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Today on Marketplace, reporter Emily Hanford has a report about new tactics being victimized in the attempt to improve teachers and education. The man is a special based on her documentary series Testing Teachers from American RadioWorks, the national documentary unit of American Public Media. Here, Emily shares more from her reporting and links to more data and resources.

by Emily Hanford

Education reformers say schools want to get rid of the poorest performing teachers and pay the best teachers more. And so what? The bulk of teachers are in the middle - not terrible, but they could be better.Figuring out how to assist them get better is one of the most important challenges facing American schools today.

As function of my search for an American RadioWorks documentary called Testing Teachers , I went in research of teacher improvement programs that work. The best model I found is the Benwood Initiative in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Benwood follows a set of principles that concentrate on the metrics that count most these days: test scores. More specifically, teachers who weren`t doing a sound job raising test scores learned something and now they`re doing a better job raising test scores (I wrote near the argument over using test scores to evaluate teachers as function of my documentary series).

What happened in Chattanooga The interior city schools were awful, among the whip in the state. About 10 days ago, education leaders there decided to do something about it. They eroded the data to project out what was incorrect and they decided the job was teachers. There were too many ineffective teachers in the city schools. But they likewise discovered there were very great teachers in those schools too. And the education leaders thought, why not flesh out a way for the less effective teachers to ascertain from the superstars? So they set up a mentoring system.

One of the most interesting features of the arrangement is that teachers spend time in their colleagues` classrooms, watching them teach. "What we think is you make to know where greatness is and serve other teachers see and read from heavy teaching," says Dan Challener, president of the Public Education Institution in Chattanooga and one of the leadership of the Benwood Initiative.

Watching others is a mighty way to learn. Some teachers get this through student teaching experience, but few schools have formal systems that allow teachers to continue observing and learning this way. Teachers tend to end up apart in their own classrooms.

That`s changed in Chattanooga. Everything teachers do is frozen in the thought that they get better when they play together. Not just do teachers observe each other, they plan lessons together and collaborate in all kinds of ways.

"It`s a team," says Penny King, who`s been teaching in Chattanooga for 26 years. It wasn`t before. "You only did your own affair and you didn`t need anybody to get out what you were doing."

King says she`s learned much of new tricks and techniques from her colleagues. And they speak about teaching all the sentence now.In conversations I observed, teachers were asking the kinds of tough questions that require more care in public debate: what precisely is good teaching, and how can teachers tell when they`re effective? Test scores are one way, and schools in Chattanooga use tests to gain data about how students and teachers are doing.Teachers say the tests are useful, not as a way to set good education but as a target to start talking about it.

Officials with the Benwood Initiative don`t take to get all the answers about how to help teachers get better.They say teacher improvement is a complex action and what they did can`t be reduced to a set of stairs that will work everywhere.However, they consider giving teachers the opportunity to cooperate and hear from each other is critical.

Emily Hanford is a reporter for American RadioWorks, the national documentary unit of American Public Media. Listen to the entire documentary Testing Teachers online.