In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better under new teacher-evaluation systems recently put in place. In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or better. Principals in Tennessee judged 98 percent of teachers to be "at expectations" or better last school year, while evaluators in Georgia gave good…

The National Education Association, on behalf of three affiliates of its Florida chapter and seven teachers, last week filed suit against the Florida education department. They contend that some teachers are being judged against students or subjects they don't teach, in violation of their constitutional rights. The groups seek a federal court…

Student feedback, test-score growth calculations, and observations of practice appear to pick up different but complementary information that, combined, can provide a balanced and accurate picture of teacher performance, according to research recently released from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. A composite measure on teacher effectiveness…

As the movement to overhaul teacher evaluation marches onward, an emerging question is splitting the swath of advocates who support the new tools used to gauge teacher performance: Who should get access to the resulting information? Supporters of typing teacher evaluations to student performance differ over whether individuals' results should be…

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 Behind (NCLB) Act appear to depend largely on how the peer reviewers--and, ultimately, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan--interpret their applications. The U.S. Department of Education's criteria…

With state and national policymakers eyeing ways to improve teacher preparation, a handful of education programs are becoming more intentional about how such "cooperating" teachers--as they're known in the lingo of teacher preparation--are selected and trained. That interest could grow as programs wrestle with the finer points of how to…

Rounding the corner on the design of new teacher-evaluation plans, states and districts are beginning to wrestle with the significant technical and logistical hurdles for transforming their blueprints into reality. In the coming months, more states--especially those that won grants through the $4 billion federal Race to the Top initiative--are…

A handful of urban districts, such as Denver, the District of Columbia, Pittsburgh, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, are taking steps to practice "strategic hiring." The efforts consist of collecting a more-robust set of information on candidates, developing stronger relationships with teacher-preparation programs, and tracking new hires to determine their…

This article reports on how states strive to overhaul their teacher tenure policies. Over the past year, a handful of states have begun to overhaul their tenure-granting processes by increasing the number of years it takes teachers to win due process rights, and by trying to improve the evaluations that are supposed to guide determinations of…

The use of "value added" information appears poised to expand into the nation's teacher colleges, with more than a dozen states planning to use the technique to analyze how graduates of training programs fare in classrooms. Supporters say the data could help determine which teacher education pathways produce teachers who are at least as…

National Education Association (NEA) officials announced last week that they would put a "policy statement" before the union's governing body for approval that, among other changes, would open the door to the use of "valid, reliable, high-quality standardized tests" of student learning, in combination with multiple other measures, for evaluating…

Forced into an uneasy balancing act between their members and the president they helped elect, the national teachers' unions are responding to the Obama administration's teacher-effectiveness agenda in notably different ways. Publicly at least, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel has hewed closely to the union's internal…

Chicago teachers voted last week to suspend a 7-day-old strike, sending some 350,000 students back to the classroom and paving the way for the teaching force to vote on a tentative contract. But for many in the Windy City, the contract has raised another potentially tall hurdle: how the cash-strapped district will manage to pay for it. District…

Established in the 142,000-student Montgomery County, Maryland, district in 1999, peer assistance and review (PAR)--or "peer review," as it is occasionally called--is actually an old idea. In 1981, the then-president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers, Dal Lawrence, helped create the first PAR program. Almost 30 years later, only a…

The author reports on the debate about "value added" measures of teaching which may be the most divisive topic in teacher-quality policy today. It has generated sharp-tongued exchanges in public forums, in news stories, and on editorial pages. And it has produced enough policy briefs to fell whole forests. But for most of the nation's teachers,…