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First do no harm. In their impatience with a teacher evaluation system that needs improvement, proponents of a system based on student test scores ignore this simple moral imperative. No newspaper has done more to report on how test-driven policies can go wrong than USA TODAY, with its coverage of former Washington, D.C., chancellor Michelle Rhee and the nation's test-erasure scandals. Yet the real scandals are ingrained in these test-based systems; they exist with or without fraud. We sell our children short when we send them to schools where testing supplants teaching, test-taking supplants learning, and test scores are the ultimate goal.

There was a time when working at the Bronx High School of Science seemed like the pinnacle of a teaching career in the New York public schools. Along with Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science is one of the city's most storied high schools and among its most celebrated public institutions of any kind-part of a select fraternity that promises a free education of the highest quality to anyone with the intelligence to qualify. Together, the three schools reflect some of the city's most prized values: achievement, brains, democracy. Founded in 1938, Bronx Science counts E. L. Doctorow and Stokely Carmichael among its alumni, as well as seven Nobel laureates and six Pulitzer Prize winners. It has spawned 135 Intel science-competition finalists-more than any other high school in America. Virtually every senior last year gained acceptance to one of the country's top colleges. The faculty has long been known as among the best, most beloved anywhere. Teachers have traditionally held on to their jobs for decades; some have come to teach the children of their former students. This spring and summer, however, more than a third of the school's social-studies department-eight of the twenty teachers-announced they wouldn't be returning for the 2011 school year. Their departure came after similar exoduses in other departments. In 2009, it was math; before that, English. In 2010, nearly a quarter of the teachers at Bronx Science had less than three years of experience; the corresponding numbers at Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech were 6 percent and 1 percent, respectively. The reason for the seismic upheaval, virtually everyone agrees, is Valerie Reidy.

Good teaching is not something that can be calculated through a statistical analysis of students' results on a standardized test. What would be much more meaningful would be to determine teachers' effectiveness by the data we collect from our students and parents. We should ask our clients how they would rate teacher planning, pedagogy, effectiveness, and content knowledge. Good teaching begins with good intentions, and is coupled with a love of knowledge, a passion for pedagogy, and most importantly a belief that all children regardless of their home language or zip code can achieve.

First of all I am not talking about the highly profitable non-profit known as "Teach for America" or TFA, an organization which sends "corps members" (their words) into poor schools doing very little for children (as demonstrated by peer-reviewed research) but definitely making the executive board very, very rich...using your tax dollars to boot!

Any way you do the math, Teach For America raises a lot of money. And, this, in turn, raises a lot of questions. Corps members, their families, public agencies and others wonder, "Where does the money go?" It came as no surprise to me that more voices expressed concern about Teach For America's transparency in financial matters. These concerns persist across cohorts of corps members, and particularly in a tough economy, TFA interns suggest a hidden agenda that impacts financially struggling corps members and their families.

There has certainly been a lot of traffic about Teach For America (TFA) in the cyberworld lately. It all started with the audacious nerve of Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association, and Wendy Kopp, CEO of Teach for America, daring to appear together with Secretary Duncan to support his new blueprint for teacher preparation. Then of all things, they penned together a commentary for USA Today. As a result, many of my fellow bloggers have launched a storm of criticism. I respectfully ask them to "cool their jets" on that and to look more carefully at the possibilities raised by this new open dialogue of TFA and NEA.

The following is part of a series I'm working on about my time teaching in New York City. This post is an edited version of two posts I wrote while in New York: "Could You Make My Job More Difficult" and "If Only We Had Fewer Resources." You can follow the series by clicking on the label "Teaching in New York" at the bottom of this post.

I began teaching at Washington Irving in the fall of 2002, not knowing a thing about what I was in for. I had moved to New York from Chicago a few months before, and before that I had been in San Francisco. As well, I had never been inside a public school. After two days, I felt sure I would fail the students and myself. After two years I thought I could last a couple more years maybe. Now I look back and see how this experience of teaching at Irving has sustained me and given me purpose. As well, it answered this question: what is New York City?

Teacher recruitment and retention are historical problems in high-poverty school districts, but using Teach for America "interns," who are recent college graduates and professionals, will only institutionalize this problem. The basic characteristics of Teach for America recruits - they are undercertified and lack classroom experience - mirror one of our most severe problems. Researchers frequently bewail the fact that experienced teachers do not remain poor districts, yet now Adamowski and the Windham Board of Education wish to enshrine the "farm" system.

As student learning is the primary goal of teaching, it seems like common sense to evaluate teachers based on how much their students gain on state standardized tests. Indeed, many states have adopted this idea in response to federal incentives tied to much-needed funding. However, previous experience is not promising. Recently evaluated experiments in Tennessee and New York did not improve achievement when teachers were evaluated and rewarded based on student test scores. In the District of Columbia, contrary to expectations, reading scores on national tests dropped and achievement gaps grew after a new test-based teacher-evaluation system was installed. In Portugal, a study of test-based merit pay attributed score declines to the negative effects of teacher competition, leading to less collaboration and sharing of knowledge. I was once bullish on the idea of using "value-added methods" for assessing teacher effectiveness. I have since realized that these measures, while valuable for large-scale studies, are seriously flawed for evaluating individual teachers, and that rigorous, ongoing assessment by teaching experts serves everyone better. Indeed, reviews by the National Research Council, the RAND Corp., and the Educational Testing Service have all concluded that value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make high-stakes decisions about teachers. Why?

I share these stories not just to explain how my former students have enhanced my life personally and professionally, but to affirm the value of honoring teaching as a life-long profession, of giving teachers the autonomy to decide what takes place in their classrooms and of viewing classroom learning through the lens of relationship building as well as skill instruction. Current reforms, if taken to their logical conclusion, will undermine all of those goals and make our schools places where inquiry and imagination are stifled, and students and teachers are always looking over their shoulder to see if they have violated some rule. If that happens, something very precious in our lives will have been lost.

Latest news from the Mitten State: Legislators propose privatizing teaching. Lots of ways to accomplish this, including designating Michigan a "right-to-teach" state, preserving the right to collectively bargain for police, firefighters and private-industry unions, but making teacher unionizing illegal.

"Most of our educational traditions have something to offer, even if they include extremes against which we must be on guard. The latest batch of enthusiasms can all be placed within the context of an old conversation about what and how to teach. Though we need not reject them out of hand, we must at least question the thinking of our current gurus and of the most influential among those who would presume to shape the way we teach here in the States. Indeed, it is our duty to ask how well they advance the chief end of education-at least public education, which is to prepare our youth to take on the responsibilities of citizenship. Everything else is secondary."

In this week's show (Part One of a two part series), Education Radio continues to disrupt the dominant narrative of corporate education reform by investigating the organization Teach for America (TFA). TFA is one of many insidious examples of how the language of social justice and equity is hijacked and appropriated, and instead employed to further the goals of the neoliberal education reform agenda. This agenda includes a firm belief that education should primarily serve the interests of private profit and as with all neoliberal education reformers, TFA is actively intensifying racial and class inequality, and the destruction of education as an essential public good along with the continued decimation of unions - two institutions that are primary determinants of a democratic society.

In this second of our two-part exploration of Teach for America, we'll explore TFA's larger goals and connection to corporate education reform. In doing so, we examine TFA's impact on professional teachers and their unions, and their hijacking of a social justice discourse in an effort to manufacture public acquiescence to the imposition of an agenda that ultimately seeks to further consolidate knowledge, wealth and power for a few at the expense of the many.

The massive Measures of Effective Teaching Project is finding that teacher effectiveness assessments similar to those used in some district value-added systems aren't good at showing which differences are important between the most and least effective educators, and often totally misunderstand the "messy middle" that most teachers occupy. Yet the project's latest findings suggest more nuanced teacher tests, multiple classroom observations and even student feedback can all create a better picture of what effective teaching looks like. Researchers dug into the latest wave of findings from the study of more than 3,000 classes for a standing-room-only ballroom at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference here on Saturday.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet with one of the Department of Education's Teaching Ambassador Fellows to give feedback on a not-yet-public draft of the policy proposal before it is offered to schools. While there was much to like about the proposal, it also contained some poorly conceived ideas that would be ineffective at best, and at worst could further damage the nation's education system. Project RESPECT calls for a three-pronged reform of the teaching profession. It envisions a reorganization of schools that would use technology and aides to put more effective teachers in front of more students, coupled with a longer school day to give teachers more time for professional growth. To find more effective teachers, it calls for an expansion of entry points into the profession, with a higher bar for earning a permanent position. Finally, it calls for increased compensation for career teachers who both stay in the classroom and take on various teacher-leader roles.

It's no secret that ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, has an education agenda. The templates for policy can be accessed at ALEC EXPOSED. However, transforming a template to policy doesn't happen instantaneously. How does the ideology translate into law? Could it be with a little help from Teach for America? Bear with me while I connect the dots.

So, this all has me wondering if the real objective here - among advocates of these seemingly contradictory policies - is actually to make traditional public schooling so utterly unbearable for both teachers and students by expanding the testing and standards driven culture, expanding curricular standards across areas previously untouched, sucking any remaining creativity out of teaching, and mechanizing the teaching workforce in traditional public schools, making even the worst of the less-regulated alternatives seem more desirable for future generations of both teachers and students?

We hear a lot about why teachers leave the profession. What makes them stay?   There are surveys and studies of this topic, but they focus on general tendencies and gloss over some important points. To understand what causes people to stay in the profession, you have to consider what teaching is, what the current teaching profession looks like, and how well the two match up.