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The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation is pleased to share its latest annual Sponsorship Accountability Report, Two Steps Forward, One Step Back. The sixth of its kind, the report reflects on Ohio's charter school policy environment and the performance of Fordham sponsored charter schools - in terms of absolute achievement, growth, and adherence to goals set forth in our authorizing contract - as well as developments in state law over the year. Despite some tough battles during the state budget as it relates to holding authorizers (and operators) accountable, overall Fordham and its schools had an encouraging year, with Fordham sponsored-charters making achievement gains and positioning themselves to do even better in the future.

Education advocacy organizations (EAOs) come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some focus on specific issues (e.g. human capital decisions, forms of school choice, class size) while others approach policy more broadly (e.g. changing policy environments, membership decisions). Proponents of these organizations claim they exist, at least in part, to provide a counterbalance to various other powerful interest groups.

How can we improve performance in education, while cutting costs at the same time? In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that individual tutoring had a huge advantage over standard lecture environments: The average tutored student performed better than 98 percent of the students in the standard class. Until now, it has been hard to see how to make individualized education affordable. But I argue that technology may provide a path to this goal.

This August 2010 study from the Fordham Institute tackles a key question: Which of thirty major U.S. cities have cultivated a healthy environment for school reform to flourish (and which have not)? Nine reform-friendly locales surged to the front: New Orleans, Washington D.C., New York City, Denver, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Austin, Houston, and Fort Worth. Trailing far behind were San Jose, San Diego, Albany, Philadelphia, Gary, and Detroit. Read on to learn more.

Data can tell educators and students where they have been successful and where they need help, but too much data can make those same educators lose focus of what they are supposed to be doing, which is educating students and creating a safe and nurturing environment.

What IF schools created a culture of "DO" instead of a culture of "KNOW?" Doesn't that action-oriented stance reflect the kind of real-world learning environment that we know resonates with kids? 

New Zealand's 10-year experience with self-governing schools operating in a competitive environment provides new insights into school choice initiatives now being hotly debated in the United States with limited evidence. This article examines how New Zealand's system of parental choice of schools played out in that country's three major urban areas with particular emphasis on the sorting of students by ethnic and socioeconomic status. The analysis documents that schools with large initial proportions of minorities (Maori and Pacific Island students in the New Zealand context) were at a clear disadvantage in the educational market place relative to other schools and that the effect was to generate a system in which gaps between the "successful" and the "unsuccessful" schools became wider.

The dismantling of so many charters has some experts worrying that when students are forced to leave educational environments where they have friends and feel comfortable, the disruption is destabilizing and upsetting to some of the system's most vulnerable populations. Robert Slavin, director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, believes closure should be a last resort, after giving schools support and experimenting with solutions. Otherwise, well-meaning educational programs could wind up hurting the very kids they are trying to help. "Letting alone or closing are not the only two options," Slavin said. Closing "is very damaging to kids."

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!

There are three types of schools in New York City: Bloomberg schools, Gates schools, and orphans. The Bloomberg schools are the specialized small academies and charters that the Bloomberg administration set up to attract and hold the middle class. Student populations are often predominately White and Asian, although higher performing Black and Hispanic students from more stable home environments are generally welcomed. Gates schools are the foundation-supported schools that get extra resources from their benefactors. The Bloomberg and Gates schools get all the cookies.

Children with autism accounted for almost one third of a comprehensive sample of published court decisions concerning the core concepts of free appropriate public education (FAPE) and least restrictive environment (LRE) under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The other major, and more significant, finding was that when comparing this litigation percentage with the autism percentage in the special education population for the period 1993 to 2006, the ratio was approximately 10 : 1. The reasons for this disproportionality, or overrepresentation of children with autism in FAPE/LRE litigation, are complex. Special education leaders need to pay particular attention to establishing effective communications and trust building with parents of students with autism and to optimize the use of various approaches of alternative dispute resolution.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Measures of Effective Teaching" (MET) Project seeks to validate the use of a teacher's estimated "value-added"-computed from the year-on-year test score gains of her students-as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Using data from six school districts, the initial report examines correlations between student survey responses and value-added scores computed both from state tests and from higher-order tests of conceptual understanding. The study finds that the measures are related, but only modestly. The report interprets this as support for the use of value-added as the basis for teacher evaluations. This conclusion is unsupported, as the data in fact indicate that a teachers' value-added for the state test is not strongly related to her effectiveness in a broader sense. Most notably, value-added for state assessments is correlated 0.5 or less with that for the alternative assessments, meaning that many teachers whose value-added for one test is low are in fact quite effective when judged by the other. As there is every reason to think that the problems with value-added measures apparent in the MET data would be worse in a high-stakes environment, the MET results are sobering about the value of student achievement data as a significant component of teacher evaluations.

The AFT, led by its President Randi Weingarten, advocates vigorously on behalf of what it views as best for students in the public schools of America. In the current environment of test-driven accountability systems, there is a danger of narrowing the education our children receive to improve test scores. This leads to a "one-size-fits-all" approach that is justified on the grounds of the supposedly poor performance of U.S. schools on international comparisons. But too often, those who rely upon such comparison neither understand what the results mean nor do they examine what things high-scoring countries do. The AFT has never opposed the proper use of tests as one means of assessment. One can see AFT's well-thoughtout positions on proper use of testing on its website, including its position statement on Accountability and its publications and reports on Standards and Assessments. Now the AFT is running a petition drive against the idea of One Size Fits All in education, which has been the impact of current policies at the national and state level on assessment and accountability. 

Although much has been written about the importance of leadership in the determination of organizational success, there is little quantitative evidence due to the difficulty of separating the impact of leaders from other organizational components - particularly in the public sector. Schools provide an especially rich environment for studying the impact of public sector management, not only because of the hypothesized importance of leadership but also because of the plentiful achievement data that provide information on institutional outcomes. Outcome-based estimates of principal value-added to student achievement reveal significant variation in principal quality that appears to be larger for high-poverty schools. Alternate lower-bound estimates based on direct estimation of the variance yield smaller estimates of the variation in principal productivity but ones that are still important, particularly for high poverty schools. Patterns of teacher exits by principal quality validate the notion that a primary channel for principal influence is the management of the teacher force. Finally, looking at principal transitions by quality reveals little systematic evidence that more effective leaders have a higher probability of exiting high poverty schools.

So-called value-added rankings-which rank teachers according to the recorded growth in their students' test scores-are an important indicator of teacher effectiveness, but making them public is counterproductive to helping teachers improve. Doing so doesn't help teachers feel safe and respected, which is necessary if they are going to provide our kids with the positive energy and environment we all hope for. The release of the rankings (which follows a similar release last year in Los Angeles) is based on a misconception that "fixing" teachers is the solution to all that ails our education system.

By the end of her second year at MacFarland Middle School, fifth-grade teacher Sarah Wysocki was coming into her own. "It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined," Assistant Principal Kennard Branch wrote in her May 2011 evaluation. He urged Wysocki to share her methods with colleagues at the D.C. public school. Other observations of her classroom that year yielded good ratings. Two months later, she was fired. Wysocki, 31, was let go because the reading and math scores of her students didn't grow as predicted. Her undoing was "value-added," a complex statistical tool used to measure a teacher's direct contribution to test results. The District and at least 25 states, under prodding from the Obama administration, have adopted or are developing value-added systems to assess teachers.

"Teachers working in charters in an unnamed poor, rural Texas charter school district reported holding higher expectations of students and enjoying a more supportive teaching environment than colleagues who were working in traditional schools in the neighboring district. But the charter teachers had fewer opportunities for professional development and generally felt that the evaluation process was less fair, according to a new study that attempts to correct some of the problems with the existing research on differences between teachers in charters and traditional schools. "

"When our schools are run for profit, there are disastrous consequences for both students and teachers. Teachers are "managed" through the "outcomes" they produce, meaning their students' test scores. This makes teachers focus not on their students strengths, not on their students' needs or interests, but rather on their deficits, on the skills and concepts the students must master to pass the next test. Students who are, for whatever reasons unable to produce test score gains (perhaps they might be uninterested, alienated, traumatized, hungry, special education, new to the English language, or a hundred other reasons) become a liability for the teacher and the school. Under the pressure to produce "profits" is the form of higher test scores, schools begin to systematically reject students like these, as we are already seeing among some charter schools. Schools care less about nurturing students or teachers. The environment becomes less humane. Turnover increases among teachers, and attrition rises for students. Residual public schools become a dumping ground for students too difficult to educate."

"If you have heard the phrase "no excuses" charter schools but don't really know what they mean, here is an informative post about  them and the controversial philosophy under which they approach student discipline and achievement.  Joan Goodman, a professor in the Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania and director of the school's Teach For America program, explains her research on these charter schools to freelance journalist and public education advocate Jennifer Berkshire, who worked for six years editing a newspaper for the American Federation of Teachers in Massachusetts and who authors the EduShyster blog, where this Q * A originally appeared. Goodman is a former school psychologist whose article "Charter Management Organizations and the Regulated Environment: Is It Worth the Price?" appeared in the March 2013 issue of Educational Researcher."

"A couple of weeks ago, the website Vox.com published an article entitled, "11 facts about U.S. teachers and schools that put the education reform debate in context." The article, in the wake of the Vergara decision, is supposed to provide readers with the "basic facts" about the current education reform environment, with a particular emphasis on teachers. Most of the 11 facts are based on descriptive statistics. Vox advertises itself as a source of accessible, essential, summary information - what you "need to know" - for people interested in a topic but not necessarily well-versed in it. Right off the bat, let me say that this is an extraordinarily difficult task, and in constructing lists such as this one, there's no way to please everyone (I've read a couple of Vox's education articles and they were okay). That said, someone sent me this particular list, and it's pretty good overall, especially since it does not reflect overt advocacy for given policy positions, as so many of these types of lists do. But I was compelled to comment on it. I want to say that I did this to make some lofty point about the strengths and weaknesses of data and statistics packaged for consumption by the general public. It would, however, be more accurate to say that I started doing it and just couldn't stop. In any case, here's a little supplemental discussion of each of the 11 items"