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"BS Deserves Better," said a sign at a rally outside of the Bronx High School of Science, one of the city's most storied high schools that has been at war with itself for years over the pedagogical policies of its principal, Valerie J. Reidy. On Thursday, roughly two dozen current students and recent alumni gathered on the field across from the school's entrance to protest the school's high rate of teacher turnover and what they perceive as a marked shift in the quality of classroom instruction.

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate largely because of disagreement about (1) whether value-added (VA) provides unbiased estimates of teachers' impacts on student achievement and (2) whether high-VA teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. We address these two issues by analyzing school district data from grades 3-8 for 2.5 million children linked to tax records on parent characteristics and adult outcomes. We find no evidence of bias in VA estimates using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi-experimental research design based on changes in teaching staff. Students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher- ranked colleges, earn higher salaries, live in higher SES neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children as teenagers. Teachers have large impacts in all grades from 4 to 8. On average, a one standard deviation improvment in teacher VA in a single grade raises earnings by about 1% at age 28. Replacing a teacher whose VA is in the bottom 5% with an average teacher would increase students' lifetime income by more than $250,000 for the average classroom in our sample. We conclude that good teachers create substantial economic value and that test score impacts are helpful in identifying such teachers.

Commissioner King's decision to cut off funding to School Improvement Grant (SIG) districts will disrupt services to our neediest students and deprive their schools of millions in promised federal funding - in what appears to be an arbitrary exercise of brinksmanship. Instead of requesting a waiver for New York's SIG school districts to give them a reasonable extension of time to construct quality evaluations that support teacher development and growth in student learning, SED is using a blunt instrument - taking away funds that provide essential services for students in our neediest schools.

In today's New York Times there was a story about a research study which supposedly proved that students who had teachers with good value-added scores were more successful in life. This inspired me to complete something I have been working on for several months, off-and-on, a detailed analysis of the raw data supplied in the most quoted value-added study there is, a paper written in Dallas in 1997. This is the paper which 'proved' that students who had three effective teachers in a row got dramatically higher test scores than their unlucky peers who had three ineffective teachers in a row.  I've written about it previously much less formally here and here. The New York Times story frustrated me since I know that value-added does not correlate with future student income. Value-added does not correlate with teacher quality. Value-added doesn't correlate with principal evaluations. It doesn't correlate with anything including, as I'll demonstrate in this post, with itself.

Just this week, Florida announced its new district grading system. These systems have been popping up all over the nation, and given the fact that designing one is a requirement of states applying for No Child Left Behind waivers, we are sure to see more. I acknowledge that the designers of these schemes have the difficult job of balancing accessibility and accuracy. Moreover, the latter requirement - accuracy - cannot be directly tested, since we cannot know "true" school quality. As a result, to whatever degree it can be partially approximated using test scores, disagreements over what specific measures to include and how to include them are inevitable (see these brief analyses of Ohio and California). As I've discussed before, there are two general types of test-based measures that typically comprise these systems: absolute performance and growth. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Florida's attempt to balance these components is a near total failure, and it shows in the results.

America's public school teachers are seeing their generations-old tenure protections weakened as states seek flexibility to fire teachers who aren't performing. A few states have essentially nullified tenure protections altogether, according to an analysis being released Wednesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The percentage of charter schools that are being closed when they are up for renewal has fallen for two straight years, a new report finds, though it's unclear whether the decline is a result of improved quality, or lax oversight and persistent political pressure to keep low-performers open. In the 2010-11 year, 6.2 percent of charters reviewed for renewal were shut down, a decrease from 8.8 percent the previous year and 12.6 percent the year before that, according to a report released today by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. NACSA officials acknowledge that they don't have clear explanations for why closure rates fell.

There is a paucity of high-quality studies on urban charter markets. In my review of the research, I found rigorous studies on twelve cities (I only used studies included in this 2011 meta study or in the CREDO 16 state study). This limited sample size makes the results more illustrative than definitive. But, for what it's worth, here's the headline: charter schools outperformed traditional schools in every urban city except for Washington, DC; Chicago; and Philadelphia--and in all three of these cities results were similar across charter and traditional schools. Superintendents--especially those of you who are Reformers--this research, admittedly limited, should give you pause. In 75 percent of cities studied, Relinquisher strategies proved effective. And in the other 25 percent of cities, results were no worse.

Today, however, charter schools and districts are commonly !nding themselves sitting down at the bargaining table to work out deals. This evolution has come, in part, simply because the charter school sector has matured and can now make a compelling case that it can help districts with quality schooling for at-risk students. But districts, too, have evolved. Urban school superintendents across the country are realizing that a centrally delivered, one-size-!ts-all approach simply is not viable, and that they need partnerships to bring in entrepreneurial talent and mission-driven teams (Campbell, 2011; Hill, Menefee-Libey, Dusseault, DeArmond, & Gross, 2009; Lake & Hernandez, 2011). Together, districts and charter schools are working on some of the most dif!cult problems that choice creates in order to reap the deepest and most widespread promise that choice offers.

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. 

With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents research examining the variation between and impact that individual teacher training institutions in Washington state have on the effectiveness of teachers they train. Using administrative data linking teachers' initial endorsements to student achievement on state reading and math tests, we find the majority of teacher training programs produce teachers who are no more or less effective than teachers who trained out-of-state. However, we do find a number of cases where there are statistically significant differences between estimates of training program effects for teachers who were credentialed at various in-state programs. These findings are robust to a variety of different model specifications.

Charter school advocates have sounded a warning about an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking from the Obama administration that they say could undermine the ability of teachers in those schools to participate in state retirement plans. The notice, released by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service in November, says that federal officials are seeking to clarify what kinds of pension systems quality as "governmental plans," which would affect the regulation of them. Details of what's in the works drew a strong response from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which issued a statement saying the changes "would force states to prohibit public charter school teachers from participating in state retirement plans."

We propose a fundamental shift in the framework and language we use to discuss educational reform. Instead of a framework that views students as products, we propose a framework in which the products of education are viewed as the contexts and content of schools themselves. The schools we produce should be positive and nurturing learning environments where students are engaged in a rich, coherent curriculum. Rather than view our students as widgets, we'd do better to view them as vibrant, dynamic organisms, and view the school, by extension, as an ecosystem. While such a model would make it harder to quantify school quality based on a simple numerical scale, it would enable us to have more productive conversations about systemic education reform, and to take action in targeted ways that will have a sustainable impact. There are principles for maintaining a healthy ecosystem that can provide guidance in strengthening our school environments. We are certain that this shift in focus will - perhaps paradoxically - result in more productive student outcomes. Land maintained according to sound ecological principles results in abundant microbial soil life, interdependency of diverse species, and a sustainable yield. A school maintained according to ecological principles will result in lower teacher turnover, greater community engagement, and positive long-term student outcomes.

Currently, many states plan to have teachers of non-tested subjects use a make-shift version of value-added measures where teachers identify learning objectives, choose assessments that correspond with these objectives, monitor student progress over the course of the year, and then present that progress as evidence of student growth. While this process may very well improve the overall quality of teaching, it is an ineffective way to evaluate teachers. If it takes complex statistical algorithms to measure student growth for English and math teachers, what makes us think that teachers of non-tested subjects can validly and reliably measure student growth on their own?

It's time to put the entire issue of rankings in proper perspective. They distort educational quality, leading taxpayers to make flawed judgments about how young people are educated. This plays right into the hands of privateers who want to undermine confidence in public schools.

There is so much hot air in education reform, and it's extremely frustrating when one's arguments and supporting research are misconstrued. 

Last week, more than 400 principals on Long Island, N.Y., signed a letter of public protest against the state's new and untried teacher evaluation system. The signatories, drawn from elementary, middle, and high schools, represent two-thirds of all principals on Long Island, which includes Nassau and Suffolk counties. Their letter is historic. It's the first time that a large number of administrators have spoken out in opposition to bad ideas. It represents hundreds of educators who are willing to stick their necks out, hundreds of educators willing to speak truth to power, hundreds of educators who put their name on a statement to the state's highest education officials, with this simple message: "Stop! What you are doing is wrong. What you are imposing on us is untested. We believe it will be harmful to our students. It will undermine education quality. It will hurt teachers and ruin morale. You are treating us like lab rats. Stop. Respect the lives that are in your keeping."

There's a fascinating and very worthwhile teacher quality debate that's happening in the blogosphere right now (see Rotherham versus Weingarten and Hanushek versus Ravitch). Hanushek suggests, based on economic analyses of student test score data, that up to 400,000 teachers (up to 10% of a 4-million-person workforce) should be fired. That number is scary and high for anyone who has many individual teachers in their lives whom they care about.

There is a growing assumption that education reformers are anti-teacher and teachers are anti-reform. Disagreements between these groups have become so heated and so public recently that this seems like a reasonable conclusion. The real story is more complicated. Over the past year, I've had the chance to speak with many people in the education reform world. I have come to believe that most reformers became reformers for the same reasons that most teachers became teachers: a hope that we can provide a higher quality education to a greater number of children in a fairer and more equal way. As a teacher, though, I share my colleagues' frustrations with some of reformers' catchiest feel-good phrases. Teachers are not so much against education reforms as we are downstream from them. We see the way well-meaning changes play out in our schools and classrooms, and often hear troubling subtexts in talking points that sound great on TV. Here are a few examples, along with tips on how to engage teachers in the real conversations that we should be having about these issues.

Teaching matters and teachers matter, but not in any ways we can measure and trap in data. For the many reformers who claim otherwise, they are insuring that we will soon ruin the very aspects of teacher that genuinely create high-quality teachers.