Readers may have heard about recent developments of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative at the University of Minnesota. It's a project to revise the training of teachers, and it has infuriated conservative, libertarian, and First Amendment groups. Among the elements of the process is the Task Force for Race, Culture, Class, and Gender, which issued its recommendations in September. The Outcomes of the document read like a parody of academic identity politics, but they stand loud and clear in black and white.

Instead of just trying to recruit more great teachers, what if schools chose to reach more children with the great teachers they already have?

Hawaii decided to fix their budget shortfall by eliminating 17 days from this school year in exchange for an 8 percent reduction in teacher salaries. It’s not a bad deal… as long as you are a teacher.

Great teachers make a big difference, but there aren’t enough great teachers to go around. So which students and schools should get them? Last week, the House Committee on Education and Labor held a hearing on the topic of what the federal government can and should do to make the distribution of effective teachers more equitable.

A recent “Policy Memorandum” from the Economic Policy Institute by EPI researcher Monique Morrissey is sharply critical of our article “Peaks, Cliffs, and Valleys." Morrissey has a number of critiques of our articles, but the main one, as the title suggests, is that our metaphors are inappropriate, and there is nothing at all “peculiar” about the structure of retirement incentives in teacher pensions.

America does not now need education schools. They add little and cost a great deal. They are unable to attract talented entrants and fail to add value to their graduates (either by boosting teacher performance or teacher’s lifetime incomes).

In the Spring 2009 issue of Education Next, Robert Costrell and I presented data on the growing gap between employer pension costs for public school teachers and employer pension costs for private sector managers and professionals. This gap continues to widen.

The idea of selecting certain works for study, creating a canon of novels and poems and plays, fashioning a lineage, however multi-racial and filled with women writers it is, strikes all-too-many curriculum designers as a bad, bad idea.

‘Tis the season for teacher burnout stories.