The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation publishes content on education and related issues. Find and access current and archived items in our database.
At No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) core is the goal that all students be proficient (“at grade level”) in math and reading by 2014. NCLB's criteria has identified an enormous number of deficient schools, but is the law doing enough to actually fuel noticeable changes in student achievement?
This month's newsletter takes an in-depth look at turning around failing schools, including articles assessing the effectiveness of No Child Left Behind and School Improvement Grants.
There are numerous resources available for information on how to advocate for high quality teachers in your community. Here we have provided a list of organizations invested in the teacher quality debate.
As the National Council on Teacher Quality writes, “Neither teachers’ unions nor state legislatures look upon tenure as an honor conferred upon a teacher who is found by some measure to be effective. In their view, tenure at the PK-12 level is a right that should be conferred to all employed teachers with a few years of satisfactory teaching experience.”
In the United States, the vast majority of public school teachers are compensated on a single salary scale. Although these scales are currently included in and reinforced by collective bargaining, such systems predate union contracts by several decades.
Teachers in U.S. classrooms are regularly evaluated, both when the teacher is probationary and when the teacher has been granted tenure. The terms of these evaluations, which are dictated by collective bargaining agreements, are based on process; they are not linked to teacher compensation and are almost never tied to student achievement.
Collective bargaining refers to the regular, district-level negotiations of teacher representatives (labor) and district representatives (management) regarding salary, working conditions, and terms of employment. The result is a collective bargaining agreement (CBA), commonly called a union contract that covers all teachers, whether or not they are union members.
In this first issue of 2011, we tackle teacher quality. Specifically, this edition focuses on key areas that are currently driving the teacher quality conversation at the national, state, and local levels: the role and impact of collective bargaining, teacher evaluations, teacher compensation, and teacher tenure.
This month's newsletter takes an in-depth look at teachers: teacher evaluations, teacher compensation, and teacher tenure.
President Barack Obama signed into law H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), on February 17, 2009. Since that time, nearly $100 billion has been awarded to States and other grantees to support education related activities. The charts below provide a glimpse into where funds under ARRA have been going, how they are being used, and the overall reach of these funds across the nation.
