Phi Delta Kappa's CEO, Joshua Starr, points out that while school boards may tell their newly hired superintendents to be bold, visionary leaders, the job tends to include built-in incentives -- such as a pension system that rewards longevity -- to play it safe. If district leaders aim to challenge longstanding patterns of inequity in their local…

In April 2015, 11 educators were convicted for their roles in the cheating scandal in the Atlanta Public Schools. The authors examine the lessons that teachers, administrators, and policy makers can learn from the cheating scandal: Teachers and school leaders were not adequately prepared to navigate the school district's environment; there were…

By using group activities for learning, cooperative student effort for school events, and peer pressure for classroom discipline, Japanese teachers involve and empower their students. While American students feel that classrooms are teachers' sacred ground, Japanese students appropriate them as their rightful community. Instead of stressing…

The current academic tenure system is unacceptable, since the reward system favors research over work with teachers. Four alternative models include developing a charter with education faculty exemptions, reforming tenure codes, specifying tenure alternatives and differentiated tasks, and dispensing with tenure altogether. Implementation tips are…

After providing examples of how different reward systems impact on institutional and individual productivity, the authors present four strategies for changing the way promotion and tenure decisions are made in school of education. (IRT)

Study results indicate that overly powerful extrinsic rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation and suggest that there is a need to control unnecessarily powerful reward systems. (Author/DW)

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) Public Schools have replaced checklists with a result-based, profit-sharing administrator evaluation system that rewards educational excellence and provides principals with needed assistance or support. Effective principals enjoy substantial autonomy; marginal principals receive massive central-office…

According to a recent survey, many veteran education faculty are unhappy about their work in its institutional context. Teacher educators possess low status within a reward system increasingly centered on research and publication. The challenge is to develop good teacher preparation programs while ignoring the glories of the research institution.…

The Governors' Task Force on Leadership and Management created an action agenda to develop policies that strengthen school leadership, encourage school renewal, and determine broad educational goals. Suggested improvements include provision of proper training and certification programs for principals, effective inservice management development…

The structures, organizations, and reward systems required to sustain universities, their faculty, and their students preclude genuine restructuring of schools of education. One promising reform path is school-based teacher education, which locates the primary faculty expertise, curriculum-development responsibility, and budget authority in school…

Schools of education at elite, research-based universities have pursued three impractical survival strategies: interdisciplinary appeasement, academic intensification, and search for legitimacy as a social science. Such schools must repudiate the academic reward system and concentrate on preparing research-sensitive practitioners and conducting…

Education reform has wrongly focused on teacher motivation and rewards, when the organizational system itself is at fault. Research shows that effective school management hinges on increased individual discretion and decision-making opportunities for teachers and less controlling behavior by administrators. Ten characteristics of effective…

If we want to attract the best and brightest and those with the biggest hearts into the profession that educates all others, we must show today's college graduates that they have something to look forward to if they choose to be a teacher. We want them to know that teaching is intrinsically gratifying but that there also are tangible rewards and…

Traditional behavioral plans for children with Asperger syndrome often neglect what they need to learn to manage their anxiety and the underdeveloped skills that contribute to their anxiety. School personnel often identify a desirable target behavior and try to reinforce it through rewards (stickers, praise, etc.), which usually does not work.…

Research on teacher quality is not definitive. But, we know that developing high-quality teachers requires a multipronged approach: We need to recruit promising teachers. We need to retain and reward effective early career teachers. We need mechanisms to dismiss those who don't improve. We need to focus teacher preparation on the foundations of…