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School administrators gave 99.4 percent of all Pennsylvania teachers "satisfactory" ratings during the 2009-10 school year, the latest data available from the state Department of Education show. But, said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality: "That kind of teacher evaluation system tells you almost nothing." The state's teacher evaluations "give no consideration to teacher effectiveness and include no objective measures of student performance," Jacobs said. The nonprofit, nonpartisan council, partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recently gave Pennsylvania an overall grade of D+ for progress on policies to support and measure teacher effectiveness and an F for efforts to rid schools of ineffective teachers. That could change. State education officials are trying to convince legislators to change the Pennsylvania school code to allow for more comprehensive teacher evaluations, a move teachers unions tentatively support.

The Republican education commissioner of Texas, Robert Scott, might not be the first person you'd think would find common ground with California's Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, but Scott has savaged high-stakes testing in language that would make Brown smile. Speaking to the Texas State Board of Education late last month, Scott said that the mentality that standardized testing is the "end-all, be-all" is a "perversion" of what a quality education should be. What's more, he called "the assessment and accountability regime" not only "a cottage industry but a military-industrial complex." And he attacked the Common Core Standards Initiative as being motivated by business concerns.

Both a value-added method and principal observations tied to a teaching framework identified the same teachers as particularly high or low-performing under Chicago's teacher-evaluation pilot, a new study concludes. But principals struggled to provide high-quality "coaching" and support to teachers based on the results, the report says-a finding indicates just how difficult it will be to use the systems to improve teaching and learning.

As discussed in prior posts, high-quality analyses of charter school effects show that there is wide variation in the test-based effects of these schools but that, overall, charter students do no better than their comparable regular public school counterparts. The existing evidence, though very tentative, suggests that the few schools achieving large gains tend to be well-funded, offer massive amounts of additional time, provide extensive tutoring services and maintain strict, often high-stakes discipline policies.

Each year, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) publishes the State Teacher Policy Yearbook, a comprehensive examination of the state laws, rules and regulations that govern the teaching profession, measured against a realistic set of reform goals. For five years running, the full Yearbook compendium (www.nctq.org/stpy) presents the most detailed, thorough analysis of teacher effectiveness policy in the United States. In advance of the next Yearbook, to be released in January 2012, we offer a closer look at trends on teacher evaluation and effectiveness policies.

Legislation that would make it easier to create charter schools in failing school districts was officially signed into law on Thursday. "With this legislation signed today, we are taking another step to expand access to high quality school options to ensure that more students are stepping into classrooms that will give them a better education and a brighter future," said Gov. Chris Christie. "We have much further to go to reform education in New Jersey and ensure we are getting results for all children, regardless of their zip code.

Even as research has begun to document that teachers matter, there is less certainty about what attributes of teachers make the most difference in raising student achievement. Numerous studies have estimated the relationship between teachers' characteristics, such as work experience and academic performance, and their value-added to student achievement; but, few have explored whether instructional practices predict student test score gains. In this study, we ask what classroom practices, if any, differentiate teachers with high impact on student achievement in middle school English Language Arts from those with lower impact. In so doing, the study also explores to what extent value-added measures signal differences in instructional quality.  Even with the small sample used in our analysis, we find consistent evidence that high value-added teachers have a different profile of instructional practices than do low value-added teachers. Teachers in the fourth (top) quartile according to value-added scores score higher than second-quartile teachers on all 16 elements of instruction that we measured, and the differences are statistically significant for a subset of practices including explicit strategy instruction.

A cooperative effort of the New York City Department of Education, the Chancellor's office, and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) resulted in a specially designed educational program under which all elementary and middle schools in the Chancellor's District would operate. The program included five components: a research-based curriculum focused heavily on literacy and mathematics; a staffing model designed to ensure a qualified teacher in every classroom; a strong principal for every school; high quality professional development for teachers and administrators; and smaller classes with added dollars for materials and supplies.

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.

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.

"Backing Governor Chris Christie and Commissioner Chris Cerf's unrelenting push for more "high-quality school options" in New Jersey, the Department of Education recently approved nine charter schools to open in September, bringing the total number of charter schools in New Jersey to 86. This move is part of a broader trend toward the marketization of education policy - the incorporation of market principles into the management and structure of public schools, as well as voucher programs to subsidize alternatives to public schools. These market principles include deregulation, competition, and the unqualified celebration of "choice," all of which are embodied in the charter school movement. Despite claims of greater efficiency, innovativeness, and responsiveness, however, the growing rhetoric around choice needs to be more closely scrutinized before we wholeheartedly jump on the charter school bandwagon."

"Teachers, parents, and the public who are genuinely concerned about public school quality must enter directly the teacher evaluation/pay debate, but do so informed with the following foundational facts, messages, and questions:"

"The question of what to do with bad teachers has stymied America's education system of late, sparking chaotic protests in state capitals and vitriolic debate in a recent congressional hearing. It has also stoked the movement known as 'education reform,' which has zeroed in on teacher quality by urging school districts to sort the star teachers from the duds, and reward or punish them accordingly. The idea is that America's schools would be able to increase their students' test scores if only they had better teachers. Since 2007, this wave of education reformers -- in particular Democrats for Education Reform, a group backed by President Barack Obama and hedge fund donors -- has clashed with teachers unions in their pursuit of making the field of education as discerning in its personnel choices as, say, that of finance. Good teachers should be promoted and retained, reformers contend, instead of being treated like identical pieces on an assembly line, who are rewarded with tenure for their staying power or seniority. But what to do with the underperformers?"

"A while back, I argued that Florida's school grading system, due mostly to its choice of measures, does a poor job of gauging school performance per se. The short version is that the ratings are, to a degree unsurpassed by most other states' systems, driven by absolute performance measures (how highly students score), rather than growth (whether students make progress). Since more advantaged students tend to score more highly on tests when they enter the school system, schools are largely being judged not on the quality of instruction they provide, but rather on the characteristics of the students they serve."

Could teacher evaluations begin to offer us the best portrait yet of what instruction actually looks like in America's classrooms? And what changes might such information spur in teacher preparation and on-the-job training? Those are implications raised by a couple of different papers looking at teacher evaluations. I've written about them on this blog before, but only from the technical aspects of the systems. In reviewing the reports again, it strikes me that they also have a lot to say about instructional quality-some of which seems frankly troubling.

The problem with education in Connecticut is income inequality, not teacher quality. Unfortunately, the plans Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has outlined for education reform - for the most part - take us in entirely the wrong direction. Education in Connecticut is a paradox. Though the National Assessment of Educational Progress consistently ranks the state among the highest scoring for student achievement, we also suffer from the highest black/white and poor/non-poor achievement gaps in the country.

Since the reports were released last week, the debate has been raging about whether a formula prone to as much as 53% in margin of error is the best way to judge the effectiveness of teachers. Self-proclaimed reformers say yes; those who understand teaching say otherwise. There is no question that teachers are responsible for the learning and growth that take place inside of their classrooms. However, standardized tests are just not a reliable measure of learning. If we are truly interested in increasing the quality of education, the conversation surrounding accountability must shift. Imagine if doctors were held accountable based on the death rate of their patients, regardless of environmental factors and whether prescribed treatment was followed. Imagine if firefighters were held accountable based on fire injuries and deaths, even though they didn't start the fires, their budgets had been cut and most of the homes in their district didn't have fire alarms. That would be unreasonable. So why do we only apply this impossible standard to teachers?

As students across the country stage a national day of action to defend public education, we look at the nation's largest school systems - Chicago and New York City - and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In Chicago, the city's unelected school board voted last week to shut down seven schools and fire all of the teachers at 10 other schools. In New York City, many educators are criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration after the release of the names of 18,000 city teachers, along with a ranking system that claims to quantify each teacher's impact on the reading and math scores of their pupils on statewide tests. "The danger is that if teachers and schools are held accountable just for relatively narrow measures of what it is students are doing in class, that will become what drives the education system," says Columbia University's Aaron Pallas, who studies the efficiency of teacher-evaluation systems. "The effects of school closings in [New York City] is one of the great untold stories today," says Democracy Now! education correspondent Jaisal Noor. "The bedrock of these communities [has been] neighborhood schools and now they're being destroyed." Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union says, "When you have a CEO in charge of a school system as opposed to a superintendent - a real educator - what ends up happening is that they literally have no clue how to run the schools." Lewis recounts a meeting where she says Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told her that, "25 percent of these kids are never going to amount to anything."

This morning, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott appeared at an American University forum with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and the mayors and school superintendents from Chicago and Los Angeles. A video of the forum is here. Bloomberg defended giving out invalid and inaccurate Teacher Data Reports as providing "information" to parents, saying it was "arrogance" to suggest that peddling wildly inaccurate information was a bad idea. He made a feeble attempt at backtracking from a prior statement that in his ideal world, he would fire half of the teachers and double class size. "Class size is important," he opined, but not as important as other things such as teacher quality. At the very end of the program, Bloomberg displayed his education acumen and keen political ear by declaring that "teaching to the test is exactly what we should do." And in defense of this position, he invoked a Pete Seeger song, "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy."

Performance ratings for 217 New York City charter school teachers were made public on Tuesday but city officials cautioned that because of missing information, the reports cannot be used to objectively compare the quality of a public school versus charter school education. The controversial ratings cover math and English teachers of grades four to eight at 32 charter schools. These schools receive public funding, but are privately managed, and unlike traditional public schools, they voluntarily participated in the city's teacher data initiative, believing that the information would remain confidential. Some of the schools that volunteered for the assessment are part of established charter management organizations like KIPP or Uncommon, while others are independent schools, commonly called mom-and-pops.