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The past decade has seen increased testing of students and the concomitant proliferation of computer-based systems to store, manage, analyze, and report the data that comes from these tests. The research to date on teacher use of these data has mostly been qualitative and has mostly focused on the conditions that are necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) for effective use of data by teachers. Absent from the research base in this area is objective information on how much and in what ways teachers actually use student test data, even when supposed precursors of teacher data use are in place. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by analyzing usage data generated when teachers in one mid-size urban district log onto the web-based, district-provided data deliver and analytic tool. Based on information contained in the universe of web logs from the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 school years, I find relatively low levels of teacher interaction with pages on the web tool that contain student test information that could potentially inform practice. I also find no evidence that teacher usage of web-based student data is related student achievement, but there is reason to believe these estimates are downwardly biased.

The union representing nearly 700 public school employees who were laid off at the end of the school day on Friday held a last-minute lunchtime rally on the steps of City Hall, calling the layoffs a political vendetta and threatening possible legal action. But for all of the chanting and sign waving by District Council 37, the layoffs went through as planned. At the end of the day, Sungmi Kang, 47, a school aide at Stuyvesant High School, was out of work, along with 638 other school aides, parent coordinators, community associates, and other school support staff. They are the city's lowest paid employees and the latest victims of budget cuts.

Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, and some of the other presiding education reform yahoos have started to question the benefits of smaller class sizes. DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson deserves some credit for a semi-acknowledgement of the importance of smaller class sizes in this Q&A with Bill Turque. She states that at least some kids should have smaller classes, however she repeats the notion that it's better to have a class of forty students with one effective teacher than a class of twenty students with an ineffective teacher. Now, she's not completely wrong, but I would issue several caveats to go with her generalization.

Do charter schools draw good teachers from traditional, mainstream public schools? Using an eleven‐year panel of North Carolina public school teachers, the author finds nuanced patterns of teacher quality flowing into charter schools. High rates of inexperienced and unlicensed teachers moved to charter schools, but among regularly licensed teachers changing schools, charter movers had higher licensure test scores than other moving teachers, and they were more likely to be highly experienced. I estimate measures of value added for a subset of elementary teachers and show that charter movers were less effective than other mobile teachers and colleagues within their sending schools, by 3 to 4 percent of a student‐level standard deviation in achievement.

Perhaps the greatest current impediment to better schools is our meager understanding of the most high-leverage actions and elements that ensure large, swift improvements to learning. If implemented, they would have an immediate effect on student learning and on college and career preparation.

Education reformers who maintain poverty is often a major hurdle in teaching students received a much needed boost last Thursday. Paul Tough wrote in New York Times Magazine that school reformers reliant on charter schools and turnaround models are guilty of offering excuses for their limited progress in educating low-income students.

In a step toward reshaping how all teachers in New York City's 1,700 public schools are judged, the Department of Education and the city teachers' union agreed on Friday to a pilot teacher-evaluation system that will take effect next year in 33 struggling schools.

Ditch Testing (Part 5): Testing Has Not Improved Education The evidence is clear. Test-score cheating is not isolated to Atlanta, Baltimore, and a few other schools, as testing proponents tend to suggest. It is not a problem that can be fixed with technical measures such as tightened security. It may be human nature but it is the high and unreasonable pressure of high-stakes standardized testing that leads to corruption. Thus, we cannot minimize the problem, trivialize potential solutions, or blame a few educators who have been caught. The Atlanta scandal should serve as a wake-up call to all of us, especially to those who continue to promote testing as a necessary and effective way to improve education.

THE United States supports schools in Afghanistan because we know that education is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build a country. Alas, we've forgotten that lesson at home. All across America, school budgets are being cut, teachers laid off and education programs dismantled.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the Foundation for Excellence in Education have embarked on a well-funded campaign to spread selected Florida education reforms to other states. These reforms include assigning letter grades to schools, high-stakes testing, promotion and graduation requirements, bonus pay, a wide variety of alternative teacher credentialing policies, and various types of school choice mechanisms. This policy potpourri was recently presented by Gov. Bush in Michigan, and the documents used allow for a concrete consideration and review. Regrettably, Bush's Michigan speech relies on a selective misrepresentation of test score data. Further, he offers no evidence that the purported test score gains were caused by the recommended reforms. Other viable explanations, such as a major investment in class-size reduction and a statewide reading program, receive no or little attention. Moreover, the presentation ignores less favorable findings, while evidence showing limited or negative effects of the proposed strategies is omitted. Considering the overwhelming evidence that retention is ineffective (if not harmful), it is troubling to see Mr. Bush endorse such an approach. Finally, Florida's real problems of inequitable and inadequate education remain unaddressed.

Instead of cutting education funding for recovery, districts like Detroit should consider redirecting existing money to support the work of local organizations that are seeding effective new schools or improving existing schools.

Larry Cuban wrote a wonderful blog post recently, one that I've been planning to discuss in more detail, though now I'm going to bring it up in a way I hadn't originally intended.  In "Jazz, Basketball, and Teacher Decision Making" Cuban offers interesting analogies and scientific studies to illuminate just how complex teaching really is.  Teachers make several dozen instructional decisions every hour, hundreds per day.  For those decisions to be effective in promoting student learning, teachers need to know the difference between the meaningful information and the meaningless "noise" that we take in every second as we observe a classroom.  We need a clear sense of priorities for each student and for each moment - and though this idea will shock some people who barely understand teaching - the top priority is not always to stick to the lesson plan.  (More on that idea in a blog post coming soon).  In order for each decision to be the best it can be, we need to have a variety of options and approaches, and both the theoretical and practical background to weigh those options and make the right selection in a moment's time, and then constantly adjust.

This paper contributes importantly to the growing literature on the training of special education teachers and how it translates into classroom practice and student achievement. The authors examine the impact of pre-service preparation and in-service formal and informal training on the ability of teachers to promote academic achievement among students with disabilities. Using student-level longitudinal data from Florida over a five-year span the authors estimate value-added models of student achievement. There is little support for the efficacy of in-service professional development courses focusing on special education. However, teachers with advanced degrees are more effective in boosting the math achievement of students with disabilities than are those with only a baccalaureate degree. Also pre-service preparation in special education has statistically significant and quantitatively substantial effects on the ability of teachers of special education courses to promote gains in achievement for students with disabilities, especially in reading. Certification in special education, an undergraduate major in special education, and the amount of special education coursework in college are all positively correlated with the performance of teachers in special education reading courses.

A New York City program that distributed $56 million in performance bonuses to teachers and other school staff members over the last three years will be permanently discontinued, the city Department of Education said on Sunday. The decision was made in light of a study that found the bonuses had no positive effect on either student performance or teachers' attitudes toward their jobs.

A new outside study shows that when Chicago public school principals were given more flexibility in firing probationary teachers, they used that discretion to dismiss the ones who were truly less effective.

The student-teaching experience offered by many traditional schools of education couples poor supervision with a lack of rigorous selection of effective mentor-teachers, a controversial report issued today concludes.

Opponents of an Indiana law that would create one of the broadest voucher programs in the country are suing to block it from taking effect, arguing that it runs afoul of the state's constitution by channeling public money toward religious purposes.

U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Facilitating Outstanding Classrooms Using Size Reduction (FOCUS) Act of 2011 [bill summary, PDF], which the Senator says would provide states with the resources they need to reduce class sizes across the early grade levels in order to provide students and teachers with an educational environment that encourages maximum student academic growth. Murray's bill will also put in place evaluation tools to assess the program's effectiveness.

The UFT is a vital part of a national movement for education reform. Since its early days, the union has advocated for the conditions that are best for student learning and that help teachers to be most effective. This includes a broad range of initiatives, such as smaller class size, adequate funding for schools, school-based health clinics, mentoring for new teachers and professional development for all teachers, to name just a few.

Some school reformers are fond of saying that "great teaching" can overcome the effects of living poverty on children, and that those people (me included) who insist that poverty matters are only supporting the status quo. The critics of school reform that I know are hardly happy with the status quo, nor do they believe that poverty must be eliminated for public schools to be improved.