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Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is making a new run at revamping how the district hires, evaluates, trains and pays teachers. Last year, performance pay and a surge of new student tests used to rate teachers brought protests from teachers and parents.

For decades, policymakers have promulgated legislation that requires schools to hire effective teachers in all classrooms. Simultaneously, the education research community has attempted to define what effective teachers do in the classroom. A decade ago, No Child Left Behind provided a framework for defining effective teachers as "highly qualified," which required schools to ensure all of their teachers fit the new standard. This standard, however, is no longer appropriate, as continued evidence indicates that the relationship between credentials and achievement is tenuous. Therefore, policymakers and researchers need to revise the term "highly qualified," and, by utilizing the advances in educational accountability over the previous decade, replace it with a term grounded in practice and directly connected to achievement and effectiveness.

In a transparent attempt to punish teachers for organizing union efforts, Michigan Republicans are pushing a bill through the legislature that would prohibit public employees from sending political messages through their work emails. The bill is an attempt to stifle any union-related communication between teachers and other public employees, imposing ridiculously harsh penalties for teachers who send "political" messages

Buckle your seat belts and hold on for your life. Teachers and principals, welcome to APPR Airlines flight 2011. Your journey on the 'plane to be built in the air' just took off from New York's Albany airport. This description of the New York Teacher and principal evaluation system known as APPR is not my critique of an incomplete and untested evaluation system. Rather, it is the description provided by the state Education Department itself. Across New York State, all of the school and district leaders who evaluate Teachers are being pulled out of their schools for mandated, taxpayer-funded training in this APPR Teacher and principal evaluation system.

Education reform proposals are often based on high-profile or dramatic policy changes, many of which are expensive, politically controversial, or both.  In this paper, we argue that the debates over these "flashy" policies have obscured a potentially important direction for raising student performance-namely, reforms to the management or organization of schools. By making sure the "trains run on time" and focusing on the day-to-day decisions involved in managing the instructional process, school and district administrators may be able to substantially increase student learning at modest cost.In this paper, we describe three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K-12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments with an eye toward maximizing student achievement (e.g. allowing teachers to gain experience by teaching the same grade level for multiple years or having teachers specializing in the subject where they appear most effective). We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform. A precise benefit-cost calculation is not feasible for the set of teacher assignment reforms we describe, but we argue that the cost of such proposals is likely to be quite small relative to the benefits for students. While we recognize that these specific reforms may not be appropriate or feasible for every district, we encourage school, district, and state education leaders to make the management, organization, and operation of schools a more prominent part of the conversation on how to raise student achievement.

Perry Zirkel filled in for Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post blog, The Answer Sheet, a couple days ago and wrote a provocative post about the law v. lore in teacher tenure. Perry (who I love is jumping on blogging - what a perfect medium for him) makes some great points that the law of teacher tenure is not as ironclad against dismissing teachers as most educators assume. I teach this to my future administrators all the time. Perry also makes a good point that litigation resulting from dismissal cases frequently goes the district's way. Certainly, as is almost always the case, the law is geared to support the school in these cases. So, as is always the case with Perry, he makes some great points and actually points to data to back it up.  But, I have 2 small issues with how Perry frames this issue and a different recommendation as to how to achieve the desired result. 

Detroit Public Schools expects to shed nearly 40 percent of its teachers in the next four years to help close a $327 million deficit, yet projects a loss of just 6,000 students under a state-approved fiscal blueprint. The district would cut more than 1,500 teachers by fall 2015, according to a deficit-elimination plan obtained by The Detroit News. Most of the reduction - nearly 1,100 teachers - would occur next fall as DPS moves some of its weakest schools into a statewide recovery system, the Education Achievement Authority.

It would be somewhat churlish to criticize any attempt to honor public school teachers just when they feel under assault by the modern school reform movement - including Monday night's glitzy celebration for some D.C. teachers at the Kennedy Center. But it seems fair to ask whether a fancy event at the city's leading arts venue - complete with big-time supporters (including The Washington Post Company) - is really the best or even appropriate way to celebrate teachers and their profession.

"Today is National Teacher Appreciation Day, as well as National Teacher Appreciation Week. In various ways, millions of people are thanking their Teachers for having made a difference in their lives, including President Obama, who held an official function at the White House today honoring the National Teacher of the Year. But a couple of other things are happening today as well."

This report examines our pervasive and longstanding failure to recognize and respond to variations in the effectiveness of our teachers. At the heart of the matter are teacher evaluation systems, which in theory should serve as the primary mechanism for assessing such variations, but in practice tell us little about how one teacher differs from any other, except teachers whose performance is so egregiously poor as to warrant dismissal.

Calls to reform teacher layoff policies have begun to appear with regularity in newspaper editorials, policy briefs, and statehouses-and for good reason. A growing body of research confirms that teacher quality is the most influential in-school factor driv­ing student achievement. That being the case, teacher dismissal policies and procedures can have profound implications for how much students learn.

In a step toward reshaping how all teachers in New York City's 1,700 public schools are judged, the Department of Education and the city teachers' union agreed on Friday to a pilot teacher-evaluation system that will take effect next year in 33 struggling schools.

I am appalled by this malicious attack on teachers and teachers' unions by Jay Greene. He claims that teachers are engaging in mob-like behavior, are seething anger and are intimidating politicians. The irony is that I've met few teachers who are nearly as angry as Jay himself comes across.

Research on teacher productivity, and recently developed accountability systems for teachers, rely on value-added models to estimate the impact of teachers on student performance.  The authors test many of the central assumptions required to derive value-added models from an underlying structural cumulative achievement model and reject nearly all of them.  Moreover, they find that  teacher value added and other key parameter estimates are highly sensitive to model specification.  While estimates from commonly employed value-added models cannot be interpreted as causal teacher effects, employing richer models that impose fewer restrictions may reduce  the  bias in estimates of teacher productivity.  

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.

The teachers union is threatening to curb its efforts toward new teacher evaluations if the Department of Education doesn't remind principals again that the old evaluation system is still in place. The threat comes at the end of an angry letter sent by UFT Secretary Michael Mendel sent to the DOE yesterday. In the letter, Mendel says that UFT members report some principals are preparing to use the Danielson Framework, an evaluation model that the DOE favors, to rate teachers - even though the union hasn't agreed to the change.

A national teachers union leader joined faculty at a Los Angeles middle school Friday to criticize a major school-improvement initiative within the L.A. Unified School District. Under the strategy, called Public School Choice, groups inside and outside the school system can bid for control of new and low-performing campuses. The meeting between teachers and Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of teachers, took place at Cochran Middle School in Arlington Heights, one of the campuses affected.

For the past couple of months, Steve Brill's new book has served to step up the eternally-beneath-the-surface hypothesis that teachers' unions are the primary obstacle to improving educational outcomes in the U.S. The general idea is that unions block "needed reforms," such as merit pay and other forms of test-based accountability for teachers, and that they "protect bad teachers" from being fired.

"It was determined at trial that between 1 percent and 3 percent-roughly 8,200-of California's 275,000 teachers are grossly ineffective. Yet, only 2.2 teachers, on the average, are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance per year. Although intended to support the case against tenure laws, these statistics are actually an indictment against those responsible for evaluating teachers effectively."

"A few weeks ago, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published teacher evaluation results for the district's public school teachers in 2013-14. This decision generated a fair amount of controversy, but it's worth noting that the Tribune, unlike the Los Angeles Times and New York City newspapers a few years ago, did not publish scores for individual teachers, only totals by school. The data once again provide an opportunity to take a look at how results vary by student characteristics. This was indeed the focus of the Tribune's story, which included the following headline: "Minneapolis' worst teachers are in the poorest schools, data show." These types of conclusions, which simply take the results of new evaluations at face value, have characterized the discussion since the first new systems came online. Though understandable, they are also frustrating and a potential impediment to the policy process."