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The conventional wisdom among many education commentators is that U.S. public school teachers "come from the bottom third" of their classes. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took this talking point a step further, and asserted at a press conference last week that teachers are drawn from the bottom 20 percent of graduates. All of this is supposed to imply that the U.S. has a serious problem with the "quality" of applicants to the profession. Despite the ubiquity of the "bottom third" and similar arguments (which are sometimes phrased as massive generalizations, with no reference to actual proportions), it's unclear how many of those who offer them know what specifically they refer to (e.g., GPA, SAT/ACT, college rank, etc.). This is especially important since so many of these measurable characteristics are not associated with future test-based effectiveness in the classroom, while those that are are only modestly so. Still, given how often it is used, as well as the fact that it is always useful to understand and examine the characteristics of the teacher labor supply, it's worth taking a quick look at where the "bottom third" claim comes from and what it might or might not mean.

I was intrigued by this post from Jay Greene today, in which he points out that public schools can learn from charter schools and perhaps can implement some of their successes. Specifically, Greene is referring to KIPP-like "no excuses" charter schools as a model, and their strategies for improving outcomes including much extended school time (longer day/year).  As the basis for his argument, Greene refers specifically to Roland Fryer's updated analysis of Houston's Apollo 20 schools - which are - in effect, models of no excuses charters applied in the traditional public district.

The similarities between contemporary American educational reform and Soviet educational reform of the 1930s are as striking as they are discomfiting. Of the following three statements, which refer to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and which refer to America today? 1.  "Teachers are asked to achieve significant academic growth for all students at the same time that they instruct students with ever-more diverse needs….The stakes are huge-and the time to cling to the status quo has passed."   2.  "We had to have a campaign for 100 percent successful teaching…all students must learn." 3.  "Poor work by the school and poor achievement by the entire class and by individual pupils are the direct result of poor work by the teacher."   Although all three of the above sentiments could be attributable to current officeholders in Washington, D.C., only the first is American-from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (Duncan 2010, January). The second and third are policy statements which emanated from old Soviet policy papers on educational reform (Ewing, 2001, p. 487).

"New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's school reform proposals have infuriated educators across the state. Award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School is one of them and in this post, she  explains why. Burris, who has written frequently for this blog,  was named New York's 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010, was tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. Burris has been exposing the botched school reform program in New York for years on this blog. Her most recent post was "Principal: 'There comes a time when rules must be broken…That time is now.'" (In this post, Burris refers to "value-added" scores, which refer to value-added measurement (VAM), which purports to be able to determine the "value" a teacher brings to student learning by plopping test scores into complicated formulas that can supposedly strip out all other factors, including the conditions in which a student lives.)"

"Okay, you've won! Tenure has been abolished. There are no limits on charters, and vouchers are available to all takers. Collective bargaining is a thing of the past. The dreaded fire-breathing dragon union now resembles a salamander. Governors, state legislatures, mayors and editorial boards, who've claimed that they can turn around the dismally depressing performance levels in our urban inner cities -- if only these vestiges of the past were abolished -- have had their way. But some questions remain, because as Colin Powell once said when referring to post-war Iraq, the "Pottery Barn Rule" now applies. That is, "you break it, you own it." So it might be useful if we ask the victors some questions about the new education landscape now that the "War on Entrenched Teachers & Unions" has been brought to a successful conclusion."

State Education Department officials were blind to the feelings of deaf students on this week's English exams - heartlessly asking them questions about sounds such as the clickety-clack of a woman's high heels and the rustle of wind blowing on leaves, educators claimed. One sixth-grade teacher of hearing-impaired kids said they were completely thrown off by a lengthy listening passage rife with references to environmental noises - such as a cupboard door creaking open or the roar of a jet engine. The kids were then asked to write how a boy who hears those sounds as music in his head is like a typical sixth-grader.

It's been two decades since the first charter schools took hold within the American education system. Ember Reichgott Junge was there at the day of creation. Reichgott Junge, as a Minnesota state senator in the early 1990s, was one of the chief sponsors of the nation's first charter school law, a legislative victory that presaged the expansion of charters across the country. Today, there are about 5,700 charters in operation in the United States, according to the Center for Education Reform. Reichgott Junge, a Democrat, has written an account of her experience trying to marshal support for the charter school measure, published by the Charter Schools Development Corporation and Beaver's Pond Press, to be released next month. The book is titled "Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story," a reference to one Minnesota lawmaker's assessment of the proposal's chances. The book's release is meant to coincide with National Charter Schools Week, next month, which marks the 20th anniversary of charters.

Fashion designer Kenneth Cole felt the wrath of many teachers this week after his company posted a billboard with a controversial slogan in reference to the ongoing education reform debate.

It's not often that intellectual heavyweights disagree so fundamentally about the same issue in commentaries published days apart in the nation's two most respected newspapers. I'm referring to Paul Krugman, whose column "Wasting Our Minds" appeared on Apr. 29 in The New York Times, and to George P. Schultz and Eric A. Hanushek, whose essay "Education Is the Key to a Healthy Economy" appeared in The Wall Street Journal on May 1. The subject was the relationship between educational outcomes and economic growth.

Juan Pagan, parent leader at Legacy HS and a member of the Citywide Council on HS, gave this eloquent speech at yesterday's press conference in Foley Square:                               It is beyond me how Mayor Bloomberg refers to himself as the "Education Mayor" when his educational reform policy is nothing more than a four-step strategy to kill schools. Bloomberg's Four-Step Strategy To Kill a School

Three of Connecticut's "Big City" mayors had a commentary piece published in today's CTNewsjunkie.  They should have remembered the quote "It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt" before they put their names on to today's piece entitled "Small Investment, Big Payoff".   (also linked below as well) Unless of course what they are referring to the price whoever wrote this piece paid to get them to sign it. It would be far better to believe that this piece was ghost written by the charter school lobbyists and the mayors didn't read it before they signed it than to think they would ever be so dismissive and insulting to the needs of their constituents.

I often hear the following argument: Improving teacher quality is more cost-effective than other options, such as reducing class size (see here, for example). I am all for evaluating policy alternatives based on their costs relative to their benefits, even though we tend to define the benefits side of the equation very narrowly - in terms of test score gains. But "improving teacher quality" cannot yet be included in a concrete costs/benefits comparison with class size or anything else. It is not an actual policy. At best, it is a category of policy options, all of which are focused on recruitment, preparation, retention, improvement, and dismissal of teachers. When people invoke it, they are presumably referring to the fact that teachers vary widely in their test-based effectiveness. Yes, teachers matter, but altering the quality distribution is whole different ballgame from measuring it overall. It's actually a whole different sport.

Readers may recall that I posted a blog criticizing the College Board for its shameful campaign attacking American education. The ad says that the education system is "crumbling" and calls on the presidential candidates to talk more about education. The College Board asserts that American education is bad and getting worse. I received two great responses. One came from the brilliant scholar Yong Zhao, now at the University of Oregon. He makes reference to a valuable comment by Brian, which follows Yong Zhao

As the DFER veneer for right-wing "parent trigger" laws wears off, and more and more people see the privatization agenda for what it is, charlatans like Gloria Romero and Ben Austin have been scrambling to hide or minimize their ties to right wing extremists. The good news is that it isn't working, and that aside from shills like Andi Rotherham and Alex Russo even mainstream media journalists are starting to see through what the distinguished Professor Diane Ravitch refers to as the "Parent Tricker." Josh Eidelson's "Parent trigger": The latest tactic for fighting teachers' unions is a good example.

"The findings reviewed in this section refer to the results for the most appropriate comparison-the sending schools comparison-unless otherwise noted. Full results are in the body of the report or in the appendices. The CMOs included in this particular study included: KIPP, YES Preparatory, Harmony (Cosmos), IDEA, UPLIFT, School of Science and Technology, Brooks Academy, School of Excellence, and Inspired Vision."

"First I want to clarify what I mean by us all. I believe the Chicago teachers strike is an important stand in the battle to improve, even save, public education in the United States. The strike, if successful, will benefit teachers, students and parents, not only in Chicago but across the entire country, as well as both unionized workers and non-unionized workers. This strike has the potential to go down in history along with other labor actions, such as those in Homestead, Lawrence, Paterson, Ludlow and Flint that ultimately built the union movement in the United States and transformed life for what used to be known as the working-class but what politicians today euphemistically refer to as the middle class. That is why I strongly support this strike and why I am wearing a red t-shirt to work in support of the teachers and public education."

So, I've seen on more than a few occasions these last few weeks references to the recent Dobbie and Fryer article on NYC charter schools as the latest evidence that money doesn't matter in schools. That costly stuff like class size, or  overall measures of total per pupil expenditures are simply unimportant, and can easily be replaced/substituted with no-cost alternatives like those employed in no excuses charter schools (like high expectations, tutoring, additional time, and wrap-around services). I'll set aside the issue that many of these supposedly more effective alternatives do, in fact, have cost implications. Instead, I'll focus my critique on whether this Dobbie/Fryer study provides any substantive evidence that money doesn't matter - either broadly, or in the narrower context of looking specifically at NYC charter schools.

As discussed in a previous post, roughly half of Americans believe that government should take some active role in reducing income differences between rich and poor, though, as one would expect, this view is less prevalent among Republicans, more educated and higher earning survey respondents. These data, however, lack a frame of reference. That is, they don't tell us whether American support for government redistribution is "high" or "low" compared with that in other nations. The conventional wisdom in this area is that Americans generally prefer a more limited government, especially when it comes to things like income redistribution. It might therefore be interesting to take a quick look at how the U.S. stacks up against other nations in terms of these redistributive preferences.

Tragically, our nation is in the midst of a mass extinction that threatens our future and this catastrophe will devastate our nation's ability to compete in the 21st century. America is in the process of systematically wiping out higher level thinking skills. Ironically, when I say "systematically" I am referring to our educational system. The skills needed for tomorrow (creative thinking, critical thinking, and problem solving) are being driven out of our children. Tragically this occurs during the process of becoming "educated." Unfortunately, we are equipping students for yesterday, not tomorrow.

I've seen a number of tweets and vague media references of late about the fact that NJ Education Commissioner Cerf will at some point in the near future be providing recommendations for how to change the School Funding Reform Act of 2008.