More states are closing failing charter schools, but shuttling students back to mediocre public schools could be doing the system’s most vulnerable children more harm than good.

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 [...]

A report to be released Thursday by a national research group on teacher quality suggests the Miami-Dade school district is not doing enough to get rid of underperforming teachers.

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 [...]

States seeking waivers under the No Child Left Behind Act are hoping to replace what is widely considered an outdated, but consistent, school accountability regime with a hodgepodge of complex school grading systems that are as diverse as the states themselves.

Buffy Hamilton, who calls herself “The Unquiet Librarian,” holds the phone receiver away from her ear at Creekview High School library in Canton, Ga., revealing a cacophony of noise in the background. “It sounds like that a lot of the time,” says Hamilton, who welcomes what she calls “the hum of learning”—students talking about projects, [...]

DENTON, Texas — One afternoon in mid-November, Jeff Arrington scattered 80 paper gingerbread men labeled with numbers across the floor of his high school disaster-response class. The numbers corresponded with the severity of injuries ranging from burns to hysterical blindness. His students had to categorize the “men” based on the level of medical attention each [...]

In Washington, D.C., one of the first places in the country to use value-added teacher ratings to fire teachers, teacher-union president Nathan Saunders likes to point to the following statistic as proof that the ratings are flawed: Ward 8, one of the poorest areas of the city, has only 5 percent of the teachers defined [...]