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On September 8, 2011 Teachers College Record published a book review of Douglas N. Harris's recent book Value-Added Measures in Education. In this commentary the author takes issue with not necessarily the book's What Every Educator Needs to Know content but the author's overall endorsement of value-added, and his and others' imprudent adoption of some highly complex assumptions.

The architect of many of the metrics the city uses to assess teachers and measure student growth spent Monday evening defending his work against a steady stream of criticism from parents and educators. Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky sat on a three-person panel titled "High-Stakes Testing 101″ hosted at The Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies and The Brooklyn New School. The panel included two principals, Long Island's Sean Feeney and Elijah Hawkes of the James Baldwin School in Manhattan, who have publicly criticized the city's and state's use of testing data to measure student growth and evaluate teacher effectiveness. Hawkes was one of about 170 city principals to sign on to a petition Feeney authored against the state's use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.

This is an open letter written by Larry Lee after he sat through a meeting of the Alabama House Ways & Means Education Committee last week during a hearing on HB541, a bill known as the "Education Options Act of 2012." Lee, of Montgomery, is the former executive director of the Covington County Economic Development Commission and the West Central Partnership of Alabama. He writes often about education. HB541 is intended to: * Allow local school systems to have more flexibility by entering into a contract with the Alabama Department of Education that allows flexibility from state laws, including state Board of Education rules, regulations, and policies, in exchange for academic and assorted goals. * Authorize the establishment of public charter schools in the state, which current has none.

In confronting any other national security threat, the U.S. wouldn't trust unreliable and unproven solutions. We would go with what works. Why, then, do some in the education sector insist we gamble on the privatization of our public schools? A new report from the Council on Foreign Relations, written by Joel I. Klein and Condoleezza Rice, rightly identifies a problem in our nation's education system, namely, that we are not educating our students well enough to maintain our country's economic vitality, international competitiveness or vibrant democracy. The report argues that this, in turn, poses a national security risk. But simply encouraging more competition, choice, and privatization within our nation's schools, as Klein and Rice advocate, does not constitute the systemic, scalable or sustainable solution that our country needs or that the report claims to present. The dissenting opinions included with the report criticize the authors' policy recommendations for promoting a reform agenda that is based on inconclusive evidence and that fails to address the serious issue of inequity in education funding and opportunity.

Recently, there's been controversy over the motion picture "The Hunger Games" and the casting choice for Rue, a character that the book's author, Suzanne Collins, intended to be dark-skinned at the very least. Amandla Stenberg, a young black actress, plays Rue in a cast that also includes rocker Lenny Kravitz and actress Kimiko Gelman. Some fans expressed disappointment all over social media that they didn't think the character should be black and that they hadn't envisioned a black child as this character to whom they gravitated to so ardently in print. One search on Twitter for Rue leads to a set of tweets ranging from subtly questionable to strangely racist. Teens are the predominant target group for this movie. At some point, don't we as a society have to step in and question what we're teaching our children about race?

Student learning is at the heart of what teaching is all about. But we have made a huge mistake when we take what is a very indirect measurement of all the learning that ought to be occurring in a classroom -- a test or set of tests -- and mistake that for the sum of learning, and then start attaching negative and positive consequences to that. When we do this, instruction becomes distorted, and learning becomes all about test performance. The purpose for both teaching and learning is up-ended, and becomes about satisfying an external authority rather than pursuing what ought to be developed as an intrinsic passion. And this would be true even if VAM was accurate!

In a series of recent blog posts and in a forthcoming article I have discussed the potential problems with using bad, versus entirely inappropriate measures for determining teacher effectiveness.  I have pointed out, for example, that using value-added measures to estimate teacher effectiveness and then determine whether a teacher should be denied tenure, or have their tenure removed might raise due process concerns which arise from the imprecision and potential outright inaccuracy of teacher effectiveness estimates derived from such methods. I have also explained that in some states like New Jersey, which have adopted Student Growth Percentile measures as an evaluation tool, that where those measures are used as a basis for dismissing teachers, teachers (or their attorney's) might simply rely on the language of the authors of those methods to point out that they are not designed to, nor were they intended to attribute responsibility for the measured student growth to the teacher. Where attribution of responsibility is off the table the dismissing a teacher on an assumption of ineffectiveness based on these measures is entirely inappropriate, and a potential violation of the teacher's due process rights. But, the problem is that state legislatures are increasingly mandating that these measures absolutely be used when making high stakes personnel decisions.

Our guest author today is Dr. Clifford B. Janey, former superintendent for the Newark Public Schools, District of Columbia Public Schools, and Rochester City School District. He is currently a Senior Weismann Fellow at the Bankstreet College of Education in New York City, and a Shanker Institute board member. For too many students, families, and communities, the high school diploma represents either a dream deferred or a broken contract between citizens and the stewards of America's modern democracy. With the reform movement's unrelenting focus on testing and its win/lose consequences for students and staff, the high school diploma, which should signify college and work readiness, has lost its value. Not including the over seven thousand students who drop out of high school daily, the gap between the percentage of those who graduate and their readiness for college success will continue to worsen the social and income inequalities in life.

"The National Press Club Newsmaker Program holds a discussion on school choice programs in Washington, D.C. Speakers discuss whether the choice options work for students and how options such as charter schools, vouchers, online education and homeschooling compare to traditional public schools. They also examine what political candidates are saying about school choice options and whether their claims are true. Participants include: Dr. Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado and Dir. of the Natl. Education Policy Center; Dr. Gary Miron of Western Michigan University; Policy and Advocacy for the Natl. Association of Charter School Authorizers Vice President Alex Medler; Executive Director of the District of Columbia's 21st Century School Fund Mary Filardo; and Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute Policy Analyst Adam Schaeffer. Drs. Kevin Welner and Gary Miron are contributors to the book: Exploring the School Choice Universe: Evidence and Recommendations, being released this week. The book raises critical questions about the performance of choice programs."

"Brookings recently released an evaluation of New York City's voucher program, called the School Choice Scholarship Foundation Program (SCSF), which was implemented in the late 1990s. Voucher offers were randomized, and the authors looked at the impact of being offered/accepting them on a very important medium-term outcome - college enrollment (they were also able to follow an unusually high proportion of the original voucher recipients to check this outcome). The short version of the story is that, overall, the vouchers didn't have any statistically discernible impact on college enrollment. But, as is often the case, there was some underlying variation in the results, including positive estimated impacts among African-American students, which certainly merit discussion.* Unfortunately, such nuance was not always evident in the coverage of and reaction to the report, with some voucher supporters (strangely, given the results) exclaiming that the program was an unqualified success, and some opponents questioning the affiliations of the researchers. For my part, I'd like to make a quick, not-particularly-original point about voucher studies in general: Even the best of them don't necessarily tell us much about whether "vouchers work.""

"It was obviously too difficult for the authors of the 2012 Republican Party platform to hide their contempt for public education, because it is evident throughout the section on schooling."

A new Illinois commission can authorize charter schools rejected by local officials. Its money comes from a foundation that backs charter schools.

The new breed of paternalistic schools appears to be the single most effective way of closing the achievement gap. No other school model or policy reform in urban secondary schools seems to come close to having such a dramatic impact on the performance of inner-city students. Done right, paternalistic schooling provides a novel way to remake inner-city education in the years ahead.

I bet you never thought you would see the words collective bargaining and charter schools in the same headline, but a new study came out this week from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) located at the University of Washington. The study is titled, "Are Charter School Unions Worth the Bargain?" Mitch Price, legal analyst for CRPE, is the author with a forward from Robin J. Lake. It is worth the read. The study looked at collective bargaining agreements from 10 charter schools. Yes, there is collective bargaining at some charter schools. The study indicated that as of 2009-10, 604 of the 4,315 charter schools have collective bargaining. That is about 12% of all charter schools. The National Education Association represents 76% of those schools, and the American Federation of Teachers represents 11%. The remaining 13% are shared through merger of the two unions.

While numerous recent authors have studied the effects of school accountability systems on student test performance and school "gaming" of accountability incentives, there has been little attention paid to substantive changes in instructional policies and practices resulting from school accountability. The lack of research is primarily due to the unavailability of appropriate data to carry out such an analysis. This paper brings to bear new evidence from a remarkable five-year survey conducted of a census of public schools in Florida, coupled with detailed administrative data on student performance. We show that schools facing accountability pressure changed their instructional practices in meaningful ways. In addition, we present medium-run evidence of the effects of school accountability on student test scores, and find that a significant portion of these test score gains can likely be attributed to the changes in school policies and practices that we uncover in our surveys.

A newly-created state school district, the Educational Achievement System (EAS), will begin in Fall 2012 as part of Gov. Rick Snyder's education reform. At that point, it begins receiving state and federal per-pupil funding. Until then, the new system will operate as the only public district in the nation supported entirely by private donations. A newly-formed business entity, the Michigan Education Excellence Foundation, is collecting private monies for the operation of the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), the board that will oversee and implement the EAS, a statewide district for "low-performing" public schools.

This was written by Joanne Yatvin, a longtime public school educator, author and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She teachers part-time at Portland State University and is writing a book on good teaching in high poverty schools.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported that criminal charges have been filed against 20 students in an affluent New York suburb for allegedly cheating on the SAT. Some are accused of paying stand-ins up to $3,500 per test to take the exam for them; others accepted payment to take the test. Bernard Kaplan, the principal of Great Neck North High School, which five of the accused students attended, suggested that the experience of his community is the tip of an iceberg. "I think it's widespread across the country," he told The Times. "We were the school that stood up to it." We have every reason to believe he's right. While criminal authorities and the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, investigate, parents and educators should ask: What have we done to lead teens to such an act of desperation?

The School Reform Act ("SRA") grants the D.C. Public Charter School Board authority to hold D.C. public charter schools accountable for fulfilling their duties and obligations under the Act.  The PCSB has developed these Guidelines to outline the process by which it will evaluate the performance of the charter schools, including how the PCSB will ensure that each school complies with its charter agreement and applicable law and how the PCSB will track the progress of each school in meeting its student academic achievement expectations. 

This was written by Mike Rose, who is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and is the author of "The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker," and "Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us."