Even though it has been known for some time that teachers and principals play the largest role in student success, it is only recently that districts and schools have started making requisite changes to their strategic management of talent. This is the central contention of Allan Odden’s new report, Getting the Best People into the Read more about Getting the Best Teachers into the Toughest Jobs[…]
Mario Marino of Venture Philanthropy Partners recently blogged on the importance of great people for the success of any education reform. Although his audience consists mostly of nonprofits and philanthropies, his reflections are appropriate for anyone working in the education sector. Marino writes: I’d be the last to discourage innovation, but our problem is not Read more about Great People over Great Models[…]
Sara Mead of Bellwether Education recently wrote in an Education Week blog about her investigation into teacher evaluation legislation in 21 states that have passed laws in the last three years requiring teacher evaluations based in part on student achievement. Bellwether’s study finds that 12 states’ laws link tenure to teacher effectiveness, 16 explicitly give Read more about The Missing Piece in Teacher Evaluation Laws: Empowering Principals[…]
A study released yesterday finds that urban schools are systematically neglecting their best teachers, losing tens of thousands every year even as they keep many of their lowest-performing teachers indefinitely-with disastrous consequences for students, schools, and the teaching profession. The study by TNTP documents the real teacher retention crisis in America’s schools: not only a Read more about The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis[…]
A new report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) finds that leaders in the charter sector hire teachers based on their fit with a school’s mission, not just their individual characteristics and talent, as a way to build strong schools. The report, Managing Talent for Coherence: Learning from Charter Management Organizations, details how Read more about Managing Talent for Coherence: Learning from CMOs[…]
In a recent blog post for Education Week¸ Sarah Sparks reported on the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference in Vancouver, BC. Under discussion was the massive Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project, funded by the Gates Foundation. MET is finding that their teacher effectiveness assessments “aren’t good at showing which differences are important between Read more about Studies Give Nuanced Look at Teacher Effectiveness[…]
Mathematica and the Institute of Education Sciences released a joint report earlier this month on the implementation experience and intermediate impacts of the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI), a pilot transfer-incentive strategy launched in seven school districts. TTI offered $20,000 to each teacher who transferred from a high-performing to a low-performing school, and the program helped Read more about The Talent Teacher Initiative: Early Impacts[…]
Districts and states planning to apply for Teacher Incentive Fund Round 4 (TIF4) funding need to take steps to engage teachers and administrators, their Boards of Education, and the public in planning for applications. The TIF 4 draft regulations place emphasis on the core elements of both performance- based compensation and human capital management systems. Read more about US Department of Education Releases Draft TIF Regulations[…]
In a recent opinion piece for Education Week, Arthur Wise of the Center for Teaching Quality writes that current mainstream ideas on how to improve American public schools will result in “at best, a marginal improvement for small numbers of students.” Teacher effectiveness is worthy of increased research, but the proposals for value-added evaluation measures Read more about The “Tyranny” of the Self-Contained Classroom[…]
There is ample research on the differences in teacher distribution across schools vis-à-vis teacher demographics and experience, but what about teacher distribution within schools? A paper published by the Urban Institute looks at this issue. By comparing teachers within the same grade level and school in an urban district during a given year, the authors Read more about Teacher Characteristics and Class Assignments[…]
A new issue brief released by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices offers lessons drawn from its State Strategies to Improve Chronically Low-Performing Schools project, which sought to address underlying causes of failing schools: weak leadership; inadequate skill levels among teachers; and insufficient high-quality teaching materials. In 2009, the project gave Colorado, Maryland, Read more about State Strategies to Improve Chronically Low-Performing Schools[…]