Stories like these clearly demonstrate the inherent tension and difficult issues between employment and jobs and student learning. We need to commit to a new and better process that has creative mechanisms to serve all our students and our teachers fairly.

“The actions of the teachers unions in both Baltimore and New York make sense from their perspective. Unions exist to advance the interests of their members. The problem is that unions present themselves as student advocates while pushing education policies that work for their members even if they leave kids worse off.“

This article is more than a shout out to Teach for America. It references some studies and metrics for measuring alternative educator training programs in relation to traditional education schools. There are opportunities to truly serve all children. We must find the political will and financial investment to do this. Or our current investments will be wasted. It is crude to utilize a financial model as the sole evaluation benchmark. The author articulates the most basic issue at hand in another way:

“Continuing to fund the status quo, when two-thirds of American children can barely read and write, is state-sanctioned child abuse.”

The Attorney General of New York State is digging deep into the many layers of government that we have here. And gathering data about the financial impact.

There is a lot of data here. The most important thing is to understand how the numbers interact in our own municipalities and affect the quality and costs of services. It’s a great starting point for discussion. School Districts are no exception. How we look at and define municipal and district boundaries is incredibly inconsistent. To create real change requires real evaluation and discussion as opposed to falling back on commonly held beliefs and ideas without mechanisms for understanding the value - costs and benefits alike.

Here’s an organization looking to incentivize good teaching.

A “Conservation Campaign Toolkit.”

Great resource, complete with case studies.

Unfunded mandates. And other things.

Interesting and detailed information analyzing the implications of consolidating school districts/ sharing services in western New York State. Lite on the critique, but some very useful points to consider in general. And it addresses equity for students.