In Los Angeles, where I teach seventh-grade math, our current teacher evaluation system is undeniably broken. Initially designed to be a robust observation protocol and rubric, our system has degenerated into a 10-minute checklist. A well-intentioned but often overspent administrator comes into my room, fills out the requisite paperwork and signs on the dotted line. [...]

The U.S. Department of Education released an action plan last week to improve how we measure the success of postsecondary students and institutions. The plan is sure to be met with enthusiasm by community-college leaders across the country. The plan makes recommendations on how to better evaluate and report on community-college performance, many of which [...]

As college acceptance letters begin popping up in mailboxes across the county, incoming students are left with the daunting task of choosing the right school. While cost has always been a consideration, more students than ever before are now considering it a key factor—not only in terms of which school to attend, but whether to [...]

Ask 10 fifth-grade teachers how they teach fractions, and you’ll probably get 10 different answers. That’s the beauty of teaching: part art, part science, all creativity. Will the Common Core State Standards change that? Will we suddenly have a nation of automatons at the front of our classrooms, delivering identical lessons? As a teacher, I [...]

Americans who visit Chinese schools quickly realize that many of our beliefs and assumptions about education hold little water in China: In the United States, our urban public schools perform relatively poorly, but in China the urban systems rate among the nation’s best. Here we often regard private schools as a cut above public ones [...]

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 [...]

Editor’s Note: With the rise of for-profit colleges and online learning, higher education is at a crossroads. Some experts say America’s colleges and universities are facing a period of “disruptive innovation,” with new ideas and technologies potentially sweeping away established institutions—if they don’t adapt. We asked Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring, authors of The Innovative [...]

As governors across the nation look for ways to close yawning budget gaps, a prime target is higher education—especially community colleges. We can all sympathize with the need to rein in deficits, but states that slash deeply in this category are setting themselves up for even worse budget crises down the road. Education is the [...]

As a Teach For America (TFA) alumnus, I enjoyed George Will’s recent op-ed, “Teach for America: Letting the cream rise,” in The Washington Post. Will notes that TFA has become a force not just in education-reform circles but also among recent college graduates, with more than 15 percent of seniors at Harvard and Princeton competing [...]

Local control of schools implies to many Americans the existence of a small group from the community to oversee elementary and secondary education in order to safeguard and promote the well-being of students. This vision of the school board is synonymous with democracy in the minds of people. Yet, the arrangement does not always optimize [...]

In “Learning from Finland,” Pasi Sahlberg highlights reasons for the success of Finland’s educational system – noting, in particular, that Finns highly regard and strongly support their teachers, and that local schools are given great independence. It turns out that there are additional lessons to be learned from Finland when it comes to special education. [...]