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The Web site of Carnegie Learning, a company started by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University that sells classroom software, trumpets this promise: "Revolutionary Math Curricula. Revolutionary Results." The pitch has sounded seductive to thousands of schools across the country for more than a decade. But a review by the United States Department of Education last year would suggest a much less alluring come-on: Undistinguished math curricula. Unproven results.

Would you rather have an actual person score your carefully crafted essay, or an automated software program designed for that purpose? I'd still take the flawed human being any day-assuming, of course, the proper expertise and that he or she is operating on a good night's sleep-but a new study suggests there is little, if any, difference in the reliability and accuracy of the computer approach.

Education Policy Analysis Archives recently published an article by Audrey Amrein-Beardsley and Clarin Collins that effectively exposes the Houston Independent School District use of a value-added teacher evaluation system as a disaster. The Educational Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS) is alleged by its creators, the European software giant SAS, to be the "the most robust and reliable" system of teacher evaluation ever invented. Amrein-Beardsley and Collins demonstrate to the contrary that EVAAS is a psychometric bad joke and a nightmare to teachers. EVAAS produces "value-added" measures for the same teachers that jump around willy-nilly from large and negative to large and positive from year-to-year when neither the general nature of the students nor the nature of the teaching differs across time. In defense of the EVAAS one could note that this is common to all such systems of attributing students' test scores to teachers' actions so that EVAAS might still lay claim to being "most robust and reliable"-since they are all unreliable and who knows what "robust" means?

Rudy Crew has had an eventful career in education. He's run two of the four largest school districts in the United States-New York City in the 1990s and Miami-Dade County from 2004 to 2008-where he initiated ambitious policies and programs but left amid controversy. In New York, he took over and rejuvenated some of the city's poorest-performing schools, but was forced out in 1999 after clashing with then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. In Miami, Mr. Crew offered salary increases to teachers who would transfer to the worst schools and got more students to take Advanced Placement tests. But in 2008, the same year he was named National Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators, he was fired after a long, escalating spat with the school board. Since then, he's worked as an education consultant with Global Partnership Schools, which he co-founded, and is teaching at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Last month, Mr. Crew, 61, was named president of Revolution K12, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based provider of adaptive-learning software in math and English. Education Week Staff Writer Jason Tomassini spoke with Mr. Crew last week in a telephone interview about his move into the educational technology marketplace, the differences between the public and private sectors, and the changing role of teachers in the classroom.

There is enormous interest in information about how learners interact with educational materials. Being able to collect data about student progress in real time is a very powerful idea. Essentially, it enables us to observe and understand the process of learning. Questions such as 'how do people learn?' or 'what exactly influences learning outcomes?' have always been critical, and adaptive learning may help to address them. But who will have access to student data? At the moment most of these and similar data belong to the companies that collect them. In fact, to some extent, public money is indirectly financing data collection for the development of a for-profit product. Ironically, when such software products are finished, they may be sold back to students - much like those students whose data helped fine-tune the starting algorithms.

The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month. Now he wants to weave those digital lessons into the fabric of the school curriculum - a more ambitious and as yet untested proposition. This semester, at least 36 schools nationwide are trying out Mr. Khan's experiment: splitting up the work of teaching between man and machine, and combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises.

Brian Backstrom's piece is typical of both the incoherence and the union-hating that pervades all of Rupert Murdoch's empire. Of course, Murdoch stands to make tons of money if he can follow through on his plan to replace teachers with software, so it's easy to understand why he wants his minions to bad-mouth as many educators as they possibly can.

"The state Education Department is poised to award a $27 million no-bid contract to a company former city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein oversees, the Daily News has learned. The money - part of the state's $700 million in Race to the Top winnings - will go to Wireless Generation, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., to develop software to track student test scores, among other things."

Faced with the relentless campaign against teachers and public education, educators have sought a different narrative, one free of the stigmatization by test scores and punishment favored by the corporate reformers. They have found it in Finland. Even the corporate reformers admire Finland, apparently not recognizing that Finland disproves every part of their agenda. It is not unusual for Americans to hold up another nation as a model for school reform. In the mid-nineteenth century, American education leaders hailed the Prussian system for its professionalism and structure. In the 1960s, Americans flocked to England to marvel at its progressive schools. In the 1980s, envious Americans attributed the Japanese economic success to its school system. Now the most favored nation is Finland, and for four good reasons.

"On Tuesday, News Corp announced "The Future of American Education: A Presidential Primary Forum.""