Better Benefits: Reforming Teacher Pensions for a Changing Work Force

Forty-seven states have unfunded pension liabilities, and collectively the gap between what states owe to current and future retirees and what they have saved totals almost $500 billion. But the problems with teacher pensions are not just financial, and they do not just affect individual teachers and retirees, argue Chad Aldeman and Andrew J. Rotherham in this new Education Sector report. The way pension plans are structured can negatively influence the teaching work force as a whole, they say.

Understanding Teachers Contracts

Despite increasing attention to contract reform, the public often has no idea what a typical teachers contract looks like. This interactive Education Sector explainer offers a side-by-side comparison of common provisions found in contracts and highlights the differences and similarities between two contracts on key dimensions, including teacher pay, evaluation, and transfers.

Teachers at Work

In this Education Sector report, Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva highlights promising models of school design and calls for a new approach to addressing the teacher quality challenge in public education. 

Achieving Teacher and Principal Excellence: A Guidebook for Donors

In this guidebook written for the Philanthropy Roundtable, Co-director Andrew J. Rotherham provides philanthropists a solid grounding in the nature of the human capital challenge. It explores the current policy landscape, most effective interventions, and opportunities for donors seeking to achieve an excellent teacher and principal for every child.

Waiting to Be Won Over

In the national conversation on teacher quality, there is considerable debate about what teachers think and what they want. Too often assumptions guide the discussion rather than actual evidence of teachers' views. In a new report, Education Sector and the FDR Group provide that evidence, detailing findings from a national survey of public school teachers.

The Benwood Plan: A Lesson in Comprehensive Teacher Reform

Chattanooga's Benwood Initiative is one of the most widely touted school-reform success stories of recent years. And many credit its success to financial incentives used to lure new teachers to low-performing schools. In this report, Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva argues that Benwood's success was not just about attracting new talent, but helping existing teachers improve the quality of their instruction.

Collective Bargaining in Education and Pay for Performance

Andrew J. Rotherham and Jane Hannaway examine teacher performance incentives and the response of teachers unions in a working paper presented at a recent conference sponsored by the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University.

Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education

The troubled state of teacher evaluation is a glaring and largely neglected problem in public education. Co-director Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform examine the causes and consequences of the crisis in teacher evaluation, as well as its implications for the current debate about performance pay.

Leading the Local: Teachers Union Presidents Speak on Change, Challenges

Presidents of 30 local teachers unions in six states speak candidly about their views on a number of education issues, revealing that they are focused on far more than the traditional union priorities of wages, hours, working conditions, and due process for their members.

Frozen Assets: Rethinking Teacher Contracts Could Free Billions for School Reform

In an era of limited resources, public school districts under intense pressure to boost student achievement will have to be creative in looking for ways to fund improvements. One often overlooked source of funds: common provisions in teacher contracts.

Collective Bargaining in Education

Collective bargaining shapes the way public schools are organized, financed, staffed, and operated. Edited by Education Sector's Andrew Rotherham and Jane Hannaway of the Urban Institute, Collective Bargaining in Education takes an in-depth look at the controversial world of teacher collective bargaining.

Rebuild It and They Will Come

In Educational Leadership, Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva highlights how schools can arrange people and organize time in ways that make teaching both more attractive and more effective.

Detroit Schools are on a Slow Reform Path

Although Detroit's new teachers contract breaks a logjam, the deal is not the radical change Detroit Public Schools need, argues Co-founder Andrew Rotherham argues in The Detroit News.

How Teachers Unions Lost the Media

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Co-founder Andrew Rotherham and EWA's Richard Whitmire take a look at the changing media environment for teachers unions and education reform.

Ladders of Success: Keeping Teacher Pay on Schedule

While recent years have seen much attention on controversial performance pay plans, traditional single salary schedules can also be reformed to better attract and retain high-quality teachers, argues Policy Associate Chad Aldeman in a new Education Sector Chart You Can Trust.

Making the Grade

In this article for The New Republic, Andrew Rotherham and Richard Whitmire explore whether AFT President Randi Weingarten can satisfy teachers and education reformers at the same time.

Teach For America Makes the Grade at Challenged Schools, Criticism Aside

In his latest column for U.S. News and World Report, Co-director Andrew Rotherham questions the contempt in the education community for TFA, which, he argues, has helped fuel a long overdue revolution in American education.

DCPS Should Focus on Teacher Evaluations

Thomas Toch provides testimony to the D.C. Council's Committee of the Whole and argues D.C. Public Schools should focus attention on the issue of teacher evaluation.

Investing in Teachers Produces Results for Chattanooga Schools

In the October 2008 edition of Phi Delta Kappan, Senior Policy Analyst Elena Silva writes about the success of Chattanooga's Benwood Initiative.

The Teacher Autonomy Paradox

In The American Prospect, Kevin Carey argues that only by relinquishing some autonomy will teachers finally be able to attain the true professional status they deserve.

ProComp Strikes Solid Balance in Attracting and Retaining Teachers

Education Sector's Andrew J. Rotherham and Robert Gordon of the Center for American Progress lay out the positives behind ProComp in The Rocky Mountain News.

Avoiding a Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation and Teacher Quality

Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman revisit the troubled state of teacher evaluation in the summer 2008 issue of Voices in Urban Education.

Letter to the Next President

In the Journal for Teacher Education, Education Sector's Andrew J. Rotherham co-authors a letter to our next president urging an aggressive agenda to improve teacher quality.

Mr. Tough Guy No More

After months of being stern and rigid, a new teacher lightens up, gets personal, and finds a way to connect with his students.

Hot for Teachers

Andrew J. Rotherham reviews Relentless Pursuit, a new book by Donna Foote that chronicles a year spent in the "trenches" with four Teach For America teachers.

Teaching Change

In The New York Times, co-director Andrew J. Rotherham argues that if teachers unions want to stay relevant, they must embrace more than one kind of contract. Creating a portfolio of contracts to match a portfolio of schools can help re-energize teachers unions as an agent of progress.

Test Results and Drive-By Evaluations

In Education Week, Co-director Thomas Toch argues that when evaluating teachers, test scores should play a supporting rather than a lead role. To get a fuller and fairer sense of performance, evaluations should focus on teachers' instruction—the way they plan, teach, test, manage, and motivate.

What Public Schools Can Learn From Recent Baseball History

Education Sector's Kevin Carey provides fresh insight on New York City's new teacher evaluation initiative in the Daily News.

Labor Leader's Courage, Complexity

During a recent Education Sector author talk, Tough Liberal author Richard Kahlenberg and educator-writer E.D. Hirsch Jr. spoke about the legacy of the eminent teacher unionist, Albert Shanker.

Collective Bargaining in Education: A New Dialogue

Andrew J. Rotherham describes the changing educational policy landscape in a National Governors Association conference presentation.

Union Man

Thomas Toch reviews Richard Kahlenberg's new book Tough Liberal, a biography of Albert Shanker, the smartest, and long the most militant, teacher unionist in America.

America's Teaching Crisis

Our public schools are failing, warn Andrew J. Rotherham and Jason Kamras in Democracy. To save them, we must invest in our teachers.

Identity Crisis: Sorting the Good from the Bad in Teacher Prep

Teacher education programs have been subject to harsh criticism of late, but states have been slow to identify those programs that need help.

Does This Spending Help Students?

In The Providence Journal, Nonresident Senior Fellow Marguerite Roza explains how the "frozen assets" in teacher contract provisions could be changed to support both teachers and better student learning.

How Low Teacher Quality Sabotages Advanced High School Math

An analysis of high school course-taking, teacher quality, and college readiness in Illinois finds students who take advanced math courses in schools with the least qualified teachers are far less likely than students who take the same classes with more qualified teachers to be prepared for college or succeed once they get there.

D.C.'s New Teacher Demographics

An influx of young, well-educated teachers from Teach For America and other non-traditional routes is changing the demographics of the teacher labor market in Washington, D.C.

Debating Teacher Certification

Education Sector's Kevin Carey debates Association of Teacher Educators Executive Director David Ritchey on the pros and cons of teacher certification and its impact on student achievement.

New Roles for an Old Player

Andrew J. Rotherham outlines new roles for teachers unions in an increasingly pluralistic public education system.

Chasing the Achievement Gap in American Education

Rachel Mazyck, currently at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, tells the story of how her passion for closing the achievement gap for minority students evolved as she moved from being a minority high school and college student to teaching in the Mississippi Delta and studying education policy at Harvard.

Should Class Size Be a Top Priority?: No

In the New York Daily News, Andrew J. Rotherham explains why reducing class size without improving teacher quality more broadly isn't smart policy.

Teachers Have it Easy—We're Kidding, Of Course

Ethan Gray reviews a new Dave Eggers book about the high costs of low teacher pay for our nation's educators.

Teachers Unions as Agents of Reform

Brad Jupp, an architect of Denver's landmark performance-based teacher pay system, ProComp, is an outspoken advocate of both labor organizing and quality education for disadvantaged kids. In this interview, Jupp talks about ProComp, his views on teacher unionism, and the future of the teaching profession.

Transform Teaching Now

In the New York Daily News, Kevin Carey writes that we must change the nature of the teaching profession to recruit the best and the brightest.

Staying Power: Teach for America Alumni in Public Education

It would be reasonable to expect recent college graduates entering Teach for America to complete their two-year TFA teaching requirements in public schools and then move on. But that isn't happening. TFA alumni are increasingly working throughout the public education system.

Reporters Go Back To School

Two new books by education reporters examine the challenges at the intersection of education and poverty and the educational future that is being built in our great cities.

Blackboard Journey

As a portal into one man's experiences, Frank McCourt's Teacher Man has much to offer readers interested in public education. Read our review of McCourt's 2005 memoir.