I’m hearing rumblings that the Obama administration is going to take the teacher-effectiveness and teacher-distribution language in the stimulus bill seriously. If you’re looking for a primer on those issues, take a look at this story I wrote not long ago.
Delaware is one of a handful of states that’s doing some really exciting work on teacher distribution. The state, in collaboration with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Education Laboratory, the Mid-Atlantic Comprehensive Center, and the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality—three federally supported technical-assistance/research bodies—is using state teacher data and surveys of administrators, to figure out the working conditions and policies that seem to contribute to the uneven distribution of teacher talent. (I neglected to mention two of those partners in the story. Thanks to several readers for pointing this out.)
Teacher Beat will keep you updated as we learn more about what Delaware discovers about distribution, and also once we have a better sense of what the Education Department expects to see in applications for the state stabilization funds.