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 »

There’s a lot of talk, both in the media and on Twitter, about the meaning of the Los Angeles Unified School District school board races. There are those who are trying to spin the story line that this was a flat rejection of outside money in political races.

Of course, the people making this argument are, for the most part, just repeating what “everyone knows” about moContinue 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 »

The research field of teacher pensions has been a relative backwater, but lately it just keeps getting more interesting. Yesterday, the Fordham Institute released a new paper from Marty West and Matt Chingos analyzing a 2002 policy change in Florida which allowed teachers to choose between a traditional defined benefit pension plan and a 401k-style defined contribution plan. The authors were abContinue Reading »

The new Education Next piece on substitute teachers by June Kronholz is terrifying. It weaves together her own son’s experiences as a substitute, the latest findings on the prevalence of teacher absences, and eye-opening research on the (lack of) standards for substitute teachers and their harmful effects on student learning. It’s well worth your time.

Kronholz’ son gives the story a perContinue 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 »

According to important new research, teacher pensions—both how generous they are and how they are structured—have important effects on the quality of the teaching workforce. This research provides some insight into how the looming retirement of the Baby Boom generation may affect students.

Last week the Center for Retirement Research released a research brief looking at whether teacher sContinue Reading »

On Tuesday the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project released its third and final series of reports. The media has reported the main findings: that we can measure and predict effective teaching. And, because the MET Project randomly assigned students to teachers, we can say that there is causality in this relationship, that teachers with high value-added scores in one year caused studentContinue Reading »

The Department of Education’s planned release of the first year of School Improvement Grant (SIG) data has important implications for the future of the program – and for reform generally.  While much of the early attention devoted to SIG has focused on its cost-effectiveness, in light of the ongoing debate over school and district human-capital policies the question of which of the four SIG modContinue Reading »

People in Washington rarely like to admit they’ve been surprised. “I heard that last week,” they will often say when some bombshell hits the newspaper.

Denizens of think tanks also don’t like surprises. After all, their job is to stay in close touch with what’s happening and what’s on the horizon.

Still, there were some surprises for our WashingContinue Reading »