"Every day, the National Education Policy Center brings together some of the most of the most interesting and insightful perspectives on current education policy. We expect that our readers will find here some blogs they are already familiar with but that readers will also find some exciting new discoveries."

"There is no doubt that teacher evaluation systems in the U.S. are broken: Teachers, administrators, parents, and policymakers agree that most districts fail to measure teaching well, help teachers improve, or dismiss those who are failing. Most teachers are tenured without a rigorous examination of their competence, and those who are struggling are often left to struggle indefinitely, while their students suffer. The vast majority of teachers, who are working hard and want to continue to improve, get little help to do so."

"This brief describes the prevalence of highest-performing teachers in ten purposely selected districts across seven states. The overall patterns indicate that low-income students have unequal access, on average, to the district's highest-performing teachers at the middle school level but not at the elementary level. However, there is evidence of variation in the distribution of highest-performing teachers within and among the ten districts studied. Some have an under-representation of the highest-performing teachers in high-poverty elementary and middle schools. Others have such under-representation only at the middle school level, and one district has a disproportionate share of the district's highest-performing teachers in its high-poverty elementary schools."

"The sharp decline in U.S. union membership over the past 30-40 years is well known, but does it reflect a change in attitudes towards organized labor? In other words, is decreasing union membership accompanied by decreasing support for labor?"

"Mandated as a condition for states to receive federal Race to the Top (RTTT) funds, many states and districts are concocting schemes to "evaluate" their teachers in large part based on student test scores. These initiatives are inconsistent with strong evidence showing such uses of tests are error-prone and will undermine the quality of teaching and learning. Some states and districts are mandating dozens more exams, so that all teachers can be included in test-based evaluation plans. "

"Here are recommendations made by a coalition of organizations called the Forum for Educational Accountability to help guide Congress - should it be willing to listen - in any rewrite of of the flawed law known as No Child Left Behind. The forum is chaired by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or FairTest, a nonprofit organization dedicated to stopping misuse of standardized tests. "

"The nation's overall education spending grew at a slower pace in 2009 than at any other time in more than a decade, amid deepening state fiscal woes and flatter tax revenues, according to new census figures released Wednesday. "

"When you're a billionaire woman in a billionaire man's world, the best way to get attention sometimes is to out-boy the boys. That's what Betsy Devos's of All Children Matter fame did a few years back when the astroturf group run by Amway's exploitation queen pumped tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of illegal dollars into the 2006 election pushing corporate education reform (vouchers and charters). "

"According to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, childcare workers earn about 4 percent less than animal caretakers-$20,940 and $21,830 per year, respectively."

"...But the New York Times neglected to mention one important fact that is key to placing the work of our foundation in the right context-that our spending, though significant, is barely more than a half of one percent of what the country spends on education every year. The Times noted that we spent roughly $375 million on U.S. education in 2009. That's a significant amount of money to be sure. But each year, the country as a whole spends some $600 billion on education..."

"A federally-funded two-year study of professional development programs for seventh grade mathematics teachers found there was no statistically significant cumulative impact on teacher knowledge or on student achievement. The study, led by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), in partnership with MDRC, was released on May 25, 2011 by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES)."

"...We readily recognize the consistent, ironclad law of association between poverty and educational achievement and attainment. However, we persist in school reform strategies that, despite success at the margins, regularly fail to address the factors associated with poverty that, on average, tend to impede student learning. While the past decade-plus of school reform has seen a necessary and laudable increase in emphasis on the need to improve curriculum and instruction for all students, we continue, for the most part, to look the other way when it comes to addressing out of school factors which get in the way of students benefitting from optimized curriculum and instruction..."

"I recently described a new study finding that public programs keep tens of millions of Americans out of poverty. The same study illustrates that after policymakers weakened certain elements of the safety net, deep poverty - that is, the share of the population with incomes below half the poverty line - rose sharply."

"In American public opinion it almost goes without saying that teachers should be paid more. The public is especially supportive of increasing compensation for accomplished teachers, teachers dedicated to working in hard to staff subjects, and teachers committed to closing the achievement gap."

"Robert Schwartz's post today on Huffington, "Why Charters and College Access Programs Should Cream," is but the latest incarnation of Social-Darwinism applied to current public education policy."