From the Headlines

According to the first of a new series of briefs from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, four strategies are all vital to improving the recruitment, placement, evaluation, retention, and support of highly effective teachers:

According to The Harvard Business Review, what motivates "knowledge workers" most is not recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, or clear goals. Rather, it is a sense of progress. These and other "breakthrough" ideas for 2010 grew out of a multiyear study that followed knowledge workers in an array of settings, gathering data on their activities, emotions, and motivation levels.  "On days when workers have the sense they're making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles," the authors wrote, "their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak."  Conversely, their moods and motivation are lowest on days characterized by obstacles.  Based on the findings, the authors advise those in charge to: "Scrupulously avoid impeding progress by changing goals autocratically, being indecisive, or holding up resources.

In the fall of 2009, MetLife asked 1,003 K-12 public school teachers, 500 K-12 public school principals and 1,018 public school students in grades 3-12 to share their views on their respective roles and responsibilities, current practice, and priorities for the future. The effort marked a continuation of MetLife’s Annual Survey of the American Teacher, which it has been conducting since 1984. The first report on the survey findings, Effective Teaching and Leadership, compares teachers’, principals’, and students’ perspectives on responsibility and accountability and explores the nature and extent of collaboration in schools today.

Among the key survey findings:

Houston Independent School District has been the focus of considerable national attention lately as a result of the school board’s bold decision to link student achievement data to teacher evaluations as well as the superintendent’s announcement of a pilot program that will allow struggling schools to adopt an extended-year calendar beginning this fall. 

Regardless of whether or not one agrees that longer school days are the right approach, or whether the evaluation system currently being used to measure teachers' effectiveness is ideal, the conversations about doing what's needed to ensure that all students have access to the high-quality education they deserve are vital and healthy.

An offshoot of the National School Reform Faculty (NSRF), the School Reform Initiative, Inc. focuses on the professional learning of educators through collaboration, best practice sharing and reflection.  Schools interested in pursuing teacher-centered professional development models can find many valuable resources here.

Don’t take our word for it.  Here’s great example of how teacher-centered professional development in Portland, Oregon is having lasting effects on teacher performance and improvement.  Rethinking Schools

If half of the estimated 27,000 students who dropped out of the Houston metro area's Class of 2008 had graduated, their increased earnings would pump an estimated $120 million in additional spending and $44 million in additional investment into the regional economy during an average year.

Despite the Lone Star State's decision to go it alone as the other 48 contiguous states work toward common standards for student success, Texas earned an A for its standards, testing and school accountability system, according to Education Week's annual Quality Counts national report card on public education.

Citing a decade's worth of internal Teach For America data linking more than 7,300 corps members and alumni to their student outcomes, The Atlantic magazine defines superstar teachers as those who:

• Set big goals for their students
• Plan exhaustively by working backward toward a desired outcome
• Constantly reevaluate what they're doing to improve their effectiveness
• Maintain focus on student learning
• Recruit students and families into the process
• Work relentlessly to fight the trappings of poverty, bureaucracy and budgetary shortfalls

"Everybody says principals make a difference, but there's really been no systematic effort to try to estimate the extent to which they make a difference, how they make a difference, and how they're distributed across schools," says Jane Hannaway, head of the Urban Institute's National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), which is publishing a new collection of working papers on the subject. Read summaries of the studies in Ed Week.