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The racial achievement gap in education is an important social problem to which decades of research have yielded no scalable solutions. Recent evidence from "No Excuses" charter schools - which demonstrates that some combination of school inputs can educate the poorest minority children - offers a guiding light. In the 2010-2011 school year, we implemented five strategies gleaned from best practices in "No Excuses" charter schools - increased instructional time, a more rigorous approach to building human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations - in nine of the lowest performing middle and high schools in Houston, Texas. We show that the average impact of these changes on student achievement is 0.276 standard deviations in math and 0.059 standard deviations in reading, which is strikingly similar to reported impacts of attending the Harlem Children's Zone and Knowledge is Power Program schools - two strict "No Excuses" adherents. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of the scalability of the experiment.

While the importance of effective principals is undisputed, few studies have addressed what specific skills principals need to promote school success. This study draws on unique data combining survey responses from principals, assistant principals, teachers and parents with rich administrative data to identify which principal skills matter most for school outcomes. Factor analysis of a 42-item task inventory distinguishes five skill categories, yet only one of them, the principals' organization management skills, consistently predicts student achievement growth and other success measures. Analysis of evaluations of principals by assistant principals confirms this central result. Our analysis argues for a broad view of instructional leadership that includes general organizational management skills as a key complement to the work of supporting curriculum and instruction.

The double-entry-journal incident was part of my induction into New York City public schools. There, the rubric (which usually emphasized appearance and format) ruled supreme; if you did everything just so, you could get a good score, while if you diverged from the instructions but had a compelling idea, you could be penalized. I saw rubrics applied to student work, teachers' lessons, bulletin boards, classroom layout, group activities, and standardized tests. I will comment on the last of these-rubrics on standardized tests-and their bearing on the recent publication of New York City teachers' value-added ratings (their rankings based on student test score growth).

The two teachers systematically dissect the video, noting a variety of missteps. There are a few unquestionable errors of mathematics: Khan uses incorrect terminology at a couple of points. Khan is also inconsistent in his language about positive and negative numbers (using plus when he means positive, or minus when he means negative), which is perhaps a lesser sin, but poor practice and misleading for students. He's also inconsistent in his use of symbols, sometimes writing "+4", sometimes writing "4", never explaining why he does or doesn't. He making the kind of mistakes that would reduce his score on the Mathematical Quality of Instruction observational instrument, used in the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching Project.

This message from Commissioner King looks more in-depth at the Common Core, data-driven instruction, educator practice, and network teams.

"Some see us as education's odd couple-one, the president of a democratic teachers' union; the other, a director at the world's largest philanthropy. While we don't agree on everything, we firmly believe that students have a right to effective instruction and that teachers want to do their very best. We believe that one of the most effective ways to strengthen both teaching and learning is to put in place evaluation systems that are not just a stamp of approval or disapproval but a means of improvement. We also agree that in too many places, teacher evaluation procedures are broken-unconstructive, superficial, or otherwise inadequate. And so, for the past four years, we have worked together to help states and districts implement effective teacher development and evaluation systems carefully designed to improve teacher practice and, ultimately, student learning."

"In the Michael Bloomberg era of school reform, we hear a lot about rising educational standards. "When Dennis Walcott became chancellor," Josh Thomases, a deputy chief academic officer in the city's Department of Education, tells the Voice, "one of his first acts was to say the correct bar was no longer a high school diploma, but career and college readiness." Put another way, New York City officials openly admit that a high school diploma earned in our public schools today does not mean that a student is ready for college. In fact, 80 percent of New York public school graduates who enrolled in City University of New York community colleges last fall still needed high school level instruction-also known as remediation-in reading, writing, and especially math. Despite the department's proclamations, that percentage is up, not down, from 71 percent a few years ago."

The specifics of how growth models should be constructed and used to evaluate schools and teachers is a topic of lively policy debate in states and school districts nationwide. In this paper we take up the question of model choice and examine three competing approaches. The first approach, reflected in the popular student growth percentiles (SGPs) framework, eschews all controls for student covariates and schooling environments. The second approach, typically associated with value-added models (VAMs), controls for student background characteristics and aims to identify the causal effects of schools and teachers. The third approach, also VAM-based, fully levels the playing field so that the correlation between school- and teacher-level growth measures and student demographics is essentially zero. We argue that the third approach is the most desirable for use in educational evaluation systems. Our case rests on personnel economics, incentive-design theory, and the potential role that growth measures can play in improving instruction in K-12 schools

"Anthony Cody, experienced middle school science teacher and fabulous blogger, has offered to coordinate our campaign to write President Obama on October 17. We call it the Campaign for Our Public Schools."

The claim that Chicago public school teachers aren't working enough hours during the school day are unwarranted at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, according to research from a University of Illinois labor expert. The contentious debate between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis over the length of the school day has focused on Chicago public schools having the shortest official day of any major city - five hours and 45 minutes for elementary school students, and six hours and 45 minutes for high school students. But Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois, says when you account for time outside of the contractually obligated instruction, a teacher's day is almost twice as long.

Recent studies have examined the relationship between principals and student outcomes, and attempted to identify what characteristics and qualifications are needed to be an effective principal, whether that's providing staff with the resources and support they need, hiring and retaining the best talent, setting expectations for instruction, or simply gaining more experience. So what has the research found out? Let's take a look.

The federal program providing billions of dollars to help states and districts close or remake some of their worst-performing schools remains a work in progress after two years, with more than 1,200 turnaround efforts under way but still no definitive verdict on its effectiveness. The School Improvement Grant program, supercharged by a windfall of $3 billion under the federal economic-stimulus package in 2009, has jump-started aggressive moves by states and districts. To get their share of the SIG money, they had to quickly identify some of their most academically troubled schools, craft new teacher-evaluation systems, and carve out more time for instruction, among other steps. Some schools and districts spent millions of dollars on outside experts and consultants. Others went through the politically ticklish process of replacing teachers and principals, while combating community skepticism and meeting the demands of district and state overseers.

If somebody told me, 15 years ago, when I was spending many of my days working with community groups in the Bronx and East New York dealing with the consequences of the crack epidemic, that you could solve the problems of neighborhoods under siege by insulating students in local schools from the conditions surrounding them, and devoting every ounce of teachers energies to raising their test scores, I would have said "what planet are you living on?." Students were bringing the stresses of their daily lives into the classroom in ways that no teacher with a heart could ignore, and which created obstacles to concentrating in school, much less doing their homework , that people living in middle class communities couldn't imagine. To be effective in getting students to learn, teachers had to be social workers, surrogate parents, and neighborhood protectors as well as people imparting skills, and at times, the interpersonal dimensions of their work were more important than the strictly instructional components. Now, such thinking is considered a form of educational heresy.

New York State's heralded anti-bullying law is about to go into effect July 1. But the state Board of Regents recently took some teeth out of the law, known as the Dignity Act, when it said that charter schools don't have to provide in-class instruction to schoolchildren about the dangers of discrimination and harassment, leaving their students without a key protection from bullying.

While his research is limited, because E.T.S. is the only organization that has permitted him to test its product, he says the automated reader can be easily gamed, is vulnerable to test prep, sets a very limited and rigid standard for what good writing is, and will pressure teachers to dumb down writing instruction. The e-Rater's biggest problem, he says, is that it can't identify truth. He tells students not to waste time worrying about whether their facts are accurate, since pretty much any fact will do as long as it is incorporated into a well-structured sentence. "E-Rater doesn't care if you say the War of 1812 started in 1945," he said. Mr. Perelman found that e-Rater prefers long essays. A 716-word essay he wrote that was padded with more than a dozen nonsensical sentences received a top score of 6; a well-argued, well-written essay of 567 words was scored a 5. An automated reader can count, he said, so it can set parameters for the number of words in a good sentence and the number of sentences in a good paragraph. "Once you understand e-Rater's biases," he said, "it's not hard to raise your test score."

What effective CMOs do rely on heavily is trust, relationships, and clear communication. In well-run charters, there is a common belief about teaching and learning, and teachers are hired and retained based on whether they share that belief. Teachers know they are getting ongoing feedback and no surprises. They know that the principal doing their observations and evaluations is a master teacher operating on the same definition of good instruction as they are. They know that every other teacher in the building is a potential collaborator. In other words, they trust their coworkers and operate in a culture of common understanding and mutual respect. Evaluation is understood to be more about organizational improvement than about passing judgment on an individual. In fact, some CMOs have tried and dumped merit pay because they felt it disrupted this collaborative culture.

At its annual meeting held in Saratoga Springs the weekend of March 23-25, the New York State Council for the Social Studies passed five resolutions condemning the national and state common core standards for marginalizing social studies. The resolutions charged that attention to math and reading left little time or money in K-12 classrooms for effective instruction in social studies, citizenship, and history. The Council demanded that the state develop a new set of core standards that emphasize the teaching of social studies, citizenship, and history. This action by the NYSCSS is one of a number of reasons to question whether the much ballyhooed national common core standards will deliver promised improvements in education.

I may not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students' test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores. The problem is that low-income students, who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary and are less able to comprehend complex sentences than their more privileged peers, are also less likely to read at home. Many will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort. But those are the same students who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep. By "using data to inform instruction," as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck's novels of the opportunity to read them. It is ironic, then, that English Language Arts exams are designed for "cultural neutrality." This is supposed to give students a level playing field on the exams, but what it does is bleed our English classes dry. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level - not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous. These are literary qualities, and they are more or less absent from testing materials.

Professor Michael Klonsky teaches in the College of Education at DePaul University in Chicago. He also serves as the national director of the Small Schools Workshop, and on the national steering committee of Save Our Schools, a national movement dedicated to supporting public schools. Klonsky has blogged, spoken and written extensively on school reform issues with a focus on urban school restructuring. Klonsky received his MA in Education Studies in 1992 and his PhD in Curriculum & Instruction from UIC in 1996. He talks with Communications Director Eva Moon.

I recently wrote about an analysis of Michigan's education system that concluded that charter schools-contrary to what some of their backers claim-spend more on administrative costs, and less on instruction, than traditional public schools. But you didn't really think that would be the final word on the subject, did you? This week, a consultant writing for a charter school association takes issue with that claim, put forward in a study released by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education. In a blog post written for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Larry Maloney argues that the authors' research does not present a true comparison of administrative spending in charters and traditional publics, particularly in urban areas, such as charter school-rich Detroit.