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Within hours of the publication of the Teacher Data Reports (TDRs) last Friday, the UFT began to hear stories of teachers and their families being hounded by news reporters from the New York Post. On Friday evening, New York Post reporters appeared at the door of the father of Pascale Mauclair, a sixth grade teacher at P.S. 11, the Kathryn Phelan School, which is located in the Woodside section of Queens. They told Mauclair's father that his daughter was one of the worst teachers in New York City, based solely on the TDR reports, and that they were looking to  interview her. They then made their way to Mauclair's home, where she told them that she did not want to comment on the matter. The Post reporters rang Mauclair's bell and knocked on her window all Saturday morning. She finally called the police, who told the reporters that since they were inside her private housing development, they were on private property and had to leave. The reporters rang the bell again, leading to a second visit from the police and a final warning to leave. Later, Mauclair's neighbors told her that that the Post reporters had been asking them questions about her.

Performance ratings for 217 New York City charter school teachers were made public on Tuesday but city officials cautioned that because of missing information, the reports cannot be used to objectively compare the quality of a public school versus charter school education. The controversial ratings cover math and English teachers of grades four to eight at 32 charter schools. These schools receive public funding, but are privately managed, and unlike traditional public schools, they voluntarily participated in the city's teacher data initiative, believing that the information would remain confidential. Some of the schools that volunteered for the assessment are part of established charter management organizations like KIPP or Uncommon, while others are independent schools, commonly called mom-and-pops.

Increasingly, teachers in both the public and independent sector are being asked to teach the same material in the same way at the same time so that standards and accountability measures can be established. Of course, there is nothing wrong with standards. Most teachers - indeed most professionals in any field - have them. And there is nothing wrong with aiming for some common core of knowledge to be taught in, for example, ninth-grade English. But increasingly, a bottom-line for minimum standards and uniformity is being raised to the top of all curricular considerations. And as our cultural obsession with standardization and accountability measures is increasingly reflected in our schools, the most common complaint I now hear from both teachers and administrators is this: I have been stripped of my professional judgment, creativity, and freedom to make decisions in the best interests of my students.

Are doctors denigrated for the high rates of diabetes? Are the police officers responsible for crimes? Why are teachers responsible for the lack of parenting? For the impact of poverty? How can teachers be "graded" on student progress when we have no control over students out of school experiences? Why aren't "they" listening to us? The educational community: parents, principals, teachers and advocates all feel the current government education policies are seriously flawed; no matter how much they express their opinions no one seems to be listening to their cries.

Gov. Jindal has submitted a legislative proposal that would offer vouchers to more than half the students in the state; vastly expand the number of privately managed charter schools by giving the state board of education the power to create up to 40 new charter authorizing agencies; introduce academic standards and letter grades for pre-schoolers; and end seniority and tenure for teachers. Under his plan, the local superintendent could immediately fire any teacher-tenured or not-who was rated "ineffective" by the state evaluation program. If the teacher re-applied to teach, she would have to be rated "highly effective" for five years in a row to regain tenure. Tenure, needless to say, becomes a meaningless term, since due process no longer is required for termination. The bill is as punitive as possible with respect to public education and teachers. It says nothing about helping to improve or support them. It's all about enabling students to leave public schools and creating the tools to intimidate and fire teachers. This "reform" is not conservative. I would say it is radical and reactionary. But it is in no way unique to Louisiana.

Last week, Leo Casey gave Edwize readers the real story of Pascal Mauclair, whom the NY Post declared was the "at the bottom of the heap" when the DOE released the Teacher Data Reports to the press. The DOE gave Ms. Mauclair a "0" on her report, but the results seemed, to put it mildly, arbitrary. As Casey pointed out, Ms. Mauclair was graded on a small number (11) of high-need (ESL) students who were compared to other students learning in very different, departmentalized, classrooms. Aside from that, Ms. Mauclair has a reputation as an excellent teacher. As her principal said, "I would put my own child in her class." All this alone should be enough to clear Ms. Mauclair's name. But this week fresh evidence shows that Ms. Mauclair's report should be declared invalid altogether by the DOE.

By the end of her second year at MacFarland Middle School, fifth-grade teacher Sarah Wysocki was coming into her own. "It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined," Assistant Principal Kennard Branch wrote in her May 2011 evaluation. He urged Wysocki to share her methods with colleagues at the D.C. public school. Other observations of her classroom that year yielded good ratings. Two months later, she was fired. Wysocki, 31, was let go because the reading and math scores of her students didn't grow as predicted. Her undoing was "value-added," a complex statistical tool used to measure a teacher's direct contribution to test results. The District and at least 25 states, under prodding from the Obama administration, have adopted or are developing value-added systems to assess teachers.

The long-term goal of many education reformers is to create a teaching force in which nearly all teachers are high-performing. However, in New York City's rankings - which rated thousands of teachers who taught in the system from 2007 to 2010 - teachers were graded on a curve. That is, under the city's formula, some teachers would always be rated as "below average," even if student performance increased significantly in all classrooms across the city.

In today's knowledge‐based economy, education-especially education beyond high school-is central to achieving the American Dream. Yet, recent research points to devastating statistics related to educational outcomes in the nation's communities of color.  For example, only 54 percent of Native American students will graduate high school on‐time. Half of today's African American and Latino eighth‐graders will drop out of high school before graduation. And, only 10 percent of African‐American and Latino eighth grade students will complete any sort of college degree. While Asian American student outcomes are seemingly high compared to other students of color, this is not true for all Asian groups. Within the Southeast Asian community, 34 percent of Laotian, 39 percent of Cambodian, and 40 percent of Hmong adults do not have a high school diploma or equivalent.

This paper outlines how such an investment structure might be used to solve a different challenge: chronic academic underachievement among low-income students. The academic achievement gap is well documented and seemingly intractable. Low-income students do consistently worse than their middle and upper-income peers in all measures of academic success at every grade level, including standardized test scores, high school graduation rates, and college completion rates. A number of social and education reforms have been offered to help close the achievement gap. This paper will not attempt to add to this voluminous history; rather, it will explore a new approach to financing schools that demonstrate success in closing the gap. It will also deliberately steer clear of any discussion of pedagogy. Curriculum reform is beyond the scope of this proposal as well. That said, this paper will focus on a particular type of school-charters-because many have demonstrated success serving low-income students.

Little did I know when I posted a piece on the NYC Public School Parents blog on April 19 revealing that there was a passage on the eighth-grade New York state exam about a race between a talking pineapple and a hare that a month later, people would still be talking about it. I've broken quite a few stories in my time, but none has had the viral velocity of this scandal.

Many uptown Manhattan parents hope that winning the lottery for a seat at Harlem Success Academy I will put their child on the path to academic achievement. But just because a child gets into Harlem Success does not mean he or she will complete 5th grade there. The school -- part of Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy network -- has a high attrition rate, leading critics to charge that the school may push out low achieving or difficult students.

Jindal vetoed House Bill 1106 by Rep. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, which would have established a tax rebate for those who give to low-performing schools. The percentage of the donation that could be claimed as a rebate would have depended on the school's letter grade, with donations to failing schools eligible for a rebate of 75 percent. The program would have been capped at $10 million.

After 38 years of teaching in Vermont and Minnesota in a variety of schools and programs, I've decided to step away and retire from classroom teaching. I've cleaned out my classroom, graded all the papers and returned my library books. Now I need to clean out my head. Here is my bucket list of 10 items that are useless and should be removed from schools, followed by 10 items that should be the center of every school system.

"A dominant narrative of the past decade and a half of education reform has been to highlight alleged persistent failures of our education system.  While this tale began long ago with the Reagan Administration report A Nation at Risk, it has been put into overdrive in the era of test based accountability that began with the No Child Left Behind Act.  That series of amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act mandated annual standardized testing of all students in grades 3-8 and once in high school, set a target for 100% proficiency for all students in English and mathematics, and imposed consequences for schools and districts that either failed to reach proficiency targets or failed to test all students.  Under the Obama administration, the federal Department of Education has freed states from the most stringent requirements to meet those targets, but in return, states had to commit themselves to specific reforms such as the adoption of common standards, the use of standardized test data in the evaluation of teachers, and the expansion of charter schools.  All of these reforms are predicated on the constantly repeated belief that our citizens at all levels are falling behind international competitors, that our future workforce lacks the skills they will need in the 21st century, and that we have paid insufficient attention to the uneven distribution of equal opportunity in our nation. But what if we've gotten the entire thing wrong the whole time?"

"A federally-funded two-year study of professional development programs for seventh grade mathematics teachers found there was no statistically significant cumulative impact on teacher knowledge or on student achievement. The study, led by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), in partnership with MDRC, was released on May 25, 2011 by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES)."

"This was written by sophomore Jack Eiselt, who attends Myers Park High School in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina. This year the district launched a new testing regime so that students take standardized tests in every subject so that all teachers can be evaluated based in part on the test scores of their students. Students in every grade helped field-test a total of 52 new tests this spring, kindergarteners included. This piece appeared in the Charlotte Observer."

This is the intro to links to the following articles: A Dangerous Obsession Linda Darling-Hammond Avoiding the Poverty Issue Paul Thomas Costly, But Worth It Marcus Winters Wasting More Money Molly Putnam One Factor Among Many Kevin Carey Trust Principals, Not Tests Michael Petrilli Too Much For Tests to Bear Clara Hemphill

"New York City education officials are developing more than a dozen new standardized tests, but in a sign of the times, their main purpose will be to grade teachers, not the students who take them. "

"While any teacher evaluation system must include a measure of growth of student learning over time, a snapshot of a student's skills, understanding and content knowledge doesn't give a true picture of a teacher's performance. Our current state tests are not designed to measure growth from year to year, and we are years away from having valid state tests that are. "