Improving systems for supporting and evaluating teachers is an urgent priority in states and districts all across the country. To learn from this work and strengthen efforts moving forward, the Aspen Institute Education and Society Program has published several profiles of leading efforts in the field. Recently, the Aspen Institute Read more
A new report by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and spearheaded by a list of who’s who in humanities, social science, and the arts, recommends that the nation take 12 key steps to ensure that humanities and social sciences maintain an important place in American classrooms. “The Heart Read more
Jenny DeMonte of the Center for American Progress has penned a new report that calls for teacher-training programs to be more closely aligned with those organizations that actually hire and professionally develop the teachers that make such a crucial difference in the academics and lives of students. Everyone agrees that Read more
A new report from Ed Money Watch explores the use of student achievement data to improve classroom instruction. The paper, Promoting Data in the Classroom: Innovative State Models and Missed Opportunities, highlights examples from two states, Oregon and Delaware, of federally funded, state-driven efforts to equip teachers with the tools Read more
With an increased focus on student assessment and its application in classrooms across the United States, the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) has officially launched a new informational website to initiate a meaningful dialogue among educators on assessment and to build “assessment literacy” skills for teachers and school administrators, in particular. Read more
Meredith I. Honig at AEI Education has penned a new report urging reform of school district central offices. Honig sees these offices as good candidates to lead schools to higher rates of student progress, but because these central offices have traditionally focused on issues of business and compliance, they are Read more
Montgomery County Public Schools, MD, will greet its students this fall with a survey that asks them questions, not about academics, but about “hope, engagement and well-being.” MCPS is teaming up with Gallup, the polling giant, to conduct this survey, which they also conducted last year. For three years of Read more
Marc Tucker, of the National Center on Education and the Economy, was recently commissioned by the Center for American Progress to write a report in which he would outline his plans for education reform in the United States. Tucker, a veteran voice in American education debates, has long studied the Read more
“The results being released today show that we are indeed in a new world. And we as adults need to learn from kids in this instance. We need to learn from students about how they learn, where they learn, and how they seek information. I believe we must harness this Read more
One of the many opportunities provided by the transition to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is the chance to develop high quality instructional materials for teachers and schools that are aligned to the rigor and college- and career-ready expectations found in the standards. At the same time, determining how Read more
As the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Achieve have recently released the final version of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has completed its review of the new standards and given them a Read more
The professional lives of teachers have recently been flooded with “the new.” With new standards, new curricula, new evaluations, new assessments, and all the other changes that take place on an annual basis in schools and districts, very little remains constant from year to year. In this sea of changes, Read more
Well-meaning education reformers are too often content to layer their new proposals atop outdated schools and systems. Unsurprisingly, school improvement efforts have repeatedly failed to deliver the results we had hoped for. Doing radically better will require state, civic, and system leaders to embrace a more coherent and comprehensive push Read more
State Education Agencies (or SEAs) are a crucial element in translating policy to schools. A new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, in coordination with the Building State Capacity and Productivity Center, “The SEA of the Future“, urges state education agencies to use performance management to support school Read more
To strengthen state implementation of Common Core State Standards and meaningful teacher evaluations, the Aspen Institute and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released a set of recommendations for forging coherence across these efforts at CCSSO’s Implementing the Common Core Standards (ICCS) meeting of 22 states in New Read more
An example of the ongoing battle in some states about how much autonomy should be given to Charter Schools recently occurred in Maryland. The soon to be opened Frederick Classical Charter School (FCCS) hoped to hire 9 new teachers that fit its model of classical education. In Maryland, however, the Read more