The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation publishes content on education and related issues. Find and access current and archived items in our database.
There are numerous resources available with information on how to advocate for turning around low-performing schools in your community. Here we have provided a list of organizations invested in the school reform debate.
School Improvement Grants (SIGs) are authorized under NCLB, but received limited funding or attention until the last few years. Recently, though, funding has significantly increased, and the focus of these grants—concentrating significant resources on those schools furthest behind—realigned SIGs with the Race to the Top fund competition.
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.
2010 was a busy and productive year for ICW. We continued to grow our Business LEADs Network; convened a high-level panel of experts to discuss the midterm election results and their impact on education and workforce policy; published numerous reports on the importance of business supporting a range of issues, from early childhood education to extended learning time opportunities; and brought the documentary film Waiting for “Superman” to business audiences in a nationwide 12-city tour; among many other efforts.
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.
