The Alliance for Excellent Education has released a new webinar and report on Improving the Effectiveness of Beginning Teachers. Webinar: Improving the Effectiveness of Beginning Teachers This webinar highlighted current trends in the teaching workforce, the research on induction programs, and a systems approach to creating supportive teaching and learning Read more
Vanderbilt University has recently put out a new study on teacher retention, which examined a Tennessee program that offered high-performing teachers in the state’s worst schools a $5,000 bonus to stay on another year. The program was fairly small and implementation was uneven, but researchers still found preliminary evidence of Read more
At The Lens, part of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Paul Hill offers a model for finding existing star performers in underperforming urban school districts. Every school district has teachers and administrators who are part of the problem but also teachers and administrators who are already or are very Read more
An increasing number of states are mandating that teacher performance be considered in employment decisions, including tenure and layoffs, according to a 50-state policy review of teacher-tenure laws by the Education Commission of the States. Three states — Florida, Kansas, and North Carolina — have attempted to eliminate tenure or Read more
Written for state legislators, governors, and their staff, this policy snapshot provides an overview of the latest research, information, and policy trends for establishing and supporting effective induction programs. Induction is a term that is often associated with mentoring of new teachers, and for good reason, but it is important Read more
Through a first-of-its-kind exploratory survey, over 300 National and State Teachers of the Year reveal the professional experiences and supports that they believe most contributed to their growth and eventual excellence as a teacher. Reflecting back on their careers, from preparation through mastery and even into retirement, the teacher leaders Read more
A new report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching highlights the causes for and consequences of a relatively inexperienced teacher workforce, as well as promising practices in response to this reality. The high number of inexperienced teachers in public school classrooms is a largely unrecognized problem that Read more
For more than two decades, Teach for America has been sending bright young college grads into challenging classrooms with as few as five weeks of up-front training and expecting them to teach for two years. That’s about to change. TFA recently announced a pilot program to give an extra year Read more
One policy response to the challenge of attracting high-performing teachers to low-achieving schools is offering teachers monetary incentives to transfer. This report examines impacts of transfer incentives — including the willingness of teachers to transfer when offered an incentive, teacher retention in the schools to which they transferred, and the Read more
Thomas S. Dee, of Stanford University, and James Wyckoff, of the University of Virginia, have sparked the debate on teacher evaluations with a new working paper which suggests that DCPS’ IMPACT teacher evaluations have proven effective to increase teacher performance and student test scores. IMPACT is the most radical of Read more
The New York Times recently published an education article that asks, “Do teachers need to have experience?” They asked this question of five different educators who each inhabit different realms of the education field, and as might be expected, they received five unique answers to their question. We have picked Read more
New York City, especially under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has often tried to be a model of a progressive city, willing to take on business lobbies or entrenched bureaucracies in an effort to improve. For example, recently, New York started using data to rate restaurants, track the repair of potholes and Read more
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 Read more
TNTP, a national nonprofit committed to ending the injustice of educational inequality, has released a new report that seeks to help first year teachers become better teachers. TNTP was created by teachers in 1997, so the TNTP team has a vested interested in creating cohorts of new teachers who have Read more
According to a MetLife survey, educators’ levels of satisfaction have dropped appreciably in recent years, but others see the change as a result of poor surveying techniques. “According to the survey, principal and teacher job satisfaction is declining. The responsibilities school leaders face have become increasing complex, and the biggest Read more
In a recent AEI Teacher Quality 2.0 report, Timothy Knowles argues persuasively for radical changes with a practical mindset. His article is called “New pathways for teachers, new promises for students: A vision for developing excellent teachers.” Knowles, John Dewey Director of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute, writing Read more