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The 2010 law that established a new framework for the evaluation of New York educators was a complex piece of legislation, and last week's agreement to clarify and refine that law with additional legislation added another layer to that complexity. The complexity is unavoidable. It is important to have evaluations based on multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, just as it is important to evaluate students based on multiple measures of their learning: more measures and more forms of evidence produce more robust, more accurate and fairer evaluations. Further, multiple measures allowed New York to avoid placing inordinate weight on standardized exams and value-added algorithms, as other states have done to very negative consequences. And it was essential that the bulk of the evaluations be established locally through collective bargaining, with the law only providing a general framework. These objectives necessarily led to a high level of complexity.

The Institute on Race and Poverty's 2008 analysis of charter schools in the Twin Cities metro found that charter schools have failed to deliver on the promises made by charter school proponents. The study showed that charter schools were far more segregated than traditional public schools in the metro, even in school districts where traditional public schools already have high levels of racial segregation. The analysis also showed that charter schools performed worse than traditional public schools. The findings made it clear that, at that time, charter schools offered a poor choice to low-income students and students of color-one between low-performing public schools and charters that fared even worse. Compared to charter schools, other public school choice programs such as the Choice is Yours program offered much better schools to low-income students and students of color. Finally, the report found that charter schools hurt public education in the metro by encouraging racial segregation in the traditional public school system.  This work updates the 2008 study with more recent data-updating the work from the 2007-08 school year to 2010-11 in most cases. The results show that, despite significant changes to the state's charter law during the period, little has changed in the comparison between charters and traditional schools. Charter school students of all races are still much more likely to be attending a segregated school than traditional school students and the trends are largely negative. Charter schools are also still outperformed by their traditional equivalents. Analysis of 2010-11 test score data which controls for other school characteristics shows that charters still lag behind traditional schools, including especially the schools available to Choice is Yours participants.  

The key element in the agreement reached between the New York City teachers' union and the city's Education Department last Thursday was given a closer look, as The New York Times and Gotham Schools examined the role to be played by so-called "independent validators" in rating teacher effectiveness. As part of the deal reached between the city Education Department and the United Federation of Teachers, independent observers will be brought into New York City's classrooms "to monitor the weakest teachers and provide a second opinion to supplement observations by the school principal," writes Winnie Hu in The Times.

Though most of the critiques so far focus on the inherently volatile nature and large margins of error in any such calculation, here in NY State we have a special problem: the state tests themselves have been fatally flawed for many years.  There has been rampant test score inflation over the past decade; many of the test questions themselves are amazingly dumb and ambiguous; and there are other severe problems with the scaling and the design of these exams that only testing experts fully understand.  Though the State Education Department claims to have now solved these problems, few actually believe this to be the case. As further evidence, see Fred Smith's analysis below.  Fred is a  retired assessment expert for the NYC Board of Education, who has written widely on the fundamental flaws in the state tests.  Here, he shows how deep problems remain in their design and execution -- making their results, and the new teacher evaluation system and  teacher data reports based upon them, essentially worthless.  He goes on to urge parents to boycott the state exams this spring.

In 2009, 96 percent of their fifth graders were proficient in English, 89 percent in math. When the New York City Education Department released its numerical ratings recently, it seemed a sure bet that the P.S. 146 teachers would be at the very top. Actually, they were near the very bottom.

So-called value-added rankings-which rank teachers according to the recorded growth in their students' test scores-are an important indicator of teacher effectiveness, but making them public is counterproductive to helping teachers improve. Doing so doesn't help teachers feel safe and respected, which is necessary if they are going to provide our kids with the positive energy and environment we all hope for. The release of the rankings (which follows a similar release last year in Los Angeles) is based on a misconception that "fixing" teachers is the solution to all that ails our education system.

By the end of her second year at MacFarland Middle School, fifth-grade teacher Sarah Wysocki was coming into her own. "It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined," Assistant Principal Kennard Branch wrote in her May 2011 evaluation. He urged Wysocki to share her methods with colleagues at the D.C. public school. Other observations of her classroom that year yielded good ratings. Two months later, she was fired. Wysocki, 31, was let go because the reading and math scores of her students didn't grow as predicted. Her undoing was "value-added," a complex statistical tool used to measure a teacher's direct contribution to test results. The District and at least 25 states, under prodding from the Obama administration, have adopted or are developing value-added systems to assess teachers.

The long-term goal of many education reformers is to create a teaching force in which nearly all teachers are high-performing. However, in New York City's rankings - which rated thousands of teachers who taught in the system from 2007 to 2010 - teachers were graded on a curve. That is, under the city's formula, some teachers would always be rated as "below average," even if student performance increased significantly in all classrooms across the city.

Over the past two years of gut-punching, teacher job satisfaction has fallen from 59 percent to 44 percent. That's according to the annual ­ MetLife Survey of the American Teacher. While this 15-point plummet is no doubt caused in part by the bad economy and budget cutting, it's also hard to overlook things like Waiting for Superman , the media deification of Michelle Rhee, and the publishing of flawed "scores" that purport to evaluate teachers based on students' test results - an offense first committed by the Los Angeles Times and now taken up by the New York Times and other New York papers. Teachers knew these evaluations were unreliable and invalid even before researchers documented those problems.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan loves evaluation. He insists that everyone should willingly submit to public grading of the work they do. The Race to the Top program he created for the Obama Administration requires states to evaluate all teachers based in large part on the test scores of their students. When the Los Angeles Times released public rankings that the newspaper devised for thousands of teachers, Duncan applauded and asked, "What's there to hide?" Given Duncan's enthusiasm for grading educators, it seems high time to evaluate his own performance as Secretary of Education. Here are his grades

Today I came across a Wall Street Journal opinion piece written by Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp. She rightly condemned the public release of teacher test scores in New York City. I applaud her for speaking out against this disgusting act. But as I read, I became enraged when I saw a story about Ms. Kopp's own experience with her child's teacher.

In Washington, D.C., one of the first places in the country to use value-added teacher ratings to fire teachers, teacher-union president Nathan Saunders likes to point to the following statistic as proof that the ratings are flawed: Ward 8, one of the poorest areas of the city, has only 5 percent of the teachers defined as effective under the new evaluation system known as IMPACT, but more than a quarter of the ineffective ones. Ward 3, encompassing some of the city's more affluent neighborhoods, has nearly a quarter of the best teachers, but only 8 percent of the worst. The discrepancy highlights an ongoing debate about the value-added test scores that an increasing number of states-soon to include Florida-are using to evaluate teachers. Are the best, most experienced D.C. teachers concentrated in the wealthiest schools, while the worst are concentrated in the poorest schools? Or does the statistical model ignore the possibility that it's more difficult to teach a room full of impoverished children?

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.

In my post earlier today about NAEP test score trends, I said I was pessimistic about recent educational reforms because big gains among 9-year-olds mostly seem to wash away by the time students graduate from high school. However, several commenters complained that this was unfair: high school students in 2008 had spent only a few years in the post-NCLB "reform" environment. What we really want to look at are cohort effects. How do kids who have spent their entire lives in the new environment do?

An often quoted 'statistic' by various 'reformers' is that an effective teacher is three times as good as an ineffective one.  Sometimes it is said that the ineffective teacher gets a half year of progress while the effective teacher gets one and a half years of progress. I don't doubt that there are a small percent of teachers who have little classroom control, mostly new teachers, who only manage to get a half a year of progress.  I also can imagine a rare 'super-teacher' who somehow gets one and a half years of progress.  (I think I'm a pretty good teacher, but I doubt I get a year and a half worth of progress.)  I don't think there is a very accurate way to measure this nebulous 'progress' aside from test scores, but I could still imagine that there is a 'true' number, even if we will never be able to accurately calculate it. As this statistic has been quoted by Melinda Gates recently on PBS and by Michelle Rhee in various places, including the StudentsFirst website I thought, in response to a recent post on Diane Ravitch's blog I would investigate the source of this claim.

In short, there are different ways to measure the gender gap, and their "accuracy" is not about the statistics as much as how they're interpreted. The gap is 75-80 cents on the male dollar if you're making no claims that the difference is attributable solely to discrimination. When you account for the underlying factors - and you must do so to interpret the data in this manner - you get a somewhat different picture of the extent of the problem (problem though it still is). Now, think about how easily this all applies to test data in education. We are inundated every day with average scores and rates - for schools, districts, states, subgroups of students, etc. These data are frequently compared between groups and institutions in much the same way as wages are compared between men and women.

"If you remember your No Child Left Behind history, 2014 is the year that all children were supposed to be scoring proficient on standardized tests. That was, of course, a ridiculous goal, which the authors of the bill knew full well when they wrote it, and a symbol for just how misguided school reform has become. Here, George Wood, superintendent of Federal Hocking Local Schools, offers four things that reform really should be targeting. He is the executive director of the Forum for Education and Democracy  and board chair of The Coalition of Essential Schools."

"Now we do have evidence. This is what we know: the Common Core tests cause a huge decline in test scores. Passing rates fell 30% in Kentucky and about the same in New York. What is worse is that the achievement gaps grew larger. As Carol Burris recently wrote, the test results were especially devastating for black and Latino children."

"Recently, I have been on the radio talk-show circuit promoting my new book, which exposes the ugly realities of what passes for "school reform,"and how the current obsession with test scores and other data is playing a big part in destroying a public education system that once was the envy of the world. Of course, much of talk radio takes an anti-government attitude on just about every subject ("Traffic lights? Why should the government have a monopoly on traffic lights?!"). So my plea for fixing - not dismantling - our public schools rarely is met with sympathy."

"To teachers, administrators and parents these may seem like the dark days on the eve of destruction of public education. Indeed, from draconian budget cuts to school closings, from competition for students from private fund-enhanced charter schools to maniacal focus on test scores, from flawed measures of teacher performance to attacks on teacher professionalism, public schooling as a collective good is under siege. These threats are especially ironic and unconscionable because we now know more about teaching, learning and effective change than ever before. So, it is the age of wisdom, light and hope because our knowledge grows and deepens. But it is also the age of foolishness, darkness and despair because ignorance and selfishness have prevailed over knowledge and evidence. In each critical area for improvement, foolishness threatens wisdom."