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A few days ago, 206 "ineffective" or twice-rated "minimally effective" teachers were dismissed from their positions at the District of Columbia Public Schools thanks to the District's new teacher-evaluation system, IMPACT.

In a series of posts inspired by one of Jeff Henig's recent guest posts for Rick Hess Straight Up, I'd like to explore the concept of data-driven instruction over the next few days, why it's become so suddenly all the rage in low-achieving schools, and its promises and pitfalls. I intend on doing this especially by relating my experiences with data-driven instruction, exploring the culture and systems that bore it, and soliciting feedback from other educators who have similar and divergent perspectives.

Chicago Public Schools principals are no longer prohibited from hiring teachers who scored low on a preapplication screening, CEO Jean-Claude Brizard told them Thursday, a day after officials had defended the process.

A couple of days ago I was surprised to find an insightful post in Forbes Magazine, offering us "The Single Best Idea for Reforming Education," by columnist and management expert Steve Denning. I wrote a post describing his idea, and also sent him some questions, because I think he offers some useful ways to reframe our concerns around the current direction of our schools. Here are his answers.

A few days ago, Fox News personality Ann Coulter sparked outrage when she asserted that kindergarten teachers "have useless jobs," and suggested their work be turned over "to vouchers, to charter schools. They fight for every last dime, they get summers off, they're off at two, and they make more money than most of those pipefitters who no longer have jobs."

Perry Zirkel filled in for Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post blog, The Answer Sheet, a couple days ago and wrote a provocative post about the law v. lore in teacher tenure. Perry (who I love is jumping on blogging - what a perfect medium for him) makes some great points that the law of teacher tenure is not as ironclad against dismissing teachers as most educators assume. I teach this to my future administrators all the time. Perry also makes a good point that litigation resulting from dismissal cases frequently goes the district's way. Certainly, as is almost always the case, the law is geared to support the school in these cases. So, as is always the case with Perry, he makes some great points and actually points to data to back it up.  But, I have 2 small issues with how Perry frames this issue and a different recommendation as to how to achieve the desired result. 

"Test scores are an inadequate proxy for quality because too many factors outside of the teachers' control can influence student performance from year to year - or even from classroom to classroom during the same year. Often, more than half of those teachers identified as the poorest performers one year will be judged average or above average the next, and the results are almost as bad for teachers with multiple classes during the same year. Fortunately, there's a far more direct approach: measuring the amount of time a teacher spends delivering relevant instruction - in other words, how much teaching a teacher actually gets done in a school day. "

In the early days of the education-reform movement, a decade or so ago, you'd often hear from reformers a powerful rallying cry: "No excuses." For too long, they said, poverty had been used as an excuse by complacent educators and bureaucrats who refused to believe that poor students could achieve at high levels.

In our last post, we introduced the idea that federal compliance rules can have an unintended effect on what goes on in the classroom by encouraging defensive spending, discouraging comprehensive programs, and creating administrative burdens that take away resources from students. Over the next two days we will give examples of how two seemingly unrelated rules - supplement not supplant, and time and effort - interfere with comprehensive school improvement.

Appearing with union officials in the Capitol, Governor Andrew Cuomo called the agreement "a victory for all New York State." Diane Ravitch, an education expert and professor at New York University, doesn't like the deal at all. Under the deal, 60 percent of a teacher's evaluation will be based on subjective classroom observations by the principal or other school officials, and up to 40 percent will be based on student scores on statewide standardized tests. In an email to me, Ravitch said, "40% is too much, in my view" and "evaluations should be conducted by experienced professionals." She said the plan could result in unfairly low evaluation scores for teachers dealing with students who are not prepared for standardized tests (for example, students with learning disabilities and those who are not proficient in English).

Just this week, Florida announced its new district grading system. These systems have been popping up all over the nation, and given the fact that designing one is a requirement of states applying for No Child Left Behind waivers, we are sure to see more. I acknowledge that the designers of these schemes have the difficult job of balancing accessibility and accuracy. Moreover, the latter requirement - accuracy - cannot be directly tested, since we cannot know "true" school quality. As a result, to whatever degree it can be partially approximated using test scores, disagreements over what specific measures to include and how to include them are inevitable (see these brief analyses of Ohio and California). As I've discussed before, there are two general types of test-based measures that typically comprise these systems: absolute performance and growth. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Florida's attempt to balance these components is a near total failure, and it shows in the results.

Today, to mark the 224th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, I and hundreds of others will gather at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to remember a feat that projects the best of human potential to the far corners of the world. As we cheer our nation's creation, an important report will be issued: "Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools." It confirms what we suspected: We're failing our students on civics education, and, in the process, we are setting our country up for disaster.

A few days ago, I responded to an utterly silly CT Ed Reform op-ed which argued that poverty doesn't really matter so much, nor does funding (by omission), and that Massachusetts and New Jersey do better than Connecticut on behalf low income kids because they've adopted accountability and teacher evaluation reforms in the past few years. Thus, the answer is for Connecticut to follow suit by adopting SB 24 in its original form. To be clear, NJ has absolutely not adopted anything like SB 24.

Yesterday was a big day for big new studies on teacher evaluation. First, there was the New York Times report on the new study by Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff. Second, there was the release of the second part of the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project. There's still much to digest. But here's my first shot, based on first impressions of these two studies (with very little attention to the Gates study)

Sharon McNary believes in having tough teacher evaluations. But these days, the Memphis principal finds herself rushing to cram in what amounts to 20 times the number of observations previously required for veteran teachers - including those she knows are excellent - sometimes to the detriment of her other duties. "I don't think there's a principal that would say they don't agree we don't need a more rigorous evaluation system," says Ms. McNary, who is president of the Tennessee Principals Association as well as principal at Richland Elementary. "But now it seems that we've gone to [the opposite] extreme."

I had a twitter argument the other day about a blog posting that compared the current debate around "de-selection" of bad teachers to eugenics. It is perhaps a bit harsh to compare Hanushek  (cited author of papers on de-selecting bad teachers) to Hitler, if that was indeed the intent. However, I did not take that as the intent of the posting by Cedar Riener.  Offensive or not, I felt that the blog posting made 3 key points about errors of reasoning that apply to both eugenecists and to those promoting empirical de-selection of fixed shares of the teacher workforce.

It is unfortunate that the day after a court decision held that NY teachers should be evaluated by use of multiple assessments, with student scores on state standardized tests only one minor factor, today, the appellate court said that the DOE could release the teacher data reports to the public, based only on these same test scores. 

Some Twitter followers may have noticed the ongoing back and forth regarding the validity of the recent Monmouth University Poll on education reform.I'd certainly rather spend my time on more substantive discussion. As I've noted on many occasions, polls are what they are. They ask what they ask. And the responses to the questions must always be evaluated only with respect to what was asked. Questions about specific policies in particular require that the policies in question be described correctly. This is a point raised the other day by Matt Di   Carlo about the Monmouth Poll here. Yesterday, Patrick Murray, director of the polling institute posted a response to some of the criticisms levied against the recent Monmouth poll. Unfortunately, I found his response to be much less fulfilling and in many ways far more disturbing than the poll itself. Quite honestly, I'd have left this issue alone if not for some particularly troublesome assertions made by the polling institute director Patrick Murray.

A fund called The Michael R. Bloomberg Revocable Trust, of which the principal trustee is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, donated $100,000 to a Baton Rouge-based political action committee just days before a pivotal Louisiana election that decided the make-up of the state's main K-12 board of education. The PAC in question, Alliance for Better Classrooms, spent at least $300,000 in contributions on behalf of generally pro-charter, anti-teacher-tenure and anti-union candidates running for positions on the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).

As the DFER veneer for right-wing "parent trigger" laws wears off, and more and more people see the privatization agenda for what it is, charlatans like Gloria Romero and Ben Austin have been scrambling to hide or minimize their ties to right wing extremists. The good news is that it isn't working, and that aside from shills like Andi Rotherham and Alex Russo even mainstream media journalists are starting to see through what the distinguished Professor Diane Ravitch refers to as the "Parent Tricker." Josh Eidelson's "Parent trigger": The latest tactic for fighting teachers' unions is a good example.