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Given the challenges facing American public education today, identifying effective teachers is a more vital task than ever before. A wide body of research shows that teachers are the most important school-based factor related to student achievement. Policymakers and taxpayers want to know what factors create effective teachers-not only for the sake of their own children's educations but also because teacher salary and benefits represent the nation's single largest educational expenditure. And school administrators need to identify teachers who will be successful over the long term before those teachers earn the ironclad job protection of tenure.

With the country deeply divided over the best way to improve education, Mr. Walcott plans to reposition New York City on the reform spectrum - from the standard-bearer that it was during Mr. Klein's tenure to a quiet executor of the initiatives he started.

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.

Basically, almost everything that market-based reformers think needs to happen has been the reality in DCPS for the past 2-3 years. And the staff  has been transformed too. The majority of principals, and a huge proportion of teachers, were hired during the tenure of either Michelle Rhee or her successor, Kaya Henderson. The district should be in overdrive right about now. Is it?

Mayor Bloomberg likes to boast of the "gains" made in city schools during his tenure, but the test scores and graduation rates he cites have long been suspect. Want to know why? As Susan Edelman reported in last Sunday's Post, the folks at struggling Washington Irving HS in Manhattan apply a major, um, fudge factor.

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.

A fund called The Michael R. Bloomberg Revocable Trust, of which the principal trustee is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, donated $100,000 to a Baton Rouge-based political action committee just days before a pivotal Louisiana election that decided the make-up of the state's main K-12 board of education. The PAC in question, Alliance for Better Classrooms, spent at least $300,000 in contributions on behalf of generally pro-charter, anti-teacher-tenure and anti-union candidates running for positions on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

It is an almost universal tribute offered about Michelle Rhee's 3 1/2 -year tenure of the Washington D.C. school district - that if she accomplished one thing, it was to instill a sense of urgency in the city about the need to fix broken schools that had failed children for decades. Actually, it was Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who hired Rhee and gave her carte blanche, who made school reform the city's top priority. Rhee got all the attention because Fenty wanted it that way.

Imagine you are David Tepper, a 54-year-old guy with $5 billion in the bank. You've played the Wall Street game all your adult life, and you've scored huge wins, over and over. Now what? Tepper, a hedge fund manager who lives in Livingston, has found his answer: He is jumping into the political game in New Jersey, promising to spend huge bucks over the long term to change the state of play on school reform, starting with tenure.

"John King recently resigned as New York state's education commissioner after a tumultuous tenure in which he helped create and implement a controversial education evaluation system and rushed the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and aligned testing. (He is now going to work as a top assistant to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who apparently thought the controversy that King created was just fine.)  That evaluation system, known as APPR, required that 20 percent of an educator's evaluation be based on student standardized test scores. Now, New York Schools Chancellor Merryl Tisch wants to make new changes. What are they and why would they take a flawed evaluation system from bad to worse? This post explains."

"Teachers faced an unprecedented level of scrutiny in 2014, thanks to a landmark legal case dismantling teacher tenure in California, which is likely to spark copycats lawsuits across the country. In part due to this increased scrutiny, educators also encountered various attacks from mainstream and conservative media over the year, five of which were particularly egregious."

"On Thursday, August 21, 2014, United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used his "Homeroom" blog to announce victory in his war on schools and teachers. After six years of decrying the inadequacy of education in the United States, Duncan "celebrated that "America's students have posted some unprecedented achievements in the last year." In addition, after battling against teacher tenure and seniority rights, Duncan decided, "we should celebrate America's teachers, principals, and students and their families.""

"This commentary traces the transition of education policy from the Bloomberg-Klein years to the current administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina a year into their tenure."

Dan Malloy is saying - you better get your legislators to cave in and vote for my version of the bill because if they don't your towns don't get the money.  If your towns don't get the money, you either don't provide the education services or you have to raise your local property taxes to meet those costs.. $40 million dollars to help 200,000 kids in return in return for what I want (or you get nothing).

Erich Martel, one of the hardest-working D.C. teachers ever, received an e-mail last month from a former student. The man said he was switching from a successful business career to research in ancient history, in part because of Martel, "the best history teacher I ever had." That happens often to Martel, 68, an Advanced Placement history instructor. He has been teaching for more than 40 years, mostly at Wilson High School. His post-AP-test classes on the Vietnam War are famous, first for insisting on study during the usual late May and June playtime, and second for thrilling his audience with visits by Vietnam veterans and war opponents such as former senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern and prisoner of war Everett Alvarez Jr. Yet, Martel was forced to retire last summer after a long campaign to get rid of him. He had too much energy and investigative zeal for his supervisors' comfort. It also didn't help that he was a school representative for the Washington Teachers Union.

Perhaps most importantly, one of the best ways to improve public education would be to work to alleviate those factors beyond teachers' control that affect students' ability to learn. They are some of the same factors that lead to Louisiana's dismal Kids COUNT rating-unemployment, poverty, violence, crime rates, family instability, childhood hunger, access to health care. No, no, and no, according to the politicians. What do teachers know about education, anyway? Public-school teachers, according to most of the Senate members who testified, are obviously part of the problem, not the solution, so it's better to follow noneducators' recommendations when improving schools. The philosophies behind the legislation passed last week echo the pro-charter, pro-private philosophies of distinctly non-local figures as diverse as the anti-union former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee (who now finds her former district embroiled in a cheating scandal), the deep-pocket GOP puppetmasters the Koch Brothers and, most significantly, the American Legislative Exchange Council. (ALEC, a conservative think tank that prizes small government and free markets, hosts large meetings at which it gives politicians dummy legislation that they can personalize and file in their home states; its influence is clear in some of Louisiana's education bills.) Similar legislation has been proposed in other states across the country, particularly in legislatures that, like Louisiana's, are overwhelmingly Republican, and teachers and others with an interest in public education would do well to pay attention to what's going on here.

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.

Governor uses national platform to pitch for vouchers, dump on Newark public schools

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.