Liz Pulliam Weston, an MSN financial columnist, writes:

Graduate school has traditionally been a great place to wait out recessions while honing your skills for a better job. But sometimes, the payoff doesn’t justify the cost.

Community college significantly boosts earnings. Bachelor’s degrees also pay off, especially if earned at a lower-cost public university.  Medical and law degrees are expensive but lead to much higher earnings.

Not such a slam dunk: Master’s degrees.

In some fields, such as business or engineering, a graduate degree typically boosted income by more than enough to justify the cost. In others — the liberal arts and social sciences, in particular — master’s degrees didn’t appear to produce much if any earnings advantage.

Degree inflation makes the master’s more useful, writes Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus and professor of public services at George Washington University.

In a bad job market does it make sense for students to seek a safe harbor and earn a master’s degree? Absolutely: if they can afford it; if the debt from their previous academic work is not too great; if someone else is paying; if they seek to reinvent themselves. If, if …

The consensus view: Look before you borrow money.

A portion of the grant goes toward paying teachers of Advanced Placement courses bonus money if they successfully recruit more students to take AP courses and if the students perform well on the end-of-the-year AP exam.

Students also would have received cash payments of $100 for every AP course they passed.

Bernadette Marso, outgoing president of the Leominster Education Association, said the union objected to “pay for performance.”

The grant also would have covered half of students’ costs for the AP exam and paid for professional development for teachers.

Via EIA Intercepts.

All we parents get to see on the website is fluff, peripheral material, and educational mumbo jumbo about “seeds“, “clarifications“, “sample assessments“, “thinking skills“, “Articulated Instruction Modules“, “Core Learning Goals toolkits“, “parent summaries” that don’t exist yet, and so on. And this comes in an Alice-in-Wonderland format that is impossible to skim in an efficient way.

Do other school districts make it hard for parents to access the curriculum?

In an interview, Balls told parents:

“If your child starts to fall behind, we should step in straight away and give one-to-one or small group tuition.”

 But there’s a kicker:

In return, parents will be under new obligations to support their child at school. They will have to sign stricter home school agreements and face fines of up to £1,000, enforced by the courts, if they fail to meet the conditions.

Like Core Knowledge Blog, I wonder about enforcement. What happens to the fines when the parents have no money? For that matter, can Britain really afford tutors for all students who fall behind?

Submit here for the Carnival of Education.

. . . Of 66 Montgomery teachers in peer review in the 2008-09 school year, 10 are being dismissed and 21 have resigned or retired. Five will remain in review for a second year. The remaining 30 will successfully exit.

“We’ve changed the whole culture from ‘gotcha’ to support,” said Montgomery Superintendent Jerry D. Weast.

If teachers don’t improve after a year of mentoring, a panel of 16 teachers and principals “decides whether to recommend termination or a second year of monitoring,” reports the Post. “No one gets more than two years.”

Toledo Federation of Teachers pioneered peer review 28 years ago, but few districts have followed suit. It requires a high degree of trust between the superintendent and the union.

In Montgomery County, a poor job evaluation triggers peer review. 

Each year, the program weeds out 2 to 3 percent of the county’s probationary teachers, along with a smaller number of tenured faculty. (Of 66 teachers in peer review this year, 27 had tenure.) In nine academic years, peer review has pared 403 teachers from the system.

Mentors make unannounced classroom visits and exchange dozens of phone calls and e-mails to help teachers improve.

Peer review doesn’t work without more rigorous standards, use of data and managerial discretion, writes Eduwonk.

Brad Nornhold, 31, a math teacher at Ujima Village, told Mathews the union never contacted the teachers before making the pay demand.

“This is a school of choice for teachers, too. I knew what I was getting into.” Ujima Village teachers were already the highest-paid in Baltimore for their experience level, and the union’s demands seem to overlook the appeal of what Nornhold called “the freedom to teach the way I want to teach.” The union ignores the lure of a school that supports teachers and structures their day so they can raise student achievement to levels rarely seen in their city. “To teach in a school that works, that’s nice,” Nornhold said.

A union leader responds. “Effective teachers can get the same results in a seven-hour-and-five-minute day.”

KIPP has been paying teachers an extra 18 percent to work longer hours. The Baltimore union said that wasn’t enough. In New York City, Mathews points out, the American Federation of Teachers contract with Green Dot accepts 14 percent more for a longer school day and year.

“I believe that the increased flexibility that charters provide can . . . help us close the achievement gap,” (Menino) declared.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has threaten to withhold federal education funds from cities and states that refuse to reform, including allowing charter schools.

“That’s $5 billion, b-i-l-l-i-o-n, up for grabs,” moaned Mr. Menino in an interview with me. “I’ve gotta sit here sucking my thumb because I can’t get reforms?”

Boston has “pilot” schools with “limited managerial flexibility in making personnel and budget decisions,” Keller writes. The mayor wants to create in-district charter schools that would differ from pilots in one critical respect: No union contract.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Mr. Menino told me, came when a principal of one of the struggling school accepted a grant from ExxonMobil to give teachers small bonuses when their students excelled. The unions “took us to arbitration,” Mr. Menino said, essentially killing the bonuses. So for good measure the mayor included a call for merit pay in his blockbuster school-reform speech. “Every time we try to do a reform they stop it.”

If the unions block his plan for district-run charter schools Menino “vows to lobby for lifting the state’s restrictive cap on the number of “pure” charter schools.”

A recent Boston Foundation study found charter students outperforming similar students in regular public schools and  pilot schools.

Menino’s children are considering Boston charter schools for two of his grandchildren next fall.