A new report from Education Next demonstrates the academic differences between those entering the teaching profession in recent years and those entering in decades past. The numbers suggest that the teaching profession is benefiting from higher numbers of academic high achievers than has been the case in the past. Dan Read more
Teach for America is no stranger to controversy. For some, they are the poster child for the new wave of urban education and should be commended for the way that they are able to recruit highly talented, motivated college graduates to devote at least 2 years to teaching in nigh-needs Read more
Michele McNeil at Education Week describes in a recent article how the Education Department, under Secretary Arne Duncan, continues to use NCLB waivers to enforce its policy goals. The situation, which we have blogged about before here and here, is essentially that Congress has yet to pass a new version Read more
This tipsheet is a complement to TNTP’s latest report, Leap Year: Assessing and Supporting Effective First-Year Teachers, which shares what TNTP learned after radically evolving the way they train and evaluate new teachers. It is based on a simple idea: The first year is the most important year of a Read more
In “Flexibility for Fairness: Crafting Business Rules for Student Learning Objectives” AIR’s Amy Potemski explores the ways in which states are creating “business rules” to allow for flexibility in the SLO process. SLOs, or Student Learning Objectives, are being used across states as a way to provide a student growth Read more
Economist Douglas Harris sees one clear priority for the Education Department: “Now that the election is over, the Obama Administration and policymakers nationally can return to governing. Of all the education-related decisions that have to be made, the future of teacher evaluation has to be front and center.” Within this Read more
A new paper recently released by the Center for American Progress argues that excessive teacher absences, as might be expected, cause decreases in student achievement and waste school district resources. However, the paper asserts that problem of these excessive absences could be fairly easily alleviated because “the vast variation in Read more
The results from the 6th annual Education Next survey have recently been released. Education Next is an education policy journal which, according to their website argues that “bold change is needed in American K–12 education” although they claim to partake “of no program, campaign, or ideology” and only to go Read more
The teachers’ strike in Chicago has generated considerable interest in the use of test-based measures of teacher effectiveness in personnel decisions. For a clear discussion of the uses, value, and limitations of test-based measures check out the CADLER Conversation on the issue. The National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data Read more