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Drawing on a statewide study of Florida middle-school reading coaches, this article examines what constitutes, contributes to, and is associated with high-quality coaches and coaching. Authors find that coaches generally held many of the qualifications recommended by state and national experts and principals and teachers rated their coaches highly on many indicators of quality. However, several common concerns about recruiting, retaining, and supporting high-quality coaches emerged. Estimates from models indicate that a few indicators of coach experience, knowledge, and skills had significant associations with perceived improvements in teaching and higher student achievement, although the magnitude of the latter relationship was quite small. Findings suggest that although possessing strong reading knowledge and instructional expertise may be important for coaching, it may not be sufficient.

Teacher-coaching linked to a well-known teaching framework paid dividends for student achievement in the secondary grades, according to a study published today in Science magazine. In all, the study found a 0.22 standard deviation increase in the scores of students taught by teachers who received a special form of teacher-coaching-roughly the equivalent of an increase from the 50th to the 59th percentile-relative to the students taught by teachers in a control group.

Recent research has indicated that teacher coaching and high expectations for student behavior are characteristics of the most effective charter schools. In "Learning from Charter School Management Organizations: Strategies for Student Behavior and Teacher Coaching," researchers from the University of Washington's Center for Reinventing Public Education and New Jersey-based research firm Mathematica probe into exactly what those polices look like.

For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers. Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores. People like Jim Knight think we should push coaching.

Over the last several weeks, in light of all the standardized testing taking place in the state of New York, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the ideas of assessment and testing and how important they are in the world of public education. In New York State we have reached a point where our children are sitting for at least 6 days of standardized testing in grades 3, 4 and 5 in the areas of English Language Arts and Mathematics. As if that weren't enough, the results from these tests will serve as the proverbial rock thrown into the middle of a placid lake on a beautiful spring day. We all know what happens next because we've seen it - the pond fills with ripples and the rock disappears. These ripples represent our children, their families, our classroom teachers, fellow building principals, schools as a whole and our communities at large. Everyone, at least in the state of New York, will be impacted and judged based on the results of these various standardized tests.

The National Study of CMO Effectiveness is a four-year study designed to assess the impact of CMOs on student achievement and to identify CMO structures and practices that are most effective in raising achievement. Earlier reports from the study documented substantial variation in CMOs' student achievement impacts and in CMOs' use of particular educational strategies and practices. The last report from the study found that the most effective CMOs tend to emphasize two practices in particular: high expectations for student behavior and intensive teacher coaching and monitoring. This report provides a more in-depth description of these two promising CMO practices, drawing on surveys and interviews with staff in high-performing CMOs that emphasize one or both practices.

I noted in my blog last week that the visionaries of the charter school idea-Raymond Budde of the University of Massachusetts and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers-never intended that charter schools would compete with public schools. Budde saw charters as a way to reorganize public school districts and to provide more freedom for teachers. He envisioned teams of teachers asking for a charter for three to five years, during which time they would operate with full autonomy over curriculum and instruction, with no interference from the superintendent or the principal. Shanker thought that charter schools should be created by teams of teachers who would explore new ways to reach unmotivated students. He envisioned charter schools as self-governing, as schools that encouraged faculty decisionmaking and participatory governance. He imagined schools that taught by coaching rather than lecturing, that strived for creativity and problem-solving rather than mastery of standardized tests or regurgitation of facts. He never thought of charters as non-union schools where teachers would work 70-hour weeks and be subject to dismissal based on the scores of their students. Today, charter schools are very far from the original visions of Budde and Shanker.

There is huge pressure from all sides - the federal government, Governor Cuomo, and Mayor Bloomberg - on the UFT, the NYC teachers union, to agree to a test-based teacher evaluation and compensation system in NYC. Similar pressures are being exerted on teachers throughout the US, as a result of "Race to the Top" and the corporate reform agenda being promoted by the Gates Foundation and the other members of the Billionaire Boys Club.  In his State of the City address, Bloomberg also proposed that teachers rated highly through such a system should  get a salary increase of $20,000 a year.  Merit pay has been tried in many cities, including NYC, and has never worked to improve student outcomes.  When challenged about the evidence for such a policy, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson tweeted a link to a recent NY Times puff piece about DC's Impact system, in which a couple of teachers who had received bonuses after being rated "highly effective" were interviewed as saying that this extra pay might persuade them to stay teaching longer.    Stephanie Black is a former teacher in Washington DC.  In both 2010 and 2011 she was rated "effective" by the DCPS evaluation system.  She is now living in Chicago where she tutors math and coaches in an after school program.  Here is her story.

he Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study conducted in the Metropolitan Nashville School System from 2006-07 through 2008-09, in which middle school mathematics teachers voluntarily participated in a controlled experiment to assess the effect of financial rewards for teachers whose students showed unusually large gains on standardized tests. The experiment was intended to test the notion that rewarding teachers for improved scores would cause scores to rise. It was up to participating teachers to decide what, if anything, they needed to do to raise student performance: participate in more professional development, seek coaching, collaborate with other teachers, or simply reflect on their practices. Thus, POINT was focused on the notion that a significant problem in American education is the absence of appropriate incentives, and that correcting the incentive structure would, in and of itself, constitute an efective intervention that improved student outcomes.By and large, results did not confirm this hypothesis

If you wanted to reform the legal system, you would probably want to speak to attorneys. If you wanted to reform the way that sports leagues address the problem of concussions, you would want to speak to coaches and players. If you were interested in reforming medicine, you'd probably want to speak to doctors and nurses. But those who want to change the education system want nothing to do with teachers. Pretend-reform governors such as Chris Christie (NJ), Scott Walker (WI) and Rick Scott (FL), entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and politicians including President Obama all believe that they know more about how to improve the public education system in the United States than professional educators who are working with students on a day-to-day basis to educate them and provide them with life skills.

Both a value-added method and principal observations tied to a teaching framework identified the same teachers as particularly high or low-performing under Chicago's teacher-evaluation pilot, a new study concludes. But principals struggled to provide high-quality "coaching" and support to teachers based on the results, the report says-a finding indicates just how difficult it will be to use the systems to improve teaching and learning.

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.

"The College Board, the organization behind the SAT, acknowledges that historically its tests have been biased in favor of the children of wealthy, well educated elites - those who live in the best zip codes, are surrounded by books, go to the best regarded schools (both public and private), enjoy summer enrichment programs, and can avail themselves of as much tutoring and SAT test-prep coaching as they need. That's why, early last month, College Board president David Coleman announced that the SAT would undergo significant changes, with the aim of making it more fair and equitable for disadvantaged students."

Five months after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg outlined a plan to give principals more autonomy to run their schools, the city imposed what would be the first of five consecutive cuts to the schools' budgets. To make ends meet, principals have trimmed after-school programs, shrunk their support staffs and tightened their schools' use of things like printing paper, markers and Post-it notes. They have dismissed coaches who used to help teachers prepare for their lessons, and teachers whose salaries they could no longer pay.

Each time I read the newest claims coming from the new reformers -- Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and Geoffrey Canada -- I think about my days in the classroom and on the field. These new reformers reached their positions of authority in education reform, first, without any real expertise (similar, I must admit, to how I became a varsity soccer coach without ever having played the game). Next, one of the central refrains of their message has been teacher accountability.

A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was "tricky," and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.

No Chance for Latinos and Blacks. That's what came to mind for me when I first heard about NCLB, and that's what still comes to mind nearly ten years later. I'm referring in particular to at-risk Latino and African American public school students like those I taught in Chicago. And though I had few students from other ethnic/racial groups, my thoughts here certainly apply to them too. But don't get me wrong. I've never believed anyone intended to enact a law that would hurt many of the very children it purportedly helps. Too often, however, there's a difference between intent and effect, and there was no doubt in my mind that NCLB would indeed leave many kids behind.