Today in my “special” kindergarten class, Jordan wrote, with very little prompting, my most favorite small moment story ever: Page 1: “Mis Brave wz at school.” (Picture of Miss Brave wearing glasses, which indeed she was today, with her head only vaguely attached to her body, floating outside the school building.) Page 2: “Mis Brave wz at [...]

Good luck to Mr. Vanderhoek and the Equity Project charter school.  As reported in today’s New York Times, the school is premised—almost exclusively—on recruiting top-quality teachers, as this is “the crucial ingredient” for success.  Little argument from Edwize, and this is one type of capacity-retaining innovation that charter schools [...]

Each fall the New York State Education Department reviews data from the thousands of schools across the far reaches of the State and identifies schools who are moving away from Adequate Yearly Progress - the No Child Left Behind measurement rubric. The SED then enters into a “negotiation” with the Department of Education … the Department [...]

It’s no secret that there’s a major problem with teacher retention in this country. Something like 50% of all new teachers leave the profession within five years. Programs like Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows recruit thousands of highly qualified candidates every year, but a great number of them stick around [...]

Aside from Eduwonk’s equivocating, US Charter Schools’ weekly roundup of headlines missed this article about flagrant union-busting at a charter school in Illinois, as did NAPCS’s daily headlines.  Any advice for a member, INCS?   What should an authorizer do, NACSA?  Are unfettered rights part of the legislative agenda and new portal?  How does this impact [...]

Figuring out how to get experienced, certified teachers to work in hard to staff schools isn’t really rocket science. You just have to do the same thing you’d do to attract and retain people in any difficult job that requires talented people who have other options: 1. give them professional power, support their needs as human [...]

[A computer in Ohio swallowed the end of the original post. I have rewritten that part.] In the late 1970s, at the height of New York City fiscal crisis and before many of today’s teachers were born, the law governing the pensions of New York City public school educators was changed for the worse. New tiers [...]

There is a delegation of 15 UFT activists spending the weekend in Cleveland as part of the AFT’s and Ohio Federation of Teachers campaign for Hillary Clinton. Saturday morning we attended a rally for Clinton at Latewood High School, where Bill Clinton and Randi Weingarten spoke. During Clinton’s speech, the line which received the greatest applause [...]

I think I’ve mentioned before that one of the things that disappoints me most about a great many of my students is their total lack of regard for their fellow human beings. They’re always stepping on each other and sitting down on top of each other and writing on each other’s papers and just generally [...]

Governor Spitzer has signed 55/25 into law. Eligible UFT members now have a 180 day window to opt in. Look for more information to answer your questions about opting in soon.

For your viewing pleasure, here is the UFT’s “Seeds of Knowledge” TV ad: Learn more about the ad campaign.

When Sara Mead left Ed Sector and The Quick and The Ed, the educational blogophere lost an intelligent and thoughtful voice. Now she’s back, writing about her passion for early childhood education, at Early Ed Watch.

If you have an hour or two to take a short journey through the history of the poultry industry in order to understand value added measures for teacher evaluation, read this meandering parable of eggs by Kevin Carey. He seems intent on taking argument by analogy to new lengths. Alternatively, for those of you who don’t [...]

With Mark Simon’s thoughtful dismantling of Fordham Institute’s recent “analysis” of teacher labor agreements, there’s little need to spill more ink on the report’s specifics. Yet stepping back from the paper’s repeated call for managerial “flexibility” reveals a confusion of concepts that merits some discussion. In the report’s rush to stereotype teacher contracts as “old-fashioned, [...]

Among American sports, baseball occupies an unique place as “America’s pastime.” Part of its charm for working class Americans is that baseball resists the tyranny of the clock and the standardization of time, the work discipline which defines wage labor in the factories of a market society. While basketball, football, soccer and hockey are all [...]