I remember the moment I stopped resenting the deduction in my paychecks that went to my union. It took me three years, and happened suddenly. Halfway through my third year of teaching music, in 2007, administrators in my St. Louis district decided to cut student time in the arts by 64 percent at the middle-school [...]

In the age of accountability, measuring teacher effectiveness has become king. But it’s not enough merely to measure effectiveness, according to many leading thinkers and policymakers; personnel decisions—from pay and promotions to layoffs and outright firings—should be based on teacher-effectiveness data, they say. The Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition brought renewed attention to [...]

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in a recent speech to students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that in his ideal world, he’d get rid of half of his city’s teachers and double the salaries of those remaining. This statement, together with a weak economy and teacher layoffs, has led to renewed interest in [...]

I broke a cardinal rule of teaching several times last year: I cried in front of my students. Sometimes it happened out of frustration. Just as often, I was overcome during very honest conversations about the struggles my students face within and beyond the school building. At least twice the tears were brought on by [...]

Is it really surprising that students in a tony New York suburb figured out a way, according to law-enforcement officials, to cheat on the SAT? When I first saw the headlines, I was slightly shocked at the audacity of a scam that allegedly involved a 19-year-old college student accepting large sums of money to take [...]

The extraordinary gulf between science and education was on sharp display this week. The New York Times’ Schools for Tomorrow conference and NBC’s Education Nation took place within a few days of each other, both in New York City. The Times’ conference emphasized the tremendous strides that have been made in educational technology—particularly in online [...]

The American college experience has often been likened to drinking from a fire hydrant: There’s so much going on and so many new people to meet that it’s more than a little overwhelming. Ambitious freshmen tend to sign up for a full slate of extracurricular activities and the toughest classes on campus. Sleep becomes a [...]

Can $500 million invested in 20 million of America’s youngest learners help close the achievement gap? That is the aim of the new Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, the Obama administration’s first competitive grant targeted to improving the quality of early learning programs for children under age 5. While the dollar amount for the [...]