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…

Amid the cacophony of special interests fighting to be heard in statehouses and on Capitol Hill, a cadre of current and former chief state school officers is elbowing its way into the nation's education debate at a time when states are taking more control of K-12 education. A little more than a year old, Chiefs for Change is an invitation-only…

As the governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007, Mitt Romney championed aggressive education policies later embraced by the Obama administration and by other states. But for most of his second run at the Republican presidential nomination, voters have heard little about his education record in Massachusetts or initiatives that Mr. Romney was…

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…

A prominent and sustained White House push for renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is viewed as crucial to prospects for the 9-year-old law's reauthorization by a now-divided Congress. The law's current version, the No Child Left Behind Act, was President George W. Bush's signature domestic achievement when it was passed…

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…

Back in 2008, it wasn't clear just where candidate Barack Obama's heart lay when it came to the big issues facing schools. Although Mr. Obama had been a community organizer, a law professor, and a state legislator, the junior U.S. senator from Illinois didn't have a long record on K-12 issues, and he rarely spoke about them in his presidential…

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,…

The president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten, is putting the sensitive issue of due process on the education reform table, with a pledge to work with districts to streamline the often-cumbersome procedures for dismissing teachers who fail to improve their performance after receiving help and support. She has also…

States are pushing ahead with efforts to make sweeping changes to education policy through the Race to the Top program, despite some of them having seen individual schools and districts back out of the process because of concerns over the time and money required to make those plans a reality. The Obama administration has envisioned Race to the…

Teachers' unions in at least two states are threatening to withhold endorsements of their states' Race to the Top applications, which could jeopardize the states' chances of winning the coveted federal dollars. In a letter printed as an advertisement in the Tallahassee Democrat, Florida Education Association President Andy J. Ford discouraged…

During the recently concluded presidential nominating conventions, President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney offered stark choices on K-12 policy while downplaying areas of agreement between their two parties--and the tensions within each party on education issues. In Charlotte, North Carolina, last week, the Democrats put a…

State-level battles over changes in education policy have shifted in many places from legislative chambers to courthouses, as unions and other critics of new laws challenge them on the grounds that they violate state constitutions and worker contracts. Republican governors and lawmakers--their ranks bolstered by the 2010 elections--won passage…