Topics in the News:
education law and policy

Researchers studying the Philadelphia school district, which has taken a business-model approach to school reform for years, find that such policies have nearly eliminated opportunities for public oversight and that little attention is paid to systemic issues.

The UFT has always stood for teachers helping teachers, but that aspect of our mission has never been so critically important as it is now, in these final years of the Bloomberg administration. The work you have done to support each other in these difficult times has been astounding.

Enraged at the mayor’s threat to close 33 “persistently lowest achieving” schools and remove half the staff in each school, more than 1,000 UFT-represented educators descended on a Jan. 18 meeting of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy at Brooklyn Technical HS, disrupting the proceedings with whistles and chants before walking out in protest.

Declaring that “we need a new blueprint for education,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his Jan. 4 State of the State address announced that he will convene a statewide commission to recommend education reforms. UFT President Mulgrew said, "A bipartisan state commission on education is a very promising idea. Rather than do what New York City now does, which is to set its educational policy by a political agenda, the commission could look at the research about what really works in schools"

Less than a year after new teacher evaluation rules went into effect in Tennessee, both educators and administrators say they have had enough, and state education officials are mulling changes. The new rules tie teachers’ evaluations to student test scores and require principals to observe educators at least four times per year.

New York City’s Teacher Data Reports will be going the way of the dodo bird, following a Department of Education announcement on Sept. 15. The DOE said it would no longer produce the reports and instead turn that part of the teacher evaluation process over to the state.

Bill Gates recently wrote an editorial in The Washington Post, “How teacher development could revolutionize our schools,” in which he argued that most of what we have been doing in education for the last four decades hasn’t worked. But finally, he wrote, we have figured out “the big change that everyone knows we need: building exceptional teacher personnel systems.”

In February, the UFT organized an essay contest in which it asked members to tell the chancellor about the value that they add to the lives of students. What work do you do every day? What makes you so special? What do you do that often gets lost in all the talk? Here’s what your colleagues had to say.

The University of Florida didn’t make the NCAA final four, but Florida Gov. Rick Scott is in the running for worst state leader on education. The governor has signed into law a bill that overhauls how teachers across the state will be evaluated and paid.