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New York State education officials and the state teachers' union reached an agreement on a new teacher evaluation system on Thursday, just hours before a deadline imposed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who had threatened to break the impasse by imposing his own way to judge the quality of a teacher's work, according to a number of people directly involved. The agreement allows school districts to base up to 40 percent of a teacher's annual review on student performance on state standardized tests, as long as half of that portion is used to analyze the progress of specific groups of students, like those who are not proficient in English or have special needs. The remaining 60 percent is to be based on subjective measures, like classroom observations and professional development projects.

If rating teachers based on standardized test scores was such a brilliant revelation for improving the quality of the teacher workforce, if getting rid of tenure and firing more teachers was clearly the road to excellence, and if standardizing our curriculum and designing tests for each and every component of it were really the way forward, we'd expect to see these strategies all over the home pages of web sites of leading private independent schools, and we'd certainly expect to see these issues addressed throughout the pages of journals geared toward innovative school leaders, like Independent School Magazine.  In fact, they must have been talking about this kind of stuff for at least a decade. You know, how and why merit pay for teachers is the obvious answer for enhancing teacher productivity, and why we need more standardization… more tests… in order to improve curricular rigor?  So, I went back and did a little browsing through recent, and less recent issues of Independent School Magazine and collected the following few words of wisdom

Any number of educators-principals, personnel directors, superintendents-can be called upon to evaluate teachers. But one school district in Indiana, Anderson, has decided that another group has perhaps the best expertise to judge quality teaching: other teachers. This type of peer review is catching on nationally but is rare in Indiana. That might soon change.

Ravitch, who came to realize that what works in business doesn't work when it comes to education, notes that her critics condemn her as a defender of the status quo. But the status quo is now the unproven approaches championed by Wall Street's hedge-fund managers and billionaire "philanthropists" whose education reform views just happen to fall perfectly in line with efforts to crush organized labor, including teacher unions. The key to improving schools isn't found in vouchers, charter schools, teacher evaluations, merit pay and all of the other current approaches, according to Ravitch. Schools must end the punitive approach to education. They must identify their best performers and allow them to share what they know with other educators. It's making the arts a key piece of the curriculum and ensuring that students learn how to think critically and write well. It's ensuring health care for all children - including prenatal care - and quality early childhood education.

One pattern of failure in education reform is that political leadership and the public focus attention and resources on solutions while rarely asking what problems we are addressing or how those solutions address identified problems. The current and possibly increasing advocacy of charter schools is a perfect example of that flawed approach to improving our schools across the U.S. Let's start with two clarifications. First, the overwhelming problems contributing to school quality are pockets of poverty across the country and school policies and practices mirroring and increasing social inequities for children once they enter many schools.

There is a small but growing body of evidence about the (usually test-based) effectiveness of teachers from Teach for America (TFA), an extremely selective program that trains and places new teachers in mostly higher needs schools and districts. Rather than review this literature paper-by-paper, which has already been done by others (see here and here), I'll just give you the super-short summary of the higher-quality analyses, and quickly discuss what I think it means.

Admittedly, defending teachers' collective bargaining rights is a challenge when the vast majority of private sector workers are currently not union members. I do not claim to know what is best for non-union laborers in their own lines of work. However, I unapologetically believe that protecting teacher union rights is vital to the long-term future of quality public education.

They say, "It takes a village to raise a child." Family and community engagement is integral to a quality education. Ensuring participation is especially important in communities where poverty, language barriers or discrimination have resulted in disenfranchisement. Apparently, this lesson is lost on our governor, whose SB 24 will strip the neediest communities of any meaningful participation in their public schools with the creation of a "Commissioner's Network" of schools.

Anyone who wants to start a charter school must of course receive permission, and there are laws and policies governing how such permission is granted. In some states, multiple entities (mostly districts) serve as charter authorizers, whereas in others, there is only one or very few. For example, in California there are almost 300 entities that can authorize schools, almost all of them school districts. In contrast, in Arizona, a state board makes all the decisions. The conventional wisdom among many charter advocates is that the performance of charter schools depends a great deal on the "quality" of authorization policies - how those who grant (or don't renew) charters make their decisions. This is often the response when supporters are confronted with the fact that charter results are varied but tend to be, on average, no better or worse than those of regular public schools. They argue that some authorization policies are better than others, i.e., bad processes allow some poorly-designed schools start, while failing to close others. This argument makes sense on the surface, but there seems to be scant evidence on whether and how authorization policies influence charter performance. From that perspective, the authorizer argument might seem a bit like tautology - i.e., there are bad schools because authorizers allow bad schools to open, and fail to close them. As I am not particularly well-versed in this area, I thought I would look into this a little bit.

I have argued previously that unadjusted absolute performance measures such as proficiency rates are inappropriate for test-based assessments of schools' effectiveness, given that they tell you almost nothing about the quality of instruction schools provide, and that growth measures are the better option, albeit one that also has its own issues (e.g., they are more unstable), and must be used responsibly. In this sense, the weighting of the NYC grading system is much more defensible than most of its counterparts across the nation, at least in my view. But the system is also an example of how details matter - each school's growth portion is calculated using an unconventional, somewhat questionable approach, one that is, as yet, difficult to treat with a whole lot of confidence.

The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure. As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools. The Civil Rights Project has been issuing annual reports on the spread of segregation in public schools and its impact on educational opportunity for 14 years. We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools are the striking example of and offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.

A reader posted a comment that I think is profound. The more that people begin to see education as a consumer choice, the more they will be unwilling to pay for other people's children. And if they have no children in school, then they have no reason to underwrite other people's private choices. The basic compact that public education creates is this: The public is responsible for the education of the children of the state, the district, the community. We all benefit when other people's children are educated. It is our responsibility as citizens to support a high-quality public education, even if we don't have children in the public schools. But once the concept of private choice becomes dominant, then the sense of communal responsibility is dissolved. Each of us is then given permission to think of what is best for me, not what is best for we.

That sense of immediacy, what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the fierce urgency of now," gave rise to the charter school movement. Charter schools are public schools that operate under separate management, giving them the freedom to innovate, to refine, and to tailor approaches to specific groups of students. Many charters have longer school days, weeks, and years. We have seen urban charter schools that perform better than their traditional public school counterparts, making up ground that students have lost in traditional schools. They are a right-now education solution for children who need a high-quality education.

The two teachers systematically dissect the video, noting a variety of missteps. There are a few unquestionable errors of mathematics: Khan uses incorrect terminology at a couple of points. Khan is also inconsistent in his language about positive and negative numbers (using plus when he means positive, or minus when he means negative), which is perhaps a lesser sin, but poor practice and misleading for students. He's also inconsistent in his use of symbols, sometimes writing "+4", sometimes writing "4", never explaining why he does or doesn't. He making the kind of mistakes that would reduce his score on the Mathematical Quality of Instruction observational instrument, used in the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching Project.

Last week, Diane Ravitch called for a cite on a frequently used factoid from the Big Book of Eduformers: research shows that students with effective teachers make three times the progress of students with ineffective teachers. More than a few commenters found the cite: Eric Hanushek, "The Trade-off between Child Quantity and Quality," Journal of Political Economy 100 no. 1 (1992): 84-117 (at p. 107). The research conclusions are based on the data from the Gary Income Maintenance Experiment, which took place between 1971 and 1975, and which involved 1920 exclusively low-income black children.

Citizens for Public Schools (CPS) believes the compromise reached by the Massachusetts Teachers Association and corporate-funded Stand for Children would avoid the worst aspects of Stand's proposed ballot question, which was a deceptive and destructive proposal that failed to address real obstacles to educational quality and equity. The compromise was passed by the legislature and signed into law by Gov. Deval Patrick today, June 29. In exchange, Stand said it would drop the ballot measure it proposed to put on the November ballot. "Stand for Children has become a vehicle for a few billionaires who want to control how we run our public schools," said CPS President Ann O'Halloran, who was the 2007 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year. "I'm relieved that Stand was blocked from achieving its full agenda, but CPS and our allies must be prepared to resist similar efforts down the road. We need to raise awareness of this as a national problem, not just a Massachusetts issue."

This technical report contains four main sections:  1) Data. Description of the data used to implement the student growth model, including data processing rules and relevant issues that arose during processing.  2) Model. Statistical description of the model.  3) Reporting. Description of reporting metrics and computation of effectiveness scores.  4) Results. Overview of key model results aimed at providing information on model quality and characteristics. It is important to note that results presented in this report are based on 2010-11 and prior school years' data. The model will be re-estimated with 2011-12 data when they are available"

A keystone of this reform movement is the replacement of subjective evaluation with quantifiable measures of each teacher's effectiveness. The quantitative method is known as value-added modeling (VAM), a statistical analysis of student scores that seeks to identify how much an individual teacher contributes to a pupil's progress over the years. The use of VAM in teacher evaluations is growing, but the method remains extremely controversial. Critics often claim that it does not and cannot measure actual teacher quality. This paper addresses that claim. Part I analyzes data from Florida public schools to show that a VAM score in a teacher's third year is a good predictor of that teacher's success in his or her fifth year. Having established that VAM is a useful predictive tool, Part II of the paper addresses the most effective ways that VAM can be used in tenure reform."

"The charter school movement is now at a crossroads. More than 2 million students will be enrolled in charter schools in the fall - a big number for a movement that's barely 20 years old. The publicly funded, privately run schools have spread so fast, they operate more like a parallel school system in some places. The intention was to create labs for education experimentation. But the quality of charters and their record of success are mixed. Sometimes, the results aren't much different from their public counterparts. Original arguments against the business model have never dissipated, and now there are questions about whether charters are serving their initial purpose."

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made school choice a foundation of his education agenda, and since he took office in 2002, the city opened more than 500 new schools; closed, or is in the process of closing, more than 100 ailing ones; and created an environment in which more than 130 charter schools could flourish. No neighborhood has been as transformed by that agenda as Harlem. When classes resume on Thursday, many of its students will be showing up in schools that did not exist a decade ago. The idea, one that became a model for school reform nationwide, was to let parents shop for schools the same way they would for housing or a cellphone plan, and that eventually, the competition would lift all boats. But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform."