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There are lots of kids who can't or won't connect with the traditional high school setting. Many brilliant and talented among them drop out and wind up on the street. That's one of the reasons why we created the Small Schools Workshop 20 years ago, to help educators develop small, public, personalized, alternative models focused on areas of student interests, talents and passions. While many of the ideas of the early small schools movement were captured and distorted by the regressive currents of privately-managed charter schools, there are still lots of good small, alternative schools fighting to survive and flourish.

Like many other gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods, Bedford-Stuyvesant has an influx of new residents who have a complex relationship with the public schools. On the whole, the newcomers are a progressive group, committed, at least in principle, to the idea of public education for their children. But many are also dismayed by the quality of their options, which include elementary schools where half of the students - in some cases, fewer - passed the state's reading and math exams last year. At the home of Chris Antista, a graphic designer and wine distributor, they gathered in late March to express their concerns and hear about an alternative from three teachers at the Community Roots Charter School. The three are planning to open a new charter school in Brooklyn in September 2014. Eric Grannis, a lawyer in private practice and the husband of Eva Moskowitz, founder and C.E.O. of a chain of schools, the Success Academy Charter Schools, organized the meeting.

This NBER report concludes that teachers whose students tend to show high gains on their test scores (called "high value-added teachers") also contribute to later student success in young adulthood, as indicated by outcomes such as college attendance and future earnings. To support this claim, it is not sufficient for researchers to show an observed association between teacher value-added and later outcomes in young adulthood. It is also necessary to rule out plausible alternative explanations-for example, that parents who did the most to promote their offspring's long-term success also endeavored to secure high value-added teachers for their children. This review explains that, for the most part, the evidence needed to rule out these alternatives is missing from the report. Thus, policy-makers should tread cautiously in their reaction: the case has not been proved.

NJOSA is often pitched publicly as a scholarship program that would allow students trapped in failing urban districts to exercise the choice to select a better alternative - implicit in this argument is that any private school option a student might choose would necessarily be a better alternative. Also suggestive in the rhetoric around NJOSA is that this program is mainly focused on kids in places like Camden and Newark - the stereotypical New Jersey urban centers.

Isolating the effect of a given teacher on student achievement (value-added modeling) is complicated when the student is taught the same subject by more than one teacher. We consider three methods, which we call the Partial Credit Method, Teacher Team Method, and Full Roster Method, for estimating teacher effects in the presence of co-teaching. The Partial Credit Method apportions responsibility between teachers according to the fraction of the year a student spent with each. This method, however, has practical problems limiting its usefulness. As alternatives, we propose two methods that can be more stably estimated based on the premise that co-teachers share joint responsibility for the achievement gains of their shared students. The Teacher Team Method uses a single record for each student and a set of variables for each teacher or group of teachers with shared students, whereas the Full Roster Method contains a single variable for each teacher, but multiple records for shared students. We explore the properties of these two alternative methods and then compare the estimates generated using student achievement and teacher roster data from a large urban school district. We find that both methods produce very similar point estimates of teacher value added. However, the Full Roster Method better maintains the links between teachers and students and can be more robustly implemented in practice. 

So, I've seen on more than a few occasions these last few weeks references to the recent Dobbie and Fryer article on NYC charter schools as the latest evidence that money doesn't matter in schools. That costly stuff like class size, or  overall measures of total per pupil expenditures are simply unimportant, and can easily be replaced/substituted with no-cost alternatives like those employed in no excuses charter schools (like high expectations, tutoring, additional time, and wrap-around services). I'll set aside the issue that many of these supposedly more effective alternatives do, in fact, have cost implications. Instead, I'll focus my critique on whether this Dobbie/Fryer study provides any substantive evidence that money doesn't matter - either broadly, or in the narrower context of looking specifically at NYC charter schools.

Four out of 10 new public school teachers hired since 2005 came through alternative teacher-preparation programs, according to a survey just released by the National Center for Education Information. That's up from 22 percent of new teachers hired between 2000 and 2004.

"Diane Ravitch's (2010) critique of the standardized achievement testing apparatus has not been refuted, but it has been criticized for failing to present an alternative. Likewise, proponents of standardized achievement testing, although conceding, "it has its flaws," respond "there is no better way." This commentary sketches a Plan B alternative that is supported by contemporary events and by Educational R&D resulting from the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965."

Alice Mercer asked: What are the major critiques of standardized tests and what are alternatives to them? My bias is pretty obvious if you look at the title of my related "The Best..." list -- The Best Posts On How To Prepare For Standardized Tests (And Why They're Bad). However, there are far more articulate critics than me out there, and two of the most well-known and most respected -- David C. Berliner and Yong Zhao -- agreed to respond to Alice's question.

"In the debate over charter schools, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools are hailed by charter advocates as illustrative of what these alternatives to public schools can produce. With KIPP, poverty need not impede academic success. Enroll students from economically impoverished backgrounds in a "no excuses" school like KIPP and their chances of attaining academic success would soar markedly. There, neither hunger, poor health, relentless stress, lack of access to the material sustenance and cultural experiences available to students from more affluent homes, nor other adverse effects of poverty are impediments to learning and the attainment of good test scores. If only poor youngsters were not in the nothing-but-excuses public schools where they are taught by nothing-but-excuses teachers. So the story goes and so it was conveyed to me by a KIPP schools manager who, in an oped exchange, presented what the chain considers its best supporting evidence. Whether this evidence actually makes the case for KIPP I will discuss below"

"This brief reviews the history and current status of Parent Trigger legislation, presents a critique of the legislation, and suggests alternative ways to meet the stated goals of a Parent Trigger."

Interest in Student Growth Modeling (SGM) and Value Added Modeling (VAM) arises from educators concerned with measuring the effectiveness of teaching and other school activities through changes in student performance as a companion and perhaps even an alternative to status. Several formal statistical models have been proposed for year-to-year growth and these fall into at least three clusters: simple change (e.g., differences on a vertical scale), residualized change (e.g., simple linear or quantile regression techniques), and value tables  (varying salience of different achievement level outcomes across two years). Several of these methods have been implemented by states and districts.  This paper reviews relevant literature and reports results of a data-based comparison of six basic SGM models that may permit aggregating across teachers or schools to provide evaluative information.  Our investigation raises some issues that may compromise current efforts to implement VAM in teacher and school evaluations and makes suggestions for both practice and research based on the results.

Despite being promoted as a viable alternative to traditional public schools, privately owned charter schools in Texas have higher attrition rates for black students than comparable urban public schools, says a University of Texas at Austin study. Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig's research shows that, although many privately operated charter schools claim that 90 percent or more of their students go on to college and many, such as the Houston-based KIPP chain of schools, spend 30-60 percent more per pupil than comparable urban school districts, more black students drop out and leave charter schools.

"There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it's the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill," concludes Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a trustee of the State University system of New York and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. A more accurate description, I think, is "Failure by Design," the title of a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has long been a major source of reliable information and analysis on the state of the economy. The EPI study reviews the consequences of the transformation of the economy a generation ago from domestic production to financialization and offshoring. By design; there have always been alternatives.

So, this all has me wondering if the real objective here - among advocates of these seemingly contradictory policies - is actually to make traditional public schooling so utterly unbearable for both teachers and students by expanding the testing and standards driven culture, expanding curricular standards across areas previously untouched, sucking any remaining creativity out of teaching, and mechanizing the teaching workforce in traditional public schools, making even the worst of the less-regulated alternatives seem more desirable for future generations of both teachers and students?

In August 2008, many teachers in America and this one in particular were thrilled about Barak Obama's nomination. Linda Darling-Hammond was a leading spokesperson articulating the Obama campaigns' education positions. Darling-Hammond had pushed for professional education standards for teachers and had presented data showing the importance of teacher training. Yet, by November Alexander Russo of the Huffington Post was reporting "The possibility of Darling-Hammond being named Secretary has emerged as an especially worrisome possibility among a small but vocal group of younger, reform-minded advocates who supported Obama because he seemed reform-minded on education issues like charter schools, performance pay, and accountability. These reformists seem to perceive Darling-Hammond as a touchy-feely anti-accountability figure who will destroy any chances that Obama will follow through on any of these initiatives." In December, Obama tapped Chicago's Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Because Duncan had no real education experience it was considered highly likely that Darling-Hammond would be the Deputy Secretary of Education. On February 19, 2009 the New Republic reported, "Darling-Hammond was a key education adviser during the election and chaired Obama's transition education policy team. She has been berated heavily by the education reform community, which views her as favoring the status quo in Democratic education policy for her criticisms of alternative teacher certification programs like Teach for America and her ties with teachers' unions." They reported that she was going home to California to work on other priorities and would not be a part of the new administration.

Teacher pension systems target retirements within a narrow range of the career cycle by penalizing individuals who separate too soon or remain employed too long. The penalties result in the retention of some teachers who would otherwise choose to leave, and the premature exit of some teachers who would otherwise choose to stay. We examine how the effects of teachers' pension incentives on workforce composition influence teacher quality. Teachers who are held in by the "pull" incentives in the pension systems are not more effective, on average, than the typical teacher. Teachers who are encouraged to exit by the "push" incentives are more effective on average. We conclude that the net effect of teachers' pension incentives on workforce quality is small, but negative. Given the substantial and growing costs of current systems, and the lack of evidence regarding their efficacy, experimentation by traditional and charter schools with alternative retirement benefit structures would be useful.

Statistical models, such as linear or logistic regression or survival analysis, are frequently used as a means to answer scientific questions in psychosomatic research. Many who use these techniques, however, apparently fail to appreciate fully the problem of overfitting, ie, capitalizing on the idiosyncrasies of the sample at hand. Overfitted models will fail to replicate in future samples, thus creating considerable uncertainty about the scientific merit of the finding. The present article is a nontechnical discussion of the concept of overfitting and is intended to be accessible to readers with varying levels of statistical expertise. The notion of overfitting is presented in terms of asking too much from the available data. Given a certain number of observations in a data set, there is an upper limit to the complexity of the model that can be derived with any acceptable degree of uncertainty. Complexity arises as a function of the number of degrees of freedom expended (the number of predictors including complex terms such as interactions and nonlinear terms) against the same data set during any stage of the data analysis. Theoretical and empirical evidence-with a special focus on the results of computer simulation studies-is presented to demonstrate the practical consequences of overfitting with respect to scientific inference. Three common practices-automated variable selection, pretesting of candidate predictors, and dichotomization of continuous variables-are shown to pose a considerable risk for spurious findings in models. The dilemma between overfitting and exploring candidate confounders is also discussed. Alternative means of guarding against overfitting are discussed, including variable aggregation and the fixing of coefficients a priori. Techniques that account and correct for complexity, including shrinkage and penalization, also are introduced.

I often hear the following argument: Improving teacher quality is more cost-effective than other options, such as reducing class size (see here, for example). I am all for evaluating policy alternatives based on their costs relative to their benefits, even though we tend to define the benefits side of the equation very narrowly - in terms of test score gains. But "improving teacher quality" cannot yet be included in a concrete costs/benefits comparison with class size or anything else. It is not an actual policy. At best, it is a category of policy options, all of which are focused on recruitment, preparation, retention, improvement, and dismissal of teachers. When people invoke it, they are presumably referring to the fact that teachers vary widely in their test-based effectiveness. Yes, teachers matter, but altering the quality distribution is whole different ballgame from measuring it overall. It's actually a whole different sport.

The Louisiana "reforms" are intended to encourage pupils to transfer out of public education. There is nothing in them to improve public schools, just to promote alternatives so that students can "escape." The Jindal "reforms" are a template for the Romney education program. Romney, who went to elite private schools and sent his own children to elite private schools,  views public education as a disaster. Given his Bain background, he may see public education as a business that should be shut down, with its component parts sold off. From his perspective, privatization makes sense.