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The VIVA Project is a new initiative that gives teachers an opportunity to collaborate, share ideas, and inform education policy and reform conversations at the state and national levels. VIVA stands for Voices, Ideas, Vision, Action. The Goal of the VIVA Project is to identify ideas and opinions straight from the classroom, work together to create actionable policies to improve public education for classroom teachers and their students, and deliver them directly to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Teachers are encouraged to share their ideas in both the national and New York idea mines. Register today! And check out its Facebook page , too. You have until October 10, 2010 to add your voice to the conversation. Other notables initiatives in a similar vein include Teach PLUS , the Teacher Leaders Network and the Hope Street Group's Policy 2.0 . The VIVA Project is a worthy addition to an education reform marketplace that too often ignores and discounts the thoughts and...

A lot of us in education policy get lost within our own locus of control. In my case , it's all about teachers. After all, teacher quality is the strongest school-based indicator impacting student outcomes. Sounds good, right? Yes, and no. While it is inevitable that one focuses on what one can control professionally, it is important to have a sense of the bigger picture. That goes for us in education. After all, research has shown that the influence of schools on student outcomes pale in comparison to family and social factors outside of schools' direct control -- especially, but not only, in the early years of childhood. So while it is critical that we concentrate education policy efforts around attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers, we also must attend to a variety of factors outside of schools that impact students' ability to learn and succeed. This report ( Promoting A Comprehensive Approach to Educational Opportunity ) from Cross & Joftus, fund...

Governors are an interesting group. Always. They are not interchangeable spirits. Just think of some of the characters and personalities amidst their ranks: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rick Perry, Bill Richardson, Jennifer Granholm, Ed Rendell, Haley Barbour. With regard to education, governors do not come to the job with equal chances to impact the policy agenda. I grew keenly aware of this when I worked for the National Governors Assoiciation (NGA) from 2001 to 2004. Some of this is due to personalities and individual capacities, such as whether they effectively use their bully pulpit and engage in policy conversations. And some is due to politics, such as whether they campaigned for office on education. But much of the reason for this variation is out of governors' control: It is due to widely varying nature of state educational governance systems. This Education Commission of the States brief [summarized below] maps four models of state educational governance, present in 40 of the...