Like other states across the country, mine (Massachusetts) is in the midst of piloting a new teacher evaluation system. I'm a teacher, so this matters deeply to me. But it also matters to anyone with any stake in education, as the impact of how we measure teacher effectiveness will be immense. Now, how are these evaluations going so far? Last month, Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellows sent a survey to teachers in Massachusetts's Level 4 Turnaround Schools, who are currently piloting the new system. While the purpose of pilots is, of course, to iron out the kinks in something before rolling it out more broadly, the data compiled from the 112 responses is still concerning and eye-opening, and it points to some major areas for improvement

Virtually everyone agrees that teacher evaluation in the United States needs an overhaul. Existing systems rarely help teachers improve or clearly distinguish those who are succeeding from those who are struggling. The tools that are used do not always represent the important features of good teaching. Criteria and methods for evaluating teachers vary substantially across districts and at key career milestones-when teachers complete pre-service teacher education, become initially licensed, are considered for tenure, and receive a professional license.  A comprehensive system should address these purposes in a coherent way and provide support for supervision and professional learning, identify teachers who need additional assistance and-in some cases-a change of career, and recognize expert teachers who can contribute to the learning of their peers. This report outlines an integrated approach that connects these goals to a teaching-career continuum and a professional development system that supports effectiveness for all teachers at every stage of their careers.

The Metlife survey of American teachers has been much discussed in recent weeks. The biggest red flag I see waving here is the 70% increase, over the past two years, in the number of teachers who are likely to leave the profession in the next five years (from 17% to 29%). Assuming this data is accurate, this amounts to more than a million teachers who are preparing to march out of our classrooms. And this is in addition to the roughly one million baby boomers approaching retirement age! I wonder if the teaching profession as it is now being redesigned and redefined is one that any of us would have chosen when we began teaching? And I especially wonder who would choose to teach in a school with a high level of poverty?

I worked for two years at a non-profit whose mission centered on improving teaching. The first and most important thing I learned there was that nobody--not the most supportive policy wonk, not the most effusive public education proponent--understands the sheer hard work and complexity of teaching, unless they've chosen classroom teaching as a long-term career.

For my very smart MIT student, Teach for America, would be a pit stop where she would pick up some leadership skills while teaching disadvantage children on her way to Chase, where she would use her finely honed mathematical and leadership skills in ways that almost certainly would not benefit the students she taught.

Dear President Obama, I am half a year into my twentieth year of teaching here in Florida. I am not sure how much longer I will last in the profession I thought I would never want to leave. I wonder how much longer I can last because as an English teacher, I teach my students to keep a sharp eye out for irony. I practice what I preach, and my irony radar is on full-tilt, bell-ringing, red-strobe-lights-blinking, high alert. The ironies have grown too much for me to bear; I am nearly crushed beneath them, yet people like you seem to be unaware of them. So let me teach you, as I might my students, about Irony. When I use the second person "You" in this letter, I refer not just to you, but to all the "powers that be" in education reform.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Measures of Effective Teaching" (MET) Project seeks to validate the use of a teacher's estimated "value-added"-computed from the year-on-year test score gains of her students-as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Using data from six school districts, the initial report examines correlations between student survey responses and value-added scores computed both from state tests and from higher-order tests of conceptual understanding. The study finds that the measures are related, but only modestly. The report interprets this as support for the use of value-added as the basis for teacher evaluations. This conclusion is unsupported, as the data in fact indicate that a teachers' value-added for the state test is not strongly related to her effectiveness in a broader sense. Most notably, value-added for state assessments is correlated 0.5 or less with that for the alternative assessments, meaning that many teachers whose value-added for one test is low are in fact quite effective when judged by the other. As there is every reason to think that the problems with value-added measures apparent in the MET data would be worse in a high-stakes environment, the MET results are sobering about the value of student achievement data as a significant component of teacher evaluations.

By day, Wade Brosz teaches American history at an A-rated Florida middle school. By night, he is a personal trainer at 24 Hour Fitness. Brosz took the three-night a week job at the gym after his teaching salary was frozen, summer school was reduced drastically, and the state bonus for board certified teachers was cut. He figures that he and his wife, also a teacher, are making about $20,000 less teaching than expected to, combined.

"Speaker: Anthony Bryk, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Video 9 of 13 This presentation was a part of "Tomorrow's Teacher: Paths to Prestige and Effectiveness," a session held May 18, 2012 at EWA's 65th National Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. Program description America's teaching corps has become the focus of intense reform activity in recent years. A single, but by no means simple, question sits at the center of much of this work: How can we transform teaching into a prestigious profession? In this special plenary session, a succession of expert speakers delivers succinct talks over the course of the morning on various aspects of this critical topic."

After 38 years of teaching in Vermont and Minnesota in a variety of schools and programs, I've decided to step away and retire from classroom teaching. I've cleaned out my classroom, graded all the papers and returned my library books. Now I need to clean out my head. Here is my bucket list of 10 items that are useless and should be removed from schools, followed by 10 items that should be the center of every school system.

"Beneath the political and corporate veneer espousing teaching as a profession lurks a simple fact: the corporate and political elite wants teaching to be a service industry. Worse yet, they have their wish, because teaching is now a service industry, ultimately devoted to perpetuating an economic system based on social inequity and a venal consumer culture."

There is much to admire in the schools that lead international assessment results. Finland, Singapore, and South Korea have nurtured a teaching profession that encourages the most able college students to consider teaching as a rewarding and noble career (Darling-Hammond, 2010). China, home to world-leading Shanghai, hosts a thousand-year tradition of reverence for teaching (Reeves, 2011).

"The last thing I will do is refuse to take your test," said an angry 15-year old to a math teacher who's a friend of mine in Georgia. "I just wanted to teach him to balance his checkbook, something he would use in the real world," she said, "but the school system made me sit there and watch him sullenly refuse to write on the 'high stakes' standardized test for the two days before his 16th birthday when he would quit school. This is not teaching."

"Every spring without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them the same answer: "Sorry. Until Teach for America changes its objective to training lifetime educators and raises the time commitment to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in high poverty areas and then after two years, encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity rubs me the wrong way""

"The following is an excerpt of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York. Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: "How do we teach it?" In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it's time to crack that shell. It's time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab's Human Dynamics group."

Even beyond grades, I want my students to know that what they're learning is valuable and can be fun. From playing games to reviewing parts of speech and subject-verb agreement to talking about film adaptations and exploring plot and character development, getting creative with the way we teach will be key to fighting end-of-year distractions. What's more important than the grades on my students' report cards or the score on their standardized tests is helping them see the true value of education. We may only have five weeks left, but a lot can happen in that time. My team and I are going to make sure we make the most of it for all our students.

Many discussions of "school reform" focus either on the need to provide students with choice as a way out of failing schools or on how to close or restructure the schools in order to "turn them around." For our purposes in this first paper, let's examine the underlying claim that a particular child is actually in a failing school. A school in Louisiana is given the letter grade F and we assume that children in this school are receiving a sub-standard education. Almost by definition! Yet the second part of the title of this paper, which comes from a chapter in the late Gerald W. Bracey's 2003 book "On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools," raises an interesting question.  Should we be confident that the letter grade F actually indicates that the quality of teaching in the school is the reason for the failure? If it is not the quality of teaching, then what is it?