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Fueled by the ever-increasing availability of detailed test score datasets linking teachers to students, the research literature on teachers' test-based effectiveness has grown rapidly, in both size and sophistication. Analysis after analysis finds that, all else being equal, the variation in teachers' estimated effects on students' test growth - the difference between the "top" and "bottom" teachers - is very large. In any given year, some teachers' students make huge progress, others' very little. Even if part of this estimated variation is attributable to confounding factors, the discrepancies are still larger than most any other measurable "input" within the jurisdiction of education policy. The underlying assumption here is that "true" teacher quality varies to a degree that is at least somewhat comparable in magnitude to the spread of the test-based estimates. Perhaps that's the case, but it does not, by itself, help much. The key question is whether and how we can measure teacher performance at the individual level and, more importantly, influence the distribution - that is, to raise the ceiling, the middle and/or the floor. The variation hangs out there like a drug to which we're addicted, but haven't really figured out how to administer.

Days after a Brooklyn principal wrote a widely publicized letter of protest about the quality of this year's new state standardized exams, another principal has written to John B. King Jr., New York's education commissioner, to complain about the tests. This time the letter comes from Sharon Emick Fougner, principal of Elizabeth Mellick Baker Elementary School in Great Neck, Long Island, who urged the commissioner to conduct a review of the math exam that was given to fourth to eighth graders last month.

Many discussions of "school reform" focus either on the need to provide students with choice as a way out of failing schools or on how to close or restructure the schools in order to "turn them around." For our purposes in this first paper, let's examine the underlying claim that a particular child is actually in a failing school. A school in Louisiana is given the letter grade F and we assume that children in this school are receiving a sub-standard education. Almost by definition! Yet the second part of the title of this paper, which comes from a chapter in the late Gerald W. Bracey's 2003 book "On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools," raises an interesting question.  Should we be confident that the letter grade F actually indicates that the quality of teaching in the school is the reason for the failure? If it is not the quality of teaching, then what is it?

Without question, designing school and district rating systems is a difficult task, and Ohio was somewhat ahead of the curve in attempting to do so (and they're also great about releasing a ton of data every year). As part of its application for ESEA waivers, the state recently announced a newly-designed version of its long-standing system, with the changes slated to go into effect in 2014-15. State officials told reporters that the new scheme is a "more accurate reflection of … true [school and district] quality." In reality, however, despite its best intentions, what Ohio has done is perpetuate a troubled system by making less-than-substantive changes that seem to serve the primary purpose of giving lower grades to more schools in order for the results to square with preconceptions about the distribution of "true quality." It's not a better system in terms of measurement - both the new and old schemes consist of mostly the same inappropriate components, and the ratings differentiate schools based largely on student characteristics rather than school performance.

One of the common assumptions lurking in the background of our education debates is that "quality" of the teaching workforce has declined a great deal over the past few decades (see here, here, here and here [slide 16]). There is a very plausible storyline supporting this assertion: Prior to the dramatic rise in female labor force participation since the 1960s, professional women were concentrated in a handful of female-dominated occupations, chief among them teaching. Since then, women's options have changed, and many have moved into professions such as law and medicine instead of the classroom.

A federal project designed to help schools "do more with less" relies overwhelmingly on speculative theorizing and other work that falls far short of the high-quality research available in the field, according to a new policy brief published today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. The brief, entitled Productivity Research, the U.S. Department of Education, and High-Quality Evidence, concludes that although the current federal effort is fatally flawed, a well-done project of this type could be helpful. The brief offers recommendations for how the Department could move forward.

Next spring, we will release the book, Pencils Down: Rethinking High-Stakes Testing and Accountability in Public Schools, edited by Wayne Au and Melissa Bollow Tempel. The following original essay by Rethinking Schools editor Stan Karp will be included in the book. In it, Stan discusses some of the problems with the current conversations around teacher quality, and examines better alternatives.

Haven't heard of Yolie Flores? You will soon. And if you've been fighting for teacher quality but need more allies, she might be your new best friend. The educator who helped revolutionize Los Angeles's sprawling school system has just launched a national organization to ratchet up the conversation around teacher quality by, among other things, getting parents seriously involved in school reform efforts. Called Communities for Teaching Excellence (C4TE), Flores's new organization is a Gates Foundation-funded advocacy group whose initial focus will be the four "deep dive" Gates districts-Memphis, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Hillsborough County (Florida)-which were awarded $335 million to overhaul teacher evaluation and support. If Flores's past accomplishments are any indication, C4TE won't be content to put out reports and hold polite press conferences: Flores's four-year stint on the LAUSD board included pushing through a controversial process that gives teachers and outside nonprofits a chance to help fix the district's most challenged schools each year.

Everyone "knows" quality teaching because we were all students at one time. Unfortunately this statement is not at all true and it is many times the root of all evils in whats wrong with education today. The question then is what's quality teaching or, as it's labeled in the world education, MASTERY teaching and how is it recognized? The first misnomer that must be dispelled is that the mastery level can be attained quickly, in just a couple years; and that any successful college graduate can enter a classroom full of students, having read the text book and teach the content well. Teaching mastery is attained over time, it cannot be sped up.

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).

Gateways to the Principalship: State Power to Improve the Quality of School Leaders proposes state policies for improving principal effectiveness and student achievement. It uses policy examples from eight "lagging" and eight "leading" states as a means of advocating for a wide range of policy actions aimed at influencing principal preparation, licensure and retention. The report, however, has several flaws that undermine its usefulness. It provides little explanation on how the state exemplars were selected or why they were considered to be leading or lagging. It makes little use of existing research. It does not report on extensive current state and professional activities on leadership standards, program accreditation and licensure requirements that address exactly these features. It recommends ending the "monopoly" of higher education in principal preparation and broadening (or lowering) the criteria for becoming a principal, but it provides no research or other evidence that such changes are warranted, will improve student achievement, or have other beneficial effects. The report's endorsement of broadly accepted, almost platitudinous reform principles, coupled with unsupported and possibly counterproductive recommendations, renders the report of little value in improving the quality of principals.

Few Americans are aware of the extent to which our civilian economy used to depend on the breadth and quality of the vocational education system in our Armed Forces prior to the inauguration of the voluntary service following the Vietnam War.  Millions of young people who were taken in by the Army had basic skills that were a bit shaky and very little in the way of vocational skills.  They were trained as truck drivers, diesel mechanics, aircraft engine maintenance workers, road builders, computer system managers and quality system analysts.  After their tour was over, they entered the civilian economy, ready to be far more productive than they were before they entered the Army.  The services still train the people they recruit.  But now, they aim to keep them, and the rate at which they become available to the civilian economy has been drastically reduced.

My hard-working, middle-class parents, like millions of American families, depended on their neighborhood public schools to provide quality education for their children, and rightfully so. Certainly, all parents in the U.S. should be able to choose the educational option that works best for them and their children. Most important, in this nation, every family in every community should have access to good schools. The only difference among schools should be perhaps each having a different focus. No parent anywhere in these United States should have to move or risk arrest in order to secure quality education for her/his child(ren).   How is it then, that millions of American children live in neighborhoods with schools chronically neglected by the same political/educational system that now wants to condemn them as "failing"?  In such settings, it is hypocritical and cruel to use the illusion of "choice" and "free-market competition" to justify closing or taking even more resources from those same schools; sending parents scurrying for scarce or non-existent schooling options. 

The finding -- reported by the Times this weekend -- that really good, and really bad, teachers are evenly distributed around New York City is jaw-dropping news. It upends everything we thought we knew about teacher quality, especially the notion that our achievement gap is caused in large part by a "teacher quality gap," with the worst teachers clustered in the neediest schools. But they aren't. So now what?

The foundation invested more than $159 million in education reform initiatives in 2011, marking the largest single-year investment in education reform initiatives. Grants were made to organizations and programs that empower parents, particularly in low-income communities, to choose among quality, publicly funded schools for their children. The foundation invests to expand the right of all parents to have access to quality schools, regardless of type, with the goal of ultimately increasing student achievement. List of grants can be found at http://waltonfamilyfoundation.org/2011-education-reform-grant-list

But we principals, too, are part of the problem. Not because we have promoted the use of bad data to rate teachers, but because we may have allowed our attention to stray from our chief job of promoting professional growth, training staff, documenting teacher performance, creating community and defining what quality teaching and learning look like in our schools. Newly necessary distractions like marketing and fund-raising and data analysis may have seemed more important than getting into classrooms and working with teachers on how to plan lessons and ask questions. But if we let our attention waiver from those things which we know should be our primary focus, if we asked "How can we help students earn more credits?" instead of "How can we help students learn more?" then some of the distrust we see driving this new agreement is our fault, even if we believe that is what the school system and the general public wanted us to do. We may have felt less incentive to concentrate on the quality of classroom instruction in our schools because we are rated on other things, but we know our jobs. If we chose to focus on tasks outside of instruction, it makes sense that the void such a choice created was filled by psychometricians.

This month, nearly 4,000 educators and friends will come to Minnesota-the birthplace of chartered schools-to celebrate a few months early the 20th anniversary of the opening of the first chartered school in the nation, on Sept. 7, 1992. As the state Senate author of Minnesota's 1991 legislation that authorized the first chartered schools (or charter schools, as most people call them), I am in awe of the number of young lives touched by chartering today: 2 million students in an estimated 5,600 schools across the country. In September 2011, the Kappan/Gallup Poll recorded-for the first time-a 70 percent public approval rating for chartered schools. We have come a long way. And yet, I know that some charters are not delivering the quality education we envisioned 20 years ago. Accountability is a keystone of the original legislation, and we must, together, make that happen as part of our stand for quality chartered schools in the next decade. One thing we've learned is the importance of developing strong authorizers to hold chartered schools accountable. As we look to the future of chartering, it is important to revisit the origins and set the historical record straight. Here are some key facts that may surprise you and dispel a few common myths.

Abstract: The expansion of charter schools-publicly funded, yet in direct competition with traditional public schools-has emerged as a favored response to poor performance in the education sector. While a large and growing literature has sought to estimate the impact of these schools on student achievement, comparatively little is known about demand for the policy itself. Using election returns from three consecutive referenda on charter schools in Washington State, we weigh the relative importance of school quality, community and school demographics, and partisanship in explaining voter support for greater school choice. We find that low school quality-as measured by standardized tests-is a consistent and modestly strong predictor of support for charters. However, variation in performance between school districts is more predictive of charter support than variation within them. At the local precinct level, school resources, union membership, student heterogeneity, and the Republican vote share are often stronger predictors of charter support than standardized test results.

"While much is known about the effects of class size and teacher quality on achievement, there is little evidence on whether policymakers can improve education by utilizing non-instructional resources. We exploit plausibly exogenous within-school variation in counselors and find that one additional counselor increases boys' reading and math achievement by over one percentile point, and reduces misbehavior of both boys and girls. Estimates imply the marginal counselor has the same impact on overall achievement as increasing the quality of every teacher in the school by nearly one-third of a standard deviation, and is twice as effective as reducing class size by hiring an additional teacher."

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).