Education Department Launches “National Conversation” on Teacher Quality

By Michelle Hudgins and Tim Walker National Education Association leaders believe a new Department of Education proposal is a promising proposition toward improving the teaching profession. This week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan launched RESPECT (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching), a proposal that challenges states and districts to work with teachers [...]

Van Roekel Announces Plan to Strengthen Teaching Profession

By Tim Walker National Education Association (NEA) President Dennis Van Roekel today laid out a new action agenda for the nation’s largest organization of educators that will help transform the teaching profession and accelerate student learning. Speaking at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, D.C., Van Roekel detailed three major strategies that will guide the NEA’s [...]

“Mitchell 20″ Spotlights Educator-Led Transformation

By Will Potter As educators are facing attacks across the country – from budget cuts to bargaining rights – a new documentary spotlights a group of teachers in a low-income, high-needs school who are taking a stand. “Mitchell 20: Teacher Quality is the Answer” is the story of 20 teachers who pledge to earn National [...]

Grading Teacher Effectiveness Strategies

By Tim Walker As more state legislatures across the nation pass laws requiring teacher evaluations, the debate over what to actually do with the data is heating up. Many districts are using these evaluations – many based on narrow, value-added data – to label teachers “ineffective” and subsequently remove them from the classroom. Scrutiny of [...]

Professional Learning Deserves Professional Pay

By Tim Walker The recently released 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a periodic review of test results among elementary and secondary students in the United States, contained an interesting nugget. It suggests that, contrary to most of the recent research, having a teacher with an advanced degree is associated with higher student achievement. [...]

Poll: Americans Give Public School Teachers High Marks

By Tim Walker The 2011 Phi Delta Kappa survey  has good news for the nation’s public school educators. More than 70 percent of Americans say they have “trust and confidence” in the men and women who are teaching. Furthermore, 69 percent give teachers in their specific community a letter grade of an A or B. [...]

How to Make Better Math and Science Teachers

By Mary Ellen Flannery There was one kid who never showed up to algebra class at his Washington State middle school. Then one day, he sidled in and his classmates showed him how to use the classroom’s new hand-held technology. “He’s been coming to class every since,” his teacher said. It’s hard to resist a [...]

How Do We Increase Teacher Quality in Low-Income Schools?

By Cindy Long An eighth grade math class in Oakland, California, had so many substitute teachers in one year the students couldn’t keep track of them, let alone remember all their names. They live in a high-poverty neighborhood where school funding is so low the district finds it cheaper to hire a series of substitutes [...]

Report Calls For More Experienced Teachers in Low-Performing Schools

By Mary Ellen Flannery When school boards don’t create incentives for experienced, highly qualified teachers to teach in their poorest schools, the kids in those schools are denied the same resources and opportunities to learn that middle-class kids get every day, says a newly report from Appleseed, a national network of public interest justice centers. [...]

Leading Economist: Gates Value-Added Research Deeply Flawed, Ignores Its Own Data

By Kevin Hart One of the country’s leading economists is warning that a Gates Foundation study on value-added teacher evaluation not only fails to meet key academic standards, but that it dangerously misinterprets its own data. Last month, the Gates Foundation released the first report of the Measures of Effective Teaching project, and the report [...]

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