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.

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.

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.”

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.