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This morning, the New York Times carried a column by Nicholas Kristof talking about the import of the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff paper; later, Kevin Carey wrote a blog entry telling us what to think about the study.1 To be honest, I'm shocked it took more than half a week for folks to use Friday's Times story by Annie Lowrey as a springboard for public policy discussions. Maybe the quick responses by Bruce Baker and Matthew Di Carlo played a role in delaying the inevitable.2 What was most surprising about the Kristof column is not that he bought the weakest part of the paper as a shiny bright object (as did Carey) but that he first cited (and linked to) Di Carlo's comments and then entirely ignored Di Carlo's cautions about the extrapolatory analysis on young-adult effects.

Earlier today on Twitter, Annie Lowrey and I had a brief exchange (or an exchange of tweets) about the column inches she used for the Hanushek-like extrapolation in Friday's New York Time story on the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff value-added measure paper.1 Of 1142 words for the story as a whole, about 15% of the story was spent on the following passages

...This criticism of the abandonment of scholarly norms is of particular salience with respect to the release of CFR [Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff], because the authors are using the authority of their study to advocate public policy prescriptions which are simply not supported by their underlying analysis, even if one were to grant its validity.

I've been able to read through the December paper by Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (hereafter CFR) discussed in yesterday's Annie Lowrey article, and my impressions on the first read are similar to those of Bruce Baker's

This report is intended for policymakers and practitioners wanting to understand the implications of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project's interim analysis of classroom observations. Those wanting to explore all the technical aspects of the study and analysis also should read the companion research report, available at www.metproject.org.

Governor Cuomo's commission on education has an opportunity to change the direction of school reform.

Sam Dillon's piece in the New York Times seems to have reignited the merit pay debate.  At least for this week.  After watching the Twittersphere for the past few days, it remains clear that merit pay or pay for performance remains the most titillating of education "reform" discussions.

Columnist Alan Chartock ("Cuomo the students' lobbyist? Not really," Jan. 15) rightly points out Gov. Cuomo's surplus confidence in claiming to be the lobbyist for the state's students.  He correctly observes the "terrible situation" that Chancellor Merryl Tisch and the Board of Regents will be in if Cuomo sets up another education commission, stripping them of much or perhaps all of their authority. He affirms that the Regents offer protection from a political takeover of public schools, saying, "the whole idea was to get the traditional grubby politicians out of the game." However, he fails to point out that both Tisch and the Regents have not done a good job representing the best in public education lately.

After watching the State of the Union address Tuesday night, I found myself thinking about the differences between President Obama's statements on education and those of California Governor Jerry Brown.

The field of education bubbles over with controversies. It's not unusual for intelligent people of good will to disagree passionately about what should happen in schools. But there are certain precepts that aren't debatable, that just about anyone would have to acknowledge are true. While many such statements are banal, some are worth noticing because in our school practices and policies we tend to ignore the implications that follow from them. It's both intellectually interesting and practically important to explore such contradictions: If we all agree that a given principle is true, then why in the world do our schools still function as if it weren't? Here are 10 examples.

Over the past decade, amazing research has been conducted in the area of school leadership. With the wealth of information out there, I often wish someone would take the best of it and put it into simple terms, describing exactly what it is that great principals do to significantly improve teaching and learning. The Wallace Foundation's recent Perspective, The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning, is a huge step forward in granting my wish. The report tells us that the most successful principals perform five key functions well

The UFT released a television ad the week of Jan. 23 that is bluntly critical of Mayor Bloomberg's management of our schools. As I travel around the city and visit schools, educators and parents who have seen the ad have thanked me for taking on the mayor and sounding an alarm about the state of our schools. But people who aren't in schools - and who don't get to see every day the consequences of the mayor's policies - have asked me why I decided to run such a "negative" ad. We created this ad to help people understand that Mayor Bloomberg is running our school system into the ground.

My first reaction when hearing that we should be more businesslike in our approach is, "You can"t be serious! You want to use the model that for the last 30 years has driven people out of the middle-class, has foisted imperialism on large parts of the world, and created the worst economic catastrophe in eighty years? You want to use that failed model? Are you BSC?" One of the reasons for the failure of this model is the focus immediate profits rather than long term results.

As I cited in my last blog, NCATE appears to be pursuing the use of Value Added Measures (VAM). In fact, NCATE president James Cibulka said, "Working within this climate of heightened expectations, [NCATE] will ask for more performance data and greater transparency in reporting performance, as these data become available." In other words, everybody is starting to use VAM and we should get ready to use it too. However, all the credible research on this use of VAM is unequivocal -- it is not ready for prime time.

A penchant among far too many education writers who embrace the Poverty Myth of Education is to oversimplify the debate over the role of education in stemming the long-term effects of poverty. First, they argue that school reformers proclaim that education is the sole solution for economic development in poor communities - even though no one ever says this. Then they argue that education can't possibly be either the long-term or short-term solution for poverty - and find some flimsy data or examples to back it up.

This week's debate between Eric Hanushek and Diane Ravitch, exemplifies the tendency of true believers in data-driven policies to refuse to communicate with educators. Hanushek became so preoccupied with name-calling that he forgot that advocates of risky policy gambles have just as much of a burden of proof for their "reforms" as do advocates of more balanced policies.

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

Six charter applicants seeking to open schools in Baltimore city in school years 2012 and 2013 were all denied Tuesday, after the city school board voted to affirm city schools CEO Andres Alonso's decision that the plans for the new schools were insufficient or failed to present a compelling reason to obtain charter status.

The AFT, led by its President Randi Weingarten, advocates vigorously on behalf of what it views as best for students in the public schools of America. In the current environment of test-driven accountability systems, there is a danger of narrowing the education our children receive to improve test scores. This leads to a "one-size-fits-all" approach that is justified on the grounds of the supposedly poor performance of U.S. schools on international comparisons. But too often, those who rely upon such comparison neither understand what the results mean nor do they examine what things high-scoring countries do. The AFT has never opposed the proper use of tests as one means of assessment. One can see AFT's well-thoughtout positions on proper use of testing on its website, including its position statement on Accountability and its publications and reports on Standards and Assessments. Now the AFT is running a petition drive against the idea of One Size Fits All in education, which has been the impact of current policies at the national and state level on assessment and accountability. 

...reminds me of what I have come to call the Rush Limbaugh strategy from posing an argument: Present a quick and compelling premise, and then argue within or against that premise. In popular and political discourse, this strategy is highly effective even though, as with the church sign noted above, the argument and conclusions depend entirely on whether or not the premise is accurate. In other words, start with a false premise and you have only false arguments and conclusions. The current discourse about education suffers under this paradigm; for example, two recent commentaries highlight just how pervasive and misleading the Rush Limbaugh strategy can be: Sol Stern's rambling endorsement of Common Core State Standards (CCSS), as a thinly veiled front for endorsing E. D. Hirsch and bashing "liberal" educators, and Joel Klein's praising of Success charters schools in New York. Vigorous and informed debate is an essential element in a democracy, just as I believe a vibrant universal public education is. Yet, when that debate becomes deformed, the results of public and political debate are also deformed. How, then, should all stakeholders in public education approach the many and varied claims and conclusions being offered about public schools and the need to reform that institution?