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An urban school district and a charter school have forged a successful - and (unusual - partnership to share best teaching practices and collectively support early reading proficiency.

Bain helped develop the strategy and business plan for launching StudentsFirst, the new organization founded by Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools. StudentsFirst is leading a national movement to advocate for common sense reforms that accelerate student achievement. The Bain team worked with Rhee and her team to build an indepth plan that has helped guide the initial launch and early success of the organization. We have committed to an ongoing partnership with StudentsFirst and are excited by the opportunity to support them in their mission of significantly improving the US educational system. That is one part of our launch of a new education practice in the US that will include pro bono teams in every office.

"Would I send my child to this school?" This is a question I asked myself every day while working at Achievement First and helping to build their first high school in Brooklyn, NY in 2009 and 2010. I served as the Director of Student Life at Achievement First Crown Heights High School (now called AF Brooklyn High School), which entailed developing and managing all after-school and summer enrichment programs, building the advisory system for both college skills and character development, counseling students, and organizing and leading community events each week to contribute to school culture. As a member of the founding team, I was involved in almost every aspect of the school, from hiring, to behavior management, to building systems for school culture and discipline, to working with others in the Achievement First network to find and implement best practices for our new school.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan plays school with scantrons. Those lovely lead-filled bubbles help him sort the wheat from the chaff in classrooms all over America. He and other market-based reformers claim there is now "scientific evidence" to sort the ineffective teacher from the strong.  And after the weak contributors to scantron scores are found, we can fire our way to excellence.  We will drill and drill our students and raise the bar so high, every child will walk under it.  The caring teachers who spark creativity and joy will disappear. She will be replaced by those who cower in fear of their number score.  My colleagues are already seeing the transformation. The rich conversations about teaching and learning that used to occur after observations are being replaced by timid voices asking, "What is my number?" But do not worry, as we Race to the Top, Mr. Duncan has a plan of 'best practices' in place to increase educational productivity.

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).

Test scores are the coin of the educational realm in the United States. No Child Left Behind demands that scores be used to reward and punish districts, schools, and teachers for how well or poorly students score on state tests. In pursuit of federal dollars, the Obama administration's Race to the Top competition has shoved state after state into legislating that teacher evaluations include student test scores as part of judging teacher effectiveness. Numbers glued to high stakes consequences, however, corrupt performance. Since the mid-1970s, social scientists have documented the untoward results of attaching high stakes to quantitative indicators not only for education but also across numerous institutions. They have pointed out that those who implement policies using specific quantitative measures will change their practices to insure better numbers.

There is a widespread consensus among practitioners, researchers, and policy makers that current teacher evaluation systems in most school districts do little to help teachers improve or to support personnel decision making. For this reason, new approaches to teacher evaluation are being developed and tested.  There is also a growing consensus that evidence of teachers' contributions to student learning should be a component of teacher evaluation systems, along with evidence about the quality of teachers' practice. Value-added models (VAMs) for examining gains in student test scores from one year to the next are promoted as tools to accomplish this goal. Policy makers can benefit from research about what these models can and cannot do, as well as from research about the effects of other approaches to teacher evaluation. This background paper addresses both of these important concerns. 

As a reporter from the Voice of San Diego quickly found, no one was critical of the idea of inclusion at the time the district wanted to make the shift. In fact, inclusion is widely regarded as the attitude districts should have and what is best for students, and when districts segregate too much, they may be punished. But San Diego parents, who had advocated for more inclusion, were alarmed by the district's approach, which has turned out to be problematic in practice. Now three years into the shift to inclusion, parents and educators are wondering: Did San Diego move too fast? One parent, who oversees special education in a nearby district, reacted by plucking his young son with autism out of the district before the switch.

Noam Chomsky discusses the purpose of education, indoctrination, conformity, and imagination. What do you think of the current educational system? What practical things can be transformed in today's systems?

The large-scale expansion of charter schools in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina has generated few differences in educational practice between traditional and charter schools. One difference that did emerge in a RAND study was this: Parents of kids in charter schools perceived a greater sense of choice and greater satisfaction with those schools, on average, than did their counterparts in traditional schools.

Let me start by pointing out that Mathematica Policy Research, in my view, is an exceptional research organization. They have good people. They do good work and have done much to inform public policy in what I believe are positive ways. That's why I found it so depressing when I started digging through the recent report on Charter CMOs - a report which as framed, was intended to explore the differences in effectiveness, practices and resources of charter schools operated by various Charter Management Organizations.

In this report, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) claims that California charter schools are reversing the trend of low academic achievement among African American students and effectively closing the Black-White achievement gap. After a review of CCSA's analyses and findings, however, it becomes clear that the claims are misrepresented or exaggerated. In the years under study, African American students enrolled in traditional public schools outgained those enrolled in charter schools by a small margin, although the charter school students started and ended higher. In addition, the authors present a regression model, with Academic Performance Index (API) scores as the outcome variable, that accounts for only 3-6% of overall variance. Based on this model, the percentage of African American enrollment is negatively related to API scores in both charter and traditional public schools, a trend that will not reverse the academic standing for African American students. In fact, the gap continues to grow, albeit at a slightly slower rate in charter schools. Finally, the report's claim that charter schools are centers of innovation does not hold. Rather, as the authors eventually conclude themselves, there were no instructional practices observed in California charter schools that are not also present in traditional public schools.

A shareholder in Virginia-based K12 Inc. has filed a lawsuit against the virtual-schools operator in federal court, alleging that the firm violated securities law by making false statements to investors about students' poor performance on standardized tests. The class-action complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, also accuses K12 of boosting its enrollment and revenues through "deceptive recruiting" practices.

Dear President Obama, I am half a year into my twentieth year of teaching here in Florida. I am not sure how much longer I will last in the profession I thought I would never want to leave. I wonder how much longer I can last because as an English teacher, I teach my students to keep a sharp eye out for irony. I practice what I preach, and my irony radar is on full-tilt, bell-ringing, red-strobe-lights-blinking, high alert. The ironies have grown too much for me to bear; I am nearly crushed beneath them, yet people like you seem to be unaware of them. So let me teach you, as I might my students, about Irony. When I use the second person "You" in this letter, I refer not just to you, but to all the "powers that be" in education reform.

The values of efficiency and fairness collide head-on in New York's Education Law §3012-c, passed as part of the state's efforts to bolster its chances in the 2010 Race to the Top competition. The law requires annual professional performance reviews (APPRs) that sort teachers into four categories-"highly effective," "effective," "developing" and "ineffective"-based on multiple measures of effectiveness, including student growth on state and locally selected assessments and a teacher's performance according to a teacher practice rubric. The fundamental problem is that it's hard to assess the efficiency or fairness of an evaluation system that doesn't exist yet. There are too many unknowns to be able to judge, which is one of the arguments for piloting an evaluation system before bringing it to scale.

Policymakers, administrators, and advocacy groups have correctly diagnosed a major problem plaguing the teaching profession-high rates of teacher attrition-but have missed the mark in their prescriptions for fixing it, concludes a new report released this morning by the New York City-based TNTP, formerly The New Teacher Project. In essence, it contends, most school leaders fail to identify and encourage the very best teachers to stay in schools. In part, it says, that's because of the K-12 field's tendency to uncouple decisions about retention from discussions of teacher quality. The consequences of these practices, according to the report, has particularly affected low-performing schools, where a revolving door gradually makes it harder to develop a critical mass of effective teachers to sustain improvements. In such schools, the report estimates, a high-performing teacher who leaves will be replaced by an equally effective peer less than a tenth of the time.

"The modernization of teacher evaluation systems, an increasingly common component of school reform efforts, promises to reveal new, systematic information about the performance of individual classroom teachers. Yet while states and districts race to design new systems, most discussion of how the information might be used has focused on traditional human resource-management tasks, namely, hiring, firing, and compensation. By contrast, very little is known about how the availability of new information, or the experience of being evaluated, might change teacher effort and effectiveness. In the research reported here, we study one approach to teacher evaluation: practice-based assessment that relies on multiple, highly structured classroom observations conducted by experienced peer teachers and administrators. While this approach contrasts starkly with status quo "principal walk-through" styles of class observation, its use is on the rise in new and proposed evaluation systems in which rigorous classroom observation is often combined with other measures, such as teacher value-added based on student test scores."

"As a society, one of our most important shared responsibilities is the one we take to raise children who are ready to become productive, engaged members of our communities. It's up to all of us to keep them safe, healthy and whole, so they can do the hard work of learning and meeting their full potential. Keeping kids safe and healthy requires trust and cooperation among the adults in each child's life, as well as vigilance among the members of the broader community. This is why we have laws and policies against child abuse and neglect, as well as policies and practices that aim to prevent-or in the awful cases when that fails, to report and prosecute-such abuse. This is a serious issue, which is why it's incredibly offensive and dangerous for it to be politicized and trivialized, as has happened over the past few days. Last week, former journalist Campbell Brown published an incendiary op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, falsely accusing unions of failing to protect children."

This report highlights the perceptions of parents, whose opinions are rarely sought and whose voices tend to be lost in decisions about how assessments are developed, administered and used. Parents are key consumers of assessment information-and, as taxpayers, they pay for assessments. Classroom teachers and district administrators have the most practical and personal experience with the day-to-day impact of assessments and accountability. Their perceptions matter.

How, for example, if I was the principal of a given, average sized school in NYC, might I use the VA data on my teachers to council them? to suggest personnel changes? assignment changes, or so on? Would these data, as they are, provide me any useful information about my staff and how to better my school? For this exercise, I've decided to look at the year to year ratings of teachers in a relatively average school. Now, why would I bother looking at the year to year ratings when we know that the multi-year averages are supposed to more accurate - more representative of the teacher's over time contributions? Well, you'll see in the graphs below that those multi-year averages also may not be that useful.