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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. 

Here is a new critique of the Khan Academy, the subject of a widely read post I published Monday about the hype and reality of the academy. You can find that post here. And you can find a response to that post from the founder of the Khan Academy, Sal Khan, by clicking here. The following was written by Christopher Danielson and Michael Paul GHoldenberg. Danielson holds a Ph.D. in mathematics education from Michigan State University. He teaches math at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, MN. He maintains the blog "Overthinking My Teaching" and has written for Connected Mathematics. As of this writing, he has three badges and 11,041 energy points on Khan Academy. Goldenberg holds a master's degree in mathematics education from the University of Michigan, as well as master's degrees in English and psychological foundations of education from the University of Florida. He writes the blog "Rational Mathematics Education" and was a co-founder of the group Mathematically Sane. He currently coaches high school mathematics teachers in Detroit.

"Beneath the political and corporate veneer espousing teaching as a profession lurks a simple fact: the corporate and political elite wants teaching to be a service industry. Worse yet, they have their wish, because teaching is now a service industry, ultimately devoted to perpetuating an economic system based on social inequity and a venal consumer culture."

The actor Matt Damon and his mother, a professor of education, on Wednesday turned down an award from the country's largest teachers union after reading an opinion article that the union's president had co-authored with the founder of Teach for America. Writing that she was "confused by your collaboration" with Teach for America, Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige said she and her son, Mr. Damon, no longer desired to be nominated for the National Education Association's Friend of Education Award.

The decision by Dennis Van Roekel to co-author a column with Teach For America director Wendy Kopp continues to generate negative reaction among educators, the latest being the decision by Nancy Carlsson-Paige and her son Matt Damon to reject the union's Friend of Education award. The response by the union has been defensive.

"Dani Lea, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University, believes that Teach for America (TFA) teachers in her high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, were detrimental to her learning experience and for those around her. Lea claimed that her principal didn't even know which teachers were members of TFA and which weren't. Upon hearing this, TFA co-CEO Matthew Kramer said, "That's not our lived experience." Lea responded, "That was my lived experience.""

Rudy Crew has had an eventful career in education. He's run two of the four largest school districts in the United States-New York City in the 1990s and Miami-Dade County from 2004 to 2008-where he initiated ambitious policies and programs but left amid controversy. In New York, he took over and rejuvenated some of the city's poorest-performing schools, but was forced out in 1999 after clashing with then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. In Miami, Mr. Crew offered salary increases to teachers who would transfer to the worst schools and got more students to take Advanced Placement tests. But in 2008, the same year he was named National Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators, he was fired after a long, escalating spat with the school board. Since then, he's worked as an education consultant with Global Partnership Schools, which he co-founded, and is teaching at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Last month, Mr. Crew, 61, was named president of Revolution K12, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based provider of adaptive-learning software in math and English. Education Week Staff Writer Jason Tomassini spoke with Mr. Crew last week in a telephone interview about his move into the educational technology marketplace, the differences between the public and private sectors, and the changing role of teachers in the classroom.

Urban Academy has just 150 students and is one of six small schools in the Julia Richmond complex, New York. Ann Cook, co-director, explains how it operates and what they do to appeal to young people.