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San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro on Tuesday may be one of the few to call for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Some worry that the House hearing signals Republicans' continued opposition to compromise.

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Pants-wearing Parisian women are finally fashionably legal: the law restricting women to dresses and skirts has been lifted. While the principle is exciting, Parisian women have been wearing pants for decades.

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Pants-wearing Parisian women are finally fashionably legal: the law restricting women to dresses and skirts has been lifted. While the principle is exciting, Parisian women have been wearing pants for decades.

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Being a public school teacher has never been the road to wealth. But there’s a public charter school in New York City that’s paying its teachers six figures.

Kristen VanOllefen was teaching music in New Jersey when she read about the school on a friend's Facebook post.

"And, I said, who gets paid $125,000?” VanOllefen remembered. 

After a few years, and a grueling hiring process, VanOllefen can now say she does.

The school is called The Equity Project Charter School, or TEP for short. Most of its students are low-income and from the Washington Heights neighborhood. Since it opened four years ago, it’s been at the forefront of an experiment to see if paying top teachers top-dollar leads to a better education.

Zeke Vanderhoek, TEP’s founder and principal, says he would have paid teachers even more, but “candidly, it was the maximum amount that would keep our budget in the black.”

Vanderhoek wants to prove that if you've got great teachers, little else matters, and, you can afford them, even on a public school budget. "Teachers are the critical lever in student achievement, in student growth. If we’re serious about this, let’s pay them what they’re worth,” Vanderhoek says. 

But that strategy has its own costs. For now, TEP is a just a group of red trailers. The kids walk outside between periods.

There are no small classes, and there aren't laptops on every desk. Vanderhoek hopes the school moves to a better building some day. But, to him, what matters is having top teachers in the classroom, so that’s where the money goes. 

In Kristen VanOllefen’s music class, there are also lessons in vocabulary and math. And Van Ollefen's job doesn't stop at the classroom. Last year, she also administered state achievement tests. This year, she has a different additional job. And that’s part of the secret to TEP's high pay: Most teachers are doing the work of, well, two teachers.

TEP saves money by not hiring the kind of support staff other schools have. There are no substitutes. That makes for long, demanding days. Casey Ash, for instance, is both the 8th grade math teacher and the assistant principal. “I certainly don’t think it’s the right fit for everybody,” Ash says. 

Judith LeFevre learned that lesson the hard way. She spent most of her teaching career in Arizona, where she was highly regarded, but the pay was lousy. “After 30 years, I was still making just over $40,000,” she said.

So she applied to TEP. During the year-long interview process at TEP, she was observed in the classroom several times. Many applicants also submit videos of their teaching, or samples of student work showing major improvements.

LeFevre was finally hired to teach special education, and serve as the dean of discipline. Expectations were high. She soon found that her Arizona skills weren't as effective with students in New York.

After her first year, she wasn’t asked back.

“I think the big unanswered question is 'gee, what would’ve happened the second year, now that I had those skills, and had made that improvement?'” she says. 

But for TEP founder Zeke Vanderhoek, there’s no time to wait. Teachers must bring their A-game on day one, or else.

“We give our master teachers one year to prove themselves,” Vanderhoek says. 

Teachers are judged on classroom management and student test scores. They're also evaluated by other teachers. Vanderhoek says about a quarter of them don't make it to the second year.

Michelle Fine studies urban education at the City University of New York. She says she’s “a little worried about sustainability of the model. [TEP] might, in fact, be getting highly qualified educators, but either they’re burning out, or it’s not working very well, or they’re dissatisfied," she said.

Teachers at TEP acknowledge the stress, but many insisted it’s worth it. And they commend the quality of their colleagues.

Fine says she doesn't expect the school to become a national model, even though it may work well for this one community in Washington Heights.

And even that isn't clear yet. TEP hasn’t even been open four years. And while student test scores are creeping up, it’s too early to declare it a success. 

This year, TEP’s first class of eighth graders will head off to high school. In a few years, we’ll know better if their highly paid teachers will have a lasting effect on their lives.

Ever since the Great Recession started more than five years ago, Americans have paid closer attention to how we bring in a paycheck every two weeks. But the American labor market started changing long before the financial crisis. Today we're starting a new series on Marketplace called "Disappearing Jobs" to examine the changing job market.

For the last 40 years I've been a motion picture projectionist. A film projectionist.

A friend of mine was managing a sleazy old theater called the Vagabond Theater and said "our projectionist just quit. Go in there and run it."

I didn't care about getting paid, I just wanted to go in there and do it. So for $3.50 an hour, I taught myself. I found a stable union job and I was told by my older peers that I could probably keep this job forever. I would never have to retire because it didn't require physical labor, it just required your know-how on the equipment.

Everybody in America went to the movies every week, so we were important. Also, "projectionist" was listed as the highest-paid industrial job in California. I like to remind people of that now that they're trying to pay us nothing.

Digital movies drive change
My favorite quote is still the studio executive who said "we have a robust system and we can pay any idiot $5 an hour to run it."

So why do away with the film projectors? The reason is everyone loves new technology, and now they have it.

I still intend to be the last projectionist alive. But it will be a real accident if I get more jobs.

In an experiment, Eurasian jays were able to ascertain their mates internal states — a trait that is usually thought of as uniquely human.

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The Bolshoi Ballet is deeply beloved in Russia. But a series of recent scandals — capped by a nasty acid attack on the company's artistic director in mid-January — has sent shock waves through artistic circles.

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For a week, 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes held a 5-year-old boy hostage in an underground bunker. Authorities killed the gunman.

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Israelis and Palestinians often say that the other side uses school textbooks that ignore or demonize the other side. A three-year study examined the claims.

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Many of them have cut out smoking, and rates of heart attack and emphysema have declined. But baby boomers are burdened with diabetes, hypertension and many other chronic conditions. Researchers say too little exercise and a rise in obesity threaten baby boomers' golden years.

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By now you know that when you shop online, you’re being tracked. The data you hand over with every click helps e-tailers learn more about you. They use that information to do everything from recommend products you might like to tweaking prices.  Now the same thing is happening offline, too.

New "smart" security cameras can help stores do a whole lot more than stop shoplifters, says Brian Kiraly. His company, Infusion, just developed one of these cameras with Microsoft.

"What that does is a partial facial recognition. It takes cheeks, chin, eyes and basically gets gender and age," he said, demonstrating the camera at the National Retail Federation trade show in New York.

The camera records passersby, and a software program sorts them in real time, dividing them up by age category -- child, adult or senior -- and gender.

Retailers can use this information to decide what to stock, where to put it and where and how to advertise. Brick and mortar stores are hungry for all of the information they can get on their customers. The kind of information online retailers know. So many are trading security cameras in for smart cameras.

"We can actually look at your movements, such as how you go from a merchandise table in the front to a merchandise table in the back,"says Roseanne McCauley, vice president of Experian Footfall, a new business started by the big consumer credit report agencies. It supplies all kinds of foot traffic data to merchants. "Whether you go up the escalator or not. We can also do dwell time: How long did you stay in a specific area."

McCauley says big retailers like Lacoste, Crabtree and Evelyn and Adidas have used that information to improve sales and, on the whole, have seen customers spend up to 5 percent more in their stores -- huge in the slim profit margin retail business. That number could grow as retailers find new ways to step up shopper surveillance.

"The next wave of technology is mobile," explains McCauley. Experian is teaming up with cell phone companies to take customer tracking to the next level. When you walk into a participating store, your cell phone company will tell Experian who you are, Experian will tap into the vast pool of data it has on you -- things like age and credit history. Then, without telling stores who you are, Experian will hand some of that information over to stores.

"There are all sorts of privacy issues around cell phone data, so no one is able to take a cell phone number and bring it to a person," says McCauley. "But what we can do is profile groups of people and give people a demographic code."

Experian assigns shoppers one of 60 consumer profiles, such as Dream Weaver, people with six figure salaries and a penchant for tech gadgets, or Struggling City Center, people on tight budgets, who tend to like watching talk shows.

Which consumer profile do you fit? Check out Experian's breakdowns here.

Experian and Verizon are both piloting programs that could tell retailers even more.

"Through wireless technology, you can get the pattern of the person when they left the house, drove to the mall and the stores they went to," says McCauley.

We can expect to see retailers doing more and more of this, says Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School For Communication and author of "The Daily You: How The New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity And Your Worth."

"We are moving into a world where companies are going to judge us by our data," says Turow. "We will have people being put into what I call reputation silos, which would tell the store, 'This person is more likely to buy the cheap stuff and here’s the person who buys the premium stuff.'"

If you’re suddenly feeling the urge to wear a ski mask everywhere and ditch your phone,  you’re having exactly the reaction retailers are worried about, says digital marketing consultant Will Riegel.

"Every single day, people in data, are concerned about the ‘creep’ factor," he says.

Riegel says one way to target shoppers without freaking them out is to use loyalty programs, where customers essentially volunteer to have their purchases tracked in exchange for relevant discounts. The next stage would be to embed tracking chips in, say, your Target card.

"When you walk into a store, an in-store advertisement will adjust to say, 'Hey, you haven’t picked up Tide recently. It’s been over a month. Your clothes getting dirty? Check out aisle number 7,'" explains Riegel.

Of course, that’s at least a few years away.

For now, cameras are just starting to be able to separate boys from girls, which is proving challenging enough. Infusion's camera thought I was a man until I took my hair out of a bun.

Congress, which has been pushing for answers, says there may have been serious security lapses. The attack killed two U.S. Marines.

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Bathroom hand dryers used to be a hated product because they took too long to work. But a decade ago, a family-owned business in Massachusetts came out with a new product that changed the way we dry our hands.

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Now that all's said and done, the game has been played, millions of people watched and companies spent millions of dollars on television ads, all lot of what people are talking about is a tweet. A spur of the moment -- opportunistic, even --  tweet from Oreo soon after some of the power went out at the Superdome during the Super Bowl, pointing out that you can still dunk in the dark.

It seemed like a whole lot of sound and fury for a single tweet to be the thing that lingers after the Super Bowl, so we called up Ben Winkler. He's the chief digital officer at OMD, an ad agency in New York.

Oreo's tweet, said Winkler, was lightning in a bottle but the company spent months cultivating a Twitter following.

"Oreo has been tweeting and posting culturally relevant ads for six months, every day of the week," he said, noting that Oreo wouldn't have had its Twitter moment if it hadn't paid millions of dollars for TV spot that ran during the Super Bowl.

Still, despite the buzz it got, those tweets and re-tweets pale in comparison to the 112 million people watching the Super Bowl on TV. He added that 6 out of 7 people on the Internet don't use Twitter, and that doesn't even speak to the many Americans who aren't even on the web.

For this week's Sandwich Monday, we test if two great tastes really do taste great together: we try The Mac, from Cheesie's in Chicago. It's a Grilled Cheese Sandwich, topped with Macaroni and Cheese.

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The Charleston Gazette reports that mine regulators found hundreds of violations but haven't issued any citations.

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You know it’s rough when an investment club stops investing. That’s in large part what happened in recent years at Gene Senter’s Dayton, Ohio, club. Last year, stocks accounted for only around half their roughly $100,000 portfolio. Spooked by the financial downturn, the mostly retired club members had moved the money to safer waters.

Their skittishness about stocks -- even as the S&P and Dow Jones Industrial Average recently hit multi-year highs -- reflects the thinking of a lot of American small investors. They know the importance of stocks in a portfolio, but worry about losing their shirts if the current bull market turns south.

Americans are returning to stocks, but slowly. Mutual fund tracking firm Lipper says that in 2013, stock funds have taken in $20.7 billion more than investors have pulled out. But that’s tip money compared to the far greater amounts investors took out in recent years, often at a loss. Wounds from the latest downturn are still fresh for many Americans.

“They got crushed in the crisis and they just have not come back,” says Tom Roseen, who heads Lipper’s research services.

He adds that many investors also got burned in the dot-com meltdown.

Washington State University finance professor John Nofsinger studies investor psychology. No matter how much media hype kicks up around a rising market, he says it’s not enough to distract investors from what’s happening in their lives.

“People still know friends or relatives that are either out of work or trying to get a better job or those kinds of things and so we’re still a little cautious,” Nofsinger says. “But now we’re at least positive cautious.”

“Positive cautious” is a far cry from enthusiastic. But that may be all the market can ask for from ordinary Americans whose retirement savings have been battered.

As for the Ohio investment club, it’s now wading back into stocks. Members are frustrated with the paltry returns of safe spots like money market funds. At their meeting last month, they took more than half of the cash that was on the sidelines and bought a new batch of stocks.

“We decided that we are investors and we want to be in there,” Senter explains. “Because you’re not getting anything with cash.”

Kai Ryssdal: The Dow Industrials spent most of last week dancing around the 14,000 mark. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq were doin' fine as well. Small investors who'd largely bailed out of stocks during the financial crisis started gingerly returning during weeks of encouraging economic and corporate news.

And then, today. The Dow's first triple-digit loss of the year. Marketplace's Mark Garrison looked into why jitters continue as apparently good news abounds.

Mark Garrison: You know it’s rough when an investment club stops investing. That’s in large part what happened in recent years at Gene Senter’s Dayton, Ohio club. Last year, stocks accounted for only around half their roughly $100-thousand dollar portfolio. But at their meeting last month, they added a large batch of stocks.

Gene Senter: We decided that we are investors and we want to be in there, because you’re not getting anything with cash.

And there’s evidence more Americans are doing the same thing, moving away from safe, but low-return spots like money market funds. Mutual fund tracking firm Lipper says stock funds have taken in more than $20-billion dollars this year. But that’s tip money compared to what people took out in recent years, often at a loss.

Tom Roseen: They got crushed in the crisis and they just have not come back into there.

Lipper’s Tom Roseen adds many investors also got mixed up in the dot-com meltdown.

Roseen: Really I think people were burned and they’ve been burned twice in a decade.

Washington State University finance professor John Nofsinger studies investor psychology. No matter how much media hype kicks up around a rising market, it’s not enough to distract investors from what’s happening in their lives.

John Nofsinger: People still know friends or relatives that are either out of work or trying to get a better job or those kinds of things and so we’re still a little cautious. But now we’re at least positive cautious.

“Positive cautious” is a far cry from enthusiastic. But that may be all the market can ask for from ordinary Americans whose retirement savings have been battered. In New York, I'm Mark Garrison, for Marketplace.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei turned to social media recently. Meanwhile, Iran's government has stepped up efforts to identify and target online pro-democracy activists. Analysts say the government is using increasingly sophisticated methods to shrink the online space for free expression.

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You may have caught the news that McDonald's has a new item called Fish McBites. It's the second seafood offering from the fast-food giant. The first being, of course, the Filet-O-Fish. That classic with the fried fish, steamed bun, American cheese and tartar sauce was added nationally in 1965, a way to lure Catholics who didn't eat meat on Fridays. So it's no surprise Fish McBites are debuting near the start of Lent.

Filet-O-Fish has never outsold burgers at McDonald's, but the company is one of the largest buyers of fish in the United States, says Kerry Coughlin, a regional director with the Marine Stewardship Council. The council recently certified all McDonald's fish as sustainable. This morning, she says, several council staff brought in their wrappers from the sandwich and the cardboard boxes of the new Fish McBites, to show off the "wild-caught Alaskan pollock" language on the packaging.

Coughlin says the Alaskan fishery is sustainable because the managers make sure the boats don't catch too much, too fast.

"Ensuring that they will have a supply of fish to keep that business going," she says.

In addition to the green halo, fish gives McDonalds another reputation boost with moms, says marketing analyst Maria Bailey.

"Millenial moms like to have their children have a broader range of flavors and tastes in their diet," she says.

They might see a McBites Happy Meal as a way to introduce the fish flavor. Plus she finds these younger moms tend to me more conscious of health. Sure it's battered, fried fish, but compared to rumors and concerns over beef (remember "pink slime"?), it's better.

"They want to keep their children safe, and fish seems like a safer route," Bailey says.

A Fish McBites Happy Meal has 135 calories less than a cheeseburger meal. However, if you pick up another seasonal item on the menu, the oh-so-popular Shamrock Shake, it probably negates any health savings.

Mitt Romney's eldest son reportedly is considering a bid for the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by new Secretary of State John Kerry. His candidacy would bail out Republicans there who were deflated by former Sen. Scott Brown's decision not to run in the June 25 special election.

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