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Last spring students, teachers and parents endured the outbreak of what we soon called "testing madness." On top of the regular state tests, teachers across Mecklenburg County were required to administer 52 new high-stakes standardized tests, part of then superintendent Peter Gorman's goal of testing every child in every subject every year. The tests were tied to a pay-for-performance scheme that was slated for rapid approval by the state legislature. We were racing down a fast track to nowhere. This year, however, the rush has slowed. The pay-for-performance legislation has stalled. Interim superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh announced recently that CMS was scrapping the 52 extra tests. For the moment, students and teachers can focus more on learning, and breathe a little easier. Why the change? People stood up for the kind of education they believe in.

As a growing number of states move toward legislation that would institute teacher merit pay, the debate around whether and how to use student test scores in high-stakes staffing decisions has become even more hotly contested. The majority of merit pay initiatives, such as those recently proposed in Ohio and Florida, rely to some extent on value-added estimation, the method of measuring a teacher's impact by tracking student growth on test scores from year to year. We recently exchanged e-mails with Steven Glazerman, a Senior Fellow at the policy research group Mathematica. Glazerman specializes in teacher recruitment, performance management, professional development, and compensation. According to Glazerman, a strong understanding of the constructive uses and limitations of value-added data can prove beneficial for district-level human resources practitioners.

The current teacher salary scale has come under increasing fire, and for a reason. Systems where people are treated more or less the same suffer from two basic problems. First, there will always be a number of "free riders." Second, and relatedly, some people may feel their contributions aren't sufficiently recognized. So, what are good alternatives? I am not sure; but based on decades worth of economic and psychological research, measures such as merit pay are not it.

Investments in high-quality early childhood programs, particularly those targeted to children at risk, are not just a virtuous service, but can yield a large return for those paying the bill. Study after study has proved that such programs, coupled with training for parents, result not only in economic gains for the children as they grow up, but sizable savings on taxes. For example, graduates from these preschool programs are less likely to need special education, end up being arrested fewer times and spend less time in prison (which means fewer crime victims), require fewer social services, are healthier and wind up paying more in taxes.

Members of the Board of Regents said today that they would back the state education department's recommendations to overhaul New York's system for grading its standardized tests. But the state, as well as local districts, are asking: Who is going to pay for it?

Have you noticed there's a lot of hullabaloo about Finland's education system lately? I've been paying attention to what the Finns have been doing for a couple years now,  but it is only recently that I've thought to pay attention to Finland's neighbour Norway. Norway and Finland have some similarities. They are neighbouring countries that each take up about 350 000 square kilometres with populations around 5 million and about 10 percent foreign born. A notable difference, however, is that Norway has a significantly higher Gross Domestic Product.

"Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham from the University of Virginia gets to the heart of the matter:"

"School reformers this year had something of a banner year, moving ahead with key initiatives such as using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers, expanding charter schools and establishing voucher programs that permitted the use of public funds to be used to pay religious school tuition. But is any of this grounded in research? Here's a look at the year in ed research from Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C. This post originally appeared on the institute's blog."

"I'm a big fan of surveys of teachers' opinions of education policy, not only because of educators' valuable policy-relevant knowledge, but also because their views are sometimes misrepresented or disregarded in our public discourse. For instance, the diverse set of ideas that might be loosely characterized as "market-based reform" faces a bit of tension when it comes to teacher support. Without question, some teachers support the more controversial market-based policy ideas, such as pay and evaluations based substantially on test scores, but most do not. The relatively low levels of teacher endorsement don't necessarily mean these ideas are "bad," and much of the disagreement is less about the desirability of general policies (e.g., new teacher evaluations) than the specifics (e.g., the measures that comprise those evaluations). In any case, it's a somewhat awkward juxtaposition: A focus on "respecting and elevating the teaching profession" by means of policies that most teachers do not like."

Blatant forms of discrimination against women in academia have diminished since the Equal Pay Act and Title IX became law in 1964 and 1972, respectively. Yet gender differences in salary, tenure status, and leadership roles still persist among men and women in higher education. In particular, wage differences among male and female professors have not been fully explained, even when productivity, teaching experience, institutional size and prestige, disciplinary fields, type of appointment, and family-related responsibilities are controlled for statistically (see here).

To understand how and why teachers' opinions may be changing, Education Sector worked with the Farkas Duffett Research Group to conduct four focus groups and a nationally representative survey  of K-12 public school teachers. The survey, which gathered responses from 1,101 teachers, repeated questions from a 2007 Education Sector survey and a 2003 Public Agenda survey about a variety of teacher-centered reforms, including new approaches  to evaluation, pay, and tenure, and the role of unions in pushing for or against these reforms. Accordingly, this report examines changes in teacher opinion from 2007 to 2011 and, as with the 2007 report, looks closely at differences between new teachers (less than five years) and veterans (more than 20 years).

Whether you consider today's New York Times article on K12.com a "hit piece" (Tom Vander Ark) or a "blockbuster" (Dana Goldstein), there's little doubt that it will have a long-term impact on the debate around digital learning. Polls show that the public and parents are leery of cyber schools, and this kind of media attention (sure to be mimicked in local papers) will only make them more so. But just as these criticisms aren't going away, neither is online learning itself. The genie is out of the bottle. So how can we go about drafting policies that will push digital learning in the direction of quality?

The Education Department will spend about $5 billion on the program, and even if you're thinking, hey, I could use $5 billion, consider this: New York won the largest federal grant, $700 million over the next four years. In that time, roughly $230 billion will be spent on public education in the state. By adding just one-third of one percent to state coffers, the feds get to implement their version of education reform. That includes rating teachers and principals by their students' scores on state tests; using those ratings to dismiss teachers with low scores and to pay bonuses to high scorers; and reducing local control of education.

Like the overwhelming majority of my colleagues, I give 100%. If you give me more money, that won't change. In fact, merit pay has never been proven effective. Right here in New York, the city dropped a pilot program that ran from 2007 to 2010 after it did not yield the desired results. Why, then, does that call for trying the same thing all over again?

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy today outlined six broad principles that he says will guide the debate on education reform next year, including "intensive interventions" by the state in troubled school systems and a lighter bureaucratic touch at successful ones. In a two-page letter addressed to legislators and stakeholders, Malloy hinted at a willingness to take up the politically charged issue of tenure and pay reform, saying teachers and principals should be valued for "skill and effectiveness" over "seniority and tenure."

"When we sit down with the UFT, there are two groups in the room: the UFT and our school children," Mayor Bloomberg said, adding that the latter group is "who we work for…We have an obligation to stand up for their lives, their futures." He called for merit pay, for more a more stringent teacher evaluation system, more (union-free) charter schools. "It's a legacy thing. Remember, 'I am the education mayor.' Two years left and [test] scores have been flat the whole time. Closing schools has not really worked out. We have the warehousing of students," said Mr. Mulgrew. "Those are problematic, so I'm sure he's worried about his legacy."

Regrettably, with the onset of the New Year, the debate on how to improve our public schools and student learning was once again marked by baseless attacks and a relentless effort to demonize teachers and the unions that represent them. Last week, Mayor Bloomberg repeatedly attacked the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in his State of the City address over issues like holding teachers accountable and paying some teachers more if student test scores go up. MSNBC's "Morning Joe," picked up the next day where the Mayor left off and attacked teachers unions for "being out of touch" and supporting "mediocrity." Both are ridiculous and uninformed statements. Sadly, the Mayor and our newscasters should know better.

Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers ("ProComp") is one of the most prominent alternative teacher compensation reforms in the nation.* Via a combination of ten financial incentives, ProComp seeks to increase student achievement by motivating teachers to improve their instructional practices and by attracting and retaining high-quality teachers to work in the district. My research examines ProComp in terms of: 1) whether it has increased retention rates; 2) the relationship between retention and school quality (defined in terms of student test score growth); and 3) the reasons underlying these effects. I pay special attention to the effects of ProComp on schools that serve high concentrations of poor students - "Hard to Serve" (HTS) schools where teachers are eligible to receive a financial incentive to stay. The quantitative findings are discussed briefly below (I will discuss my other results in a future post).

The study claims they found that if they gave teachers several thousand dollars at the beginning of the year and told them they'd have to return it if their students didn't do well on math tests, then students did better on those tests (there was no impact on score improvement for students of teachers in the group that were offered bonuses after the test -- the more typical merit page scheme).  The study only included teachers from nine schools and student scores were also not tracked past one school year.

Economist Jesse Rothstein recently released a working paper about which I am compelled to write, as it speaks directly to so many of the issues that we have raised here over the past year or two. The purpose of Rothstein's analysis is to move beyond the talking points about teaching quality in order to see if strategies that have been proposed for improving it might yield benefits. In particular, he examines two labor market-oriented policies: performance pay and dismissing teachers.