Teachers Enter the Main Office
Posted on September 13th, 2010 by Jaimie Schock
A growing number of teachers are moving beyond the classroom and into the main office. Teacher-led schools have recently opened in Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston. Districts are taking a chance on these grassroots experiments to see if teachers themselves can turn around troubled schools.
Filed under: K-12 Education News | Comments Off on Teachers Enter the Main Office
Tags: Education Policy, School Budgets, Teachers
Use of value-added modeling systems to assess teacher performance is rapidly increasing. But do they provide a fair and accurate account of teacher competency? 
Last year, Brittany Hinyard’s eighth graders became astronomers. Students built models of the solar system, used software to make planets gravitate toward or apart from each other, and sought out information on satellites. Teaching this way, emphasizing inquiry, multiple science disciplines, and team learning, requires an extra commitment. But for Hinyard, there have been rewards in prestige and professional satisfaction. 
Teachers and students across the country have been writing in with comments on eGFI — telling us what they most enjoy, and how they put the magazine and Website to use. We’re delighted with the feedback.
A new Harvard study finds that students who had strong teachers when they started school reaped benefits later on. More went on to college, and they earned more than their peers whose kindergarten teachers were mediocre. The study followed a cohort of 12,000 Tennessee students from the 1980s who are now around 30.
President Obama rode into the White House on a wave of support that included America’s two largest teachers unions. But more recently, the administration’s relations with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have soured.
Up to 300,000 K-12 and public university teachers and staff face layoffs in the next academic year. Members of the U.S. Senate Education Committee are hoping to pass a $23 billion measure to keep many of them on the job.
A healthy majority of teachers describe themselves as satisfied with their careers, according to a recent study released by MetLife. Only 17 percent of respondents said they were very or fairly likely to exit the profession within the next five years. 
