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A substantial body of evidence reveals that past reforms have largely failed to improve schools in urban areas. The authors contend that prior efforts failed because they did not address the numerous ways that past research has shown poverty influences student academic outcomes and school performance (Coleman et al., 1966; Rothstein, 2004). The author's call for a new approach to school improvement, one that draws upon the principles advocated by the Broader and Bolder Approach, and includes: evidence-based instruction, community engagement, and the strategies that have been pursued by the Harlem Children's Zone, the Children's Aid Society, and a small number of similar efforts that attempt to mitigate the effects of poverty.

America was founded, and has flourished, as a land of opportunity-a place where, by working hard and seizing opportunities, each generation can do better than the last. But this very American notion seems frayed, as the effects of economic recession have taken a terrible toll on our kids and the schools they depend upon.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is making a new run at revamping how the district hires, evaluates, trains and pays teachers. Last year, performance pay and a surge of new student tests used to rate teachers brought protests from teachers and parents.

As the Chicago Teachers Union struck back at CPS over the longer-day issue Friday, claiming 115 schools nixed the plan in straw polls, it also sought to highlight the disproportionate effect of this year's school layoffs. Bearing the brunt of the layoffs are schools with more African-American students and those where at least 87 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches.

I've posted a few blogs recently on the topic of Student Growth Percentile Scores, or SGPs and how many state policymakers have moved to adopt these measures and integrate them into new evaluation systems for teachers. In my first post, I argued that SGPs are simply not designed to make inferences about teacher effectiveness.

A year ago, the Los Angeles Times created a media sensation when it obtained the names and test scores of thousands of teachers, then commissioned a researcher to rate them in relation to their "effectiveness" in raising test scores. The Times then published online the names and ratings of those thousands of teachers. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan saluted the Times for rating teachers and naming names, but the overwhelming majority of testing and evaluation experts thought it was a terrible idea.

THE CLEAR INTENT of Alabama's viciously xenophobic immigration law - and the likely effect, now that most of it was upheld by a federal judge this week - is to hound, harass and intimidate illegal immigrants into uprooting their lives and moving elsewhere. The law aims to do this by various means, but none is more pernicious than a provision requiring the state's public schools to collect information on every student's immigration status, starting in kindergarten and going to 12th grade.

Education reform proposals are often based on high-profile or dramatic policy changes, many of which are expensive, politically controversial, or both.  In this paper, we argue that the debates over these "flashy" policies have obscured a potentially important direction for raising student performance-namely, reforms to the management or organization of schools. By making sure the "trains run on time" and focusing on the day-to-day decisions involved in managing the instructional process, school and district administrators may be able to substantially increase student learning at modest cost.In this paper, we describe three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K-12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments with an eye toward maximizing student achievement (e.g. allowing teachers to gain experience by teaching the same grade level for multiple years or having teachers specializing in the subject where they appear most effective). We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform. A precise benefit-cost calculation is not feasible for the set of teacher assignment reforms we describe, but we argue that the cost of such proposals is likely to be quite small relative to the benefits for students. While we recognize that these specific reforms may not be appropriate or feasible for every district, we encourage school, district, and state education leaders to make the management, organization, and operation of schools a more prominent part of the conversation on how to raise student achievement.

The growth of contingent faculty reflects the increasing tendency of higher education institutions to operate like businesses. It's no secret that this is a major feature of for-profit colleges, most of which have effectively eliminated tenure on the grounds that this will help flexibility and innovation.

A review of the value-added analysis underlying the effectiveness rankings of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers by the Los Angeles Times

Jeff Pfeffer and I had a piece appear today in The New York Times "Preoccupations" column called "Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts."  We are pleased with the points it makes and how it reads, but as is inevitable given the space constraints in newspapers, the final version is a bit shorter than the piece we submitted. In particular, we wish there had been space to include our point that, not only has linking incentives to standardized test scores been generally ineffective, a nasty side effect is that such programs often drive teachers and administrators to cheat (giving students the right answers or erasing wrong answers and replacing them with right answers).

Michigan state Republicans said this week they are preparing a package of bills to privatize public school teaching -- eliciting concerns about working conditions and trading academic quality for cost effectiveness.

Nearly one million American youth have participated in service programs such as Peace Corps and Teach For America. This paper provides the first causal estimate of the impact of service programs on those who serve, using data from a web-based survey of former Teach For America applicants. We estimate the effect of voluntary youth service using a sharp discontinuity in the Teach For America application process. Participating in Teach For America increases racial tolerance, makes individuals more optimistic about the life chances of poor children, and makes them more likely to work in education. We argue that these facts are broadly consistent with the "Contact Hypothesis," which states that, under appropriate conditions, interpersonal contact can reduce prejudice.

I've previously written about the growing number of rigorous peer reviewed and other studies which tend to show positive effects of state school finance reforms. But what about all of those accounts to the contrary? The accounts that seem so dominant in the policy conversations on the topic. What is that vast body of research that suggests that school finance reforms don't matter? That it's all money down the rat-hole. That in fact, judicial orders to increase funding for schools actually hurt children?

The practice of law in the U.S. is an adversarial system that is widely accepted as being the most effective way of ensuring that justice is done. This is the antithesis of the way educating the young is supposed to be conducted in this country. Nevertheless, the system too often still pits teachers against principals, to the detriment of students.

The charter school movement has received plenty of advice on policy and practice issues in recent years. Policy analysts have debated the best way to promote chartering at the state and federal levels, while education consultants and support organizations have focused on advising schools on operating more effectively. But considerably less work has been done on bringing the disparate pieces of charter school management together into a coherent strategic framework.

In 1968, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) went on strike over the involuntary transfer of 19 teachers by a newly empowered community-controlled school board in New York City's Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood. The controversies at the heart of that bitter struggle live on in current debates over the methods of teacher selection, the role of seniority and due process in teacher assignment, and the appropriateness of affirmative action in the composition of urban teaching corps. Then, as now, the role of educators of color in urban school districts was an issue that sparked controversy. In recounting how rules for teacher selection evolved in New York, Christina Collins' book, "Ethnically Qualified", Race, Merit and the Selection of Urban Teachers, 1920-1980, illuminates the failure of the city's teachers' unions to effectively challenge the exclusion and marginalization of African American teachers.

I spent some time the other day, while out running, pondering the usefulness of student growth percentile estimates and value added estimates of teacher effectiveness for the average school or district level practitioner. How would they use them? What would they see in them? How might these performance snapshots inform practice?

Class Warfare: that's the title Steven Brill gave to his recent book on the state of American education. With such a title, one might think that that Brill's book would investigate how the deep class divisions between America's wealthy class and our poor and working class, a gap that has grown immensely over the last four decades, has harmed our schools and our students. After all, educational research has shown that greatest challenge our schools face is the grinding effect of poverty on so many of the students we teach.

On a largely bipartisan vote, the U.S. House of Representatives this week approved legislation aimed at expanding and promoting charter schools throughout the country. The Empowering Parents through Quality Charter Schools Act, passed 364-54, and now goes to the Senate for further consideration. Although the bill, designated as H.R. 2218, had wide backing from both parties, including "ayes" from Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, and Rep. Frank Guinta, R-N.H., skepticism about the effectiveness of charter schools looms over the legislation. Organizations opposed to the bill as it currently reads include the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher organization, the American Association of School Administrators, and Parents Across America.