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How does the DOE decide which high schools to close? For the third straight year, and all claims to a nuanced review of quality aside, the schools the DOE chooses to shut are simply those that dare to teach the students with the city's highest needs. There's nothing terribly nuanced about it at all. (For previous years, see here and here).

The two consortia-which, you probably recall, are working with federal Race to the Top money-have released documents that shed a bit more light on what the tests might look like when they're fully operational in 2014-15. We say "might" because there is a very long road to travel between these documents and the final tests-lots of tweaking, field-testing, revising, reviewing. But the accumulating stack of documents offers interesting glimpses.

Yesterday, I wrote a post (see "The message is to fire people sooner rather than later") commenting on the big (non peer reviewed) study featured in The New York Times about the long-term impact on students of having "high value added" teachers. One of the researchers was interviewed on the PBS News Hour last night, and a comment seems to me to point out a huge blind spot in the study.

Monday's announcements that all three charter schools in the Believe Network would likely have their charters revoked at the end of the school year were no surprise to those who have been following recent news about these schools and the network which runs them. From security camera footage that showed Believe students were being forced to attend classes in factory space to the photo of Believe CEO Eddie Calderon-Melendez charging a New York Post photographer, evidence suggested that both the state's investigation into the Network's finances and the DOE's review of the school's management would find multiple egregious violations of the school leaders' legal responsibilities.

Ensuring that all students in America's public schools are taught by good teachers is an educational and moral imperative. The teacher is the most important school-based influence on student achievement, and poor children and those of color are less likely to be taught by well-qualified, experienced, and effective teachers than other students. Yet teacher incentive proposals - including those promoted by President Obama's Race to the Top program - are rarely grounded on what high-quality research indicates are the kinds of teacher incentives that lead to school excellence and equity. Few of the current approaches to creating teacher incentives take into account how specific conditions influence whether or not effective teachers will work in high-need schools and will be able to teach effectively in them. This review of research finds little support for a simplistic system of measuring value-added growth, evaluating teachers more "rigorously", and granting bonuses. Instead, the brief supports four recommendations: use the current federal Teacher Incentive Fund to attract qualified, effective teachers to high-needs schools, expand incentives by creating strategic compensation, create working conditions that allow teachers to teach effectively, and more aggressively promote the best practices and policies that spur school excellence and equity. The accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement these recommendations.

The answer to the often-debated question - Does money matter in providing a quality education? - is yes, according to a new report that reviewed research on the subject.

Is it true? Are TFAers just as good - uh, I mean just as bad - as ed school grads? Here's a policy brief from the Great Lakes Center that summarizes the peer-reviewed literature on TFA and student achievement

Unless you live under a rock (or if you don't track education policy matters through social media - same thing), you know about the "big" study about teacher effects that was conducted by Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff, disseminated through NBER and reported in multiple outlets, most notably the New York Times. This is an important study for at least a couple of reasons. First, methodologically, the study is massive and novel in some important ways. Second, from a policy perspective, even if the authors overreach in their interpretation, the study adds to the growing body of literature on teacher effectiveness and value-added measures. The more empirical evidence we have, the better; that's the nature of scientific research.

It was a tale of two new chancellors in 2011 for the city's Department of Education. NY1's Lindsey Christ filed the following report.

A book review by Ken Bernstein (@teacherken).

This year, the gloves came off, as teachers faced unprecedented attacks on our right to collective bargaining, as well as continued attempts to tie our pay and job security to test scores. Some of these attacks were blatant, as in Wisconsin, but most were veiled behind a cloak of rhetoric about education reform. Today I want to review some of the posts that attempted to bell the corporate education reform cat.

Gateways to the Principalship: State Power to Improve the Quality of School Leaders proposes state policies for improving principal effectiveness and student achievement. It uses policy examples from eight "lagging" and eight "leading" states as a means of advocating for a wide range of policy actions aimed at influencing principal preparation, licensure and retention. The report, however, has several flaws that undermine its usefulness. It provides little explanation on how the state exemplars were selected or why they were considered to be leading or lagging. It makes little use of existing research. It does not report on extensive current state and professional activities on leadership standards, program accreditation and licensure requirements that address exactly these features. It recommends ending the "monopoly" of higher education in principal preparation and broadening (or lowering) the criteria for becoming a principal, but it provides no research or other evidence that such changes are warranted, will improve student achievement, or have other beneficial effects. The report's endorsement of broadly accepted, almost platitudinous reform principles, coupled with unsupported and possibly counterproductive recommendations, renders the report of little value in improving the quality of principals.

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.

I should be a cheerleader for the New York evaluation system for educators known as the Annual Professional Performance Review system, or A.P.P.R. I am the principal of a very successful high school where students get great test scores. I have a wonderfully supportive superintendent. My personal "score," in all probability, will be high. The right question to ask, however, is not whether this evaluation system is good or bad for adults, but rather whether it is good or bad for students.

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.

For the first time this year, LAUSD has prepared reports for teachers that rate their effectiveness. When I received an email saying I could now view my own personal "Average Growth over Time" report, I opened it with a combination of trepidation, resignation and indignation.

Jeff Henig reviews Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools by Terry M. Moe.

CNN's Fareed Zakaria focused on education during his Sunday morning show GPS and had a prime time special with expanded coverage.  The prime time show kicked off with a video review of South Korea's pressure-cooker test-driven system.  Fareed contrasted the Korean system with Finland's lack of testing and focus on great teachers Fareed interviewed Bill Gates who discussed the foundation's focus on teacher effectiveness. There was a little footage of teachers from grantee district Hillsborough FL that appreciated improved performance feedback. The morning show (CNN's FAREED ZAKARIA GPS) and the evening special featured a great interview with Secretary Arne Duncan.

This report compares the pay, pension costs and retiree health benefits of teachers with those of similarly qualified private-sector workers. The study concludes that teachers receive total compensation 52% greater than fair market levels, which translates into a $120 billion annual "overcharge" to taxpayers. Built on a series of faulty analyses, this study misrepresents total teacher compensation in fundamental ways. First, teachers' 12% lower pay is dismissed as being appropriate for their lesser intelligence, although there is no foundation for such a claim. Total benefits are calculated as having a monetary value of 100.8% of pay, while the Department of Labor disagrees, giving a figure of 32.8%-a figure almost identical to that of people employed in the private sector. Pension costs are valued at 32%, but the real number is closer to 8.4%. The shorter work year is said to represent 28.8% additional compensation but the real work year is only 12% shorter. Teachers' job stability is said to be worth 8.6%, although the case for such a claim is not sustained. In sum, this report is based on an aggregation of such spurious claims. The actual salary and benefits for teachers show they are in fact undercompensated by 19%.

The values of efficiency and fairness collide head-on in New York's Education Law §3012-c, passed as part of the state's efforts to bolster its chances in the 2010 Race to the Top competition. The law requires annual professional performance reviews (APPRs) that sort teachers into four categories-"highly effective," "effective," "developing" and "ineffective"-based on multiple measures of effectiveness, including student growth on state and locally selected assessments and a teacher's performance according to a teacher practice rubric. The fundamental problem is that it's hard to assess the efficiency or fairness of an evaluation system that doesn't exist yet. There are too many unknowns to be able to judge, which is one of the arguments for piloting an evaluation system before bringing it to scale.