By Stephen Sawchuck, Education Week

The nation’s oft-criticized systems for evaluating the quality of its educator workforce are poised to receive increased scrutiny, thanks to an Obama administration plan to require school districts to disclose how many teachers perform well or poorly.

Although nearly every state requires districts to evaluate teachers, the instruments are typically designed locally. And as both policy experts and some union leaders attest, they are frequently of poor quality, not based on standards of good teaching, and incapable of rendering fine-grained, fair judgments about teacher performance.

Policy experts widely view the U.S. Department of Education initiative, which is part of the implementation of the federal economic-stimulus package’s aid to education, as an attempt to collect baseline data on teacher evaluations and to promote an overhaul of those systems.

Click here to continue reading.

By Stephen Sawchuk and Erik W. Robelen

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today started rolling out $44 billion in economic-stimulus aid for education that comes with new teacher-quality reporting requirements for states and districts, and also with significantly more spending flexibility on school construction than many administrators had expected.

New guidance from the Department of Education spells out in more detail how states, districts, and institutions of higher education will receive money under the $39.8 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund and the $8.8 billion Government Services Fund, as well as how they may use it. Unveiling the first payments at a school in Capitol Heights, Md., Mr. Duncan emphasized that the funding could be a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.

“We have this magical opportunity to invest significantly in these best practices and scale up what works,” he said of aid under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

This story was reported in the Orlando Sentinel recently. It is a scenario that is undoubted played out in school districts around the state of Florida.

By Leslie Postal | Sentinel Staff Writer

Courtney Coker graduated from Florida State University in 2006 eager to start work as a music teacher. It wasn’t hard to turn her passion into a paycheck.

“It was teacher shortage, teacher shortage, teacher shortage,” Coker said. “I had no problem finding my first job. Everybody I knew found a job.”

Now, three years later, the band director at Blankner School in Orlando finds herself consumed with fear that her dream job will soon be gone. Like thousands of teachers across Florida, she worries the state’s financial crisis could push her into the ranks of the unemployed.

For the rest of the story, click here.

By Stephen Sawchuk

Courtesy of Edweek.org.

The recently enacted economic-stimulus bill requires every state to take steps to improve teacher effectiveness, as well as to tackle one of the most pervasive problems in K-12 education: inequities in access to top teaching talent for poor and minority children.

In those two provisions, which governors must address to get their cuts of $53.6 billion in state fiscal-stabilization aid, some experts see glimpses into the future of federal teacher-quality policy.

“We have a lot of evidence that this administration is very interested in making effective teaching a priority,” said Sabrina W.M. Laine, the director of the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality at Learning Point Associates, a federally financed technical-assistance center in Naperville, Ill. “The stimulus bill is wide open for interpretation, but it provides the proverbial shot in the arm for equitable distribution and for discussions to move a reauthorization bill [on education] forward.”

To read more of this discussion, you have to signup at edweek.org.

KIDS ARE QUICK

____________________________________
   
TEACHER:   Maria, go to the map and find North America . 
MARIA:       Here it is.
TEACHER:  Correct. Now class, who discovered America? Read the rest of this entry »