Given the challenges facing American public education today, identifying effective teachers is a more vital task than ever before. In the U.S. public school system today, the method used to determine teacher effectiveness--and thus to drive salary, promotion, and tenure decisions--is based on a few external credentials: certification, advanced…

To all the other fiscal travails facing this country's states and largest cities, now add their pension obligations, which are far greater than they may realize or are willing to admit. This paper focuses on the crisis in funding teachers' pensions, because education is often the largest program area in state budgets, making it an obvious target…

It is often said that public school teachers are poorly paid. At an average salary of about $60,000 a year, public school teachers in New Jersey take home substantially less pay than do many other college educated professionals. Teachers tend to work fewer hours in a year than do other professionals. Does the widespread assertion that New Jersey's…

New York State educators are warning that proposed cuts in state aid to public schools next year could force more than 14,000 teacher layoffs. Officials of the state's largest teachers' union claim aid cuts will "devastate" education, leading to a "drastic" reduction of programs and "much larger class sizes." But these dire forecasts need to be…