Teacher Quality

These days, it's not enough for teachers to know how to manage a classroom, impart knowledge and deliver lesson plans. In the wake of test-heavy po...

As we continue to cut public education in unimaginable ways, please remember the amazing teachers that shaped your lives. Let us help fight to enable teachers to continue to provide the highest possible instruction possible.

The crisis in American education is really about how to find and retain and nourish ordinary teachers. They are the ones who do most of the work, have the greatest influence, and are under the greatest stress.

We have never heard more policy rhetoric about developing, recruiting and retaining strong teachers. Ironically, our policies have also never done more to ensure that good teachers have little incentive to serve and stay in those schools.

When there are distractions in the classroom and in children's lives, teachers have a harder time doing their job. That's not an excuse, that's reality.

It is now guaranteed that any child in a public school whose teacher is evaluated with VAMs will receive a bare bones curriculum, focused only on isolated skills.

During my six years of teaching middle school in a major urban school system, I never worked with a consistent team of teachers that provided high quality instruction all year long.

We need to reward the "thankless job" of substitute teaching with better pay and chances for permanent positions. I look forward to the day when no student comes home saying, "I didn't learn much today... we had a sub."

If Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had had any idea what the latest Gates Foundation project would find, would he have gambled so heavily on test-driven policies in Race to the Top and his other "teacher quality" reforms?

I've made a few comparisons between other occupations and teaching to highlight some of the ridiculous rules and regulations imposed on educators as a...

WASHINGTON — Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Wednesday spelled out details of a proposed new $5 billion Race to the Top-style competition foc...

WASHINGTON — America's public school teachers are seeing their generations-old tenure protections weakened as states seek flexibility to fire te...

Anyone who ever finds him or herself asking teachers to do anything other than teach students ought to do so with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The status quo in public education isn't working. Not for students -- and not for educators. Now, more than ever, our schools need a highly skilled and effective teaching force to guide students in meeting the challenges of the 21st century.

Despite the ubiquity of the "bottom third" and similar arguments (which are sometimes phrased as massive generalizations, with no reference to actual proportions), it's unclear how many of those who offer them know what specifically they refer to.

If 2010 was the year of the bombshell in research in the three "major areas" of market-based education reform -- charter schools, performance pay, and value-added in evaluations -- 2011 was the year of the slow, sustained march.

An NEA commission report released last Thursday appears to depart from union positions on seniority; tenure; performance pay; student achievement as a factor in evaluations; and the role of teachers in evaluating their colleagues.

Where their teacher-quality proposals are concerned, the fates of the 11 states that have bid for waivers of core principles of the No Child Left Behi...

Our teachers come from an elite group -- college graduates -- to begin with. Where they rank within this elite is the issue, and it's simply unfair to suggest that a large group of people in the top third is somehow fundamentally flawed.

Although the argument that "teacher quality" has declined substantially is sometimes taken for granted, its empirical backing is actually quite thin, and not as clear-cut as some might believe.

WASHINGTON — Teachers and principals are worrying more about their own report cards these days. They're being graded on more than student test ...

This week's debate between Eric Hanushek and Diane Ravitch exemplifies the tendency of true believers in data-driven policies to refuse to communicate with educators.

If you thought you knew everything about the remarkable transformation of Finland's schools from mediocre to one of the top performing school systems in the world, think again.