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This is a follow-up to Monday's guest post about a school board member who took a version of a state standardized test and was horrified at what he found. That post was written by veteran educator Marion Brady, who said he did not name the board member to save him from mean personal attacks by critics. The board member, however, agreed to talk to me about the experience on the record because he has come to feel very strongly about the issue. The man in question is Rick Roach, who is in his fourth four-year term representing District 3 on the Board of Education in Orange County, Fl., a public school system with 180,000 students. Roach took a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT, earlier this year.

There was a time when working at the Bronx High School of Science seemed like the pinnacle of a teaching career in the New York public schools. Along with Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science is one of the city's most storied high schools and among its most celebrated public institutions of any kind-part of a select fraternity that promises a free education of the highest quality to anyone with the intelligence to qualify. Together, the three schools reflect some of the city's most prized values: achievement, brains, democracy. Founded in 1938, Bronx Science counts E. L. Doctorow and Stokely Carmichael among its alumni, as well as seven Nobel laureates and six Pulitzer Prize winners. It has spawned 135 Intel science-competition finalists-more than any other high school in America. Virtually every senior last year gained acceptance to one of the country's top colleges. The faculty has long been known as among the best, most beloved anywhere. Teachers have traditionally held on to their jobs for decades; some have come to teach the children of their former students. This spring and summer, however, more than a third of the school's social-studies department-eight of the twenty teachers-announced they wouldn't be returning for the 2011 school year. Their departure came after similar exoduses in other departments. In 2009, it was math; before that, English. In 2010, nearly a quarter of the teachers at Bronx Science had less than three years of experience; the corresponding numbers at Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech were 6 percent and 1 percent, respectively. The reason for the seismic upheaval, virtually everyone agrees, is Valerie Reidy.

On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-October, between 40 and 50 Cedarburg School District educators sat in a small auditorium to hear about plans that could change the way they earn an income. Instead of pay raises awarded on the basis of education credits and years of experience-long a hallmark of teachers union salary structures-Superintendent Daryl Herrick said the district wanted to distribute annual bonuses to teachers based on the quality of their work. Educators' ranking on Cedarburg's 6-year-old, multipronged performance evaluation system would determine the size of their bonuses.

Education is a long way from the perfect pure market of rational consumers that we all learned about in Econ 101. When it comes to choice in education, there are issues of information asymmetries, principal-agent problems, and high transaction costs that make this something other than a perfectly competitive market. Not to mention that education, like health care, carries a deep emotional weight that leads consumers (even super-smart ones) to make decisions based on emotions as well as reason. Not to mention that parents in historically underserved communities have been given only very poor options for so long that they may not even fully grasp what a truly high-quality educational experience for their children can and should look like.

Given the experience to date with an overwhelming focus on student achievement scores as a basis for high-stakes decisions, policymakers would do well to pause and carefully examine the issues that make teacher assessment so complex before implementing an assessment plan. To facilitate such examination, this brief reviews credible research exploring: the feasibility of combining formative assessment (a basis for professional growth) and summative assessment (a basis for high-stakes decisions like dismissal); the various tools that might be used to gather evidence of teacher effectiveness; and the various stakeholders who might play a role in a teacher assessment system. It also offers a brief overview of successful exemplars.

The second element of the new stupid is Translating Research Simplistically. For two decades, advocates of class-size reduction have referenced the findings from the Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project, a class-size experiment conducted in Tennessee in the late 1980s. Researchers found significant achievement gains for students in small kindergarten classes and additional gains in 1st grade, especially for black students. The results seemed to validate a crowd-pleasing reform and were famously embraced in California, where in 1996 legislators adopted a program to reduce class sizes that cost nearly $800 million in its first year and billions in its first decade. The dollars ultimately yielded disappointing results, however, with the only major evaluation (a joint American Institutes for Research and RAND study) finding no effect on student achievement.

In this weeks' program we look at the attempt by education reformers to impose value added measures on teacher evaluation as an example of how neoliberal forces have used the economic crisis to blackmail schools into practices that do not serve teaching and learning, but do serve the corporate profiteers as they work to privatize public education and limit the goals of education to vocational training for corporate hegemony. These processes constrict possibilities for educational experiences that are critical, relational and transformative. We see that in naming these processes and taking risks both individually and collectively we can begin to speak back to and overcome these forces. In this program we speak with Sean Feeney, principal from Long Island New York, about the stance he and other principals have taken against the imposition of value added measures in the new Annual Professional Performance Review in New York State. We also speak with Celia Oyler, professor of education at Teachers College Columbia University, and Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, about the impact of value added measures on teacher education and the corporate powers behind these measures.

Two years ago I first heard about a new Charter School in New York City called The Equity Project, founded by a TFA alum named Zeke Vanderhoek.  There was an article in The New York Timesabout how they were going to pay their teachers $125,000 in return for more work and accountability.  Teachers could also earn bonuses of up to $25,000.  They were also featured on 60 minutes.  I have to admit that I considered applying.  That's a lot of money.  Even veteran teachers in New York City with 30 years experience make just about $100,000.  With 8 years in New York City, I'm up to about $75,000.

As the No Child Left Behind Act turns 10 on Sunday, the bill's future remains uncertain, with Congress and the Obama administration divided over how to update the controversial law. Meanwhile, NCLB has been largely irrelevant to two of the major trends in national education policy-making over the past three years: the push to tie teacher evaluation and pay to student achievement data, and the move toward a Common Core curriculum in math and English. (The main lever pushing those changes is the Obama administration's deployment of billions of federal grant dollars to states that agree to adhere to those priorities.) Nevertheless, NCLB has had a profound effect on what students experience in the classroom and on the way the American public talks about its schools. Here is my assessment of how NCLB has changed American education over the past decade, both for the better and for the worse.

Drawing on a statewide study of Florida middle-school reading coaches, this article examines what constitutes, contributes to, and is associated with high-quality coaches and coaching. Authors find that coaches generally held many of the qualifications recommended by state and national experts and principals and teachers rated their coaches highly on many indicators of quality. However, several common concerns about recruiting, retaining, and supporting high-quality coaches emerged. Estimates from models indicate that a few indicators of coach experience, knowledge, and skills had significant associations with perceived improvements in teaching and higher student achievement, although the magnitude of the latter relationship was quite small. Findings suggest that although possessing strong reading knowledge and instructional expertise may be important for coaching, it may not be sufficient.

...they both ignore the facts and push unproven experiments on our children.

This paper describes an experiment designed to investigate the impact of aligning student, parent, and teacher incentives on student achievement. On outcomes for which incentives were provided, there were large treatment effects. Students in treatment schools mastered more than one standard deviation more math objectives than control students, and their parents attended almost twice as many parent-teacher conferences. In contrast, on related outcomes that were not incentivized (e.g. standardized test scores, parental engagement), we observe both positive and negative effects. We argue that these facts are consistent with a moral hazard model with multiple tasks, though other explanations are possible.

Some two decades into the grand national experiment with charter schools, how much do we really know about them? Not all that much. And not nearly as much as we easily could, say researchers from the University of California, San Diego Division of Social Sciences. Writing in the journal Science, UC San Diego educational economist JuIian Betts and Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former director of the National Science Foundation, find that most studies of charter schools "use unsophisticated methods that tell us little about causal effects."

In response to low take-up, many public schools have experimented with moving breakfast from the cafeteria to the classroom. We examine whether such a program increases performance as measured by standardized test scores, grades and attendance rates. We exploit quasi-random timing of program implementation that allows for a difference-in-differences identification strategy. Our main identification assumption is that schools where the program was introduced earlier would have evolved similarly to those where the program was introduced later. We find that in-class breakfast increases both math and reading achievement by about one-tenth of a standard deviation relative to providing breakfast in the cafeteria. Moreover, we find that these effects are most pronounced for low performing, free-lunch eligible, Hispanic, and low BMI students. We also find some improvements in attendance for high achieving students but no impact on grades.

John White, who has experience working in school districts in New York City, New Orleans, and Chicago, was selected Wednesday by Louisiana's state board of education as the state's superintendent of education. The new schools chief was Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal's pick for the job, and his supporters included U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Unlike many of my colleagues and friends, I personally support the use of standardized testing results in education policy, even, with caution and in a limited role, in high-stakes decisions. That said, I also think that the focus on test scores has gone way too far and their use is being implemented unwisely, in many cases to a degree at which I believe the policies will not only fail to generate improvement, but may even risk harm. In addition, of course, tests have a very productive low-stakes role to play on the ground - for example, when teachers and administrators use the results for diagnosis and to inform instruction. Frankly, I would be a lot more comfortable with the role of testing data - whether in policy, on the ground, or in our public discourse - but for the relentless flow of misinterpretation from both supporters and opponents. In my experience (which I acknowledge may not be representative of reality), by far the most common mistake is the conflation of student and school performance, as measured by testing results.

As most people know, the majority of public school teachers are paid based on salary schedules. Most (but not all) contain a number of "steps" (years of experience) and "lanes" (education levels). Teachers are placed in one lane (based on their degree) and proceed up the steps as they accrue years on the job. Within most districts, these two factors determine the raises that teachers receive. Salary schedules receive a great deal of attention in our education debates.

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) just released a "fact sheet" on value-added (VA) analysis. I'm all for efforts to clarify complex topics such as VA, and, without question, there is a great deal of misinformation floating around on this subject, both "pro-" and "anti-." The fact sheet presents five sets of "myths and facts." Three of the "myths" seem somewhat unnecessary: that there's no research behind VA; that teachers will be evaluated based solely on test scores; and that VA is useless because it's not perfect. Almost nobody believes or makes these arguments (at least in my experience). But I guess it never hurts to clarify. In contrast, the other two are very common arguments, but they are not myths. They are serious issues with concrete policy implications. If there are any myths, they're in the "facts" column.

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."