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Most people now recognize that NCLB is a train wreck. Its mandates have imposed on American public education an unhealthy obsession with standardized testing.

More than a third of the staff members at a Harlem charter school run by the Success Charter Network have left the school within the last several months, challenging an organization that prides itself on the training and support it offers its teachers.

The Department of Education will replicate other cities' parent training programs and start measuring how well schools engage families, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced tonight.

There's been some good blogging lately on how to interpret the studies on Teach For America (TFA) teacher effectiveness - see Matthew Di Carlo and Adam Ozimek. But neither addresses the research from a Relinquisher standpoint.

You've probably heard that NCTQ president Kate Walsh and new Tennessee Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman testified in Congress this week on issues related to teacher quality. (Snippets of their testimonies burst into useful sound bites all over Twitter.) One of the most quotable, shared here by Huffington Post, came from Walsh when she said it's "easier to get into an education school than it is to qualify to play college football."

Everyone agrees that the most important in-school factor in student achievement is the classroom teacher. At the same time, however, everyone has a different proposal for reaching that goal. Rather than recite the entire list, I'd like to examine one recommendation more closely.

Of all the states that have taken steps to rethink systems for preparing teachers, New York appears to be experimenting with the greatest variety of approaches.

This was written by Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former president of Teachers College, Columbia University.

Yes it is time to rethink teacher education. However, I recommend we start where future teachers take the bulk of their coursework -- in schools of arts and sciences and in schools of liberal arts. My fellow teacher educators and I can't spend an entire semester trying to reteach all the content from the disciplines and also help future teachers understand how this knowledge translates into material to be introduced to children in pedagogically powerful ways.

Disrupting the entrenched education system is daunting. There are 7.2 million teachers in the U.S., 76 million students, and more than 98,000 public schools, according to a government census (as of 2008). So what's the most effective way to unshackle the current archaic system from ineffective tactics that no longer work in the digital age?

A residency program in Denver, and mentorship and leadership-development programs in Georgia's Gwinnett County school system are among the projects getting a financial injection over the next five years from a $75 million investment from the New York-based Wallace Foundation that is aimed at improving the pipeline leading to the principal's office.

This was written by Will Miller, president of The Wallace Foundation, an independent, national foundation that works to expand learning and enrichment opportunities for children. The foundation maintains an online library of lessons at www.wallacefoundation.org.

The Obama Administration's Plan for Teacher Education Reform and Improvement

Momentum appears to be gathering behind a U.S. Department of Education plan to hold teacher education programs accountable for the achievement of students taught by their graduates. At an event hosted here Friday by the think tank Education Sector, a diverse group of stakeholders, including Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association, and Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, spoke in favor of the initiative, which was first outlined in the Obama administration's fiscal 2012 budget request. ("New Rules for Ed. Prep Are Mulled," March 9, 2011.)

Tweeters and education writers the other day were  all abuzz with talk by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan of the need to crack down on those god-awful schools of education that keep churning out teachers who don't get sufficient value-added out of their students.

In my previous post, I explained that the new push to rate schools of education by the student outcome gains of teachers who graduated from certain education schools is a problematic endeavor… one unlikely to yield particularly useful information, and one that may potentially create the wrong incentives for education schools.  To reiterate, I laid out 3 reasons (and there are likely many more) why this approach is so problematic. Here, I divide them out a bit more - 4 ways.

What makes the Finnish school system so amazing is that Finnish students never take a standardized test until their last year of high school, when they take a matriculation examination for college admission. Their own teachers design their tests, so teachers know how their students are doing and what they need. There is a national curriculum-broad guidelines to assure that all students have a full education-but it is not prescriptive. Teachers have extensive responsibility for designing curriculum and pedagogy in their school. They have a large degree of autonomy, because they are professionals. Admission to teacher education programs at the end of high school is highly competitive; only one in 10-or even fewer-qualify for teacher preparation programs. All Finnish teachers spend five years in a rigorous program of study, research, and practice, and all of them finish with a masters' degree. Teachers are prepared for all eventualities, including students with disabilities, students with language difficulties, and students with other kinds of learning issues.

Can public-sector pensions be reformed, particularly for teachers? Everyone knows that unfunded and underfunded pension systems of the traditional kind ("defined benefit"), plus ancillary health care costs and related benefits for retirees, are burdening state and local education budgets across the land, particularly at a time of broader economic frailty. But few communities and states have yet demonstrated the wisdom, fortitude, capacity, and imagination to devise workable alternatives and put them into place. We're at a point in time where a major public-policy (and public-finance) problem has been defined and measured, debated and deliberated, but not yet solved.

"Why are school districts paying millions in "finder's fees" to an organization that places people without education degrees to teach in urban schools-even where applications from veteran teachers abound?"