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Teacher evaluation--with all its multiple facets, blind alleys, disputed data models, technocratic hype and roll-out problems-- is on every principal's mind these days. It would be great to think that principals in states with new evaluation plans are eager to begin this work, now having permission to sink more deeply into their roles as instructional guides, to have productive two-way professional conversations with their teachers, thinking together about improving instruction to reach specific goals. But no. They're worried about another time suck and avalanche of paperwork on top of an already-ridiculous workload. And--you can't blame them. Being a good principal, like being a good teacher, is impossible. There is no way one single human being can cover all the bases, from keeping the buses running on time to staying abreast of the new math curriculum in grades K through 6. Besides, the new evaluation plans have huge problems embedded, beyond the make-work element.

The average scores of graduating teacher-candidates on state-required licensing exams are uniformly higher, often significantly, than the passing scores states set for such exams, according to an Education Week analysis of preliminary data from a half-dozen states. The pattern appears across subjects, grade levels, and test instruments supplied by a variety of vendors, the new data show, raising questions about the rigor and utility of current licensing tests.

Right now, the biggest, heaviest assumption on the reform truck has it that, when the Common Core State Standards Initiative is complete - when somebody has decided exactly what every kid in every state is supposed to know in every school subject at every grade level - the education reform truck will take off like gangbusters. It won't. If all the reformers' flawed assumptions are corrected, but the traditional math-science-language-arts-social-studies "core curriculum" remains the main organizer of knowledge, the truck may creep forward a few inches, but it won't take the young where they need to go if we care about societal survival. The mess from this generation's political paralysis and refusal to address looming problems can't be cleaned up using the same education that helped create it.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, has released its final content frameworks for the common standards. And the newsiest thing about the document is this: The consortium is going to create content frameworks for grades K-2.

At the very least, I have to rethink my views of Darling-Hammond and the ill-considered labels thrown around in school policy battles, because I know the Hillsdale story is real. I attended Hillsdale and have visited often since graduating. Former Hillsdale principal Don Leydig, one of the most influential participants in its changes, has been my friend since third grade.

Nearly 40 years have passed since the Fiscal Crisis budget cuts and our public schools now face a challenge more insidious and perhaps, more formidable. All across the nation, a poisonous coalition of multi billionaire business leaders, test and technology companies, charitable foundations and elected officials are pushing a nationwide education agenda that involves the introduction of high stakes testing at all grade levels, evaluation of teachers and schools based on student test scores, and the introduction of "competition" into public education by the creation of independently managed charter schools given special advantages in funding and recruitment.

I'm used to receiving a variety of conflicting opinions on the quality of my work. I don't believe, however, that most Nebraskans and Iowans are used to conflicting opinions about the quality of their public schools. They definitely are not used to the grades for those schools falling into the realm of failure.

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

School administrators gave 99.4 percent of all Pennsylvania teachers "satisfactory" ratings during the 2009-10 school year, the latest data available from the state Department of Education show. But, said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality: "That kind of teacher evaluation system tells you almost nothing." The state's teacher evaluations "give no consideration to teacher effectiveness and include no objective measures of student performance," Jacobs said. The nonprofit, nonpartisan council, partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recently gave Pennsylvania an overall grade of D+ for progress on policies to support and measure teacher effectiveness and an F for efforts to rid schools of ineffective teachers. That could change. State education officials are trying to convince legislators to change the Pennsylvania school code to allow for more comprehensive teacher evaluations, a move teachers unions tentatively support.

This article explores student mobility in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) and its effects on student achievement. An urban district with plentiful opportunities for school choice, Milwaukee has a transient student population.  From 2003-04 through 2007-08, 11% of MPS students switched schools or left the district between the fall and spring of a given school year, while 22% were mobile between the spring of one year and the fall of the following year. Using both student fixed-effects and instrumental variables approaches, we examined the effects of this mobility on both the students who moved and their classmates who did not. We found evidence that mobile students' test score gains dropped immediately after they switched schools, but these students typically recovered their losses in the subsequent year. We detected modest but statistically significant negative effects of grade-level turnover on non-mobile students' academic achievement.   

Tennessee's new teacher evaluation system has hit an unexpected snag. With teacher tenure and job retention riding on a top score, Williamson County is banning student teachers from working in core subjects in high school and suggesting individual principals not allow them in grades 3-8. Even though they're not under formal policies, other principals and teachers statewide who formerly volunteered to take student teachers are backing off, too.

Analysts often examine the black-white test score gap conditional on family income. Typically only a current income measure is available. We argue that the gap conditional on permanent income is of greater interest, and we describe a method for identifying this gap using an auxiliary data set to estimate the relationship between current and permanent income. Current income explains only about half as much of the black-white test score gap as does permanent income, and the remaining gap in math achievement among families with the same permanent income is only 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations in two commonly used data sets. When we add permanent income to the controls used by Fryer and Levitt (2006), the unexplained gap in 3rd grade shrinks below 0.15 standard deviations, less than half of what is found with their controls.

New York State is set to release its annual testing data tomorrow. Throughout the state, and especially in New York City, we will hear a lot about changes in school and district proficiency rates. The rates themselves have advantages - they are easy to understand, comparable across grades and reflect a standards-based goal. But they also suffer severe weaknesses, such as their sensitivity to where the bar is set and the fact that proficiency rates and the actual scores upon which they're based can paint very different pictures of student performance, both in a given year as well as over time. I've discussed this latter issue before in the NYC context (and elsewhere), but I'd like to revisit it quickly.

The biggest new thing in American public education these days is a two-volume, 230-page, written-by-committee document called the Common Core State Standards. Forty-five states have pledged to the federal government that they will adopt the standards-which specify the math and English skills that students must attain in each grade from kindergarten to the end of high school-within the next several years. Some of these states genuinely believe that doing so will make more of their students ready for college and careers. Others are on board primarily because the Obama administration has enticed them with billions of dollars from its Race to the Top competition, part of the administration's economic-stimulus program. Within the school-reform community, the standards have set off a virtual civil war. It pits those who believe that America desperately needs national standards to catch up to its international competitors against those who think that the administration, by imposing the standards on the states, is guilty of an unwise, or even illegal, power grab.

"In numerous previous posts I have summarized New Jersey charter school enrollment data, frequently pointing out that the highest performing charter schools in New Jersey tend to be demographically very different from schools in their surrounding neighborhoods and similar grade level schools throughout their host districts or cities. I have tried to explain over and over that the reason these differences are important is because they constrain the scalability of charter schooling as a replicable model of "success." Again, to the extent that charter successes are built on serving vastly different student populations, we can simply never know (even with the best statistical analyses attempting to sort out peer factors, control for attrition, etc.) whether the charter schools themselves, their instructional strategies/models are effective and/or would be effective with larger numbers of more representative students. Here, I take a quick look at the other side of the picture, again focusing on the city of Newark. Specifically, I thought it would be interesting to evaluate the effect on Newark schools enrollment of the shift in students to charter schools, now that charters have taken on a substantial portion of students in the city. If charter enrollments are - as they seem to be - substantively different from district schools enrollments, then as those charter populations grow and remain different from district schools, we can expect the district schools population to change.  In particular, given the demography of charter schools in Newark, we would expect those schools to be leaving behind a district of escalating disadvantage - but still a district serving the vast majority of kids in the city."

A city board voted on Thursday night to close 18 schools and eliminate the middle school grades at five others, citing poor performance. The decision drew howls of opposition from hundreds of teachers' union members, parents and students, who gathered in the auditorium of Brooklyn Technical High School along with a group that was inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

There is an interesting NY Times article about the diminishing numbers of black students at Stuyvesant and other Specialized Science High Schools (SSHS) in NYC.   It includes the following statement:  Over the years, there have been a host of efforts to increase the number of black and Latino students at Stuyvesant and the other large specialized high schools in the city, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, like making interviews and grade-point averages part of the admissions process. It is linked to an article that mentions an earlier DOE program to prep promising middle school minority students for the exam (which now has been recast as a program for economically disadvantaged students and has been heavily cut back in any case.)  But it has no info that I can see about any efforts on the part of city to change the actual admissions process which is based solely on one high-stakes exam. 

This past week, I read "the evaluation deal" between NYSUT (the New York teachers union) and the State Education Department. I was surprised, and I was angry. I was particularly struck by the lack of logic and fairness in the rules of the deal. And so to gain some perspective (and to lower my blood pressure) I went to the cafeteria at lunchtime and sat with some kids. I bought some bags of chips and put them on the table and told them I wanted input on grading, a subject near and dear to their hearts. The first scenario I gave them was this…. "Suppose this marking period you had three tests. Each of the tests was on different topics, and you passed all three. Would it be fair for your teacher to fail you?"

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as "ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective." Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents. But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: "Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall." What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and several other governors across the country have bought into an education-reform plan that won't work, a nationally recognized education adviser and author told members of the Louisiana School Boards Association on Thursday. Diane Ravitch, who says she once supported vouchers, charter schools and standardized testing for grading schools, says she reversed her opinions when she found "they don't work." "It's the wrong way to go," she said. "Public education is in a state of crisis, in a fight for survival."