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"This week a film partially funded by Walden Media, which is owned by entrepreneur and conservative Philip Anschutz, will be released in theaters. The film, Won't Back Down, is a work of fiction but claims to be based on real life events and tells the story of a teacher and a parent in a 'failing' school who join forces to 'save their school.' Walden Media also funded Waiting for Superman, which was billed as a documentary on education and chronicled the stories of several families navigating the educational landscape intermixed with commentary from journalists, economists, philanthropists, and business folks who surmised the troubles of public education today. These two films differ in style, but their substance is aligned and their conclusion is the same: teacher unions are the obstacle to student achievement."

Sixteen years ago, as students were enjoying their summer break, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman issued his own report card on the American education system. In a guest commentary in The Washington Post, he described it as "backward," often producing "dismal results."

"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."

Covington is a product of the Broad Superintendents Academy. Bill Gates wrote a commentary last March in which he argued: What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. This appears to be the inspiration for Superintendent Covington's experiment.

This commentary examines the rise of intermediary organizations that "broker" research for policymakers, and considers the implications for traditional forms of knowledge production.

Last month, Monmouth University and NJ Press Media released a poll on education reforms proposed by the Christie administration.  It has produced a whirlwind of blogosphere commentary from a few folks who took exception to the poll's results.

"Ms. Goldstein's book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic. A hate-read is nigh impossible. (Trust me, I tried.) While Ms. Goldstein is sympathetic to the unionized public-school teacher, she also thinks the profession is hamstrung by a defensive selfishness, harboring too fine a memory for ancient wounds. The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. "

"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. "

"When charter schools first emerged twenty years ago, they represented a revolution, ushering in a new era that put educational choice, innovation, and autonomy front and center in the effort to improve our schools. While charters have always been very diverse in characteristics and outcomes, it wasn't long before a particular kind of gap-closing, "No Excuses" charter grabbed the lion's share of public attention. But in this rush to crown and invest in a few "winners," have we turned our back on the push for innovation that was meant to be at the core of the charter experiment?"

"It's becoming a familiar story: Great teachers get low scores from "value-added" teacher evaluation models. Newspapers across the country have published accounts of extraordinary teachers whose evaluations, based on their students' state test scores, seem completely out of sync with the reality of their practice. Los Angeles teachers have figured prominently in these reports. Researchers are not surprised by these stories, because dozens of studies have documented the serious flaws in these ratings, which are increasingly used to evaluate teachers' effectiveness. The ratings are based on value-added models such as the L.A. school district's Academic Growth over Time system, which uses complex statistical metrics to try to sort out the effects of student characteristics (such as socioeconomic status) from the effects of teachers on test scores. A study we conducted at Stanford University showed what these teachers are experiencing."

So why do we assume, when it comes to evaluating schools, that we must look at numbers alone? Sure, there have been calls to build additional indicators, beyond test scores, into school grading systems. These might include graduation rates, student or teacher attendance rates, results from student surveys, AP course-taking or exam-passing rates, etc. Our own recent paper on model state accountability systems offers quite a few ideas along these lines. This is all well and good. But it's not enough. It still assumes that we can take discrete bits of data and spit out a credible assessment of organizations as complex as schools. That's not the way it works in businesses, famous for their "bottom lines." Fund managers don't just look at the profit and loss statements for the companies in which they invest. They send analysts to go visit with the team, hear about their strategy, kick the tires, talk to insiders, find out what's really going on. Their assessment starts with the numbers, but it doesn't end there. So it should be with school accountability systems.

Education reform does not suffer from lack of energy or activity. Everywhere you look-Congress, state legislatures, local school boards, wherever-scores of eager-beavers are filing bills, proposing solutions, calling for change, and otherwise trying to "push the ball forward." Yet for all the effort, for all the pain, we see little gain. What gives? The conventional answer, in most reform circles, comes down to: "the opposition of special interests." Teachers unions, school administrators, colleges of education, textbook publishers, and other defenders (and beneficiaries) of the status quo fight change at every step and guard their selfish prerogatives jealously. That may all be true, but our challenges are much more fundamental. It's not that the wrong people are in charge. It's that there are so many cooks in the education kitchen that nobody is really in charge. And that is a consequence of an antiquated governance structure that practically forces all those cooks to enter and remain in the kitchen.

The central idea behind standards- and accountability-driven reforms is that, in order to improve student learning, we need to do three things: Clearly define a minimum bar for all students (i.e., set standards). Hold students, teachers, and leaders accountable for meeting those minimum standards. Back off: Give teachers and leaders the autonomy and flexibility they need to meet their goals. It's a powerful formulation, and one that we've seen work, particularly in charter schools and networks where teachers and leaders have used that autonomy to find innovative solutions to some of the biggest instructional challenges. Unfortunately, in far too many traditional school districts, the push for greater accountability has been paired with less autonomy and more centralized control. That is a prescription for a big testing and accountability backlash. 

One big idea animates virtually all of today's earnest education reformers: the conviction that great schools can spur social mobility. Voucher supporters, charter advocates, standards nuts, teacher-effectiveness fanatics-we all fundamentally believe that fantastic schools staffed by dedicated educators can help poor kids climb out of poverty and compete with their affluent peers. And then Charles Murray comes along and throws cold water all over the idea.

The federal law that everybody loves to hate turns ten on Sunday. Here's what to think about it:

Unfortunately, the proposed Treasury Department regulations, if adopted as currently written, would make it very difficult for state and local teacher plans to admit charter schools and retain their governmental plan status. Indeed, if these regulations are implemented as written, the prudent course of action for any state or local plan administrator, faced with possibility of losing governmental status, would be to throw charter schools out of the plan.

It's hard to make the case anymore that test scores are irrelevant. But what remains unknown is whether reading, math, and science are the most important things that schools could be teaching.

Most readers of the NJDOE report on reforming the state's school finance formula likely glided right past the seemingly innocuous recommendation to shift the enrollment count method for funding from a fall enrollment count to an average daily attendance figure. After all, on its face, the argument provided seems to make sense. Let's fund on this basis so that we can incentivize increased attendance in our most impoverished and low performing districts. (Another argument I've heard in other states is "why would we fund kids who aren't there?"). The data were even presented to validate that attendance rates are lower in these districts (Figure 3.1). I, however, could not let this pass, because Average Daily Attendance as a basis for funding is actually a well understood trick of the trade for reducing aid to districts and schools with higher poverty and minority concentrations.  I have both blogged about this topic in the past, and written published research directly and indirectly related to the topic.[1] The intent of this blog post is to provide a (very limited, oversimplified) primer on the common methods of counting general student populations for purposes of determining state aid to schools (charter and district) and to provide some commentary on the pros and cons of each.

After 38 years of teaching in Vermont and Minnesota in a variety of schools and programs, I've decided to step away and retire from classroom teaching. I've cleaned out my classroom, graded all the papers and returned my library books. Now I need to clean out my head. Here is my bucket list of 10 items that are useless and should be removed from schools, followed by 10 items that should be the center of every school system.

"Billionaires like privately managed schools. Parents are lured with glittering promises of getting their kids a sure ticket to college. Politicians want to appear to be champions of "school reform" with charters. But charters will not end the poverty at the root of low academic performance or transform our nation's schools into a high-performing system. The world's top-performing systems - Finland and Korea, for example - do not have charter schools. They have strong public school programs with well-prepared, experienced teachers and administrators. Charters and that other faux reform, vouchers, transform schooling into a consumer good, in which choice is the highest value."