After a year that brought budget cuts, booming class sizes, radical hiring changes and governors who curtailed collective-bargaining rights, teachers' job satisfaction is at a two-decade low, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

According to the "MetLife Survey of the American Teacher," a long-running survey of educators, parents and students, teachers' job satisfaction has decreased by 15 points since the survey assessed the issue in 2009. Forty-four percent of teachers reported they were very satisfied, the lowest rate MetLife has seen in 20 years.

The Obama administration will propose a $5 billion competitive grant program to encourage states to overhaul the teaching profession, federal education officials said Tuesday, using its Race to the Top school improvement competition as a model.

President Obama said in his State of the Union address to Congress what many teachers in America have been yearning to hear from their president: Teachers matter, we change lives, and we do this hard work to make a difference in the lives of students.
He also acknowledged what every good teacher knows: that an accountability system that puts too much emphasis on test scores undermines a well-rounded education. But implicit in his speech was a challenge to America and to teachers to rebuild and strengthen the profession—a challenge that teachers are more than eager to accept.

Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years.

Teachers are more likely to stay on the job when their principal is of the same race as they are, according to a study in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Myth #7: Getting rid of unions, or weakening them, is the first step in real reform.Fact: We have already seen this experiment happen in many right-to-work states. In fact, the Bill Gates fund ...

Consider the two top contenders on PISA: Shanghai and Finland. These two places—one a very large city of nearly 21 million, the other a small nation of less than six million—represent two very ...

Teachers spent almost $400 on school supplies and $540 on instructional materials for the 2009-2010 school year, according to a survey conducted this year by the National School Supply and Equi ...

Countries with the best-performing school systems largely recruit teachers from the top third of high school and college graduates, while the United States has difficulty attracting its top students to the profession, a new report finds.
With more than half of all American teachers today becoming eligible for retirement in the next 10 years, however, the country has a “rare window of opportunity to shape the next generation of teachers,” Byron Auguste, Paul Kihn, and Matt Miller write in the report for the Washington-based management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

Erick Huth, president of the Metro Nashville Education Association, the union, derides performance-based pay as “paying teachers for test scores.” He said it’s a “political issue, not an education issue,” adding that there’s “no studies to date that indicate that money is a motivator for increasing student test scores.”

Huth said Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development is in the process of conducting a study to determine the effectiveness of performance-based pay for middle school math teachers.

The recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof. Superintendents, education professors and people seeking work say teachers are facing the worst job market sinc ...

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and teachers union leaders touted a proposed new labor contract Wednesday as a historic moment for public education in the District but then turned to the task of selling the deal to the two constituencies that will have to approve it: rank-and-file instructors and the D.C. Council.

The tentative agreement, which comes after more than two years of bargaining, would raise teacher pay by more than 20 percent by 2012, increasing the average salary of a D.C. educator from about $67,000 to $81,000. If approved, the financial package will make teacher salaries in the District competitive with those in surrounding suburban school districts, according to an analysis by the American Federation of Teachers. The contract also calls for a voluntary pay-for-performance plan, under which teachers could earn an additional $20,000 to $30,000 a year based on improved student achievement, assignment to a high-needs school or whether they teach a subject in high demand.

As part of a shared commitment to high academic achievement by all Nashville students, Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools and Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of education and human development are undertaking a new, joint initiative to strengthen teaching in Nashville's public schools.

Education researcher and labor economist Dan Goldhaber recalls the first study he published, in 1997, showing that a master's degree generally did not predict a teacher's effectiveness, though math teachers with advanced degrees in that subject were an exception.

"Since then, that finding has been replicated again and again and again," said Goldhaber, a research professor at the University of Washington at Bothell. "The academic evidence about master's degrees is just so overwhelming that it's hard to believe that most school districts ignore it."

There is a plenitude of research demonstrating that value-added assessment is not ready for prime time. Those who defend it should look at the NAEP scores of Tennessee, where value-added assessment has been used for many years. Tennessee has remarkably high state scores, but has made little, if any, improvement on NAEP. No value-added improvement there, despite years of implementation.

Facing criticism that her union makes it too hard to get rid of bad teachers, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, on Tuesday announced a union-backed effort to develop a new model for how public school teachers should be evaluated, promoted and removed. The effort will be run by Kenneth R. Feinberg, the federal government’s special master for executive compensation.

Local school boards would no longer decide whether to remove tenured teachers from their jobs, as part of the education reform bill officially unveiled Monday by Gov. Phil Bredesen's administration.

At a White House event this afternoon on STEM education, President Obama will announce more than $250 million in public-private investments to help prepare some 10,000 new math and science teachers and train more than 100,000 existing teachers, according to materials provided by administration officials. This will approximately double the commitments the president announced in November as part of his "Educate to Innovate" campaign for excellence in STEM education.

Ask a parent, politician, or school board member to describe the ideal qualifications of a math teacher, and most would probably rank having a college major in that subject high on the list. Yet when it comes to improving student learning in elementary and middle school, research shows that the value of that academic credential is limited—at best.

Radio interview with Susan Burns, NCPI program coordinator

David Brooks on Obama, Duncan and education reform, including teacher pay and Race to the Top funds

Teachers matter. In the fight to eliminate educational inequality, teachers matter most. The New Teacher Project works with school districts and states nationwide to ensure that poor and minority students get outstanding teachers.

President Obama is on board. So is Philadelphia schools chief Arlene Ackerman: Changing the way teachers are paid is an idea whose time has come, one key to fixing a broken education system, both have declared publicly. Though the subject is historically thorny - teachers unions staunchly oppose most merit-pay plans - advocates say that because teacher quality is crucial to student learning, it's time to take another stab.