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 [...]

America’s universities have long had a reputation for being the best in the world—a truth so apparently self-evident that it’s rarely been doubted or questioned. But what if the nation’s 5,000 institutions of higher education, as a whole, have fallen behind their international peers? Indeed, there’s lots of evidence that American higher education could be [...]

Not even bad eyesight could keep Brandon Hong from realizing his boyhood dream of flying airplanes. The 22-year-old native of San Jose, Calif., graduated from Boston University in May, and now he’s stationed at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas for pilot training. Hong won an ROTC scholarship out of high school that, together with [...]

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 [...]

CHICAGO—“It takes a lot to be a teacher,” Luke Carman says. “Every decision that is being made, you’re simultaneously doing 17,000 other things. It requires a lot of intellectual forethought, persistence and energy.” Carman, 23, has spent the past two years preparing for a career in the classroom through the University of Chicago’s Urban Teacher [...]

The Hechinger Report recently had a chance to ask the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, an expert on educational systems around the world, what he makes of the current push for reform in American public education. Q: The PISA results make clear that U.S. students aren’t performing particularly well compared to their peers in many other countries.  [...]

In a few weeks, Mopati Morake will graduate from Williams College in Massachusetts. A native of Botswana, Morake has been educated on three continents. He finished high school in 2007 at Li Po Chun United World College in Hong Kong. Morake spoke with Hechinger Report contributing editor Justin Snider—his former English teacher in Hong Kong—about [...]

CHICAGO—Joyce Randall, who’s in her third year of teaching history to 10th-graders in her hometown of Chicago, is blunt about the effort needed to succeed at her work. “This is a difficult job for anyone to do for a long period of time, especially for the money we’re paid,” she says. The 26-year-old spent 12 [...]

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. The Hechinger Report:  It’s well-known that Finland’s teachers are an elite bunch, with only top students offered the chance to become teachers. It’s also no secret that they are well-trained. But take us inside that training for a moment – what does it look like, [...]

They command six-figure salaries, often with annual bonuses and car allowances. (Generous health-care and pension plans are a given.) Sometimes their employers also foot the bill for their life-insurance policies.There are very few of them, for their skill set is rare. They must be savvy politicians and managers. They must be obsessed with constant improvement. They’ll be under the bright lights of the media, so the camera-shy need not apply. No, we’re not talking rock stars, pro athletes or even pro coaches.

Among the countless catchphrases that educators generally despise are “drill-’n-kill” and “rote memorization.” In keeping with their meanings, both sound terrifically unpleasant. To learn something “by rote,” according to the Random House dictionary, is to learn it “from memory, without thought of the meaning; in a mechanical way.” The fear is that we’re turning our [...]

On Monday, January 10th, Justice Cynthia Kern ruled that the decision by the NYC Department of Education to publicly release Teacher Data Reports (TDRs) with individual teachers’ names attached was not “arbitrary and capricious.” That the chips fell this way isn’t terribly surprising. Kern’s ruling is interesting more for what it doesn’t say than for [...]

Today, Education Week released its annual Quality Counts report, a treasure trove of articles, charts and graphics that in 2011 focus on how the Great Recession has affected public education in the U.S. The report issues letter grades to all 50 states and Washington, D.C. based on multiple metrics, including K-12 Achievement, School Finance, Transitions [...]

Oops, Rick Hess has done it again: challenged conventional wisdom and shown how fuzzy much of today’s education-reform thinking is. In his latest book, The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas, Hess drives home the point that doing the same thing over and over with the expectation of [...]

Richard Lee Colvin, editor of The Hechinger Report, recently spoke with Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks about some of 2010′s most interesting education stories — as well as what to be on the lookout for in 2011. Among the stories from 2010 that Colvin highlighted: the national conversation around the use of value-added data, especially [...]

The world wasn’t exactly shocked in 2009 when Alex Rodriguez’s name turned up on a list of 104 Major League Baseball players who had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Nor was anyone surprised to learn later that year that David Ortiz—the Red Sox’s “Big Papi,” and a six-time All Star—was on the same list. Except, [...]

As unlikely as it sounds, Chris Christie—the Republican governor of New Jersey who assumed office in January 2010—is a YouTube sensation. He has gained national notoriety for taking on teachers unions, in part by posting videos of his attacks on union leaders to his YouTube channel. The videos boast a combined total of over two [...]

“‘Where are the academics who are in favor of value-added?’ Here they are, with persuasive reasoning.” So concludes the press release that today announced a new Brookings report, “Evaluating Teachers: The Important Role of Value-Added.” The report was co-authored by Steve Glazerman (Mathematica Policy Research), Susanna Loeb (Stanford), Dan Goldhaber (University of Washington-Bothell), Doug Staiger [...]