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Columnist Alan Chartock ("Cuomo the students' lobbyist? Not really," Jan. 15) rightly points out Gov. Cuomo's surplus confidence in claiming to be the lobbyist for the state's students.  He correctly observes the "terrible situation" that Chancellor Merryl Tisch and the Board of Regents will be in if Cuomo sets up another education commission, stripping them of much or perhaps all of their authority. He affirms that the Regents offer protection from a political takeover of public schools, saying, "the whole idea was to get the traditional grubby politicians out of the game." However, he fails to point out that both Tisch and the Regents have not done a good job representing the best in public education lately.

Just this week, Florida announced its new district grading system. These systems have been popping up all over the nation, and given the fact that designing one is a requirement of states applying for No Child Left Behind waivers, we are sure to see more. I acknowledge that the designers of these schemes have the difficult job of balancing accessibility and accuracy. Moreover, the latter requirement - accuracy - cannot be directly tested, since we cannot know "true" school quality. As a result, to whatever degree it can be partially approximated using test scores, disagreements over what specific measures to include and how to include them are inevitable (see these brief analyses of Ohio and California). As I've discussed before, there are two general types of test-based measures that typically comprise these systems: absolute performance and growth. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Florida's attempt to balance these components is a near total failure, and it shows in the results.

A handful of the high schools the city wants to "turn around" are already doing a better-than-average job at preparing students for college. The schools all posted graduation rates below 60 percent two years ago, when the state compiled a list of "persistently low-achieving" schools that would receive federal funds in exchange for making substantive organizational and programmatic changes.

Being a teacher can be difficult: low pay, long hours, and the many challenges students bring into the classroom. If our teachers are going to be effective educators, we need to do a better job of keeping them happy. But what would teachers like to change to make their work life better? These are some of their responses.

Earlier this month, ninth and tenth graders at the Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation filmed a video inspired by Mr. Cuomo's declaration in his State of the State address that he intended to take a second job as a lobbyist for public school students. A nonprofit group that supports charter schools, the New York City Charter School Center, saw the video and was impressed. With a few tweaks to make it television-ready, and a modest outlay by the charter center, the clip has been playing this week as a 30-second commercial on NY1, the New York City cable news channel.

The following is part of a series I'm working on about my time teaching in New York City. This post is an edited version of two posts I wrote while in New York: "Could You Make My Job More Difficult" and "If Only We Had Fewer Resources." You can follow the series by clicking on the label "Teaching in New York" at the bottom of this post.

As most people know, the majority of public school teachers are paid based on salary schedules. Most (but not all) contain a number of "steps" (years of experience) and "lanes" (education levels). Teachers are placed in one lane (based on their degree) and proceed up the steps as they accrue years on the job. Within most districts, these two factors determine the raises that teachers receive. Salary schedules receive a great deal of attention in our education debates.

Last week, the Education Week Teacher online site reported on a new study that used federal wage, benefit, and job-security data, along with measures of cognitive ability, to argue that teachers are overpaid compared to what they would earn in the private sector. The study, authored by Andrew G. Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Jason Richwine, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, challenged the refrain that teachers are, in the words of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, "desperately underpaid." I suppose it's because Biggs is a colleague of mine at AEI, but many have wondered about my thoughts on the study.

This report compares the pay, pension costs and retiree health benefits of teachers with those of similarly qualified private-sector workers. The study concludes that teachers receive total compensation 52% greater than fair market levels, which translates into a $120 billion annual "overcharge" to taxpayers. Built on a series of faulty analyses, this study misrepresents total teacher compensation in fundamental ways. First, teachers' 12% lower pay is dismissed as being appropriate for their lesser intelligence, although there is no foundation for such a claim. Total benefits are calculated as having a monetary value of 100.8% of pay, while the Department of Labor disagrees, giving a figure of 32.8%-a figure almost identical to that of people employed in the private sector. Pension costs are valued at 32%, but the real number is closer to 8.4%. The shorter work year is said to represent 28.8% additional compensation but the real work year is only 12% shorter. Teachers' job stability is said to be worth 8.6%, although the case for such a claim is not sustained. In sum, this report is based on an aggregation of such spurious claims. The actual salary and benefits for teachers show they are in fact undercompensated by 19%.

I don't know about you, but I am growing convinced that President Barack Obama doesn't know what Race to the Top is. I don't think he really understands what his own administration is doing to education. In his State of the Union address last week, he said that he wanted teachers to "stop teaching to the test." He also said that teachers should teach with "creativity and passion." And he said that schools should reward the best teachers and replace those who weren't doing a good job. To "reward the best" and "fire the worst," states and districts are relying on test scores. The Race to the Top says they must. Deconstruct this. Teachers would love to "stop teaching to the test," but Race to the Top makes test scores the measure of every teacher. If teachers take the President's advice (and they would love to!), their students might not get higher test scores every year, and teachers might be fired, and their schools might be closed. Why does President Obama think that teachers can "stop teaching to the test" when their livelihood, their reputation, and the survival of their school depends on the outcome of those all-important standardized tests?

There are some questions every school leader should be able to answer: Are my teachers helping their students learn? Who are the outstanding teachers I need to fight hard to keep? Which teachers aren't meeting my expectations? How can I help my good teachers become great? As the superintendent of one of the nation's largest school districts, I believe helping our campus leaders answer these questions is the most important part of my job. After all, decades of research show that nothing we can do to accelerate student learning matters more than ensuring a great teacher leads every classroom. Unfortunately, the teacher-evaluation systems that should help principals answer such questions are often useless. Most evaluation systems rate nearly all teachers "satisfactory," based on infrequent and cursory classroom observations, and they rarely consider how much students are actually learning.

Middle and high school counselors believe they have a unique and powerful role to play in preparing all students for good jobs or college, but they feel hamstrung by insufficient training, competing duties, and their own schools' priorities, according to a study released today. The online survey of 5,300 counselors was conducted this past spring for the College Board's Advocacy & Policy Center. One of the largest-ever surveys of counselors, it paints a picture of a committed but frustrated corps that sees a deep schism between the ideal mission of schools and the work that takes shape day to day.

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.

Are charters really doing a better job educating the city's public school students than the traditional public schools? That was the question of the week, after state test scores came out on Tuesday showing not only far greater proficiency in English and math by third through eighth graders who attend the city's charters, but also far more improvement this year.

"For three years, 50 percent of the evaluations of many D.C. public school teachers were based on students standardized test scores, a key part of the ground-breaking IMPACT assessment system introduced by Michelle Rhee. Now, Rhee's successor as schools chancellor, Kaya Henderson, and her leadership team have decided that 50 percent is too much and that the better percentage for a job rating to be linked to test scores is 35 percent, as my colleague Emma Brown reported in this story. Sounds reasonable, right? It isn't."

"A while back, I argued that Florida's school grading system, due mostly to its choice of measures, does a poor job of gauging school performance per se. The short version is that the ratings are, to a degree unsurpassed by most other states' systems, driven by absolute performance measures (how highly students score), rather than growth (whether students make progress). Since more advantaged students tend to score more highly on tests when they enter the school system, schools are largely being judged not on the quality of instruction they provide, but rather on the characteristics of the students they serve."

Could teacher evaluations begin to offer us the best portrait yet of what instruction actually looks like in America's classrooms? And what changes might such information spur in teacher preparation and on-the-job training? Those are implications raised by a couple of different papers looking at teacher evaluations. I've written about them on this blog before, but only from the technical aspects of the systems. In reviewing the reports again, it strikes me that they also have a lot to say about instructional quality-some of which seems frankly troubling.

Nine year olds should not have to take tests that will determine the fate of their schools or their teacher's jobs.  NCLB mandates that they do, so I decided to take a look at the New York State 3rd grade math test from 2010.

raduating from Buffalo State College in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in math, Sara has a burning desire to teach. She's grateful to land a position fresh out of college, even in a troubled high school at low starting pay. It's been four years since the task report A Nation at Risk sounded the rallying call for change, and Sara is ready for the challenge. Unmarried, childless, and full of youthful vigor, she devotes lots of extra time to her job, even as she pursues her master's degree during the evenings. Students identify with Sara, who is young and cute, and Principal Bell makes sure the new teacher isn't assigned many "problem" kids. He urges Sara to take on extra volunteer work: chaperoning dances, serving on committees. For untenured teachers, these are offers you can't refuse.

Believe it or not, I wake up every morning eager to go to work. I never know what's going to happen in my classes, but I invariably look forward to them. My students never fail to surprise me. I feel privileged to introduce newcomers to my language. But now, if they don't pass tests likely designed for English speakers, I face losing my job. This is particularly disturbing because I see patterns, especially among kids who did not actually want to be uprooted, torn away from their friends, family and quite often even their parents. I had several students last year who spoke almost no English, and learned next to nothing the entire year. When I checked their records, I learned that two of them had not only passed junior high English classes (not E.S.L., but regular English), but had also passed Spanish. Without my crystal ball I can only speculate on how they managed this. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that their value-added scores would not have put me in a favorable light. Under New York State's new paradigm, two years of kids like that would leave me selling pencils on the corner.