Rebecca Sellers, an eighth-grade English teacher at the Lester Pre-K-8 school in Memphis, looked wary as she walked into the teachers’ lounge on a Monday afternoon last fall. The previous week, the school’s assistant principal, Isaac Robinson, had dropped in, unannounced, to watch Sellers teach as part of Tennessee’s new evaluation system.Now he was about [...]

You might have forgotten about the small schools movement amid all the recent hubbub about overhauling teacher evaluations. But a study released on January 25th reminds us that only a few years ago, reducing the number of total students in a school was seen as a key weapon in the arsenal of urban school reform, [...]

Should teachers be treated as professionals? The question may seem easy enough to answer—most people in education, whether they are union representatives or reformers advocating for more charter schools, say “yes.” Yet the question is in many ways at the heart of the raging debate–currently boiling over in New York–over how to improve struggling schools. [...]

A new study underwritten by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which is among the funders of The Hechinger Report) tackles the question of whether the new teacher evaluation systems going into effect in school districts across the country are accurate and reliable in identifying which teachers are good and which are not. The researchers [...]

PATNA, India – On the outskirts of this sprawling city in one of India’s poorest states, the whitewashed columns and domes of Chanakya National Law University rise next to a deep and murky swamp. To get there, visitors bump along potholed streets lined with idle men sipping tea and cows rooting through piles of garbage. [...]

Residents of Bihar, India’s poorest state, often remind visitors that their home was not always known for high levels of poverty and illiteracy. It used to be the cradle of Southeast Asian civilization and a place to which scholars from all over the world flocked. In the next few years, many are hoping that Bihar [...]

New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) is at risk of losing a $190 million grant, after the federal government included it on a list of 132 substandard Head Start agencies across the country this week. Head Start is the half-century-old federal preschool program for low-income children. ACS, among the oldest and largest Head [...]

The announcement of nine winners in the Obama administration’s latest version of its “Race to the Top” education competition will push forward reforms that early learning advocates have lobbied heavily for over the past several years. The winners are California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington state. To win, they promised [...]