Teachers for Education Reform

Photo Courtesy Ryan Lash

By Omar Lopez, Director of Teacher Policy

TED, a nonprofit group that sponsors conferences on ideas, teamed up with PBS to broadcast an hour-long special on education that aired last week. 

One of the seven speakers that appeared on the show was technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates. He spoke about the need for teachers to receive feedback in order to improve their practice. 

"Unfortunately," Gates says, "there's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better. And these people have one of the most important jobs in the world.  I'm talking about teachers." According to Gates, "until recently, over 98% of teachers just got one word of feedback: satisfactory."

Watch the entire special here and comment below. Do you agree that teachers' feedback system should be improved?

Photo Courtesy Library of Congress via Wiki Commons 

By Omar Lopez, Director of Teacher Policy

Interested in where the Democratic candidates for New York City mayor stand on education issues? Read this article by InsideSchools that covered the recent Democratic Mayoral Candidate forum held at Eagle Academy for Young Men in the Bronx. Parents had the opportunity to ask the candidates questions.             

Here's an example of what the questions answers look like: 

Photo Courtesy S. Ivanov via WikiCommons

By Lauren Chianese, Director of Community Engagement, The Foundation for Florida's Future

When I began my teaching career I lived in parallel evaluation universes.

Universe one: In my first year teaching in a traditional public school, I was never evaluated. And, the only observation I received from school administrators was when the principal made an unannounced visit with district personnel while I was teaching the reproductive system (yup, transparency of a uterus on the overhead and all.) The drive-thru observation proved useless as well as awkward.  As a first-year teacher, I received no feedback, no ratings, nothing--just silence. So, you can imagine my surprise, when at the end of the year, I received a pink slip. 

Photo Courtesy VentureBeat 

By Omar Lopez, Director of Teacher Policy 

Until the communication technologies that exist today were developed, if a teacher was among the most effective in the country, they were limited to teaching the handful of students lucky enough to be placed in their classrooms. Advances in both software and hardware have made it possible to amplify the voices of highly effective teachers to any student with an internet connection.

Photo Courtesy HenriLi via Wiki Commons 

By Omar Lopez, Director of Teacher Policy

The StarTribue of Minneapolis published a noteworthy editorial on Monday regarding the state's teacher evaluation system.  The editorial advocates for the state to go forward with the planned implementation of a teacher evaluation system despite pushback over cost from education organizations, including the teachers union and the association of state principals. The group estimates that the cost of implementation would be around $290 million per year. As the StarTribune reports, they are "concerned that the 2011 Legislature failed to include new funding for the assessments.