It is also widely recognized that our ways of identifying and dismissing poor-performing teachers are in- adequate, that teacher credentials alone are poor guides to teaching quality, and that teacher evaluation in most school districts around the country is abysmal.   What could be more reasonable, then, than looking at students' test scores to determine whether or not their teachers are doing a good job?The teacher's job is to teach. Student test scores measure learning.

In a show of support for public school teachers, Dare joined a growing number of counties Monday opposing a state mandate that phases out career status, or tenure, by 2018.   The Board of Education unanimously approved a resolution calling for the state to roll back the new policy, which calls for school systems to pick the top-performing 25 percent of teachers for a four-year contract with $500 in annual bonuses if they give up career status.

"Politicians and special-interest groups have really started to shape the K-12 agenda, and absent from any conversations regarding that have been superintendents, the people who have been hired by locally elected boards of education to run school districts," said Cherry Creek Schools Superintendent Harry Bull. "You get to a point where you say, 'Wait a minute. We're the people who are charged with running these districts. That's our job, and we ought to at least have a say.' "

"One of the perverse outcomes of the current education debate is the exclusion of educators from the school reform discussion at the policy level. Educators have become strangers in their own land, marginalized and silenced through a process of blame, belittlement, derogation, and the assumption of superior insights by people who have rarely spent an adult day in a classroom."  Statement by James Harvey, HML Board Member

Tea party activists have been waging war for months against the Common Core academic standards. Now, in a coordinated show of muscle, Big Business is fighting back - and notching wins.  The urgent effort stems from a sense among supporters that this is a make-or-break moment for the Common Core, which is under siege all over the country.

The American Federation of Teachers ended a five-year relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation after rank-and-file union members expressed deep distrust of the foundation's approach to education reform. AFT President Randi Weingarten told Morning Education the union will no longer accept Gates money for its Innovation Fund, which was founded in 2009 and has received up to $1 million a year in Gates grants ever since. 
 

 Why Bill Gates Defends the Common Core   by Jack Hassard  in the Ar tof Teaching Science Blog

The answer is that the Gates Foundation has invested about $2.3 billion into the Common Standards and related efforts.  Please read ahead.  In public speeches, Gates has called out those who try to interfere with the implementation of the Common Standards.   When Gates first used his billions to reach out to eduction, there was some glimmer of hope.  The Gates Foundation idea of funding smaller high schools appeared to be a plausible conception.  But things changed, and as we've seen, someone with a lot of money can influence organizations in ways that ordinary classroom educators can not.

The change theories of the "new reformers" can in large part be traced to a rejection of public bureaucracy.  Public institutions are seen as spawning pathological tendencies undermining competition, innovation, choice, and academic achievement.  As well, public institutions are described as primarily, if not exclusively, interested in addressing professional interests rather than student need.  This ideological policy frame has unsurprisingly produced structural or market solutions of increased choice/competition, teacher/student accountability, metrics, and privatization.   

Future economy: Many will lose jobs to computers  by John Shinal in USA Today.
Workers wanting secure employment in coming decades will need skills that complement software applications, rather than compete with them.  Those who don't possess such skills face a nearly-50 percent chance of having their occupations replaced by automation.  The career fields seen losing the most jobs include not just relatively low-skilled occupations such as telemarketing and retail sales, but also high-paying positions now held by accountants, auditors, budget analysts, technical writers and insurance adjusters, among others.

Nationally known education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond testified Thursday in Los Angeles that California's teacher dismissal system already works swiftly, offering a key defense to a lawsuit alleging teacher protections like seniority and tenure violate students' right to an adequate education.  "A school administrator should be able to identify a grossly ineffective teacher easily within even the first year of practice and certainly within two years."