Late last month, TNTP released a new report called Greenhouse Schools. The report seeks to identify “greenhouse schools,” or schools that “are better than others at accelerating student learning by developing and keeping great teachers.” TNTP wants to know what these schools are doing to establish such cultures. After surveying Read more
On March 27, Education Sector held a panel discussion to discuss the challenges facing states as we head towards 2014. Between now and 2014, states will be facing the challenges of new Common Core standards, new assessments, new accountability systems, new teacher evaluations, new data systems, and for some states, Read more
Last month, Common Core.org hosted a panel discussion that focused on those subjects not included in the Common Core State Standards: history, science, and the arts. Panelists included David Coleman, lead writer of the CCSS in English Language Arts; Lynn Munson, President and Executive Director of Common Core; Lewis Huffman, Read more
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education released the 2012 notice inviting applications for new “Scale-up” and “Validation” grants available through the Investing in Innovation (i3) fund. “This next round of i3 projects will build on the fund’s growing portfolio of promising education programs that help close achievement gaps, personalize Read more
TNTP has released its newest resource—the Teacher Talent Toolbox. The Toolbox “is a repository of successful strategies and practical resources that schools, districts, and networks can draw on to create effective human capital policies, with the aim of creating sustained, scalable models for effective instruction.” It is essentially an open-source Read more
Across the country, state education agencies have begun to institute new offices to specialize in innovation—searching for new ideas and helping them to make it into education policy. The “new ideas” cover a variety of areas, from teacher quality to online learning, which means they “transcend the assigned duties of Read more
Last week, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and Mathematica released a follow-up study to their January report on successful charter management organizations (CMOs). The new report, Learning from Charter School Management Organizations: Strategies for Student Behavior and Teacher Coaching, delves deeper, explaining how five successful CMOs put two Read more
The State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE), the nonprofit research and advocacy group that is the major partner in effecting change in Tennessee’s K-12 public education system, released its annual report on Tennessee’s education reforms earlier this month. SCORE also outlined what it believes are four priority areas the state Read more
Scholastic Inc. (NASDAQ: SCHL) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on the Teaching Profession, the second landmark report presenting the results of a national survey of more than 10,000 public school teachers in grades pre-K to 12. The survey is a follow-up to the Read more
The Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) has released a new report focused on parents’ perceptions of assessments: their development, administration, and the use of the resulting data. In For Every Child, Multiple Measures: What Parents and Educators Want from K-12 Assessments, the researchers found that parents, teachers and district administrators hold Read more
In the spring of 2011, Pittsburgh Public Schools selected its first 38 recruits for a new teacher residency program. Nearly 1,000 candidates had applied for the year-long program, which included active teaching service combined with mentoring, professional certification, and a salary of $39,000—in return for a commitment to teach in Read more
Mathematica Policy Research has released its final report on the Chicago Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), and found that the program did not do exactly as intended. TAP aimed to improve schools by increasing teacher quality, and provided multiple opportunities for professional development, school leadership positions, structured feedback, and mentoring. Overall, Read more
Recently, Linda Darling-Hammond wrote a commentary piece about value-added evaluation methods for Education Week. Excerpts from her commentary are below: Everyone agrees that teacher evaluation in the United States needs an overhaul. Although successful systems exist, most districts are not using approaches that help teachers improve or remove those who Read more
In his most recent blog post for Time, Andrew Rotherham discusses five things he believes teachers could learn from the US Marine Corps. He begins the article with a reflection on the fighting in Fallujah: “19- and 20-year-old Marines were trusted to make extraordinary split-second decisions in an environment more Read more
The US Department of Education is continuing its work to determine how online communities of practice (COPs) may help teachers improve their practice. For the past year, the Department’s Offices of Innovation and Improvement (OII) and Educational Technology (OET) have been researching several critical issues that may influence the effectiveness Read more
The New Teacher Center (NTC) has released a new study, Review of State Policies on Teacher Induction, which summarizes the Center’s analysis of induction and mentoring policies across the country. The paper uses a battery of criteria to highlight leading state policies, and makes policy recommendations that the Center believes Read more