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This was written by Randy Ross, who was a principal and teacher for over 43 years both in New York City and Great Neck, LI, as well as an assistant superintendent, professor at CCNY's School of Education and director of instruction and curriculum at the North Shore Hebrew Academy in Great Neck. Half of his career was in urban schools, half in suburban, and the last three years have been in private schools and higher education.

In my previous post, I explained that the new push to rate schools of education by the student outcome gains of teachers who graduated from certain education schools is a problematic endeavor… one unlikely to yield particularly useful information, and one that may potentially create the wrong incentives for education schools.  To reiterate, I laid out 3 reasons (and there are likely many more) why this approach is so problematic. Here, I divide them out a bit more - 4 ways.

This past Mon­day, the Wall Street Jour­nal posted an opin­ion piece by Fran Tarken­ton in which he pos­tu­lated what the NFL might be like if it had to play by what he called "teach­ers' rules."

Video of Commissioner King's presentation at the NYSCOSS Fall Conference on Superintendent Leadership and the Regents Reform Agenda.

Presentation to NYS School Superintendents.

They say it's all about great teachers and principals....

On Oct. 1, 650 people attended the 4th annual Northwest Teachers for Social Justice conference in Seattle.  Rethinking Schools editor Stan Karp gave a well-received talk on "Challenging Corporate Ed Reform." He ended on an uplifting note with " 10 hopeful, tangible signs of organizing resistance and alternatives to the corporate reform agenda."    The following is an excerpt from that presentation.

Basically, almost everything that market-based reformers think needs to happen has been the reality in DCPS for the past 2-3 years. And the staff  has been transformed too. The majority of principals, and a huge proportion of teachers, were hired during the tenure of either Michelle Rhee or her successor, Kaya Henderson. The district should be in overdrive right about now. Is it?

It is an almost universal tribute offered about Michelle Rhee's 3 1/2 -year tenure of the Washington D.C. school district - that if she accomplished one thing, it was to instill a sense of urgency in the city about the need to fix broken schools that had failed children for decades. Actually, it was Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, who hired Rhee and gave her carte blanche, who made school reform the city's top priority. Rhee got all the attention because Fenty wanted it that way.

Bill Gates was just in the news again, bemoaning the sorry state of America's schools, insisting that business leaders like him have a lot to teach us about measuring performance. Mr. Gates, in years past, has worried about the fact that we rank poorly on international educational comparisons, suggesting this will cause us to fall behind economically. The answer, according to Mr. Gates, is that we must get rid of bad teachers. He said, during his appearance on Oprah last year, that if we got rid of all the bad teachers, "our schools would shoot from the bottom of these rankings to the top."

Our main research question is the following: How well do commonly used estimators perform in estimating teacher effects under a variety of known conditions, including those in which particular underlying assumptions are violated?

"Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and soon-to-be acting Education Commissioner Elizabeth Berlin offered a host of proposals that would dramatically change education policy in New York state in a 20-page letter released Wednesday."

"Moshe Adler, professor of economics at Columbia University, has emerged as one of the most incisive critics of the work of Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff on Value-added measurement (VAM)."

"The biggest threat to education today is the corporate education reform movement-what many of us call "Ed Deform." It is also the biggest threat to teachers' working conditions."

"...on October 20, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) unveiled a draconian proposal that would tie teacher performance, narrowly defined, to teacher licensing. Thousands of educators knew an unmitigated attack when they saw one, and responded accordingly."

"In a recent paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Education Finance and Policy, coauthors Cassandra Guarino (Indiana University - Bloomington), Mark Reckase (Michigan State University), and Jeffrey Wooldridge (Michigan State University) ask and then answer the following question: "Can Value-Added Measures of Teacher Performance Be Trusted?""