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The new statewide school district for Michigan's worst K-12 schools is being funded by $2 million in private dollars pledged this year, making it the only district in the nation supported primarily by donations, experts said Tuesday. Start-up money for the Education Achievement Authority (EAA) will be held by the new Michigan Education Excellence Foundation. It was incorporated in August, two days before former Kansas City, Mo., Superintendent John Covington was hired to be the EAA chancellor.

[Jeff's note: Both authors of this article are members of this group.] The way to turn schools around and transform the education of at-risk students is to invest in the professional ability of the faculty, making its members a mission-driven, skilled force for change. This strategy necessitates a reorganization built around faculty collaboration, intensive and embedded professional development, and personalized instruction. Working from this premise, the Jefferson County, Ky., public school system, which includes the city of Louisville, designed and implemented a fifth model that was fully operational by the 2010-2011 school year-a model not set forth by the Education Department, yet funded through a federal Investing in Innovation, or i3, grant.

"Public schools achieve the same or better mathematics results as private schools with demographically similar students, concludes The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, published in November by the University of Chicago Press. The authors are Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, a husband-and-wife team of education professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Central to the controversy is their suggestion that vouchers, which provide public funding for private school tuition, are based on the premise that private schools do better-an assumption that is undercut by the book's overall findings."

"Earlier this year, a paper by Roderick I. Swaab and colleagues received considerable media attention (e.g., see here, here, and here). The research questioned the widely shared belief that bringing together the most talented individuals always produces the best result. The authors looked at various types of sports (e.g., player characteristics and behavior, team performance etc.), and were able to demonstrate that there is such thing as "too much talent," and that having too many superstars can hurt overall team performance, at least when the sport requires cooperation among team members."

"Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham University law professor who ran against Governor Andrew Cuomo in the recent gubernatorial election, released  a powerful and shocking-but well documented-report on the powerful hedge funds that seek to gain control of education in New York state. They are very, very rich. They have no particular expertise in education, nor are they accountable to anyone. Yet they are attempting to privatize one of the most important public institutions of our society. Teachout's co-author was Mohammad Khan. His contact information is listed below."

"The New York Times Magazine has a long article about Eva Moskowitz and her chain of charter schools in New York City. The charter chain was originally called Harlem Success Academy, but Moskowitz dropped the word "Harlem" when she decided to open new schools in gentrifying neighborhoods and wanted to attract white and middle-class families. I spent a lot of time on the phone with the author, Daniel Bergner. When he asked why I was critical of Moskowitz, I said that what she does to get high test scores is not a model for public education or even for other charters. The high scores of her students is due to intensive test prep and attrition. She gets her initial group of students by holding a lottery, which in itself is a selection process because the least functional families don't apply. She enrolls small proportions of students with disabilities and English language learners as compared to the neighborhood public school. And as time goes by, many students leave."

"Over the last decade, teacher evaluation based on value-added models (VAMs) has become central to the public debate over education policy. In this commentary, we critique and deconstruct the arguments proposed by the authors of a highly publicized study that linked teacher value-added models to students' long-run outcomes, Chetty et al. (2014, forthcoming), in their response to the American Statistical Association statement on VAMs. We draw on recent academic literature to support our counter-arguments along main points of contention: causality of VAM estimates, transparency of VAMs, effect of non-random sorting of students on VAM estimates and sensitivity of VAMs to model specification. "

"Our guest author today is Stephen Lazar, a founding teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City, where he teaches Social Studies. A National Board certified teacher, he blogs at Outside the Cave. Stephen is also one of the organizers of Insightful Social Studies, a grass roots campaign of teachers to reform the newly proposed New York State Social Studies standards. The following is Steve's testimony this morning in front of the Senate HELP committee's hearing on ESEA reauthorization."

"Education policymakers have successfully framed the language of modern school reform to reflect specific values - "accountability," for example, means standardized test-based accountability, and "no excuses" means that teachers are to blame if students don't do well. The author of the following post argues that to move past this limiting reform model supporters of public education will have to reframe the debate with language that infuses their own values of shared responsibility and empathy.  This was written by Arthur H. Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J."

"For many years now, a common talking point in education circles has been that U.S. public school teachers are disproportionately drawn from the "bottom third" of college graduates, and that we have to "attract better candidates" in order to improve the distribution of teacher quality. We discussed the basis for this "bottom third" claim in this post, and I will not repeat the points here, except to summarize that "bottom third" teachers (based on SAT/ACT scores) were indeed somewhat overrepresented nationally, although the magnitudes of such differences vary by cohort and other characteristics. A very recent article in the journal Educational Researcher addresses this issue head-on (a full working version of the article is available here). It is written by Hamilton Lankford, Susanna Loeb, Andrew McEachin, Luke Miller and James Wyckoff. The authors analyze SAT scores of New York State teachers over a 25 year period (between 1985 and 2009). Their main finding is that these SAT scores, after a long term decline, improved between 2000 and 2009 among all certified teachers, with the increases being especially large among incoming (new) teachers, and among teachers in high-poverty schools."

Who speaks for public education? Policy-makers, who set change in motion with mandates and incentives designed to get them re-elected? School leaders, who find themselves administering policy "solutions" that actually get in the way of what leaders believe is best for the school community they're leading? Teachers, whose autonomy, professional judgment and organizations are denigrated daily? Parents, who are deeply invested in educational outcomes, but seldom asked for their perspectives on core issues of teaching, learning and decision-making? Or --do we get our impressions about public schools from the media?

"School principals should be able to hire any teacher of their choosing, and displaced tenured teachers who aren't rehired elsewhere within the system should be permanently dismissed, according to a controversial new report on the Los Angeles Unified School District. The report will be presented Tuesday to the Board of Education. The research, paid for largely by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a roadmap for improving the quality of teaching in the nation's second-largest school system, with recommendations strongly backed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. "

Gov. Chris Christie has been touting his plans for education overhaul, including the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. It's the first full week of school, a traditional time for politicians to roll out proposed changes. It's also the week a new book on education, Howard Wainer's "Uneducated Guesses," was released by the Princeton University Press. It raises significant questions about the premise on which much of Christie's crusade is based - using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

Research on teacher productivity, and recently developed accountability systems for teachers, rely on value-added models to estimate the impact of teachers on student performance.  The authors test many of the central assumptions required to derive value-added models from an underlying structural cumulative achievement model and reject nearly all of them.  Moreover, they find that  teacher value added and other key parameter estimates are highly sensitive to model specification.  While estimates from commonly employed value-added models cannot be interpreted as causal teacher effects, employing richer models that impose fewer restrictions may reduce  the  bias in estimates of teacher productivity.