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This study makes a distinction between a school having high attrition and one having difficulties in hiring. It does so by exploring the relationship between definitions of hard-to-staff schools, school demographics, and school conditions that are often associated with a school being hard-to-staff.

John Mooney at NJ Spotlight provided a reasonable overview of the NJDOE waiver proposal to "reward" successful schools and sanction and/or takeover "failing" ones. The NJDOE waiver proposal includes explanation of a new classification system for identifying which schools should be subject to state intervention, ultimately to be managed by regional offices throughout the state. This new targeted intervention system classifies districts in need of intervention as "priority" districts, with specific emphasis on "focus" districts.

At a time when California's governor has proposed a major change to that state's public employees' pension plan, the Center for American Progress has released two timely reports that consider the potential benefits and detriments of scrapping traditional defined-benefit pension plans for teachers in favor of cash-balance plans. A new review of the reports finds that while they have some limitations, they raise important issues in the face of limited knowledge.

This paper outlines how such an investment structure might be used to solve a different challenge: chronic academic underachievement among low-income students. The academic achievement gap is well documented and seemingly intractable. Low-income students do consistently worse than their middle and upper-income peers in all measures of academic success at every grade level, including standardized test scores, high school graduation rates, and college completion rates. A number of social and education reforms have been offered to help close the achievement gap. This paper will not attempt to add to this voluminous history; rather, it will explore a new approach to financing schools that demonstrate success in closing the gap. It will also deliberately steer clear of any discussion of pedagogy. Curriculum reform is beyond the scope of this proposal as well. That said, this paper will focus on a particular type of school-charters-because many have demonstrated success serving low-income students.

This site, which draws primarily on data collected by organizations other than NCES, compiles and disseminates data on state-level elementary and secondary education reform efforts in the five areas indicated below.

The fact that so many states have mandated 4-5 category schemes right out of the gate, seemingly based on little more than speculation among advocacy groups, is yet another instance of the rushed, ill-considered drive to overhaul teacher evaluations. It's amazing how certain some people seem about what these new systems are supposed to look like, given the fact that there is barely a shred of evidence as to their optimal form. In these situations, it's often wise to encourage experimentation, see how different configurations turn out and learn from this variation.

For the second time, the Los Angeles Times published results of statistical testing examining the variation in teacher and school performance in the LA Unified School District. The resulting ranking system was found to be inaccurate due to the unreliable methodology.

The GAO report's authors are very careful to note that their findings merely describe what you might call the "service gap" - i.e., the proportion of special education students served by charters versus regular public schools - but that they do not indicate the reasons for this disparity. This is an important point, but I would take the warning a step further:  The national- and state-level gaps themselves should be interpreted with the most extreme caution. Although there are plenty of interesting data contained in the report, and its authors do point out many of the limitations of their analyses, the GAO's approach (and virtually all the press coverage) seems to gloss over the fact that charter schools are disproportionately located in urban, lower-income areas, where special education rates of all schools tend to be higher. To understand why this matters, consider an analogous example: On average, U.S. charter schools serve a considerably larger proportion of minority students than regular public schools. Does this mean that minority students are underrepresented in regular public schools?

"During the 2010, 2011, and 2012 legislative sessions, a combination of federal policy incentives and newly elected governors and legislative majorities in many states following the 2010 elections sparked a wave of legislation addressing teacher effectiveness. More than 20 states passed legislation designed to address educator effectiveness by mandating annual evaluations based in part on student learning and linking evaluation results to key personnel decisions, including tenure, reductions in force, dismissal of underperforming teachers, and retention. In many cases states passed multiple laws, with later laws building on previous legislation, and also promulgated regulations to implement legislation. A few states acted through regulation only. In an effort to help policymakers, educators, and the public better understand how this flurry of legislative activity shifted the landscape on teacher effectiveness issues-both nationally and at the state level-Bellwether Education Partners analyzed recent teacher effectiveness legislation, regulation, and supporting policy documents from 21 states that took major legislative or regulatory action on teacher effectiveness in the past three years. This analysis builds on a previous analysis of teacher effectiveness legislation in five states that Bellwether published in 2011. Our expanded analysis includes nearly all states that took major legislative action on teacher effectiveness over the past three years."

"Municipal finance analysts at Moody's recently took a look at the impact of charter school growth on public finances, finding "while the vast majority of traditional public districts are managing through the rise of charter schools without a negative credit impact, a small but growing number face financial stress due to the movement of students to charters.""

"Last month saw the publication of a new report, New York State's Extreme School Segregation, produced by UCLA's highly regarded Civil Rights Project. It confirmed what New York educators have suspected for some time: our schools are now the most racially segregated schools in the United States. New York's African-American and Latino students experience "the highest concentration in intensely-segregated public schools (less than 10% white enrollment), the lowest exposure to white students, and the most uneven distribution with white students across schools.""

"In The link between charter school expansion and increasing segregation, Iris C. Rotberg highlights that problems exist in both re-segregation of schools in the U.S. and the rise of charter schools as separate and interrelated forces. Schools in the U.S. are re-segregating, regardless of type-public, private, and charter. And charter schools are not creating the education reform charter advocates claim, with one failure of the charter movement being segregating students by race and class. Thus, it is important to focus on the evidence that shows the need to reconsider how to address segregation and the flawed support continuing for expanding charter schools."

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.

"For decades, principals have been recognized as important contributors to the effectiveness of schools. In an era of school accountability reform and shared decisionmaking and management in schools, leadership matters. Principals constitute the core of the leadership team in schools."

"Here's the letter that 10 assessment experts sent to the New York State Board of Regents earlier this month urging it not to approve a system that links student standard test scores to the evaluations of teachers and principals."

"Scores on tests of students' academic achievement are currently widely used in educational accountability systems. This use typically rests on two assumptions: that students' scores are a reasonable measure of educational output, and therefore that holding teachers accountable for them will provide appropriate incentives to improve the performance of teachers and the functioning of schools. This paper explains why neither of this commonsensical assumptions is warranted and argues that over-reliance on achievement tests in accountability systems produces perverse incentives. Better incentives may require that test scores be used along with numerous other measures, many of which are more subjective than test scores are."

"...Value-added modeling pops up every- where today, from newspapers to television to political campaigns. VAM is heavily promoted with unbridled and uncritical enthusiasm by the press, by politicians, and even by (some) educational ex- perts, and it is touted as the modern, "scientific" way to measure educational success in everything from charter schools to individual teachers. Yet most of those promoting value-added modeling are ill-equipped to judge either its effectiveness or its limitations..."