This guest blog post written by Danny Rosenthal, who is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former high school math teacher. He practices labor and employment law in Washington, D.C.

Two years ago, Florida’s Alachua County was faced with a dilemma. Under the state’s new teacher evaluation law, the county was required to base 40 percent of evaluations on value-added student achievementContinue Reading »

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!  ES Senior Fellow Peter Cookson remembers his “mentor from the old school.”

April 1961. I am about to graduate from Saint Mary’s High School on the south side of Phoenix, Ariz. I am a fair student at best, only functionally literate, vaguely interested in history, a bit of a cut-up, and noted for talking back to the good nuns and fathers who wContinue Reading »

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! Here’s ES Senior Fellow Ben Wildavsky on one of his crushes favorite teachers…

I remember quite a bit about first grade at John Muir Elementary School in Berkeley, California, circa 1971-1972. Our portable classroom stood apart from the main school building, next to a small creek. Inside, first- and second-graders were mixed in a single experiContinue Reading »

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! From all of us here at Education Sector, thank you, teachers, for doing the amazing work you do! Tune in all week as we remember teachers who inspire us to do the work we do.

To this day, I still backspace when I type “there is” or “there are.” My high school journalism adviser, Mrs. (Marilyn) Dreistadt, ingrained it in our minds that “there is” is quite Continue Reading »

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! From all of us here at Education Sector, thank you, teachers, for doing the amazing work you do! Tune in all week as we remember teachers who inspire us to do the work we do. Policy Analyst Connie Clark starts us off:

I’ll never forget my high school principal. The year I graduated high school was Dr. Mary Kolek’s last year at Weston High School. She had Continue Reading »

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 »

The blog Stories from School, where National Board Certified teachers in Washington state engage in policy discussions, has posted a couple responses to my piece on evaluation systems in Washington school districts. First, I want to say thanks to Maren Johnson and Tom White, and their commenters, for reading and engaging with my work. I’ve already responded to some of the points that they have Continue Reading »

In my recent paper, The Evergreen Effect, I show that nearly every employee in Washington school districts—including all teachers, principals, superintendents, and school support staff like janitors and librarians—is given a satisfactory performance evaluation. The problems with this seem self-evident to me and, as I articulate in the piece, if an employer can’t differentiate between their emplContinue Reading »

In a new Education Sector Chart You Can Trust, I show that Washington’s motto as “The Evergreen State” applies not just to an abundance of evergreen coniferous trees, but also to the state’s school districts, which almost never identify low-performing employees. Across all districts statewide, only a minuscule number of employees were deemed unsatisfactory: 0.92 percent of teachers, 1.42 percenContinue Reading »

Conventional wisdom says that public sector pensions are far too optimistic in assuming an 8-percent investment return. Indeed, the stock market has far underperformed that goal lately, leaving pension plans in precarious financial shape.

But, if we expand our time frame to a longer horizon of, say, 25 years, it turns out that conventional wisdom is false. Using actual investment return Continue Reading »