Here is another piece from Nicholas Kristof discussing Michelle Rhee’s quest to improve the quality of education in the District of Columbia. The District has a number of schools that perform poorly and used to have a number of school administrators that were not effective. Michelle fired or rather freezed some of those bureacrats and is trying to introduce a huge reform that would pay teachers based on their performance. If you want to read more about Michelle’s work click here.

Obama seems inclined to support charter schools and to link pay to performance for teachers.

Charter schools are publicly financed schools that run as a private school and serve disadvantaged areas. Charter schools work well.

Linking pay to performance is a controversial measure aimed to improve the quality of instruction. But performance pay has many problems for the simple reason that is difficult to measure performance in any job. Perhaps simply giving the authority to hire and fire to principals would be easier to implement. Anyhow if you want to read more about Obama’s plan click here.

We started the Nueva Escuela Mexicana proyect to to improve literacy of children in multi-grade schools, where a single teacher typically handles students from multiple grades in Chiapas. Our program intends to improve educational instruction. We are working with the Colombian nonprofit Escuela Nueva and the Mexican nonprofit Innovación Educativa (also known as Casa del Maestro).

This is a video of the first training session held from in January 19-23 in San Cristobal de las Casas. The week-long workshop was intended to initiate teachers in the basic concepts and methods of the program.