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Faced with mounting policy pressures from federal and state accountability programs, school leaders are reallocating curricula, time, even diet in an attempt to boost student achievement. To explore whether they are using test score data to reallocate their teacher resources as well, I designed a cross-case, cross-sectional study and explored principals' reported staffing practices in one higher performing and one lower performing elementary school in each of five Florida school districts. Findings show that school leaders are "staffing to the test" by hiring, moving, and developing teachers in an effort to increase their schools' overall performance. The paper discusses the implications of evidence-based staffing for policy, practice and future research.

If a well-heeled neighborhood of Los Angeles wanted better police protection, would it be OK for the residents to donate money to their local police station so it could assign an extra patrol car to their streets? Most people would rightly say no. Law enforcement is a public service; taxpayers support it for the safety of all, to be deployed as needed to provide the best protection for the city. Residents might hire a private security guard for their neighborhood, but they cannot reshape public allocations of resources to benefit themselves through private donations. So is it all right, then, for parents to lavish donations on one school, providing it with art and music classes, instructional aides and extra library hours, while a neighboring school in the same district might have none of those?

Today a new form of redlining is emerging. If passed, the long-awaited Senate bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) would build a bigger highway between low-performing schools serving high-need students-the so-called "bottom 5 percent"-and all other schools. Tragically, the proposed plan would weaken schools in the most vulnerable communities and further entrench the problems-concentrated poverty, segregation and lack of human and fiscal resources-that underlie their failure.

Alexander Russo chose to portray corporate reform critics such as myself as Goliaths who are trampling on the hapless reformers. But this analysis is a bit simple-minded. The corporate reformers have plenty of resources and personnel capable of responding. They are deliberately choosing to take their arguments elsewhere - to the corporate boardrooms, to the ALEC conference, to NBC's Education Nation, and to legislative hearings, speaking through hired lobbyists, astro-turf groups, and well-prepared and vetted experts. They are getting the job done there, if you notice. Most of these groups are seeing revenues climb, and state legislatures across the country are busy adopting more "reform" laws every month.

A series of studies from Roland Fryer and colleagues have explored the effectiveness of specific charter school models and strategies, including Harlem Childrens' Zone (Dobbie & Fryer, 2009), "no excuses" charter schools in New York City (Dobbie & Fryer, 2011), schools within the Houston public school district (Apollo 20) mimicking no excuses charter strategies (Fryer, 2011, Fryer, 2012), and an intensive urban residential schooling model in Baltimore, MD (Curto & Fryer, 2011).  In each case, the models in question involve resource intensive strategies, including substantially lengthening school days and years, providing small group (2 or 3 on 1) intensive tutoring, providing extensive community based wrap around services (Harlem Childrens' Zone) or providing student housing and residential support services (Baltimore). The broad conclusion across these studies is that charter schools or traditional public schools can produce dramatic improvements to student outcomes by implementing no excuses strategies and perhaps wrap around services, and that these strategies come at relatively modest marginal cost. Regarding the benefits of the most expensive alternative explored - residential schooling in Baltimore (at a reported $39,000 per pupil) - the authors conclude that no excuses strategies of extended day and year, and intensive tutoring are likely more cost effective. But, each of these studies suffers from poorly documented and often ill-conceived comparisons of costs and/or marginal expenditures.

My hard-working, middle-class parents, like millions of American families, depended on their neighborhood public schools to provide quality education for their children, and rightfully so. Certainly, all parents in the U.S. should be able to choose the educational option that works best for them and their children. Most important, in this nation, every family in every community should have access to good schools. The only difference among schools should be perhaps each having a different focus. No parent anywhere in these United States should have to move or risk arrest in order to secure quality education for her/his child(ren).   How is it then, that millions of American children live in neighborhoods with schools chronically neglected by the same political/educational system that now wants to condemn them as "failing"?  In such settings, it is hypocritical and cruel to use the illusion of "choice" and "free-market competition" to justify closing or taking even more resources from those same schools; sending parents scurrying for scarce or non-existent schooling options. 

The following is part of a series I'm working on about my time teaching in New York City. This post is an edited version of two posts I wrote while in New York: "Could You Make My Job More Difficult" and "If Only We Had Fewer Resources." You can follow the series by clicking on the label "Teaching in New York" at the bottom of this post.

The Chester Upland School District is more than $20 million in debt, its bank account is almost empty and it cannot afford to pay teachers past the end of this month. To make matters worse, the local charter school, with which the district must divide its financing, is suing the district over unpaid bills. The district's fiscal woes are the product of a toxic brew of budget cuts, mismanagement and the area's poverty. Its problems are compounded by the Chester Community Charter School, a nonprofit institution that is managed by a for-profit company and that now educates nearly half of the district's students. The district sees the charter as a vampire, sucking up more than its fair share of scarce resources. The state, it says, is giving the charter priority over the district. 

Growing up in New York City nearly half a century ago, I watched my parents try to get help for my developmentally disabled brother. There was very little available and my parents were told, on multiple occasions, by education and psychiatric professionals, to dispose of their defective child in an institution. They refused, embarking instead on a long and expensive struggle. I'm not sure how much less agonizing and lonely it is today for the parents of children with special needs--last August, a woman in Maryland killed her autistic son and herself out of despair about his school situation--but I do know that there are many public resources now that were not available when our family could have desperately used them.

Charter schools, publicly financed but independently operated, have encountered fierce resistance in many suburban communities, criticized by parents and traditional educators who view them as a drain on resources. But since the Amani Public Charter School won state approval to open this year, officials at the Mount Vernon City School District have taken that opposition to a new level.

Let me start by pointing out that Mathematica Policy Research, in my view, is an exceptional research organization. They have good people. They do good work and have done much to inform public policy in what I believe are positive ways. That's why I found it so depressing when I started digging through the recent report on Charter CMOs - a report which as framed, was intended to explore the differences in effectiveness, practices and resources of charter schools operated by various Charter Management Organizations.

The National Study of CMO Effectiveness is a longitudinal research effort designed to measure how nonprofit charter school management organizations (CMOs) affect student achievement and to examine the internal structures, practices, and policy contexts that may influence these outcomes. The study began in May 2008 and will conclude in 2012.   This report presents findings on CMO students, resources, and  practices  as well as CMO impacts on student  achievement in middle school. It also examines the relationships  between CMO  practices and impacts. A subsequent version of this report will include findings on CMO impacts on high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment.   The study is being conducted by Mathematica Policy Research and the University of Washington's Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). It was commissioned by NewSchools Venture Fund, with the generous support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. 

I did a post a short while back about the fact that there are persistent inequities in state school finance formulas and that those  persistent inequities have real consequences for students' access to key resources in schools - specifically their access to a rich array of programs, services, courses and other opportunities.  In that post I referred to the post school funding equity era as this perceived time in which we live. Been there, done that. Funding equity? No problem. We all know funding doesn't matter anyway. Funding can't buy a better education. It's all about reform. Not funding. And we all know that the really good reformy strategies can, in fact, achieve greater output with even less funding. Hey, just look at all of those high flying, no excuses charter schools. Wait… aw crap… it seems that many of them actually do spend quite a bit. But, back to my point. Alexander Russo put up a good post today about those pesky school funding gaps, asking whatever happened to them?

If governors like Andrew Cuomo are truly lobbyists for students they would look at our present system and help change it through offering proper resources for schools and children, making sure students get a positive start to their educational experience through highly effective pre-k programs and stopping the race toward higher scores on a test that is really not appropriate for the students taking it. In addition, they could allow schools to use some of the evaluation practices that they have presently. Many schools are using goal setting and teacher observation. Many schools are using best practices that encourage professional conversations between teachers and administrators. Many of those same schools are using teacher-centered and student-centered practices that focus on 21st century skills to prepare students for their future.

There are three types of schools in New York City: Bloomberg schools, Gates schools, and orphans. The Bloomberg schools are the specialized small academies and charters that the Bloomberg administration set up to attract and hold the middle class. Student populations are often predominately White and Asian, although higher performing Black and Hispanic students from more stable home environments are generally welcomed. Gates schools are the foundation-supported schools that get extra resources from their benefactors. The Bloomberg and Gates schools get all the cookies.

If you want to make a real and permanent difference in what goes on in kids' heads, accept the fact that you've been backing the wrong horse. Use your enormous influence and resources to get policymakers in Washington and state capitols to back off X - dump seat-time rules, required-subject rules, fill-out-a-form-for-everything rules, everybody-on-the-same-page rules, my-way-or-the-highway rules, and begin moving toward Theory Y.

"In the past few weeks, two major reports on teacher turnover and retention have been released. One was rolled out with extensive media coverage, and has been the subject of much discussion among policymakers and education commentators. The other was written by me, along with Teachers College doctoral student Clare Buckley. The first report, "The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America's Urban Schools," was prepared by TNTP, an organization formerly known as The New Teacher Project that prepares and provides support for teachers in urban districts, and that advocates for changes in teacher policy. The second, "Thoughts of Leaving: An Exploration of Why New York City Middle School Teachers Consider Leaving Their Classrooms," was released by the Research Alliance for New York City Schools (RANYCS), a nonprofit research group based at New York University. (RANYCS published a report by Will Marinell in February 2011 that examined detailed patterns of teacher turnover in New York City middle schools apparent through the district's human-resources office.)"

"Public preference for property taxes stands in perfect inverse relation to the public taste for parfaits. Everybody loves parfaits[i] and everybody hates property taxes.[ii] No, I don't plan to spend this blog post bashing parfaits. I do like a good parfait. But, even more blasphemous, I intend to shed light on some of the virtues of much maligned property taxes. I often hear school funding equity advocates argue that if we could only get rid of property taxes as a basis for funding public schools, we could dramatically improve funding equity. The solution, from their standpoint is to fund schools entirely from state general funds - based on rationally designed state school finance formulas - where state general fund revenues are derived primarily from income and sales taxes.  In theory, if the state controls the distribution of all resources to schools and none are raised locally through property taxes, the system can be made much fairer, even more progressive with respect to student needs and cost variation "

"The modernization of teacher evaluation systems, an increasingly common component of school reform efforts, promises to reveal new, systematic information about the performance of individual classroom teachers. Yet while states and districts race to design new systems, most discussion of how the information might be used has focused on traditional human resource-management tasks, namely, hiring, firing, and compensation. By contrast, very little is known about how the availability of new information, or the experience of being evaluated, might change teacher effort and effectiveness. In the research reported here, we study one approach to teacher evaluation: practice-based assessment that relies on multiple, highly structured classroom observations conducted by experienced peer teachers and administrators. While this approach contrasts starkly with status quo "principal walk-through" styles of class observation, its use is on the rise in new and proposed evaluation systems in which rigorous classroom observation is often combined with other measures, such as teacher value-added based on student test scores."

Readers of my blog know I'm both a data geek and a skeptic of the usefulness of Value-added data specifically as a human resource management tool for schools and districts. There's been much talk this week about the release of the New York City teacher ratings to the media, and subsequent publication of those data by various news outlets. Most of the talk about the ratings has focused on the error rates in the ratings, and reporters from each news outlet have spent a great deal of time hiding behind their supposed ultra-responsibleness of being sure to inform the public that these ratings are not absolute, that they have significant error ranges, etc.  Matt Di Carlo over at Shanker Blog has already provided a very solid explanatory piece on the error ranges and how those ranges affect classification of teachers as either good or bad. But, the imprecision - as represented by error ranges - of each teacher's effectiveness estimate is but one small piece of this puzzle. And in my view, the various other issues involved go much further in undermining the usefulness of the value added measures which have been presented by the media as necessarily accurate albeit lacking in precision.