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…

An external panel that includes several prominent critics of teacher education has been tapped to craft the performance standards for the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), the new organization's leaders announced last week. Among the standards under consideration: how programs ensure that candidates know their content;…

A hefty body of evidence documents the phenomenon of "summer learning loss," but consensus on the attributes of effective summer intervention, especially when it comes to access to high-quality teaching for students most at risk of falling behind, is only starting to emerge. Now, though, a handful of districts are beginning to wrestle with the…

A report from a high-powered education task force called last week for states and school districts to overhaul how they recruit, prepare, evaluate, and compensate teachers. Released by Strategic Management of Human Capital, the series of 20 policy recommendations for state and district policymakers is aimed primarily at improving the teaching…

Baby boomers, who make up a majority of the U.S. teaching force, are inching closer to retirement. Couple that with the downturn in the economy, and renewed worries about pension-fund liabilities are cropping up across the nation. Yet as policymakers focus on ways to make teachers' pension plans sustainable over the long haul, some economists and…

Denver's performance-pay system for teachers has long been hailed as a model, in good part because it was jointly conceived and implemented by the school district and the local teachers' union. However, that collaborative spirit is now in jeopardy, with union and district leaders engaged in a protracted battle over proposed changes to the system.…

Leaders in a handful of school districts are pondering the idea of "front-loading" teacher compensation by paying novices more than they would typically earn under traditional salary schedules. Boosting new teachers' salaries, officials in Denver, the District of Columbia, and New York City contend, would increase the applicant pool and…

The author reports the results of a study on the effectiveness of the Teacher Advancement Program in Chicago that contains performance-pay model pushed by the U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan. The study by Mathematica Policy Research finds that student test scores were no better for schools following the national Teacher Advancement Program…

Arlene C. Ackerman, who took the helm of Philadelphia's public schools a little more than a year ago, is pushing for changes that would upend how teachers are paid and assigned to schools. The veteran urban superintendent is battling tradition in the 167,000-student system, but insists that increasing the effectiveness of the city's nearly 10,700…

Few strategies for luring more students and working adults into math and science teaching have proved as popular among elected officials as financial incentives, which try to make one of the least appealing aspects of the job--low pay--a little less daunting. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are considering a number of bills that would expand existing…

The author discusses different state proposals to offer more-competitive salaries for teachers. A 2005 review by the Education Commission of the States found that at least 30 states offer such incentives--which can include housing benefits, loan forgiveness, and scholarships, as well as yearly bonuses and salary increases--to address teacher…

This year's "Quality Counts" report, the 15th edition of this annual report produced through the joint efforts of the "Education Week" newsroom and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, arrives at a time of continued fiscal anxiety and education policy ferment in the wake of what has been widely described as the…

It sounds like a simple solution to a growing problem: Address teacher shortages by adopting policies that encourage veterans to stay in the classroom while attracting retirees back to the job. While many states and districts are doing just that, they are also finding that their policies can have unintended consequences--such as raising questions…

This article reports how hundreds of fresh recruits, many of them new to K-12 teaching, were filling public school classrooms across New Orleans in Katrina's aftermath. The state-led Recovery School District (RSD), which now operates 34 New Orleans public schools, dramatically increased its teacher workforce for this academic year, having hired…

This article reports on the "discussion draft" released on September 6, about a week after a preliminary proposal to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law's core Title I program was unveiled. Under the latest House proposal for reauthorizing the NCLB Act, the federal government would invest billions in improving the nation's…