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Everyone "knows" quality teaching because we were all students at one time. Unfortunately this statement is not at all true and it is many times the root of all evils in whats wrong with education today. The question then is what's quality teaching or, as it's labeled in the world education, MASTERY teaching and how is it recognized? The first misnomer that must be dispelled is that the mastery level can be attained quickly, in just a couple years; and that any successful college graduate can enter a classroom full of students, having read the text book and teach the content well. Teaching mastery is attained over time, it cannot be sped up.

We use several data sets to consider the effect of teaching practices on student beliefs, as well as on organization of firms and institutions. In cross-country data, we show that teaching practices (such as copying from the board versus working on projects together) are strongly related to various dimensions of social capital, from beliefs in cooperation to institutional outcomes. We then use micro-data to investigate the influence of teaching practices on student beliefs about cooperation both with each other and with teachers, and students' involvement in civic life. A two-stage least square strategy provides evidence that teaching practices have an independent sizeable effect on student social capital. The relationship between teaching practices and student test performance is nonlinear. The evidence supports the idea that progressive education promotes social capital.

We need to spend much less time teaching reading as a subject and teaching reading strategies beyond their utility and much more time teaching content or subject matters, such as literature, science, social studies, p.e., art music, foreign languages, technical education, etc. Yes, most kids need to be explicitly taught to decode and yes, to a point reading strategies are useful. Of course, content should be taught as reading and writing intensive. However, literacy is largely representative of someone's background and content knowledge, and knowledge of vocabulary and does not develop or improve without it. As the University of Virginia's own Dan Willingham says, teaching content is teaching reading. (It's also much, much more meaningful and interesting for kids.)

Like many English majors who have reached their senior year of college and are unsure of what kind of job they can get with that specialized B.A. in interwar period lesbian literature, five years ago I applied to both Teach for America (TFA) and the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF). I was promptly rejected by both, but applied to NYCTF again the following year, this time checking the "yes, I would be interested in teaching education" and "yes, I would be interested in teaching mathematics even though I did not major in it" boxes.

"This week Rhode Island got a bit of attention when education historian Diane Ravitch posted an email on her blog that she'd received from Theresa Laperche, a former participant in the Rhode Island Teaching Fellows program. This program, a partnership between RIDE and Michelle Rhee's New Teacher Project (TNTP), is a Teach For America-like alternative teacher certification program that recruits individuals with no education experience, gives them five weeks of training, and places them in a high-need urban school. This is a model that I've long questioned, but I had no idea just how problematic the program was until I read Theresa's account of her time as a Teaching Fellow. I decided to call her up myself to learn more about her perspective on the program."

Nearly one million American youth have participated in service programs such as Peace Corps and Teach For America. This paper provides the first causal estimate of the impact of service programs on those who serve, using data from a web-based survey of former Teach For America applicants. We estimate the effect of voluntary youth service using a sharp discontinuity in the Teach For America application process. Participating in Teach For America increases racial tolerance, makes individuals more optimistic about the life chances of poor children, and makes them more likely to work in education. We argue that these facts are broadly consistent with the "Contact Hypothesis," which states that, under appropriate conditions, interpersonal contact can reduce prejudice.

"The Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET) is the Gates Foundation's flagship effort to fill what they believe is a huge void in the teaching profession. According to them, up until this project, there was no way to know how effective any given teacher is. Their goal has been to develop scientifically accurate means to accomplish this. I would have no problem with the Gates Foundation's Measuring Effective Teaching process if it was conducted as pure research. The MET's Tom Kane, in "Capturing the Dimensions of Effective Teaching," illustrates the good that could have come from the experiment had "reformers" considered evidence before imposing their theories on teachers across the nation."

Sixteen years ago, Charlotte Danielson, an Oxford-trained economist, developed a description of good teaching that became the foundation for attempts by federal and state officials and school districts to quantify teacher performance. The Danielson method - articulated in her book, "Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching" (ASCD, 1996) - describes good teaching using numerous criteria within four broad areas of performance: the quality of questions and discussion techniques; a knowledge of students' special needs; the expectations set for learning and achievement; and the teacher's involvement in professional development activities. "If all you do is judge teachers by test results," Ms. Danielson told Ginia Bellafante in an interview for a Big City column in the Metropolitan section of The New York Times last month, "it doesn't tell you what you should do differently."

Teachers who embodied the teaching skills outlined in certain popular teaching frameworks tended to help their students learn more, concludes a new study released by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The report is the second major release from the foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project, which seeks to identify the best gauges of effective teaching. Ultimately, the Seattle-based foundation plans to devise a prototype teacher-effectiveness measure based on the findings.

In this paper we consider the challenges involved in evaluating teacher preparation programs when controlling for school contextual bias. Including school fixed effects in the achievement models  used toestimate preparation program effects controls for school environment by relying on differences among student outcomes within the same schools to identify the program effects. However, identification of preparation program effects using school fixed effects requires teachers from different programs to teach in the same school. Even if program effects are identified, the precision of the estimated effects will depend on the degree to which graduates from different programs overlap across schools. In addition, if the connections between preparation programs result from the overlap of atypical graduates or from graduates teaching in atypical school environments, use of school effects could produce bias. Using statewide data from Florida, we show that teachers tend to teach in schools near the programs in which they received their training, but there is still sufficient overlap across schools to identify preparation program effects. We show that the ranking of preparation programs varies significantly depending on whether or not school environment is taken into account via school fixed effects. We find that schools and teachers that are integral to connecting preparation programs are atypical, with disproportionately high percentages of Hispanic teachers and students compared to the state averages. Finally, we  find significant variance inflation in the estimated program effects when controlling for school fixed effects, and that the size of the variance inflation factor depends crucially on the length of the window used to compare graduates teaching in the same schools.

I don't know about you, but I am growing convinced that President Barack Obama doesn't know what Race to the Top is. I don't think he really understands what his own administration is doing to education. In his State of the Union address last week, he said that he wanted teachers to "stop teaching to the test." He also said that teachers should teach with "creativity and passion." And he said that schools should reward the best teachers and replace those who weren't doing a good job. To "reward the best" and "fire the worst," states and districts are relying on test scores. The Race to the Top says they must. Deconstruct this. Teachers would love to "stop teaching to the test," but Race to the Top makes test scores the measure of every teacher. If teachers take the President's advice (and they would love to!), their students might not get higher test scores every year, and teachers might be fired, and their schools might be closed. Why does President Obama think that teachers can "stop teaching to the test" when their livelihood, their reputation, and the survival of their school depends on the outcome of those all-important standardized tests?

Before relocating to Austin, I had spent eight years teaching math and/or science in Egypt, Mexico and Honduras at elite private schools that used American textbooks, American curriculum and were accredited by American institutions.  The majority of my students were not Americans, but graduated with a combination of diplomas: local, American and/or IB (International Baccalaureate). After graduation, nearly all attended college, mostly in the US, Canada and England, and a few remained in their own country for higher education. I proudly returned to the US, toting my international bag of creative, engaging teaching tricks, especially curriculum-based projects that I had created, ready to dazzle my American students. So, imagine my utter shock when resettling into American life, teaching at an Austin public high school, and discovering that the standards were actually lower. Moreover, my teaching creativity was all but stifled for the sake of "standardization" in the most controlling environment I had ever taught.

A week ago I posted an interview with Teach For America's head of research, Heather Harding. Ms. Harding answered some tough questions that have been raised in recent months here on this blog. Today, I am sharing some responses to her answers. By way of context, I have come to believe that addressing teacher turnover is one of the linchpins of real reform in our struggling schools. Turnover is a key indicator of unhealthy working conditions for teachers -- and that tells us conditions for learning are poor as well. Programs such as Teach For America allow school districts to ignore these poor conditions, by providing a steady supply of novice teachers. Unfortunately, these novices turn over at a very high rate, and the schools must invest a lot of resources in their training -- which is lost when they leave. There are a number of facts in dispute regarding Teach For America, so we need to look closely at the evidence in order to make sensible conclusions. Here are some of the questions Ms. Harding answered where the facts are in question, followed by responses from myself, and several readers with some expertise in this domain.

Evidence (and evidence-based reform) are entirely neutral on the nature of teaching. Whatever works is what is valued. The distinction between teaching driven by accountability and teaching informed by evidence is crucial. Using test scores to evaluate teachers and schools, at least as defined by NCLB, runs the risk of focusing teachers on a narrow band of reading and math skills, and school and district leaders often try to improve performance by "alignment," trying to get teachers to spend more time on the skills and knowledge likely to be assessed. In contrast, evidence-based policies have no such limitations.

The New York State tests, going on now in middle and elementary schools, have always been high stakes for students, particularly in fourth and seventh grades, when their scores determine whether they end up in the very awful school they are zoned for or the very attractive magnet school that draws from a larger and more competitive pool. But the stakes have recently become equally high for teachers, whose ability to teach is being determined by their ability to improve students' test scores. Many people think it's about time. Teachers need to be held accountable for the work they are being paid to do, and many, many teachers need to get better at teaching. But tying teacher performance to student test scores is having an opposite effect: It's producing worse teachers.

I recently wrote two review articles for the New York Review of Books about the teaching profession. The first was a review of Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, about the exceptional school system of Finland, which owes much to the high professionalism of its teachers. The second of the two articles was a review of Wendy Kopp's A Chance to Make History, and it focused on her organization, Teach for America. I expressed my admiration for the young people who agree to teach for two years, with only five weeks of training. But I worried that TFA was now seen -- and promoting itself -- as the answer to the serious problems of American education. Even by naming her book A Chance to Make History, Wendy Kopp reinforced the idea that TFA was the very mechanism that American society could rely upon to lift up the children of poverty and close the achievement gaps between different racial and ethnic groups. Wendy Kopp responded to my review of her book with a blog called "In Defense of Optimism.

Monday is the deadline to apply to be a NYC Teaching Fellow, a vaunted program begun in 2000 to attract professionals to teach in inner city schools. Veteran fellows are calling for an overhaul of the program, saying they need to be better prepared to handle some of the lowest-performing kids in the worst schools in the Bronx and Harlem.

Here is a new critique of the Khan Academy, the subject of a widely read post I published Monday about the hype and reality of the academy. You can find that post here. And you can find a response to that post from the founder of the Khan Academy, Sal Khan, by clicking here. The following was written by Christopher Danielson and Michael Paul GHoldenberg. Danielson holds a Ph.D. in mathematics education from Michigan State University. He teaches math at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, MN. He maintains the blog "Overthinking My Teaching" and has written for Connected Mathematics. As of this writing, he has three badges and 11,041 energy points on Khan Academy. Goldenberg holds a master's degree in mathematics education from the University of Michigan, as well as master's degrees in English and psychological foundations of education from the University of Florida. He writes the blog "Rational Mathematics Education" and was a co-founder of the group Mathematically Sane. He currently coaches high school mathematics teachers in Detroit.

One of the problems that does exist is that most of us can't agree about the purpose and goals of education. Our current educational system born of the progressive movement, industrial revolution and other social developments of the late 19th and early 20th century has evolved into a patchwork of reforms and new ideas that emerge every few years, then disappear just as quickly, leaving a path of failed and sometimes conflicting practices and theories in its wake. Paradoxically, many of the reforms put in place 100 years ago are still in practice today. Through it all, it seems education has lost sight of why it exists at all. I know many teachers who believe their job is to teach skills, such as math or science, but that's far too limiting. When I was an English teacher, I never believed my job was to teach grammar and literature. My purpose was to teach students to love learning so they would become life-long learners. I've decided that even that's not thinking big enough.

Few observers doubt that Teach For America (TFA) has high aspirations. Established in 1990, TFA strives to close persistent racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps in U.S. public education by recruiting high-achieving college graduates to teach for two years in low-income urban and rural schools. In recent years, applications to TFA have soared, especially at highly selective colleges. In 2009-10, for example, 18% of Harvard University's seniors applied to the program. Proposing to expand its teaching corps from 7,300 to 13,000 over the next five years, TFA recently won $50 million in the federal i3 (Investing in Innovation) competition and succeeded in raising $10 million in matching funds.