As part of Jeff Charbonneau’s victory lap as National Teacher of the Year, he met with President Obama this week at the White House. There was a little kerfuffle because Charbonneau does not share the president’s views regarding teacher evaluation. Like the majority of teachers, Charbonneau opposes linking student standardized test scores to teacher evaluation. It’s unclear, he says, whether thContinue Reading »

English teacher John Keating, played by Robin Williams, inspired his tony prep school students in the classic film, Dead Poet’s Society. But I always wondered: Could Mr. Keating hack it in a lower-performing, higher-poverty school?

A recent working paper indicates that, yes, highly effective teachers continue to be highly effective when they switch schools, regardless of the new school’sContinue Reading »

Even in a perfect world—say, Missouri in the mid-1990’s—enhancing pension benefits for teachers creates winners and losers. A new report on Missouri’s teacher pension system shines a light on just how stark the difference is—and how damaging these changes will be for the teaching profession overall.

From 1995 to 2002, Missouri implemented a series of retroactive benefit enhancements to tContinue Reading »

Rick Hess’ new book title, Cage-Busting Leadership, invokes images of Hulk crushing bars designed to hold him back. But as Tuesday’s panel shows, school leaders can learn just as much, if not more, from Hulk’s alter-ego, the reserved, bookish and determined Dr. Bruce Banner: The first and perhaps most important action a leader can take is to learn the rules of the game.

For Principal AdrContinue Reading »

Conventional wisdom states that when politicians make hard decisions, they’re punished at the polls. But Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island is proving to be the exception to the rule.

In 2011, Raimondo, general treasurer of Rhode Island, spearheaded the painful but necessary public pension reform that Rhode Island passed on November 17, 2011. (Many of those reforms were anticipated in an EducContinue Reading »

On Monday, five states announced that they would add at least 300 hours of learning time to some schools in the fall of 2013. These states—Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Tennessee— are working with the Ford Foundation and National Center on Time & Learning  to roll out this initiative in two stages. In 2013-2014, 35 schools that enroll about 17,500 students will increasContinue Reading »

In 1994, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) claimed that criminals had discovered “that Pell grants are a great scam: rob a store, go to jail, and get your degree.” At the time, 27,700 state and federal prisoners were using Pell grants—far less than one percent of the overall program. But following Hutchinson’s anti-rehabilitation rhetoric, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act baContinue Reading »

Last week, Education Nation closed the summit with interviews from President Obama and Governor Romney. The candidates seemed to agree more than they disagreed—in fact, Brian Williams asked Governor Romney if he would retain Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education for a Romney presidency. Performance pay was one area where President Obama and Governor Romney were closely aligned. “There should beContinue Reading »

The National Council on Teacher Quality is in the midst of a mammoth review of the nation’s teacher preparation programs. Predictably, many schools of education are pushing back (see their letters of dissent here.) Their reasons for not participating strike common themes. Some schools argue they are already accountable to their state regulatory and accrediting bodies. Others argue that NCTQ’s mContinue Reading »

Like many policy issues, using student test scores in teacher evaluation is an iceberg—reasonably easy to understand on the surface, but incredibly complex once you dive deeper. The challenge starts with writing an individual test item and ends with the statistical quagmire of value-added models. The 44th annual PDK/Gallup poll on how Americans view public education asked whether they would supContinue Reading »