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One pervasive reformy argument is that our entire education system may be instantly transformed to be more productive and efficient by instantly adopting untested reformy policies and/or untested solutions of sectors other than education. Further, that we must take these bold leaps of faith because the public education system itself is too corrupt, too bloated, too inefficient to provide any useful lessons! Perhaps the whole system can be replaced with you-tube videos. Or perhaps we can just fire all of the teachers with more than 10 years experience and pay the rest based on the test scores they produce! Or perhaps some other lessons of industry can cure the (unsubstantiated) ills of American public schooling!

The main problem, among many, is that school systems cannot function as free markets if we want to achieve universal post-secondary readiness. Free markets produce efficiency, not equity for all. Efficiency helps maximize profit, but what about students that aren't profitable to educate?

The values of efficiency and fairness collide head-on in New York's Education Law §3012-c, passed as part of the state's efforts to bolster its chances in the 2010 Race to the Top competition. The law requires annual professional performance reviews (APPRs) that sort teachers into four categories-"highly effective," "effective," "developing" and "ineffective"-based on multiple measures of effectiveness, including student growth on state and locally selected assessments and a teacher's performance according to a teacher practice rubric. The fundamental problem is that it's hard to assess the efficiency or fairness of an evaluation system that doesn't exist yet. There are too many unknowns to be able to judge, which is one of the arguments for piloting an evaluation system before bringing it to scale.

The resolution commends Scott for "his concern about the overemphasis on high stakes testing" and says the board believes "our state's future prosperity relies on a high-quality education system that prepares students for college and careers," not just their ability to jump through the state's hoops. And it asks the state Legislature to "reexamine the public school accountability system in Texas and to develop a system that encompasses multiple assessments, reflects greater validity, uses more cost efficient sampling techniques and other external evaluation arrangements."

In recent years, interest has grown in using classroom observation as a means to several ends, including teacher development, teacher evaluation, and impact evaluation of classroom-based interventions. Although education practitioners and researchers have developed numerous observational instruments for these purposes, many developers fail to specify important criteria regarding instrument use. In this article, the authors argue that for classroom observation to succeed in its aims, improved observational systems must be developed. These systems should include not only observational instruments but also scoring designs capable of producing reliable and cost-efficient scores and processes for rater recruitment, training, and certification. To illustrate how such a system might be developed and improved, the authors provide an empirical example that applies generalizability theory to data from a mathematics observational instrument.

But in those communities, there was one set of institutions that remained functioning and intact, and those were the neighborhood public schools. No matter what happened in the surrounding area, their doors remained open and they tried to serve young people whose lives were being turned inside out by a catastrophe of a kind that no one thought could take place in the United States of America. I visited those schools and while they showed serious signs of decay, and often seemed overwhelmed by the problems deeply wounded students brought inside their doors, they were in truth, their neighborhoods most important "safe zones," and at times provided an uplift for everyone through the artistic events they put on and the success of their teams Now flash ahead twenty years later and these very same schools are being blamed for the economic failures of the communities they are located in, and the educational failures of the students they work with. Their teachers are being publicly pilloried as overpaid and selfish, and a drain on a national economy that requires schools to be run with the efficiency of American business.

You know what one of my great pet peeves is? When prominent people, who are granted a prominent place in our society's discourse, cite "research" without telling us what that research is. Case in point: Newark Superintendent of Schools Cami Anderson: Research shows that effective teachers put students on an entirely different life trajectory - toward college, a higher salary, even a more stable family life. I am committed to ensuring that we have a strong teacher in every classroom and great leader in every school. Based on my 20-plus years in education, I know we must significantly change how we recruit, select, develop and retain our educators. [...] Some research shows that we lose our best teachers to charter schools and other professions because they feel they are not growing and they become disheartened seeing students in ineffective classrooms. After multiple poor ratings validated by several people, we should presume that these few teachers are ineffective and partner with the union to manage them out - efficiently. [emphasis mine] I would dearly love to see this "research." I would love to evaluate it for myself and decide whether it's think-tanky nonsense or serious work done by serious people. But I can't, can I? Because Anderson won't tell me what it is, and the Star-Ledger thinks it's enough for her to cite it without checking it for themselves.

State Education Commissioner John King spent most of his time before legislators today going to bat for Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed schools budget. But on one key point, he said the Board of Regents would prefer a change. The Regents would rather not hinge so much of the state's funds on a competition among districts, King said. Cuomo proposed using $250 million of a proposed $800 million school aid increase to reward districts for strong academic performance and management efficiency. King said the Regents, whose agenda is similar but not identical to Cuomo's, would slash that number by 80 percent. They would still hand out $50 million through a competition but think the remaining $200 million would be better used helping high-needs districts cover their expenses, he said.

A persistent -- and, I think, powerful -- theme in conservatism is the emphasis upon limits and doubt about the wisdom of centralized actors.  One of the strongest pragmatic defenses of the free market is that centralized authority is not efficient enough and wise enough to direct the economic energies of the nation; hence, a diversity of economic actors should make their own, personal economic decisions.  Moreover, a mainstream of conservative philosophy from Burke onwards suggests that the richness of a given human society and culture goes beyond mere statistics -- something about the weave of human life resists quantification. However, a great many "conservatives" ignore these teachings when the topic of education "reform" comes up.

A major unintended consequence of this ill-conceived reform movement is that it is distracting local school administrators and boards of education from closing and/or reorganizing schools for the right reasons by focusing all of the attention on closing schools for the wrong ones. In fact, even when school officials might wish to consider closing schools for logical reasons, they now seem compelled to say instead that they are proposing specific actions because the schools are "failing!" Not because they are too small to operate at efficient scale, that local demographic shift warrants reconsidering attendance boundaries, or that a facility is simply unsafe, or an unhealthy environment. In really blunt terms, the current reformy rhetoric is forcing leaders to make stupid arguments for school closures where otherwise legitimate ones might actually exist!

"Backing Governor Chris Christie and Commissioner Chris Cerf's unrelenting push for more "high-quality school options" in New Jersey, the Department of Education recently approved nine charter schools to open in September, bringing the total number of charter schools in New Jersey to 86. This move is part of a broader trend toward the marketization of education policy - the incorporation of market principles into the management and structure of public schools, as well as voucher programs to subsidize alternatives to public schools. These market principles include deregulation, competition, and the unqualified celebration of "choice," all of which are embodied in the charter school movement. Despite claims of greater efficiency, innovativeness, and responsiveness, however, the growing rhetoric around choice needs to be more closely scrutinized before we wholeheartedly jump on the charter school bandwagon."

As students across the country stage a national day of action to defend public education, we look at the nation's largest school systems - Chicago and New York City - and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In Chicago, the city's unelected school board voted last week to shut down seven schools and fire all of the teachers at 10 other schools. In New York City, many educators are criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration after the release of the names of 18,000 city teachers, along with a ranking system that claims to quantify each teacher's impact on the reading and math scores of their pupils on statewide tests. "The danger is that if teachers and schools are held accountable just for relatively narrow measures of what it is students are doing in class, that will become what drives the education system," says Columbia University's Aaron Pallas, who studies the efficiency of teacher-evaluation systems. "The effects of school closings in [New York City] is one of the great untold stories today," says Democracy Now! education correspondent Jaisal Noor. "The bedrock of these communities [has been] neighborhood schools and now they're being destroyed." Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union says, "When you have a CEO in charge of a school system as opposed to a superintendent - a real educator - what ends up happening is that they literally have no clue how to run the schools." Lewis recounts a meeting where she says Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told her that, "25 percent of these kids are never going to amount to anything."

Pau Hill and Marguerite Roza's response to my recent report - with Kevin Welner - and series of blog posts seems to offer as its central argument that we're simply a curmudgeons, offering lots of complaints about the rigor of their arguments and their suggestions for improving schooling productivity and efficiency, but providing no creative or immediately useful ideas or solutions for school districts or states in these tough economic times. My first response would be that bad ideas are bad ideas, even in the absence of alternatives. The fact that budgets are tight and many schools are underperforming is not an argument for implementing unproven, ill-considered policy solutions. That said, my second response is that Kevin Welner and I did in fact offer our own solutions, both in our policy brief and elsewhere.

Late yesterday, the New Jersey Department of Education Released its long awaited report on the state school finance formula. For a little context, the formula was adopted in 2008 and upheld by the court as meeting the state constitutional standard for providing a thorough and efficient system of public schooling. But, court acceptance of the plan came with a requirement of a review of the formula after three years of implementation. After a change in administration, with additional legal battles over cuts in aid in the interim, we now have that report.  The idea was that the report would suggest any adjustments that may need to be made to the formula to make the distributions of aid across districts more appropriate/more adequate (more constitutional?). I laid out my series of proposed minor adjustments in a previous post. Reduced to its simplest form, the current report argues that New Jersey's biggest problem in public education is its achievement gap - the gap between poor and minority students and between non-poor and non-minority students.  And the obvious proposed fix? To reduce funding to high poverty, predominantly minority school districts and increase funding to less poor districts with fewer minorities. Why? Because money and class size simply don't matter. Instead, teacher quality and strategies like those  used in Harlem Childrens' Zone do! Here's my quick, day-after, critique

But there is another case that teachers might make-a criticism that would level a blow to the radical overhaul of teacher evaluation, and, more importantly, one that just might help students learn. And the case is this: Achievement, as we measure it, is not really about achievement. As determined by multiple-choice tests-the dominant way that we measure it in the United States-achievement is not about how students can think or write or persuade. It is not about how they can perform experiments or produce original research. It is not about their prowess in art or civics or robotics. Instead, it is about memorized minutiae and good guesses. We accept this approach to measurement only because it is so common. And it is common not because it actually measures achievement, but because it is time-efficient and cost-effective. -iStockphoto.com/Nuno Silva Simply put, we're using the wrong instrument. Evaluating teachers through multiple-choice-based tests of student learning is like using the rules of Go Fish to assess poker skill.

"This book is about designing classroom grading systems that are both precise and efficient. One of the first steps to this end is to clarify the basic purpose of grades. How a school or district defines the purpose of grades dictates much of the form and function of grades."

TERRY MOE MADE his name in the early 1990s when, with John Chubb, he co-authored a much-discussed book arguing for a system of publicly-funded private school vouchers. The central thesis of Politics, Markets and America's Schools was that "direct democratic control" of public education was "incompatible with effective schooling." Chubb and Moe argued that private school vouchers would create efficient markets in education, and that "choice is a panacea."

In the world according to ALEC, competing firms in free markets are the only real source of social efficiency and wealth. Government contributes nothing but security. Outside of this function, it should be demonized, starved or privatized. Any force in civil society, especially labor, that contests the right of business to grab all social surplus for itself, and to treat people like roadkill and the earth like a sewer, should be crushed.

For decades, scholars have debated the purpose of U.S. education, but too often ignored how power brokers outside of the educational arena define education or the consequences of those definitions. This study examines how one of the most prominent categories of U.S. leaders, state governors, defines education and discusses the policy implications. We examine gubernatorial rhetoric-that is, public speeches-about education, collected from State of the State speeches from 2001 to 2008. In all, one purpose gains overwhelmingly more attention-economic efficiency. As long as governors and the general public, seen enthymematically through gubernatorial rhetoric, define education in economic terms, other purposes will likely remain marginalized, leading to education policies designed disproportionately to advance economic ends.