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This is the RAND final evaluation report on the NYC bonus program.

The use of value-added models in education research has expanded rapidly. These models allow researchers to explore how a wide variety of policies and measured school inputs affect the academic performance of students. An important question is whether such effects are sufficiently large to achieve various policy goals. For example, would hiring teachers having stronger academic backgrounds sufficiently increase test scores for traditionally low-performing students to warrant the increased cost of doing so? Judging whether a change in student achievement is important requires some meaningful point of reference. In certain cases a grade-equivalence scale or some other intuitive and policy relevant metric of educational achievement can be used. However, this is not the case with item response theory (IRT) scale-score measures common to the tests usually employed in value-added analyses. In such cases, researchers typically describe the impacts of various interventions in terms of effect sizes, although conveying the intuition of such a measure to policymakers often is a challenge.   

In the most competitive market for job-hunting teachers in New Orleans in recent memory -- perhaps ever -- some worry that veteran educators have received short shrift. Several teachers who attended a recent meeting at the United Teachers of New Orleans, for instance, alleged the district has discriminated based on age in order to save money.

This was written by Brett Rosenthal, assistant principal at the high-achieving South Side High School in New York. He used to work at Jamaica High School in New York City.

The New York Times reports that there is a pilot program in Houston, called the "Apollo 20 Program" in which some of the district's regular public schools are "mimicking" the practices of high-performing charter schools. According to the Times article, the group of pilot schools seek to replicate five of the practices commonly used by high-flying charters: extended school time; extensive tutoring; more selective hiring of principals and teachers; "data-driven" instruction, including frequent diagnostic quizzing; and a "no excuses" culture of high expectations.

A young charter school administrator named Jessica Reid (pictured) played a small but important role in Steve Brill's book, Class Warfare, both in illustrating how some of the higher-performing charter schools do things and in highlighting the wear and tear that such efforts can create. What's it been like for her to be part of the book - her second stint as a character in a nonfiction account of school reform - and what does she think about key issues such as sustainability, ending LIFO, and unionization? Read the interview below.  You might be surprised.

Project VoiceScape, led by the documentary program POV, paired middle- and high-school artists nationwide with experienced filmmakers to tell the stories these teens see influencing the lives around them. The following short films were among the top teen documentaries and grant winners in a 2011 competition. Project VoiceScape is a project of Adobe Youth Voices, Adobe Foundation's global signature philanthropy program; POV, public television's award-winning showcase for independent nonfiction films; and PBS.