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In an environment of tight resources, tough academic challenges, and increasingly stiff competition from new education providers, smart leadership may matter more than ever for the success of America's school districts. Against this backdrop, "Education Week" introduces the first of what will be an annual "Leaders To Learn From" report--a way to recognize forward-thinking education leaders and share their ideas. This 2013 report profiles 16 district-level leaders--superintendents, assistant superintendents, and others, including a union president--who seized on creative but practical approaches and put them to work in their school districts.

A national survey of school districts last fall by the Center on Education Policy found that fewer than half of the districts had planned professional development aligned to the Common Core State Standards this school year. The challenge of getting the nation's 3.2 million K-12 public school teachers ready to teach to the standards is enormous. With new assessments aligned to the standards rapidly coming online by 2014-15, the implementation timeline is compressed. Teachers are wrestling with an absence of truly aligned curricula and lessons. Added to those factors are concerns that the standards are pitched at a level that may require teachers themselves to function on a higher cognitive plane. Evidence from a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation study suggests that teachers already struggle to help students engage in the higher-order, cognitively demanding tasks emphasized by the standards, such as the ability to synthesize, analyze, and apply information. Supporters of the common standards say the standards encourage a focus on only the most important topics at each grade level and subject, thus allowing teachers to build those skills. For districts, the professional-development challenge is in finding the place to begin. Districts furthest along in the process are integrating the training with successful efforts already in place.

A strike last week by some 29,000 teachers in Chicago pushed long-simmering tensions over deeply divisive school improvement ideas--including changes in teacher evaluation and the takeover or closure of underperforming schools--into the national spotlight. A framework for a tentative agreement emerged last Friday, and the union's house of delegates was scheduled to meet this past weekend to vet a draft and vote on whether to call off the strike. Details of the agreement were still trickling out, but it appeared likely that the Chicago district had offered to restore some elements of a hiring preference for laid-off teachers, to slow the implementation of a new teacher-evaluation system, and to allow limited appeals under that system. Students are expected to be back in school at the beginning of this week. About 350,000 students in the district, the nation's third largest, were affected by the walkout. In Chicago's case, one such complication has been the volatile relationship between two powerful city players: (1) Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the famously combative former chief of staff for President Barack Obama; and (2) Karen Lewis, the equally outspoken president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). The two have squabbled for months over Mr. Emanuel's desire to lengthen the school day, which was until recently among the shortest in urban school districts. The strike also raised delicate political questions for the White House during the tense run-up to Election Day. As in 2008, Mr. Obama is counting on the support of teachers, but his own education agenda has pushed for many of the reform ideas contested at the bargaining table. Such divisions were on display last week, as educators, clothed in CTU red, picketed in front of their schools after the walkout began on Sept. 10. Many motorists honked in support as they drove by. In the afternoon, thousands of the teachers flooded the city's downtown Loop area to attend rallies. Picketers stationed a giant, inflatable rat outside the school district's headquarters. They held up signs protesting large class sizes, too much standardized testing, and the perceived capitulation by Democrats to the education agenda of influential foundations and interest groups. But above all, the teachers took aim at their city's mayor, a testament to their frustration with his leadership of the schools, which the mayor controls under authority granted by a 1995 state law. The Chicago district has a history of contentious labor relations, but the strike was the first by the city's teachers in 25 years.

A new generation of education advocacy groups has emerged to play a formidable political role in states and communities across the country. Those groups are shaping policy through aggressive lobbying and campaign activity--an evolution in advocacy that is primed to continue in the 2012 elections and beyond. Though the record of their electoral success is mixed, such groups' overall influence appears to be growing, and it has already helped alter the landscape of education policy, particularly at the state level. The rise of such high-powered advocacy groups focused on school issues marks a shift from a decade ago, when few education organizations other than teachers' unions explicitly engaged in political activity beyond statehouse lobbying.

Back in the mid-2000s, in public and in the news media, Joseph P. Burke, then superintendent of the Springfield public schools, and Timothy T. Collins, president of the local teachers' union, often seemed to be at odds with each other. Out of the public eye, however, the two men had begun meeting regularly. When Burke left the district, the work continued under his successor, Alan J. Ingram, who appointed Collins to the district's senior leadership team and budget-advisory committee. Both bodies provide advice to the superintendent. Ingram said that forming a relationship with the union was not a luxury, it was absolutely necessary. In fits and starts--amid budget crises and legislative changes to bargaining--there are signs that more school administrators and teachers' unions are doing business together in a different way. Three large urban districts and their American Federation of Teachers (AFT)-affiliated unions--New Haven, CT; Baltimore; and Pittsburgh--each recently used the collective bargaining process to ink contracts with new approaches to teacher evaluation or compensation.

A mantra in recent years has been to blame the teachers' unions for many of the problems that beset public education. Americans only need look at Wisconsin, where the governor and lawmakers pushed through legislation curtailing the collective bargaining rights of teachers and other public employees. This special report examines the attempts by a small but growing number of districts and unions to work together to enhance the knowledge and skills of teachers and, in turn, improve the achievement of schoolchildren. Articles in this supplement include: (1) "New Attitudes Shaping Labor-District Relationships" (Stephen Sawchuk); (2) "Contract Yields New Teacher-Evaluation System" (Stephen Sawchuk); (3) "Value-Added Formulas Strain Collaboration" (Sarah D. Sparks); (4) "Union-District Collaboration a Never-Ending Process" (Stephen Sawchuk); (5) "States Urged to Promote Union-District Cooperation" (Sean Cavanagh); and (6) "Memphis Collaboration Is Poised to Bear Fruit" (Christina A. Samuels).

Most experts in the testing community have presumed that the $350 million promised by the U.S. Department of Education to support common assessments would promote those that made greater use of open-ended items capable of measuring higher-order critical-thinking skills. But as measurement experts consider the multitude of possibilities for an assessment system based more heavily on such questions, they also are beginning to reflect on practical obstacles to putting such a system into place. The issues on the table include the added expense of those items, as well as questions about who should be charged with the task of scoring them, and whether they will prove reliable enough for high-stakes decisions. Also being confronted are matters of governance--the quandary of which entities would actually "own" any new assessments created in common by states and whether working in state consortia would generate savings. In this article, the author discusses the practical challenges connected with open-ended test items.

Depending on whom one asks, "21st-century skills" can mean different things: technology literacy, the ability to analyze and apply knowledge, a knack for working effectively with colleagues in teams. In what is probably its most visible form for educators, though, the term refers to the work of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the Tucson, Arizona-based public-private initiative that has put the provision of all those skills at the center of its agenda. Known as P21, the group claims 14 member states as working to foster the adoption of new academic-content standards, professional training, and assessments aligned with those skills. But after seven relatively quiet years of work, P21 is facing a vocal chorus of detractors of its initiative, primarily from among advocates for a liberal arts and sciences curriculum. Recently, those critics have leveled a more serious charge at the organization. P21, they allege, is a veiled attempt by technology companies--which make up the bulk of the group's membership--to gain more influence over the classroom. For Ken Kay, the president of P21, such criticism amounts to a "cheap shot" by those who do not believe that the education system should be more responsive to business needs. Whether P21 can successfully convince skeptics of its good intentions remains an open question. Concerns about a lack of specificity in its materials are no longer the sole province of core-content advocates, but also now include educators in the career and technical education arena. In the meantime, P21 itself remains popular among educators, in no small part because of the influence of its two education partners, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) and the National Education Association (NEA).

Established in the 142,000-student Montgomery County, Maryland, district in 1999, peer assistance and review (PAR)--or "peer review," as it is occasionally called--is actually an old idea. In 1981, the then-president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers, Dal Lawrence, helped create the first PAR program. Almost 30 years later, only a handful of districts have followed the schools in that Ohio city with their own variations. But spurred on by new assistance primarily from the American Federation of Teachers, more districts are coming on board, even as the state of the nation's long-ignored, but much-criticized teacher-evaluation instruments rockets to the top of the national education agenda. Teacher experts are of two minds about the program's continuing expansion. Supporters believe that the stars have finally aligned to boost support for peer assistance and review. But other observers say that the program, which is intended for select subpopulations--novices and struggling veterans--should be more closely linked to an overall teacher-quality strategy for all teachers, including compensation reform. Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project, said peer review is an incomplete approach. It is a more collaborative way of doing what districts have been trying to do for decades--to detect incompetence. As the national conversation about teacher effectiveness continues, it is an open question how well peer review will fit into newly emerging systems.

For years, the St. Louis school district has experienced the convergence of two trend lines school superintendents hope never to see: rising employee-pension costs and falling student enrollment. Despite years of fully funding its share of the teacher-pension plan, the proportion of the St. Louis district's budget tied up in paying benefits for its teachers now makes up about 10 percent--a factor that, coupled with other rising costs, is fueling ongoing cuts in this beleaguered district. St. Louis' situation has resonance far beyond the city, because its troubles are similar to those that other districts are likely to face. In St. Louis, many of the cuts have been shaped with input from the city teachers' union. Changes to the pension structure have not yet been made, but they have been proposed, and more are likely to be on the table in the future. "The current system is no longer sustainable by the district," said Steven R. Carroll, the school system's lobbyist in the state capital.

One thing is immediately apparent when Erica Vuolle teaches: Not a moment of time is wasted. Ms. Vuolle is among the 40 teachers-in-training at the Match Teacher Residency, a teacher education program run by the Boston-based Match Education, a nonprofit charter-management organization that requires candidates to practice and master a repertoire of specific competencies before they lead a full classroom. It is an approach to student-teaching that does away with much of the trial-and-error that often characterizes the experience. The Match Teacher Residency is one of a small number of teacher-preparation programs focusing on what's coming to be called "practice-based" teacher education. The approach is growing in popularity among charter groups and beginning to emerge in university-based programs as well.

In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better under new teacher-evaluation systems recently put in place. In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or better. Principals in Tennessee judged 98 percent of teachers to be "at expectations" or better last school year, while evaluators in Georgia gave good reviews to 94 percent of teachers taking part in a pilot evaluation program. The data are also raising new questions about the observation components of the systems, which tended to produce the highest scores. Dozens of states have taken steps in recent years to overhaul their teacher-evaluation systems, often in response to federal incentives. Such changes have also been promoted by an influential lineup of organizations that calls for greater accountability in the teaching profession. The states hope to use the systems to strengthen teaching practices and dismiss poorly performing teachers.

Data, while imprecise, suggest that some states are producing far more new teachers at the elementary level than will be able to find jobs in their respective states--even as districts struggle to find enough recruits in other certification fields. For some observers, the imbalances reflect a failure of teacher colleges--by far, the largest source of new teachers--and their regulatory agencies to cap the number of entrants. Scholars who study the issue, however, acknowledge that, even if a net oversupply of elementary teachers exists in some states, remedies are difficult. They are complicated, such scholars say, by a lack of comparable, cross-state data and by the complex and variable nature of the education labor market.

With state and national policymakers eyeing ways to improve teacher preparation, a handful of education programs are becoming more intentional about how such "cooperating" teachers--as they're known in the lingo of teacher preparation--are selected and trained. That interest could grow as programs wrestle with the finer points of how to transform student-teaching from a haphazard, sometimes hastily tacked-on experience to the central component of preparation. The challenges seem to begin with the selection of cooperating teachers, a process that is often left to districts. There are other obstacles, too. For cooperating teachers, the rewards for taking on a teacher-candidate are generally paltry, and new teacher-related policies have added wrinkles: A nationwide push to make teacher evaluation more rigorous, sometimes using test scores as a factor, has made teachers hesitant to invite novices into their classrooms, educators say.

As the country's K-12 student population grows more ethnically diverse, students of color face the troubling possibility of never having a teacher who looks like them. According to federal data, more than 40 percent of students are nonwhite, compared to just 17 percent of teachers, and that mismatch appears to be on the rise. But a new project is taking a deeper aim at the factors contributing to what's sometimes called the "teacher-diversity gap." The organizers hope to encourage more adults from a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds to enter the profession--and stay in it. The author features Teach Tomorrow in Oakland, an Oakland, California, program that emphasizes keeping mix of educators on the job. TTO, begun in 2008, guides adults from the city as they fulfill credential requirements, pass their licensing tests, navigate the hiring process, and--crucially--negotiate the tumultuous first few years in the classroom.

As a new breed of national education advocacy organizations gains clout, they're entering into often-uneasy relationships with teachers' unions--and running into a debate about whether they can play a grassroots "ground game" comparable to that of labor. For many unions, the policy changes the newer groups typically support--staffing based on performance measures and the expansion of charter schools, among others--tilt the balance of power away from teachers and unions and toward administrators and funders who, they argue, are less well-versed in the needs of teachers, students, and parents. Others view the entrance on the political scene of such groups as Stand for Children, Democrats for Education Reform, and StudentsFirst as a welcome development--one that adds fresh voices in a field that, at the local and state level at least, has been largely dominated by unions.

The tenor of discussions held in Washington last week by negotiators rewriting federal rules on teacher preparation underscored deep-seated philosophical divisions within the field, including the thorny issue of how much responsibility schools of education should bear for producing effective teachers. Though the panelists did reach compromises on several occasions, negotiators differed on the degree to which teacher-preparation programs should be rated on outcome measures; how aggressive the federal government should be in holding programs accountable for such results; and the ramifications of any new requirements on states with training programs of varying sizes and missions. The negotiated rulemaking concerns the reporting and accountability requirements for teacher colleges, which are housed in Title II of the Higher Education Act, and the TEACH grants, a financial-aid program created under a budget-reconciliation bill five years ago. TEACH grants subsidize the tuition of teacher-candidates who commit to high-needs schools and fields. The rulemaking is one part of the U.S. Department of Education's blueprint for overhauling teacher training, which was formally unveiled last fall. It was unclear by the end of this week's sessions whether negotiators, who hail from such areas as public and private training programs, alternative routes, the financial-aid sector, and the classroom, would reach a final consensus on draft regulations. If they do not, the Education Department can issue its own set.

An external panel that includes several prominent critics of teacher education has been tapped to craft the performance standards for the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), the new organization's leaders announced last week. Among the standards under consideration: how programs ensure that candidates know their content; the programs' ability to recruit an academically strong pool of candidates; their success in training teachers to use assessment data effectively; and the performance of their graduates in classrooms. CAEP was created in late 2010 by the merger of two separate accreditors, the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC), and the far larger and older National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Both will operate until the merger is completed by the end of this year. The commission tapped to write the new body's standards will be chaired by Camilla Benbow, the dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University, and Gene Harris, the superintendent of the Columbus, Ohio, public schools. Drafting the new measures is, in any event, not likely to be an easy task. One of the major challenges could well be the specificity of any new set of performance standards, especially given the general lack of solid research evidence linking any one teacher-preparation approach to effective teaching.

Where their teacher-quality proposals are concerned, the fates of the 11 states that have bid for waivers of core principles of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act appear to depend largely on how the peer reviewers--and, ultimately, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan--interpret their applications. The U.S. Department of Education's criteria for teacher quality--one of four policy areas states must address in their applications--hinge on the ability of states and districts to ready new teacher-evaluation systems for statewide implementation by the end of the 2013-2014 school year. But even long-standing observers acknowledge that the Education Department's criteria for vetting the states' plans are vague in places and that it's hard to determine at this stage exactly what the peer reviewers will favor. All of which leaves the most important question in the hands of reviewers: How likely are the states' plans to come to fruition within the waiver period--and should they be granted the flexibility in the meantime? One challenge for the reviewers is that states and their districts are at widely divergent stages of developing new evaluation systems, ranging from Tennessee, which has an operational statewide teacher-evaluation system, to Kentucky, where nearly every detail of such a system remains undecided. And the stakes are different from those of the Race to the Top competition, which also put a premium on teacher evaluation: Unlike that contest, Education Department officials have stressed that they want all states to apply for--and earn--the flexibility. Some welcome a process that could help every state eventually win breathing room from the NCLB law. But others question whether political pressure will prevent a rigorous review.

School after school in the Phoenix area has a banner hanging on the side of the building: iTeachAZ. It is shorthand for Arizona State University's new flagship undergraduate teacher education program, which integrates several high-profile--and hotly debated--reforms to teacher preparation today. Under the program, which debuted formally this school year, ASU requires a year-long student-teaching apprenticeship for all undergraduate education majors, during which time they must demonstrate mastery of specific teaching skills as measured by a popular teaching framework. While many of the changes under way have been tried elsewhere, there is an important issue of scale taking place here: ASU is a public state institution that prepares hundreds of teachers a year. It is, in fact, the largest undergraduate education program in the country. Arizona State requires year-long student-teaching for all undergraduate education majors, who must prove mastery of teaching skills.

This article reports on the rise of nonunion advocacy groups for teachers which has enabled them to cut their teeth on policy issues that affect the profession. The teachers' unions remain the most visible, powerful, and probably the most important advocates for teachers. But over the past few years, a number of new efforts have sprung up purporting to give teachers a say in policy, and their emergence is extending discussions about "teacher voice" in unexpected ways. In general, the groups' origins, goals, and purposes remain diverse, and their work continues to evolve. Where the groups seem to converge, though, is that their members are gradually becoming involved in conversations about policy, ranging from teacher evaluation to seniority to professional development. Groups include the Los Angeles-based NewTLA, which operates as a caucus within the city teachers' union, and the Educators 4 Excellence group in New York City, which has purposely worked outside the teachers' union. Two other efforts, one begun by the Boston-based Teach Plus nonprofit organization and the other by the Carrboro, North Carolina-based Center for Teaching Quality, have gathered together teachers in multiple cities. Their approaches are similar: providing those teachers with research on issues of interest and avenues for interacting with policymakers.

National Education Association (NEA) officials announced last week that they would put a "policy statement" before the union's governing body for approval that, among other changes, would open the door to the use of "valid, reliable, high-quality standardized tests" of student learning, in combination with multiple other measures, for evaluating teachers. The statement, passed by the NEA's board of directors this month won't take effect unless the union's 9,000-delegate Representative Assembly signs on to it at its meeting over the Fourth of July weekend in Chicago. Those delegates could significantly modify the statement before approval, and it is likely to be a topic of lively debate. Still, the announcement comes as a major entry by the 3.2 million-member union in discussions about teacher evaluation, tenure, and due process. Crafted by state affiliate members as well as national staff employees, the statement says that evaluation systems must be comprehensive and built on three kinds of indicators. First, they should take into account indicators of teachers' practice, such as their lesson plans and classroom-based observations about their ability to deliver instruction. Second, the systems should take into account teachers' leadership in the school, collaboration with peers, or participation in professional development. And finally, they should show how the teacher has contributed to student learning and growth. The final element marks a departure for the NEA, which has historically opposed most attempts to tie teacher accountability to student scores. The policy statement says that measures of student growth could include student-learning objectives set with principals, like those now used in Denver's ProComp pay system, teacher-created assessments, and reviews of student work, but it also specifically references standardized tests.

It's hard to imagine two schools superficially more different from each other than Blackstone Elementary, with its labyrinthine 1970s layout, and Orchard Gardens K-8 School, which opened in 2003, with its modern skylights and cheery primary-color accents. But they were similar in the way that matters most in young lives: Both Boston schools were among the poorest-performing in Massachusetts. Now, though, district and school leaders think the pair may have turned the corner, thanks in part to an influx of a corps of top teachers in each school. Achievement has improved at both. At Orchard Gardens, teacher attrition seems to be on the wane--no small feat for the school, which has had six principals in seven years. Both schools, plus a third in the district, are participating in a novel turnaround venture that attracts and seeks to retain highly effective teachers through a bundle of incentives, including leadership opportunities, a structure for peer learning, and increased pay. Now wrapping up its first year, the initiative is providing insights into the role of teachers in overhauling the culture of a low-performing school--as well as giving way to new questions about the nature of teacher leadership and how to develop it.

Besieged by state proposals to eviscerate collective bargaining, eliminate teacher tenure, and make it harder to collect dues, teachers' unions are fighting back. Lawsuits supported by local union affiliates have for now blocked anti-union legislation in Alabama and Wisconsin. E-mail "blasts," phone banks, and rallies are also among the tools unions are using to mobilize teachers and public support. Most of the action is occurring at the state level, but by providing state and local affiliates with specialized aid, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are playing an important role in supporting the efforts. Both unions have raised or plan to raise dues to help pay for efforts to delay, block, or mitigate the impact of such legislation.

Detroit's troubled school system remains in emergency management, its enrollment dwindling and its labor-management relations contentious. Yet in spite of those challenges, a school there is making a bid to innovate with many of the formal structures that have long guided not just teachers' roles, but also how students are organized in classes. At Palmer Park Preparatory Academy, teachers are gradually assuming administrative duties to become the city's first teacher-led school. An extended day, part of the district's reform policy, gives the staff time every afternoon to compare teaching strategies. A new, pilot schedule for 7th and 8th graders lets teachers regroup the middle school students in different English/language arts and math classes frequently, based on the students' performance and how quickly they are learning new material. The changes are the K-8 school's attempt to get concrete about the much-touted but often vague concept of "differentiated instruction" for students, especially for those who have struggled to grasp key concepts and risk falling further behind. They are also the product of a partnership among teachers, the local teachers' union, the central administration, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the educational publisher hired in fall 2009 to revamp Detroit's curriculum. In a sense, the 650-student school is also an incubator of several ideas that in recent months have caught renewed attention from education reformers around the country, including: (1) the notion of the teacher-led school; (2) extended school hours, a concept favored by the Obama administration; and (3) on-the-job professional development based on data analysis. While still in its infancy, the school is being praised by district leaders as an example of organic reform.

A settlement crafted last week seeking to curb the use of seniority as a factor in teacher layoffs in the Los Angeles school system could become one of the nation's most far-reaching overhauls of the "last hired, first fired" policies common in school districts. If approved by a judge, the settlement would shield up to 45 low-performing schools in the district from the layoff process. It also would cap cuts made in other district schools. It comes in response to a class action against the district, filed in February by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and other groups. That lawsuit alleged that civil rights of students in three schools in impoverished neighborhoods were violated when half or more of the teachers in the schools were let go under the district's layoff procedures, as part of a cost-cutting plan last year. The action in the 678,000-student district, the nation's second-largest, is notable not only for the support it ended up garnering from the city's mayor and ultimately from the district itself, but also because efforts to change layoff policies through legislation have fallen short recently in California and on Capitol Hill. Observers said the settlement could be a model for other districts, though as the basis for future legal action its status is unclear. It also comes at an important time for Los Angeles, which faces a projected deficit of about $270 million next year and more than $800 million by 2012. The city's teachers' union has indicated, however, that it will fight the settlement, saying that it wouldn't alleviate a concentration of inexperienced teachers in struggling schools. The economic crisis also has brought the issue of layoff policy to the forefront of reform debates. Though seniority-based layoffs are common in districts throughout the nation, critics of such policies note that they tend to affect schools serving poor and minority students more because those schools are often staffed by novice teachers who haven't earned tenure. They also tend to drive up class sizes across a district more than other layoff procedures, since more novices must be cut to achieve budget parity.

The most rigorous experimental study of performance-based teacher compensation ever conducted in the United States shows that a nationally watched bonus-pay system had no overall impact on student achievement--results that are certain to set off a firestorm of debate. The study, known as POINT for the Project on Incentives in Teaching, was a three-year randomized experiment conducted by researchers affiliated with the National Center on Performance Incentives. It was designed to study the hypothesis that a large monetary incentive would cause teachers to seek ways to be more effective and boost student scores as a result. But it yielded only two small positive findings, limited to 5th graders in the second and third years of experiment. No effects were seen for students in grades 6-8 in any year of study. At the same time, however, participating teachers did not report finding the pay program's goals for students out of reach or its impact on school culture damaging, two concerns that have been among those voiced by opponents of performance pay.

Education programs across 19 states are piloting a performance-based assessment for teacher-candidates that potentially could serve as a common prelicensing measure for new teachers. Based on a test in use in about 30 education schools in California, the Teacher Performance Assessment includes a "teaching event" requiring teachers to extensively document and submit for review artifacts of their planning, instruction, and ability to assess and respond to student needs. Five of the states taking part in the work-- Massachusetts, Minnesota, Ohio, Tennessee, and Washington--have committed in legislation to use a performance-based licensing test, and officials have signed memoranda of understanding agreeing to adopt the assessment if it proves to be technically valid and reliable. Supporters of the initiative see in the work an opportunity to focus on classroom-based effectiveness at the precertification benchmark--an area that has not received much attention as policymakers tackle the tenure-granting and annual evaluation processes.

Forced into an uneasy balancing act between their members and the president they helped elect, the national teachers' unions are responding to the Obama administration's teacher-effectiveness agenda in notably different ways. Publicly at least, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel has hewed closely to the union's internal policy statements on such matters as embedding student learning into policies on teacher evaluation and pay. But the heads of the 3.2 million-member NEA's state affiliates have taken sundry positions on initiatives such as the federal Race to the Top competition, with some participating in their states' bids for the $4 billion initiative and others opposing them outright. In contrast, the president of the 1.5 million-member American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, has laid out--and helped local affiliates adopt--an explicit agenda for her union that, for example, endorses a new approach to teacher evaluations, including the consideration of test scores alongside other factors. Those responses, say experts on teachers' unions, are a complex product molded significantly by the unions' respective governance structures. Among other differences, the structures make the national bully pulpit a more powerful place at the AFT, but tilt NEA policy away from its president and toward its state affiliates. The author reports on how unions' tactics diverge in engaging the Obama administration's teacher-effectiveness agenda.

With effective teaching a top policy priority, certain school districts, the federal government, and nonprofit groups are renewing efforts to pilot and study strategies for pairing effective teachers with students in low-performing, high-poverty schools. The results could offer clues about how to rectify an imbalance in the distribution of the best teachers within districts--a requirement of both the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the 2009 economic-stimulus law that addresses one of K-12 education's most intractable problems. The initiatives differ from earlier attempts to equalize teacher talent by using more sophisticated techniques to identify and target top teachers, including the use of value-added data. They also go beyond narrow transfer incentives to include targeted retention strategies, improved professional development, and a focus on the caliber of the school leaders and peers whom new teachers will be working with every day. Some of the districts are even working to place whole teams of educators--rather than just individuals--in challenging schools, a promising approach, some scholars say, at a time when individual teacher performance has galvanized much policy attention. The new efforts are among the first to approach the issue of teacher distribution by looking at teachers' ability to boost their students' academic achievement, an area that is only now generating significant research.

Perhaps at no other time in the history of American education has there been more publicly available information about what teachers think about their profession, their students, and the conditions under which they work. As advocates pore over the results of teacher surveys being conducted nationally, at the state level, and even at individual schools, observers are beginning to ask questions about how the information can be used to inform policies to improve teachers' working conditions and promote teacher and leadership effectiveness. In an apparent nod to the importance of hearing directly from teachers, the Obama administration has proposed in its blueprint for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that states collect and report information on a variety of school factors, including teachers' perceptions of their working conditions and whether there is a pattern of teacher absenteeism indicative of the cultural norms of those schools. Amid more surveys on teachers' views, the Obama administration wants districts and states to do their own on schools' working conditions.

Superficially, the Brooklyn Generation School, in the Flatbush area, looks a lot like the other six small public high schools that share space in this tall building, the former South Shore High School. What's noticeably different about it, though, is the strength of the relationships among staff members. Teachers can be seen running across the hallways to each other's rooms. They tease each other good-naturedly in staff meetings. Most importantly, the tenor of staff conversations is markedly different. This article discusses the public school's novel way of differentiating teachers' roles and staggering their schedules. At Brooklyn Generation, teachers instruct only three classes a day, get two hours of common planning with colleagues each afternoon, and have a highly reduced student load--as few as 14 students per class. Yet the restructured scheduling costs no more to operate than a traditional schedule. When the visionary behind this school model, Furman Brown, began devising it more than a decade ago, he did so with an eye to using time in new ways so that both students and teachers had opportunities to learn. Mr. Brown spent more than a decade toying with the pieces of teacher schedules at hand, trying to "get the colors of the Rubik's cube to line up." With early startup money, he and business partner Jonathan Spear founded the Generation Schools Network, a nonprofit dedicated to furthering their vision. Amid that work came the added puzzle of persuading city officials to actually implement the model in a small public high school, a task that took three years. The United Federation of Teachers, the local American Federation of Teachers affiliate, provided key support in helping to craft a side addendum to the teachers' contract to set the new school calendar, while allowing most of the model's core features to be fleshed out using the "school-based option" agreement in the city contract. With the smaller class sizes and more support, the school's leaders expect teachers to engage each student in the school's college- and career-bound culture. The flexibility of the model also allows staff members to regroup students according to need.

Spurred by the promise of $350 million in Race to the Top money for improved tests--as well as an opportunity to strengthen bids for part of the federal fund's larger $4 billion pot--states are scrambling to join consortia to develop common assessments. Six state consortia are now engaged in discussions about common tests, and the multiple partnerships may put to rest for now speculation that federal support inevitably will lead to a single national set of exams. Since it is not yet clear what the U.S. Department of Education expects to see from the consortia, most states have hedged their bets by signing up for more than one partnership. In fact, there are signs that several of the consortia might try to merge even before March, when the Department of Education is expected to release its application notice for the $350 million in assessment funding, which is being provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

As peer reviewers for the U.S. Department of Education begin to comb through the thousands of pages of applications for $4 billion in federal Race to the Top Fund grants, they'll be under pressure to determine which are most worthy of funding: those that promise the most, or those with the best chance of delivering. In a competition whose criteria were tightly outlined, applications from 40 states and the District of Columbia contained many common themes. But the plans differ markedly on the details, and in interviews with "Education Week," state officials highlighted reform proposals they believed might set them apart in the scoring process. Among other areas, those officials noted factors such as how heavily they plan to weight student-achievement data in teacher and principal evaluations, highlighted the percentage of local school boards and unions that signed on to the plans, and promised to be even tougher than the federal guidelines in seeking to improve poorly performing schools. But there is little telling what the peer reviewers will value most in rating the applications. Some plans placed more flexibility in the hands of local officials, thus winning more statewide support; others took a more prescriptive approach to teacher effectiveness and school turnarounds, but faced resistance at the district level. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been coy about revealing what might give states a leg up over others in the competition intended to spur state-level education improvements. The states' applications will be weighed on more than 30 criteria reflecting the Obama administration's education priorities. High among them are improving teacher and principal effectiveness, turning around low-performing schools, and using data systems effectively. Points also are awarded for states that secure signatures from school district leaders assuring that they are on board with the state's plans. Revamping evaluation systems so that teachers are judged, at least in part, on how well students perform is a top priority of the Obama administration, and one area of the competition in which many states are seeking to make a strong case.

The president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten, is putting the sensitive issue of due process on the education reform table, with a pledge to work with districts to streamline the often-cumbersome procedures for dismissing teachers who fail to improve their performance after receiving help and support. She has also commissioned an independent expert to help revise due process for those teachers accused of misconduct. The pledge--a formal acknowledgment by the AFT that due process, a hard-won labor right, could benefit from some revisions--comes with a caveat: Districts must agree to work with unions to devise fair, meaningful systems to evaluate teacher performance and to help ineffective teachers improve, as part of any plan to reform due-process procedures. The give-and-take flavor of the proposal underscored Ms. Weingarten's broader theme of the necessity of labor-management collaboration and its place in education reform, a theme that is also coming to define her leadership of the 1.4 million-member union. Since assuming the AFT presidency in 2008, Ms. Weingarten has asserted that the collective bargaining process can serve as a vehicle for school improvement by giving educators a place to experiment with new ideas. Last year, the AFT championed several examples of the principle, including contracts in New Haven, Connecticut, and Detroit that create joint labor-management panels for determining policy around evaluations and "turnaround" schools, and agreements with charter schools in New York City and Boston that take new approaches to pay and working hours. Critics note that not all of her attempts at collaboration have proved successful. Contract negotiations in Washington have languished for nearly two years and are now in mediation, despite attempts by the AFT to reach a compromise with Michelle Rhee, the District of Columbia schools chancellor.

In what had been billed as a major speech on teacher education, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week reiterated concerns about the quality of the schools that produce a majority of the nation's teachers. But some observers said that by praising several new teacher-preparation initiatives, he struck a more conciliatory tone toward the institutions than he did in a speech on similar themes delivered less than two weeks earlier. Mr. Duncan delivered his speech, the capstone of several events focused on teacher preparation this month, before 900 educators gathered at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. He called on programs to continue their improvement, saying most have not kept pace with a now decade-long focus on student outcomes. Using milder language than he did in the previous speech, he also said they are doing "a mediocre job" of preparing teachers for the realities of the profession. "America's university-based teacher-preparation programs need revolutionary change--not evolutionary tinkering," he said. Such changes should include a stronger preservice fieldwork component, a focus on subject-matter competency and classroom-management techniques, and state action to gauge the success of teacher college graduates in classrooms, Mr. Duncan said. He highlighted recent grants to bolster teacher "residency" programs and criteria in the $4 billion Race to the Top program that would help states boost teacher-training accountability. And in the only new measure announced, he said that the Obama administration would try to improve university-based preparation programs when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act comes up for renewal. Federal attempts to change teacher education have typically centered on the Higher Education Act, which lawmakers renewed last summer.

Teach For America's (TFA) shift over the past decade toward measuring and promoting its teachers' ability to boost student performance has caused the organization to reconfigure not just program directors' roles, but nearly all its other support components. It has overhauled its five-week summer training, known as "Institute," to incorporate the new focus. Program directors, who cover small regions, now have fewer corps members--typically around 30--to observe and have more time to respond to their needs. Most recently, TFA has added an on-demand system of Web supports. Such changes have been informed by data that help the organization determine which aspects of its professional development appear to enhance teacher effectiveness and which don't. TFA now unabashedly defines effectiveness in terms of how its teachers' students perform. All corps members are expected to reach at least one of these goals: (1) move student learning forward by 1 1/2 grade levels; (2) close achievement gaps by 20 percent; or (3) ensure that 80 percent of students have met grade-level standards.

No matter where teachers, state officials, and testing experts stand on the debate about school accountability, they generally agree that the United States' current multiple-choice-dominated Kinder-12 tests are, to use language borrowed from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, "in need of improvement." Now, federal officials are signaling that they expect the caliber of testing to change. Testing experts say that money could serve as a down payment for scaling up tests that would better measure students' critical-thinking skills and improve teacher and student engagement in the assessment process. The catch, they warn, is that truly achieving that goal may force federal officials to rethink the current parameters around assessment and accountability in the NCLB law. Experts add that the infusion of federal cash could also provide more opportunities to devise tests that will better engage teachers in the cognitive science about how knowledge develops. Another possible solution, experts say, would be to move to a system that samples student performance, rather than giving every student the same test form. Each student would take only a part of the exam, with results aggregated at a higher level. But such a system has not been used for school accountability purposes, and would contravene the NCLB requirements that all students in a state take the same test. It would also complicate efforts to break out schools' test-score results by racial or ethnic and income-level categories, among other areas. Ultimately, experts say, the federal agenda for the funding will probably determine its utility.

What started as a ripple in the charter community shows signs of becoming a wave as major charter school networks scramble to respond to an unfamiliar phenomenon: moves by their teachers to organize unions. In the first half of this year, teachers formed collective bargaining units in schools run by several of the best-known and highest-profile charter management organizations. They include the Knowledge Is Power Program CMO's Always Mentally Prepared Academy, known as KIPP AMP, in New York City; the four campuses of the Accelerated School in Los Angeles; and three Chicago charters operated by Civitas, a subsidiary of Chicago International Charter Schools. Although teachers have unionized at other charter schools over the years, the recent activity is notable not only for being contentious in several instances, but also because policymakers, educators, and the news media are scrutinizing it much more closely. For that reason, commentators say, it carries high stakes for both teachers' unions and the CMOs. A subtext to the recent unionization efforts concerns the fact that teachers' unions have never exactly been on the same page as charter proponents about the appropriate function for the independent public schools. For Jed Wallace, the CEO of the California Charter Schools Organization, the spate of union activity is an acknowledgment of the charter school movement's success. But to Jeanne Allen, the president of the Center for Education Reform, a Washington-based group that promotes charters and other forms of school choice, the recent organizing drives are a worrisome sign that teachers' unions have gained footholds in a movement they have struggled to contain.

As the recession crimps education budgets, states are beginning to pare the number of standardized tests they give, particularly those that no longer factor into state or federal accountability decisions. At the district level, though, it's a different story. Despite pressure not to cut staffing and programs, many districts are preserving local "interim" or "benchmark" tests meant to gauge how students are progressing over the course of the year--even though such assessments are not required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act or generally by state officials. The trend provides insights into how the landscape of educational testing has shifted over the past decade to the more frequent assessment of students.

Baby boomers, who make up a majority of the U.S. teaching force, are inching closer to retirement. Couple that with the downturn in the economy, and renewed worries about pension-fund liabilities are cropping up across the nation. Yet as policymakers focus on ways to make teachers' pension plans sustainable over the long haul, some economists and administrators are concerned about what they see as another cost of those systems: the pressure they exert on the flow of teachers into and out of the profession. Such plans, they say, strongly "backload" benefits toward teachers who stay in the profession for decades, regardless of whether those veterans are the most effective teachers. That bias, critics say, comes at the expense of teachers who are unable to commit to such a long career or who move to teach in another state or district. By tying up precious funds, economists and others suggest, defined-benefit pension plans may be hurting districts' efforts to attract and retain talented novices and midcareer teachers.

Since its inception, the program has tackled the most challenging issue facing the teaching profession: how to align systems for managing schools' human capital with goals for improving student achievement. In addition to pay, the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) shapes new approaches to on-the-job training, career advancement, and evaluation in ways that yield insights about how such features can be arranged so teachers embrace them. It has attracted national attention, also. Seven of the Teacher Incentive Fund grantees have adopted the TAP model, and more could be on the horizon now that the federal program, which supports differentiated pay, has received $200 million in the economic-stimulus legislation.

This article reports that with the poor economy endangering more novice teachers' jobs, researchers and policymakers have begun to question the human-capital costs of "last hired, first fired" layoff policies. Such layoffs, those experts argue, do not consider teacher effectiveness, meaning that teachers who make vital contributions to school success can nevertheless be among those to receive pink slips. Seniority-based layoffs are the norm for the profession. According to a database maintained by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based group that advocates stronger state teacher-quality policies, all but five of the nation's 25 largest school districts follow seniority-based layoff policies set by contracts or state law. And all but one of those five is located in a right-to-work state without mandatory collective bargaining for teachers. Typically, layoffs--frequently referred to in contracts as reductions in force (RIFs)--are enforced within teachers' certification areas. If a district needs to cut high school social studies teachers, for instance, it cuts from the bottom of the high school social studies seniority list until the budget has been balanced. Then, it will redeploy the remaining teachers as necessary the following school year.

As West Virginia increasingly emphasizes the teaching of content in application, the shift demands a fundamental change in teachers' roles. Teachers are no longer just purveyors of facts, but also the facilitators of elaborate activities that help students exercise what are often called 21st-century skills. Business leaders and policymakers more and more say those higher-order, critical-thinking, communication, technological, and analytical skills are the ones crucial for students to master as they enter a service-oriented, entrepreneurial, and global workplace. After integrating such skills into the state's academic-content standards, West Virginia is now hard at work reorienting the training and professional support of its 20,000 public school teachers to ensure that they are capable of executing such projects.

As states' information-collection systems grow more sophisticated, officials are grappling with where to draw the line on how "value added" data on teachers can be used. Since the adoption of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the task of establishing data systems for tracking students' year-to-year achievement gains has fallen largely to the states. Value-added techniques are one way of dissecting such data. Proponents of the systems say value-added information holds promise for being integrated as one of several factors in human-capital decisions, such as evaluations. Many states are laying the groundwork for such systems by assigning each teacher a unique identification number. Few of those states have set teacher policies that incorporate the data, though--in part, observers say, because value-added systems are a political minefield. States that have progressed on value-added policies--such as Louisiana, which uses the data for teacher-preparation program accountability--typically don't use the systems for individual teacher decisions. Researchers note that technical factors can affect the systems' ability to make reliable determinations of teacher performance, an issue that has raised concerns from the national teachers' unions.