This piece comes to us courtesy of The Hechinger Report's HechingerEd blog. School districts around the country are facing obstacles as they attemp...

NEW YORK -- The city and its teachers' union can't agree on how to evaluate the educators, an impasse that has put the nation's largest school distric...

Deal Or No Deal? This afternoon, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said the union was calling it quits on negotiations with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg over teacher evaluations. Shockingly, each side blames the other. What does this mean? The city will lose oh, a couple hundred million dollars in state budget money. Bloomberg says, via Gothamschools, that it's "too soon to tell" whether the loss will necessitate teacher layoffs.

New York City stands to lose up to $450 million in funding as tense negotiations between the city and teachers union fell apart on an evaluation plan ...

Less Texas Testing? As Texas prepares its budget, lawmakers in the Lone Star State are trying to make a statement on standardized testing. Currently, KUT News notes, testing is "zeroed out" in the House budget. That means it's still in there, just followed by a bunch of zeroes. "We want to start the conversation on testing," House Budget writer and Republican state representative Jim Pitts told KUT. "And we're gonna have a lot of hearings between now and the end of the session on education and some things that we're going to do in education.  And we sure want testing to be one of the number one things. And that's why we did it." We are grateful to KUT for asking, since we were wondering ourselves: yes, says Texas Education Agency spokesperson Dabbie Ratcliffe, this is probably the first time in Texas history such a tactic has been used to discuss testing.

A Somewhat Happy Education Headline? America's students are graduating high school at higher rates, according to a new Harvard report (via the Wall Street Journal.) In 2000, researchers found, 77.6 percent of Americans ages 20-24 had high school diplomas; 10 years later, 83.7 percent of that same group held diplomas. "The improvement was particularly sharp among blacks and Hispanics," WSJ reports. "For instance, in 2000, 61.2% of black men between 20 and 24 had finished high school; in 2010, 72.0% of black men in that age bracket had." But even so, 20 percent of American men between 20 and 24 -- and 14 percent of women -- still lack that crucial certification.

Expanding the amount of learning time for students and creating a new class of higher-paid "master teachers" are among the major changes New York stat...

NEW YORK -- A few years ago, Bill Gates decided to learn more about whether a teacher's effect on student learning could be measured. Three years, 3,0...

Failing New York City teachers can have their poor ratings scrubbed from the record if they strike a deal with the city to quit or retire, according t...

This piece comes to us courtesy of The Hechinger Report. In 2012, new teacher-evaluation systems and merit pay spread across the country. Technolog...