Minnesota's Q Comp a bust and other pay news

Although Minnesota's Q Comp was sold as one of the nation's pioneering efforts in performance pay, the bonuses are proving...

Real alt cert news...do not skip this!

The main conclusion of Mathematica's hefty study of teacher certification routes isn't much of a surprise to anyone who has...

New TQB feature: What does it take to fire a teacher?

Portillo v. St. Lucie County, Florida This month, TQB begins a new feature in which we keep track, over a period...

Charters, unions and other tiresome references to body parts

Teachers at The Accelerated School, one of Los Angeles' most acclaimed charter schools, have filed to join the local teachers'...

LA union bashes even low-stakes testing

Do you ever check on a cake while it's baking? Taste the sauce while it's simmering? Weigh yourself...

Gotta go halfway around the world to do a tracking study

Kenya appears to be a fave location among educational researchers of late. A relatively stable country where teacher salaries...

Trusting your local commie, radical, hippie, leftie researcher

Cast off your nonchalance and shed your conceit, researchers and policy analysts! Word from UC Berkeley has it that the...

Tangibly terrible teacher 'tistics: New study from UVA's Pianta

Another study by researcher Robert Pianta and colleague Megan Stuhlman comes to a similar conclusion as their last: most American...

Between a rock and a hard place, there are still better choices

School district officials, faced with declining local revenue while state coffers take in stimulus dough, are scouring their budgets to...

2008 State Teacher Policy Yearbook: What states can do to retain effective new teachers

Yesterday NCTQ released the 2008 State Teacher Policy Yearbook, our second annual review of what states are doing to help--and...

Incentives to cheat

A fascinating joint study out of two business schools suggests that contingent compensation (read: performance pay) encourages cheating and sometimes...

Adding the voom to VAM: new research on value-added

As attractive an idea as value-added models (VAMs) may be, statisticians really do need to work out the bugs before...

Teachers' contracts: They're complicated

There's a growing chorus of policy wonks challenging the long-held assumption that teachers' contracts are to blame for all the...

National Board certification has seen sunnier days in Florida, D.C.

The nation's economic woes are making life harder for the National Board, after a period of many good years when...

No more double dipping in Florida

Florida superintendents are handing pink slips to veteran teachers who earn extra-juicy pension packages, while also staying in the classroom...