The DOE has canceled its three-year $9.6 million contract with CTB/McGraw-Hill in the wake of the numerous problems associated with the electronic scoring of Regents exams last spring.

A recently passed California bill stipulating that this year’s student test scores will not be released has drawn a rebuke from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, with the backing of the UFT and other labor unions, came from behind to cinch the Democratic nomination for city comptroller on Sept. 10. Forty-three of the 47 candidates that the union endorsed in City Council races also claimed victory in their primaries.

Thousands of teachers began the school year without promised Common Core-aligned textbooks, anchor texts, trade texts, teacher guides or manipulative materials, forcing them to improvise last-minute lessons and units.

In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the American Federation of Teachers’ Albert Shanker Institute published lesson plans and materials that K–12 teachers can use in their classrooms.

New Utrecht HS history teacher and UFT delegate Mark Treyger has won the three-way Democratic primary for the City Council seat in the 47th Council District in south Brooklyn.

The UFT has lost another of its founding members with the passing of Roger Parente who died in August at the age of 86.

More than 600 students, parents, teachers, elected officials and community members from a Staten Island shore neighborhood still recovering from Hurricane Sandy packed a Community Education Council meeting at IS 2 on Sept. 16 to slam plans to have a new district middle school share the school’s building starting next fall.

Want to be a skilled, successful teacher? Of course. Who doesn’t?But how do you get there: Is perfecting lessons late into the night? Keeping more binders, entering more data, even if you are exhausted and sick by December? If all your colleagues work as hard as you, isn’t that what makes a great school? Rather than driving yourself harder and harder, possibly without getting where you want to be, consider flipping this around. Maybe what makes a good teacher is an effective school.

Evaluations, elections and a continuing lack of curricular materials were on the minds of the approximately 1,000 chapter leaders who gathered in Brooklyn for their annual start-of-school unionwide meeting.