Publications

In Fordham’s new book Education Reform for the Digital Era, Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel’s opening chapter proposes that “digital education needs excellent teachers and that a first-rate teaching profession needs digital education.”

This white paper, written in collaboration with Getting Smart and Digital Learning Now!, is the seventh installment of the DLN Smart Series. The paper and accompanying infographic explain how blended learning can help create better teaching conditions and expanded career opportunities for teachers.

When high-performing teachers across the country leave our classrooms each year, 750,000 children find themselves assigned to a less-effective teacher in each subsequent year. How could education leaders reduce this outflow? In this report, we examine the research and case studies outside education to reveal four key strategies organizations successfully use to boost high-performer retention.

Many of Singapore’s lower-achieving students are learning at levels higher than gifted-student curricula in U.S. schools. What is the secret to Singapore’s success? Here we present a brief background on the state of teacher evaluation in the United States, the case for why we can learn much from Singapore, and key facts about Singapore’s competency-based teacher evaluation system.

A recent national push to use performance evaluations for critical personnel decisions has highlighted the shortcomings of our current systems and increased the urgency to improve them dramatically. This report, written with support from The Joyce Foundation, summarizes best practices and research from other sectors for education leaders who want accurate, reliable, and meaningful information about educators’ performance.

Could redesigned K-12 teacher tenure actually improve student learning? This paper examines lessons from higher education and the civil service and applies fresh thinking to offer new “elite” and “inclusive” tenure designs and a framework for policymakers who want to make tenure meaningful.

In this collection of essays, Education Sector asked commentators to address a set of dilemmas facing the nation in the current reform moment. Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel tackled one: Will the Common Core and new teacher evaluation systems strangle innovation?

As evidence continues to pile up about the central importance of effective teaching, states nationwide are rethinking how they define and measure the effects individual teachers have on educational outcomes.

The job of “teacher” in most schools today remains centered on full-time classroom responsibilities that are defined by the location, timing, and schedule of the school day and a one-teacher-per-classroom model. But particularly in today’s budget climate, interest in quality-focused job redesigns is increasing among forward-thinking state, district, and charter school leaders.