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Fordham is launching a series of working papers on digital learning.  Rick Hess makes an important contribution with the first paper focused on quality (posted tomorrow).

Will the move toward virtual and "hybrid" schools in American education repeat the mistakes of the charter-school movement, or will it learn from them?

In a New York City middle school, the principal asked teachers to spend fifteen minutes a day with students practicing how to answer multiple-choice math questions in preparation for the state-mandated test. One teacher protested, explaining she taught Italian and English, not math. But the principal insisted, and she followed his directive. As you might suspect, the plan failed, and in the end, fewer than one in four New York City middle schoolers passed the exam. While the importance of the test dominated the formal curriculum, the lessons learned through the hidden curriculum were no less powerful. Students learned that test scores mattered more than English or Italian, and that teachers did not make the key instructional decisions. In fact once the test was over, one-third of the students in her class stopped attending school, skipping the last five weeks of the school year.

Response to intervention, or RTI, is a strategy that involves identifying students' learning problems quickly and using a series of focused lessons, or interventions, to address those problems before they become entrenched. The intensity of the interventions increase if a student doesn't respond. In this survey, full implementation of RTI involved universal screening of students at least three times a year, the use of clear decision rules to move students between tiers of instruction, and regular monitoring of students' progress based on their learning needs.

In schools across America, teachers know who among their peers is doing the best work and who is not. Yet our evaluation systems tend to foster the notion that all teachers perform the same way, with the same results for students. Indeed, in an attempt at equality - uniform treatment for everyone - current evaluation systems often end up being fair to no one. Ideally, performance evaluations should serve to help teachers identify strengths and areas for development, as they work to improve their practice. Systems that work have the goal of lifting quality across the profession, aiding all teachers to become good and prompting good teachers to become great. This paper highlights key elements of evaluations that live up to these aspirations. Quality evaluation systems include regular classroom observations by trained evaluators with clear standards. They also include measurements that consider the contribution each teacher makes to student learning over a year's time, taking into account the achievement level and remediation needs students bring to the classroom. Ultimately, everyone stands to gain when teacher evaluation systems are designed to gauge teacher performance fairly, clearly, and comprehensively, with an eye to the kind of professional growth that fuels student learning. We hope this paper demystifies some of the newer approaches to evaluation for districts and states that might be considering them. Our aim is to illustrate why these new systems are better for teachers and students.

Let me start with a simple, researched-based truth: Formative assessment-timely feedback gathered and reviewed during the course of a learning experience that serves to 'inform' both teachers AND students and allows for the 'formation' of new learning plans-matters.

The party line for advocates of online learning is that virtual and brick-and-mortar schools should work collaboratively to find the best learning solutions for every student, which may or may not look like a traditional classroom experience. But in many places, the fiscal realities of state policy in a down economy can pit potential collaborators against each other.

Perhaps the greatest current impediment to better schools is our meager understanding of the most high-leverage actions and elements that ensure large, swift improvements to learning. If implemented, they would have an immediate effect on student learning and on college and career preparation.

We hear a lot about "passion-based" learning, and although in theory it sounds ideal, there are many factors to consider in building an education system around something as intangible as passion.

If the way we teach and learn is changing, the way that teachers learn should be changing, too. What are schools of education doing to keep ahead?

How do you sell a school that doesn't exist? If you are Chris Whittle, an educational entrepreneur, you gather well-to-do parents at places like the Harvard Club or the Crosby Hotel in Manhattan, hoping the feeling of accomplishment will rub off. Then you pour wine and offer salmon sandwiches and wow the audience with pictures of the stunning new private school you plan to build in Chelsea. Focus on the bilingual curriculum and the collaborative approach to learning. And take swipes at established competitors that you believe are overly focused on sending students to top-tier colleges. Invoke some Tiger-mom fear by pointing out that 200,000 Americans are learning Chinese, while 300 million Chinese have studied English. Then watch them come.

That's right. I am not opposed to testing. Tests are frequently the fastest, most direct way of uncovering what your students have learned. There's no point in cobbling together an "authentic" task if what you're shooting for is a quick check on which kiddos can reliably multiply by fives or spell "democracy." Rockets, volcanoes and bubble bombs are fun to create and explode, but somewhere in there, shouldn't students be able to describe the chemical reactions that occur when you combine baking soda and vinegar? Isn't that the point of hands-on learning, illustrating knowledge to drive home key points of content?

"RTI raises many concerns. Some parents worry that RTI winds up denying children with learning disabilities services. One fear is that some parents don't think they can request an evaluation, or they are led to believe it isn't necessary."

"Why do we refuse to learn from successful nations? The top ten high-performing nations do not test every child every year.   Why aren't we willing to learn from educational disasters in other nations? Take Chile, for example."

"The following is an excerpt of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York. Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: "How do we teach it?" In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it's time to crack that shell. It's time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab's Human Dynamics group."

Those who think that there is too much pressure to "teach to the test" find this time of year to be infuriating. Schools typically cease to focus on their regular curriculum and begin to prepare their students for these venerated exams. Laura Klein Some schools stop all social studies and science classes, as well as gym, art and enrichment activities, so they can spend all day on test prep in Math and English. This overhaul of the curriculum is extreme, but not unique. Unfortunately, for the students, it sends a larger signal that learning for the year is just about done.

Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards-not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states-the study foresees little to no impact on student learning. That conclusion is based on analyzing states' past experience with standards and examining several years of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

I was part of a National Academies of Science committee that was asked to carefully review the nature and implications of America's test-based accountability systems, including school improvement programs under the No Child Left Behind Act, high school exit exams, test-based teacher incentive-pay systems, pay-for-scores initiatives and other uses of test scores to evaluate student and school performance and determine policy based on them. We spent nearly a decade reviewing the evidence as it accumulated, focusing on the most rigorous and credible studies of incentives in educational testing and sifting through the results to uncover the key lessons for education policymakers and the public. Our conclusion in our report to Congress and the public was sobering: There are little to no positive effects of these systems overall on student learning and educational progress, and there is widespread teaching to the test and gaming of the systems that reflects a wasteful use of resources and leads to inaccurate or inflated measures of performance.

The Common Core standards, if they separate the learning of skills from content and understanding, point teachers in the wrong direction.

As states revamp their early childhood education to grab a slice of federal education dollars, some education experts are urging policymakers to look outside the classroom to improve educational opportunites for the country's youngsters. Just as Obama awarded over $500 million in state grants to improve pre-K, the Brookings Institution released a report arguing more attention paid to family background factors such as poverty and maternal education would help improve educational outcomes for our littlest learners. The report argued that gaps in children's ability to learn begin long before they enter the classroom -- and that those gaps can have lasting effects on class mobility.