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Teach for America loves to expand its reach, and so it has again, this time partnering with the controversial Imagine schools, the nation's largest for-profit charter school network. That's an interesting pairing. Imagine is based in Arlington, Virginia, with some 75 schools in more than a dozen states, including Maryland, and the District of Columbia. The for-profit charter operator has been investigated in some states for the way it exercises control over the schools it manages, essentially ignoring the boards of trustees that are supposed to really run the schools. It has also come under scrutiny for its complicated real estate deals that generate millions of public dollars for Imagine.

Last week, I attended the International Summit on the Teaching Profession. Dr. Linda Darling- Hammond, a professor at Stanford University, was the rapporteur for the session on teacher supply and demand. She said something that caused me to sit up and pay closer attention. Dr. Darling-Hammond reported on some data around the connection between teacher preparation and retention. You may know that the average attrition rate for the teaching profession is 25%. But--and this is big--for those who completed a teacher preparation program, attrition was 15%, yet for those who did not, the attrition rate was 49%. That is significant.

South Carolina's Superintendent of Education Mick Zais makes several claims in The State (March 25, 2012) that build on one central argument: "The most important information about teachers isn't the degrees they have or their years of seniority. Their effectiveness in the classroom matters much, much more." Like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Zais has no experience teaching children in K-12 public education. This complete lack of teaching experience and degrees in the field of education is a suspect position from which to claim that these two characteristics do not matter. In fact, political appointees and elected officials sit in unique positions often above both accountability (the mantra du jour of the political elite regarding education) and qualifications-unlike the real world markets they often praise.

Student learning is at the heart of what teaching is all about. But we have made a huge mistake when we take what is a very indirect measurement of all the learning that ought to be occurring in a classroom -- a test or set of tests -- and mistake that for the sum of learning, and then start attaching negative and positive consequences to that. When we do this, instruction becomes distorted, and learning becomes all about test performance. The purpose for both teaching and learning is up-ended, and becomes about satisfying an external authority rather than pursuing what ought to be developed as an intrinsic passion. And this would be true even if VAM was accurate!

Isolating the effect of a given teacher on student achievement (value-added modeling) is complicated when the student is taught the same subject by more than one teacher. We consider three methods, which we call the Partial Credit Method, Teacher Team Method, and Full Roster Method, for estimating teacher effects in the presence of co-teaching. The Partial Credit Method apportions responsibility between teachers according to the fraction of the year a student spent with each. This method, however, has practical problems limiting its usefulness. As alternatives, we propose two methods that can be more stably estimated based on the premise that co-teachers share joint responsibility for the achievement gains of their shared students. The Teacher Team Method uses a single record for each student and a set of variables for each teacher or group of teachers with shared students, whereas the Full Roster Method contains a single variable for each teacher, but multiple records for shared students. We explore the properties of these two alternative methods and then compare the estimates generated using student achievement and teacher roster data from a large urban school district. We find that both methods produce very similar point estimates of teacher value added. However, the Full Roster Method better maintains the links between teachers and students and can be more robustly implemented in practice. 

"When Teach for America entered the national stage it was applauded as a fresh, innovative approach to education. Now, well into its second decade of providing teachers to struggling schools across the country, is it still a good idea for our children? Has bringing in smart, young college graduates improved the education that American children are receiving?"

"...education is at a crossroads in our country and our neighborhood, our city is right at the intersection of these crossroads. There is an attempt to make schooling privatized, charter-ized, and more inequitable than it already is. There is an attempt to get rid of experienced teachers who have built relationships with families, who truly know how to teach and replace them with less expensive, inexperienced teachers who likely will only be at the school for two years.  There is an attempt to teach through testing, to make your child so bored in school from over-standardized testing that students aren't excited for school anymore. There is an attempt to further cut librarians, counselors, nurses, PE, World Language, Art and now classroom teachers, in order to "save" money. A budget is a political document, not a financial one, it's about priorities. Some priorities obviously need to be re-evaluated.  Teachers in no way shape or form want to strike, we want to be working with and educating your children."

One of the common assumptions lurking in the background of our education debates is that "quality" of the teaching workforce has declined a great deal over the past few decades (see here, here, here and here [slide 16]). There is a very plausible storyline supporting this assertion: Prior to the dramatic rise in female labor force participation since the 1960s, professional women were concentrated in a handful of female-dominated occupations, chief among them teaching. Since then, women's options have changed, and many have moved into professions such as law and medicine instead of the classroom.

He is earning his teaching certificate through an online, for-profit alternative certification program, a nontraditional route to teaching that is becoming more common in Texas. Such programs, which can offer certification in three months to two years, are booming despite little more than anecdotal evidence of their success.

The Center For American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, has largely bought the educational agenda of "the billionaires' boys club." It seeks a balance, with just enough union-baiting to appease corporate powers. The CAP does its share of teacher-bashing, apparently in order to parrot the word "accountability" over and over, but it does not want to spark a stampede of teaching talent from inner city schools. Two new reports, "Designing High Quality Evaluations for High School Teachers," and "Teaching Children Well," embody the tension inherent in the CAP's "Sister Souljah" tactic of demonstrating its independence from Democratic constituencies by beating up on educators. Both document the potential of improved professional development, informed by data and enhanced by video technology, to improve student performance. One also asserts that test score growth must be used to evaluate teachers, but the other is largely silent on that issue.

This is NOT a story of wonderful triumph and success.  It is a story of some of the realities of teaching, especially in a school or district of high poverty, full of minority children. It is a brutally honest film.   It is a film with a point of view, one that I largely share.   Let me tell you why I think you should see this film.

By 2015, with the help of a $50 million federal grant, program recruits could make up one-quarter of all new teachers in 60 of the nation's highest need school districts. The program also is expanding internationally. That growth comes as many districts try to make teachers more effective. But Teach for America has had mixed results.

The Boston Teacher Residency is an innovative practice-based preparation program in which candidates work alongside a mentor teacher for a year before becoming a teacher of record in Boston Public Schools. We find that BTR graduates are more racially diverse than other BPS novices, more likely to teach math and science, and more likely to remain teaching in the district through year five. Initially, BTR graduates for whom value-added performance data are available are no more effective at raising student test scores than other novice teachers in English language arts and less effective in math. The effectiveness of BTR graduates in math improves rapidly over time, however, such that by their fourth and fifth years they out-perform veteran teachers. Simulations of the program's overall impact through retention and effectiveness suggest that it is likely to improve student achievement in the district only modestly over the long run.

I find myself asking that question right now as the result of reading an op ed in today's USA Today.  It has the title Column: 3 ways to improve the USA's teacher, and it is jointly written by Dennis Van Roekel, national President of the National Education Union, the teachers union for which I am a building representative, and Wendy Kopp, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Teach for America (TFA  -USA Today incorrectly identifies that organization as "Teach for All").

Everyone working in a schools knows the hardest job is teaching special education - especially to the most challenging children. Like all elementary music teachers, I work with special education teachers every day, and I have to tell you that they constantly amaze me with their sympathy, intelligence, insight, and patience. As far as I am concerned, anyone who devotes their career to teaching these deserving but demanding children is an angel on earth. And people who casually dismiss their work ought to be ashamed of themselves. Which is why this next story bugs the hell out of me

Ensuring that all students in America's public schools are taught by good teachers is an educational and moral imperative. The teacher is the most important school-based influence on student achievement, and poor children and those of color are less likely to be taught by well-qualified, experienced, and effective teachers than other students. Yet teacher incentive proposals - including those promoted by President Obama's Race to the Top program - are rarely grounded on what high-quality research indicates are the kinds of teacher incentives that lead to school excellence and equity. Few of the current approaches to creating teacher incentives take into account how specific conditions influence whether or not effective teachers will work in high-need schools and will be able to teach effectively in them. This review of research finds little support for a simplistic system of measuring value-added growth, evaluating teachers more "rigorously", and granting bonuses. Instead, the brief supports four recommendations: use the current federal Teacher Incentive Fund to attract qualified, effective teachers to high-needs schools, expand incentives by creating strategic compensation, create working conditions that allow teachers to teach effectively, and more aggressively promote the best practices and policies that spur school excellence and equity. The accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement these recommendations.

As teacher evaluations are becoming more prevalent in schools across the country amid a growing debate on how best to grade teachers, a new report out today adds to the growing number of studies concluding that student test scores should be one of several determinants in measuring student effectiveness. Instead, teachers should be assessed based on a combination of classroom observations, student feedback and value-added student achievement gains, according to the Measures of Effective Teaching project's paper, "Gathering Feedback for Teaching." Educators should be observed by certified raters through multiple, high-quality observations with clear standards.

Facebook, Twitter, texting. An article in The Times this weekend explored the treacherous terrain of social media which, on the one hand, can be effective at organizing and teaching students. On the other hand, though, they can be seriously abused. While teachers, and their bosses, are grappling with establishing policies on conduct and privacy, Dr. Charol Shakeshaft, an expert on sexual misconduct by teachers, offers some guidelines.

The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than the overstated former Washington D.C. Chancellor of Schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty's term in office Michelle Rhee, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk. This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher's unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education-and the role of public school teachers-in a deeply unequal society.

There is a growing backlash against National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel's recent collaborations with Teach for America leader Wendy Kopp on the issue of teacher preparation. Some NEA members have written on blogs that they are furious at Van Roekel, and early childhood expert Nancy Carlsson-Paige just declined an opportunity for her and her son, actor and activist Matt Damon, to be nominated for the Friend of Education Award from the NEA.