The tenor of discussions held in Washington last week by negotiators rewriting federal rules on teacher preparation underscored deep-seated philosophical divisions within the field, including the thorny issue of how much responsibility schools of education should bear for producing effective teachers. Though the panelists did reach compromises on…

Where their teacher-quality proposals are concerned, the fates of the 11 states that have bid for waivers of core principles of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act appear to depend largely on how the peer reviewers--and, ultimately, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan--interpret their applications. The U.S. Department of Education's criteria…

Federal officials plan to overhaul the reporting requirements for higher education-based teacher preparation in favor of leaner, outcome-based indicators of program quality, according to plans outlined in the president's fiscal 2012 budget request. To bolster the overhaul, the budget also proposes a $185 million new formula grant program, dubbed…

Perhaps at no other time in the history of American education has there been more publicly available information about what teachers think about their profession, their students, and the conditions under which they work. As advocates pore over the results of teacher surveys being conducted nationally, at the state level, and even at individual…

Most experts in the testing community have presumed that the $350 million promised by the U.S. Department of Education to support common assessments would promote those that made greater use of open-ended items capable of measuring higher-order critical-thinking skills. But as measurement experts consider the multitude of possibilities for an…

Spurred by the promise of $350 million in Race to the Top money for improved tests--as well as an opportunity to strengthen bids for part of the federal fund's larger $4 billion pot--states are scrambling to join consortia to develop common assessments. Six state consortia are now engaged in discussions about common tests, and the multiple…

In its fiscal 2011 budget request, the Obama administration has laid out its intention of carrying forward key teacher-effectiveness policies within the economic-stimulus law into the next edition of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In doing so, the budget proposal would invest heavily in competitive grants for new ways of recruiting,…

No matter where teachers, state officials, and testing experts stand on the debate about school accountability, they generally agree that the United States' current multiple-choice-dominated Kinder-12 tests are, to use language borrowed from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, "in need of improvement." Now, federal officials are…

In what had been billed as a major speech on teacher education, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week reiterated concerns about the quality of the schools that produce a majority of the nation's teachers. But some observers said that by praising several new teacher-preparation initiatives, he struck a more conciliatory tone toward the…

Leaders in a handful of school districts are pondering the idea of "front-loading" teacher compensation by paying novices more than they would typically earn under traditional salary schedules. Boosting new teachers' salaries, officials in Denver, the District of Columbia, and New York City contend, would increase the applicant pool and…

The recently enacted economic-stimulus bill requires every state to take steps to improve teacher effectiveness, as well as to tackle one of the most pervasive problems in K-12 education: inequities in access to top teaching talent for poor and minority children. This article reports that in those two provisions, which governors must address to…

As the recession crimps education budgets, states are beginning to pare the number of standardized tests they give, particularly those that no longer factor into state or federal accountability decisions. At the district level, though, it's a different story. Despite pressure not to cut staffing and programs, many districts are preserving local…

This article reports on a higher education bill awaiting President Bush's signature which moves to increase accountability for programs that prepare teachers. It also refocuses the main federal funding source for education schools on collaborations between such schools and local K-12 districts to improve clinical teacher-training experiences and…

Amid stepped-up school accountability pressures under the No Child Left Behind Act, many teachers appear to be adjusting how they do their jobs. However, principals and district leaders are not necessarily in control of those instructional changes, a new study concludes. Using data collected through surveys of math teachers, principals, and…

As states' information-collection systems grow more sophisticated, officials are grappling with where to draw the line on how "value added" data on teachers can be used. Since the adoption of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the task of establishing data systems for tracking students' year-to-year achievement gains has fallen…