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Some Utah teachers worry that the Ogden School District is setting a precedent for other districts by skipping negotiations with its teachers union and phasing out pay based on experience.

"There has been a lot of controversy in Ohio in recent weeks around House-proposed legislative changes to the state's charter law that would decimate an already weak charter school accountability system (see here, here, and here). Fordham has not been shy about commenting publicly on what's wrong with the House language, nor have we shied away from arguing for stronger charter accountability and transparency. Those who know us understand our advocacy for strong charter accountability provisions are not new."

"...This thinking relies on a set of fallacies that show a stunning ignorance of why people teach and how people learn. These fallacies are perpetuated by people who have never taught, but because they happen to have tons of money behind their opinions, have accumulated an inordinate amount of power over how schools are run."

"Nine months ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a $100 million gift to improve public schools in Newark, N.J. The plan to spend the money is now taking shape, and a new superintendent is coming on board to lead the effort. But in New Jersey, initial jubilation over the gift has turned into protests, suspicion and a belief that students will never benefit from the money."

When policy and politics collide, the outcome is telling.  A recent exchange between a legislator from another district and our superintendent escalated into a public spectacle when the senator represented his views to a columnist who then issued a scathing article headlined, "State Senator Puts School Superintendent in His Place".  We believe that our public should be allowed to consider the evidence and decide for itself.

In the past, administrators often looked the other way when students skipped out a few days short of the year's final dismissal. Some still do. But these days, with numbers holding so much power over the fates of schools and their leaders, some principals are counting heads. They know that empty seats, even in the waning days of the school year, can lower their average attendance rates and shave points off their annual progress reports issued by the city.

The school privatization wars have slogged into a summer stalemate, stuck in a sort of trench warfare that, for the moment at least, rendered the big guns of the most powerful political figures in the state useless against a grassroots campaign that appears to have won the hearts and minds of New Jersey residents.

Diane Ravitch responds to David Brooks' column.

As Lisa Guisbond said, "this is an amazing video from the Aspen Ideas Festival in which Stand For Children's Jonah Edelman explains how he, with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan's senior advisor Jo Anderson (former Executive Director of the IEA) out foxed the CTU, the IFT and the IEA's Ken Swanson and Audrey Soglin into agreeing to Senate Bill 7."

A lively debate about charter schools, high-stakes testing and impoverished students arose as David Brooks criticized Diane Ravitch, she answered back and readers joined the fray.

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.  

Principals tend to prefer working in schools with higher-achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals often use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments. District leadership can also exacerbate principal turnover by implementing policies aimed at improving low-performing schools such as rotating school leaders. Using longitudinal data from one large urban school district we find principal turnover is detrimental to school performance. Frequent turnover results in lower teacher retention and lower student achievement gains, which are particularly detrimental to students in high-poverty and failing school

Reform advocates and policymakers concerned about the quality and distribution of teachers support proposals of alternative compensation for teachers in hard-to-hire subject areas, hard-to-staff schools, and with special knowledge and skills. The successful implementation of such proposals depends in large part on teacher attitudes. The current body of research on teacher attitudes toward compensation reform paints an inconsistent picture of teachers views, largely ignoring the influence of individual and workplace characteristics on teacher attitudes. Results from a 2006 survey of teachers in Washington State linked to school and district data confirm earlier findings that teacher opinion about pay reform is not uniform, and further illustrates teacher preferences for different pay structures vary substantially by individual and workplace characteristics. Nearly three quarters of teachers favored higher pay for hard to-staff schools. In contrast, only 17% favored merit pay. Teachers with a high

Why I am Marching in DC with the Save our Schools Movement on July 30

There has been much chatter - on both the local and national level - about charter schools. There is also a lot of misinformation out there, too. Unlike their public counterparts, privately run charter schools often don't offer nearly enough value relative to what they take away from traditional public schools, state and national budgets, and the public.

"Over the objections of some public school advocates, the Louisiana Senate voted 22-16 Monday to allow corporations to sponsor charter schools in exchange for controlling up to half of the enrollment slots and half of the governing board seats. "

" David Brennan has cast a long shadow over this year's state budget. The Akron charter-school magnate who has given more than $5 million to Republican politicians dating back to the mid-'80s as he built a 31-school empire was the force behind a series of charter school amendments slipped into the GOP-controlled House's budget bill in late April, House Speaker William G. Batchelder has said. "