Laid-Off Educators Go to Washington to Fight for Jobs

By Kevin Hart Lee Libby, a 25-year teaching veteran, has spent her career encouraging her students to do the right thing. Today, she went to Capitol Hill to make the same plea to the Untied States Senate. Libby, a music teacher from Poland, ME, was one of five recently laid-off educators who came to Washington, D.C. [...]

“I thought I’d stay forever.”

By Mary Ellen Flannery When Amanda Valente’s fifth-graders studied ancient civilizations last year, they dressed like Spartan warriors, drew on pharaoh beards, and played the games of Ancient Rome in their own bazaar. So why does it feel like Valente – the recently crowned teacher of the year in her New Jersey district — has [...]

Long Odds in Las Vegas

by Tim Walker Very few school districts in the United States have been hit as hard as Clark County, Nevada. As recently as 2007, the district, home to Las Vegas and the fifth-largest in the nation (300,000 students), was furiously building new schools and hiring new teachers to keep up with the region’s tremendous population [...]

Protecting Education for Children of the Military

By Collin Berglund Memorial Day is a time to reflect on the sacrifices made by the men and women of America’s armed forces. With ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, those sacrifices continue daily. But the sacrifices made by America’s troops also extend to their families. Many of our service members who are deployed overseas [...]

Chasing Experienced Teachers From the Classroom

By Kevin Hart Every public school student deserves access to a highly-qualified, experienced educator. But experience may matter more at lower-performing priority schools, where students often enter classrooms suffering from significant skills gaps and a variety of social issues that interfere with learning. That’s why many educators are so baffled by a federal plan that [...]

When the Conventional Wisdom on Unions and Teacher Firings is Wrong

By Alain Jehlen The conventional wisdom: Unions keep bad teachers from being fired. The unconventional approach: Actually look at the numbers! The belief that unions protect bad teachers is so widely accepted that it’s challenged. But when Bill Maher sounded off against teacher unions on his HBO talk show “Real Time” a few weeks ago, [...]

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