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Four out of 10 new public school teachers hired since 2005 came through alternative teacher-preparation programs, according to a survey just released by the National Center for Education Information. That's up from 22 percent of new teachers hired between 2000 and 2004.

This is a good week to remember heroic teachers: the teachers who led their children, holding hands, away from the smoking World Trade Center towers on 9/11; the teachers in Baton Rouge and Houston who welcomed a dozen terrified "Katrina kids" into their already-overcrowded classrooms, improvising seating, books and assignments.

Over the past two decades living and working in Oakland, I became well acquainted with Dr. Anna Richert. This professor of education at Mills College has built a powerful network of teachers engaged in systematically reflecting on their teaching practice. I have served as a member of the advisory board for the Mills teacher Scholars for several years. I wrote about their work last May in this post. As we look for ways to improve our classrooms for our students, teacher research ought to be very high on the list. I asked Anna to share some of her expertise in this interview.

This article critically reviews the recent empirical literature on teacher recruitment and retention published in the United States. It examines the characteristics of individuals who enter and remain in the teaching profession, the characteristics of schools and districts that successfully recruit and retain teachers, and the types of policies that show evidence of efficacy in recruiting and retaining teachers. The goal of the article is to provide researchers and policymakers with a review that is comprehensive, evaluative, and up to date. The review of the empirical studies selected for discussion is intended to serve not only as a compendium of available recent research on teacher recruitment and retention but also as a guide to the merit and importance of these studies.

"In all the conflicting accounts between the city and the UFT about the collapse of the teacher evaluation negotiations, there is one clear point of agreement: the Mayor refused to accept a two year sunset for the plan. In this, he was deeply wrong for disallowing the city to pilot what is essentially an experiment that could go badly, for both teachers and children. Meanwhile, 90 percent of the districts in the rest of the state, appropriately, have a one year sunset on their teacher evaluation systems. "

"In a direct challenge to New York's most high-profile education initiative, school superintendents from across the region are beginning an independent review of the accuracy of state-generated teacher ratings that are based on student test scores. The Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents has hired a research center at the University of Wisconsin to study the state's first round of teacher scores, released last summer, and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of New York's approach. At least 80 school districts in the Lower Hudson Valley and Long Island are turning over data on thousands of students and teachers - all anonymously - so that researchers can run the numbers."

"If the Department of Education gets its way, new teachers won't have to enroll in local colleges or universities to get certification to work in city schools. Shael Polakow-Suransky, the department's second in command, said today that the department would ask the state for permission to certify teachers internally by using top educators to train new recruits in shortage areas. Currently, teachers must either have completed an education certification program at a college or university or be enrolled in one."

Ever since New York City's Education Department released 18,000 public-school teachers' performance rankings, generating news coverage about the lowest and highest scorers, there has been talk in Albany of preventing a repeat. Increasingly, lawmakers say they are open to the idea of changing state law to allow parents to see the evaluations of their own children's teachers but to block the general public from having access to those reports. With the Legislature preparing to go into session next week, the question of how much privacy teachers are granted could soon be resolved.

In the debate over school improvement, individuals and groups advancing agendas with little or no evidence to back them up have somehow claimed the mantle of education "reformers," while teachers, their unions and others with actual education expertise often are portrayed as obstacles to reform--despite their desire to be involved in an improvement process that frequently shuts them out. In this upside-down approach to school "reform," teachers are required to implement top-down policies made without their input, often in an austerity environment, with little more than an exhortation to "just do it," and then are blamed when the policies fail. Not surprisingly, these "strategies"--such as mayoral control, school reconstitution, misuse and overuse of standardized tests, vouchers, merit pay, or simply stripping teachers of voice and professionalism--haven't moved the needle. The American Federation of teachers has promoted a better way.

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.

A new report from Stanford University researcher Linda Darling-Hammond details what the components of a comprehensive teacher evaluation system should look like at a time when such assessments have become one of the most contentious debates in education today. Much of the controversy swirls around the growing trend of using students' standardized test scores over time to help assess teacher effectiveness. This "value-added" method of assessment - which involves the use of complicated formulas that supposedly evaluate how much "value" a teacher adds to a student's achievement - is considered unreliable and not valid by many experts, though school reformers have glommed onto it with great zeal.

Unlike the Texas miracle, the Harvard-Columbia revelations are not based on fraudulent numbers. But what is deeply problematic is the spin that the authors give to their findings. The study examined the incomes of adults who, as children in the 4th through the 8th grades, had teachers of different "Value Added" scores, with Value Added defined as improvement in the scores of students on standardized tests. The study claims that the individuals who had excellent teachers as children have higher incomes as adults; we will examine the validity of this claim below. But first we must ask what these higher incomes mean. When they were children, these individuals were poor. What the H-C authors fail to mention is that even when they had excellent teachers as children and therefore have higher incomes as adults, these individuals, despite their higher incomes, remain poor.

Any number of educators-principals, personnel directors, superintendents-can be called upon to evaluate teachers. But one school district in Indiana, Anderson, has decided that another group has perhaps the best expertise to judge quality teaching: other teachers. This type of peer review is catching on nationally but is rare in Indiana. That might soon change.

Teacher satisfaction has decreased by 15 points since MetLife last measured it two years ago and is now reaching the lowest level of job satisfaction seen in the survey  series  in more than two decades. One simply need think of Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, New Jersey and other states and cities like NY and Washington where public schools, public school Teachers, and their unions have been under serious attack to begin to grasp the "why" of that drop in Teacher satisfaction. But is is more complicated than that.  

In a recent story, the New York Daily News uses the recently-released teacher data reports (TDRs) to "prove" that the city's charter school teachers are better than their counterparts in regular public schools. The headline announces boldly: New York City charter schools have a higher percentage of better teachers than public schools (it has since been changed to: "Charters outshine public schools"). Taking things even further, within the article itself, the reporters note, "The newly released records indicate charters have higher performing teachers than regular public schools." So, not only are they equating words like "better" with value-added scores, but they're obviously comfortable drawing conclusions about these traits based on the TDR data. The article is a pretty remarkable display of both poor journalism and poor research. The reporters not only attempted to do something they couldn't do, but they did it badly to boot. It's unfortunate to have to waste one's time addressing this kind of thing, but, no matter your opinion on charter schools, it's a good example of how not to use the data that the Daily News and other newspapers released to the public.

The Daily News reported yesterday that fully 1/3 of the Teacher Data Reports - 4000 reports - are unreliable. And just to add a little context: They all have multiple years of data, which are supposed to be more reliable. Hundreds and hundreds have margins of error of less than 10 percentage points - five on either side - giving the public, parents, and Teachers assurances that these reports are quite correct. In fact, the DOE was so confident in its findings that 46 of these reports had no margins of error at all! That's 4000 reports. And that means since Teachers are ranked against each other, that all the reports are unreliable. Or, let's just get right to it: "unreliable" is a euphemism for wrong.

When teachers leave schools, overall morale appears to suffer enough that student achievement declines-both for those taught by the departed teachers and by students whose teachers stayed put, concludes a study recently presented at a conference held by the Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

You know what one of my great pet peeves is? When prominent people, who are granted a prominent place in our society's discourse, cite "research" without telling us what that research is. Case in point: Newark Superintendent of Schools Cami Anderson: Research shows that effective teachers put students on an entirely different life trajectory - toward college, a higher salary, even a more stable family life. I am committed to ensuring that we have a strong teacher in every classroom and great leader in every school. Based on my 20-plus years in education, I know we must significantly change how we recruit, select, develop and retain our educators. [...] Some research shows that we lose our best teachers to charter schools and other professions because they feel they are not growing and they become disheartened seeing students in ineffective classrooms. After multiple poor ratings validated by several people, we should presume that these few teachers are ineffective and partner with the union to manage them out - efficiently. [emphasis mine] I would dearly love to see this "research." I would love to evaluate it for myself and decide whether it's think-tanky nonsense or serious work done by serious people. But I can't, can I? Because Anderson won't tell me what it is, and the Star-Ledger thinks it's enough for her to cite it without checking it for themselves.

Publishing teachers' ratings in the newspaper in the way The New York Times and other outlets have done recently is not a good use of performance data, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview yesterday. "Do you need to publish every single teacher's rating in the paper? I don't think you do," he said. "There's not much of an upside there, and there's a tremendous downside for teachers. We're at a time where morale is at a record low. ... We need to be sort of strengthening teachers, and elevating and supporting them."

Revamping the makeup of the teaching profession through tweaks such as altering tenure and teacher evaluations has become a policy debate du jour, one that has riled many a state house in recent years. As it turns out, teachers themselves support that overhaul, according to recent survey data. But that support may depend on a factor central to many of these teacher reforms: experience.