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Each day this week I have presented a response to different parts of Governor McDonnell's "Opportunity to Learn" education agenda. On Monday, I gave an introduction and talked about the goal of advancing literacy in the early grades. On Tuesday, I wrote about implications for repealing the unpopular Kings Dominion Law. On Wednesday, I talked about proceeding thoughtfully and carefully with expanding choice in the Commonwealth. On Thursday, I discussed evaluating principals and teachers. This concluding post brings me to the end and back to the place where I started in the first post of this series: Money.

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.

When Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, lawmakers set a goal widely recognized as impossible - that every student in the country be proficient in math and reading by 2014. Now, South Dakota and other states are creating their own school accountability systems and setting their own goals under a waiver system established by the Obama administration. The U.S. Department of Education, which will give final approval to the plans, wants to see states set "ambitious but achievable" annual targets for individual schools.

A recent Times article, "Motivating Students With Cash-for-Grades Incentive," looks at efforts around the world to pay students for academic achievement.

Arizona is putting in place some of the biggest changes in public schools in two decades. Over the next three years, the reforms will shake up what students learn and when they are promoted, as well as how teachers are evaluated and schools are graded.

As teacher evaluations are becoming more prevalent in schools across the country amid a growing debate on how best to grade teachers, a new report out today adds to the growing number of studies concluding that student test scores should be one of several determinants in measuring student effectiveness. Instead, teachers should be assessed based on a combination of classroom observations, student feedback and value-added student achievement gains, according to the Measures of Effective Teaching project's paper, "Gathering Feedback for Teaching." Educators should be observed by certified raters through multiple, high-quality observations with clear standards.

Unlike in elementary schools, high school teacher effects may be confounded with unobserved track-level treatments (such as the AVID program) that are correlated with individual teachers. I present a strategy that exploits detailed course-taking information to credibly estimate the effects of 9th grade Algebra and English teachers on test scores. I document substantial bias due to track-specific treatments and I show that traditional tests for the existence of teacher effects are flawed. After accounting for bias, I find sizable algebra teacher effects and little evidence of English teacher effects. I find little evidence of teacher spillovers across subjects.

Suppose your child is about to enter the fourth grade and has been assigned to an excellent teacher. Then the teacher decides to quit. What should you do? The correct answer? Panic! Well, not exactly. But a landmark new research paper underscores that the difference between a strong teacher and a weak teacher lasts a lifetime.

Central Falls, though, also has one of the most promising reading experiments in the country. The Learning Community, a local charter school, and the Central Falls public elementary schools have joined forces in a collaboration that has resulted in dramatic improvements in the reading scores of the public schoolchildren from kindergarten to grade 2. Given the mistrust of charter schools by public schoolteachers, creating this collaboration was no small feat. And while the city's bankruptcy now threatens it, the Central Falls experiment not only needs to be preserved, it should be replicated across the country. I haven't seen anything that makes more sense.

The Connecticut classroom of the future may not be limited by a traditional school year, the four walls of a classroom, or even the standard progression of grades, based on a proposed packageof unusually bold changes that are being advanced by the state's school superintendents. Instead, the current system would be replaced by a "learner-centered" education program that would begin at age 3; offer parents a menu of options, including charter schools and magnet schools; and provide assessments when an individual child is ready to be tested, rather than having all children tested in a class at the same time.

A few months back I got into an interesting discussion with my high school friends on Facebook about the books we read in our tenth grade advanced English class at Westhill High School in Stamford. My friend Debbie, who's clearly even more of a pack rat than my mother, still had the syllabus, and was able to rattle off impressively long list of books that we'd read and analyzed. When I compared it to the number of books my daughter, a high school sophomore, will get through this year in her advanced English class, it's really quite astounding. But actually, it's not. When I look at the school calendar, the entire month of March is lost to CMT/CAPT testing.  And that's just the actual testing. Much of the month before will be devoted to exercises that prepare students for the tests. Not for reading great works of literature and learning to use critical thinking skills, but rather for learning test taking skills.

Every year in New York State, there's an entire week in January devoted to giving Regents exams. Kids can study, prepare, and take tests, or if they're really lucky, get a week off. Meanwhile, their teachers proctor, grade exams, and take care of whatever has to be done before the kids return. This year things are different.

As we once again begin discussing & debating the appropriate role for Charter schools in New Jersey's education reform "mix," here's a round-up on the New Jersey charter school numbers, in terms of demographic comparisons to all other public and charter schools in the same 'city' and proficiency rates (across all grades) compared to all others in the same 'city.'

New York is on notice: The feds are threatening to yank nearly $1 billion in education funding unless the state adopts a new teacher evaluation system. Senior members of U.S. Education Secretary Arnie Duncan's office warned Gov. Cuomo's team Friday that New York would lose the staggering sum - at least $300 million more than previously thought - if the state made no progress on a system to grade teachers, a source with direct knowledge of the discussions said.

Class Size Matters has done a detailed analysis of the trend in student achievement in NYC since 2003, when Mayor Bloomberg's educational policies were first implemented, as measured by the NAEPs - the national assessment carried out every two years by the federal government in 4th and 8th grade English and math.  

The repercussions from closing persistently failing schools are about to be felt by tiny Premont, Texas, which is located about 150 miles south of San Antonio. The town of 2,700 is bracing for the shuttering of the Premont Independent School District by the Texas Education Agency because of poor academics and a high truancy rate ("Texas district cancels sports in hopes of improving grades," Fox News, Jan. 21). In a last ditch attempt to avoid what seems to be inevitable, officials are eliminating sports this spring and next fall to save enough money to keep the district's schools open. Although school districts across Texas are dealing with about $4 billion in state-aid cuts, rural districts are particularly vulnerable because they have limited local tax bases. That's why the situation in Premont serves as an invaluable case study.

We examine earnings records for more than 130,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001-02 and 2006-07 school years, roughly 35,000 of whom left the classroom during that time.  A majority of those leaving the classroom remained employed by public school districts.  Among teachers in grades 4-8 leaving for other industries, a 1 standard deviation increase in estimated value-added to student math and reading achievement is associated with 6-8 percent higher earnings outside of teaching.  The relationship between effectiveness and earnings is stronger in other industries than it is for the same groups of teachers while in the classroom, suggesting that current compensation systems do not fully account for the higher opportunity wages of effective teachers. 

A crowd of about 200 community leaders, elected officials and N.A.A.C.P. members turned out Thursday night to oppose the city's plan to phase out the middle grades of Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Harlem. In an unusual display of force, members of the District 3 Community Education Council and the school leadership teams spent about an hour grilling the city's chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, about the controversial decision, before the public comment period even began.

New York City teenagers attending small public high schools with about 100 students per grade were more likely to graduate than their counterparts at larger schools, according to new findings from a continuing study released on Wednesday night.

One of the highest compliments a teacher can get from a student is to be told that she or he is fair. When students believe their teacher is fair, they accept test grades, homework assignments, and discipline without drama. Teachers, like their students and like people in other professions, appreciate fairness and should expect it. With that in mind, I am not surprised by the pushback on new evaluation systems from teachers in Hawaii, New York, Tennessee, and many other state and local school districts. Using student test scores from flawed standardized tests as a measure of teacher evaluation does not meet the fairness test for teachers who have had to endure "reform du jour' for the last decade. It does not look like a fair deal for teachers, and fairness is one of the strongest core values of teachers.