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The actor Matt Damon and his mother, a professor of education, on Wednesday turned down an award from the country's largest teachers union after reading an opinion article that the union's president had co-authored with the founder of Teach for America. Writing that she was "confused by your collaboration" with Teach for America, Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige said she and her son, Mr. Damon, no longer desired to be nominated for the National Education Association's Friend of Education Award.

Joe Nystrom, who teaches math at a low-income high school here, used to think that only a tiny group of students -- the ''smart kids'' -- were capable of advanced coursework. But two years ago, spurred by a national program that offered cash incentives and other support for students and teachers, Mr. Nystrom's school, South High Community School, adopted a come one, come all policy for Advanced Placement courses. Today Mr. Nystrom teaches A.P. statistics to eight times as many students as he used to, and this year 70 percent of them scored high enough to qualify for college credit, compared with 50 percent before. One in four earned the top score possible, far outpacing their counterparts worldwide.

Big news today in education policy and research - or was it? The Gates Foundation-funded Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project continues to update its research findings, and continues to argue that standardized tests and value-added measurement would be useful in teacher evaluations.  (Washington Post article). A study by Harvard and Columbia researchers uses value-added measures to quantify the effects of good teaching in various outcomes for students, well into adulthood. (NY Times article)

Like Henry Ford, Bill Gates has ushered in a new era in U.S. public education, shifting the already robust accountability era that began in the early 1980s and accelerated in 2001 with the passing of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) from focusing on student accountability for standards and test scores to demanding that teachers be held accountable for student test scores addressing those standards. Gates has been assisted by Michelle Rhee and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as the "No Excuses" Reformers have perpetuated narratives conjuring the myth of the "bad" teacher, which Adam Bessie has confronted by suggesting we hire hologram teachers in order to remove the greatest problem facing education: Humans. Just as the assembly line rendered all workers interchangeable, and thus, easy to hire, and easy to fire, the current education reforms focusing on teacher accountability, value-added methods (VAM) of evaluating teachers, and the growing fascination with Teach for America (TFA) are seeking the same fact for teachers: A de-professionalized workforce of teaching as a service industry, easy to hire, and easy to fire.

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

In a state struggling to get better at teaching all students, every reform has a glaring omission. Some reforms want to pay special teachers more. As if there are Blackwater mercenary teachers out there, ready to storm the castle and kick down the achievement gap.  They even tried this to the extreme in New York, luring in teachers with $100,000 salaries to get the cream of the crop. It didn't really work. A University of Vanderbilt study, the most extensive on performance pay, concluded there was no correlation between closing the gap and performance pay. They value purpose more than profit. Teachers do not sit around all day brooding upon what their colleagues may or may not make. They deserve professional pay, but teachers are neither mercenaries nor missionaries some folks want to reform how we pay teachers. They pay no attention to reforming how they teach.

Both a value-added method and principal observations tied to a teaching framework identified the same teachers as particularly high or low-performing under Chicago's teacher-evaluation pilot, a new study concludes. But principals struggled to provide high-quality "coaching" and support to teachers based on the results, the report says-a finding indicates just how difficult it will be to use the systems to improve teaching and learning.

"Before you read on, I have to warn you. This piece is not a critique of Teach for America. It's merely a question."

Today, the day of the release of the New York City data, I received an email that I did not expect to come for at least a year.  In D.C. the evaluation process is called IMPACT.  About 500 teachers in D.C. belong to something called 'group one' which means that they teach something that can be measured with their value-added formula.  50% of their evaluation is based on their IVA (individual value-added), 35% is on their principal evaluation called their TLF (teaching and learning framework).  5% is on their SVA (school value added) and the remaining 10% on their CSC (commitment to school and community).  I wanted to test my theory that the value-added scores would not correlate with the principal evaluations so I had applied under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) to D.C. schools requesting the principal evaluation scores and the value-added scores for all group one teachers (without their names.)  I fully expected to wait about a year or two and then be denied.  To my surprise, it only took a few months and they did provide a 500 row spreadsheet.

With all this focus on individual teacher performance, I feel like we have missed the major factor in great education, the teaching environment, or context. While complex algorithms supposedly account for differences in student demographics for VAM scores, I am not convinced that these made-up numbers account for the context teachers are placed in and often have very little control over.

Today I came across a Wall Street Journal opinion piece written by Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp. She rightly condemned the public release of teacher test scores in New York City. I applaud her for speaking out against this disgusting act. But as I read, I became enraged when I saw a story about Ms. Kopp's own experience with her child's teacher.

"One of the problems with current reform is that there does not seem to be an elaborated philosophy of education or theory of learning underlying the current reform movement. There is an implied philosophy and it is a basic economic/human capital one: Education is necessary for individual economic advantage and for national economic stability. This focus is legitimate but incomplete, for it narrows the purpose of education in a democracy, which should also include intellectual, social, civic, and ethical development. The theory of learning embedded in an accountability system based on standardized testing is a simplified behaviorist one. Learning is pretty much the acquisition of discrete bits of information measured quantitatively by a standardized test. Teaching is likewise reduced to a knowledge delivery system based on the mastery of a set of teaching techniques."

"The idea that teachers have the summer off is something of a myth. I recently spent a few days with several thousand teachers -- not at the beach, but at TEACH, the AFT's largest gathering of educators focused on their professional practice and growth. Teachers spent long days learning from fellow educators and other experts about concrete ways to improve teaching and learning. Many teachers told me how they were spending the rest of their summer: writing curriculum aligned to the new, challenging Common Core State Standards; taking classes, because teachers are lifelong learners; and working with students -- in enrichment camps and in programs to stem summer learning loss. So much for the dog days of August. But our conferees did much more. We also committed to reclaim the promise -- the promise of public education. Not as it is today or as it was in the past, but as what public education can be to fulfill our collective obligation to help all children succeed."

"The event, called "Organizing Resistance to Teach for America and its Role in Privatization," took place during the Free Minds, Free People conference from July 11-14, in Chicago. It aimed "to help attendees identify the resources they have as activists and educators to advocate for real, just reform in their communities." Namely, resisting TFA. The summit didn't drop from the sky fully formed. A group of New Orleans-based parent-activists, former students, non-TFA teachers and TFA alumni collaborated for months to arrange it. Complementing their critique is a small but growing group of TFA dissidents and apostates who've taken their concerns to the press. Even as TFA marches into more and more classrooms throughout the country and world, a burgeoning group of heretics is nailing its theses to the door. But why are they speaking up just now?"

"Teach for America wanted to help stem a teacher shortage. Why then are thousands of experienced educators being replaced by hundreds of new college graduates?"

"Although Teach For America began twenty years ago as a well-intentioned band-aid, it has morphed into what is essentially a jobs program for the privileged, funded by taxpayers and wealthy individuals."

In a forthcoming book, Teaching and Its Predicaments (Harvard University Press, August 2011), I argue that fragmented school governance in the U.S. coupled with the lack of coherent educational infrastructure make it difficult either to broadly improve teaching and learning or to have valid knowledge of the extent of improvement.

Teacher pay is an entirely artificial concept unrelated to anything but union contracts and reference tables on the number of years spent teaching. Other than, say, relating it to the hourly scale for babysitting, teaching has no inherent market value. Sure, studies show the hours teachers put in, the value of good educators on student lives, and the horror show of failed school systems. But no one has figured out--or wants to figure out--a good way to measure teacher pay.

A TFA alum who has stayed in public school teaching and gotten increasingly turned off to TFA, and who follows my work, forwarded to me an email that demonstrates a new tactic by TFA, perhaps as s/he notes, in response to the criticisms of TFA this past summer by the National Education Association, the larger of the two main teachers unions.

One of the central policy ideas of market-based education reform is to increase both the risk and rewards of the teaching profession. The basic idea is to offer teachers additional compensation (increased rewards), but, in exchange, make employment and pay more contingent upon performance by implementing merit pay and weakening job protections such as tenure (increased risk). This trade-off, according to advocates, will not only force out low performers by paying them less and making them easier to fire, but it will also attract a "different type" of candidate to teaching - high-achievers who thrive in a high-stakes, high-reward system.