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So--let's say you're a teacher. Not "just a teacher," but one of those special teachers we hear about in news and policy discussions-- the supposedly rare educator who has passionate disciplinary expertise, a toolbag full of teaching strategies and genuine caring for their students. You're in education because you want to make a difference, change the world, raise the bar. You actually love teaching, finding it endlessly variable and challenging. You plan to spend a long time in the classroom.

Larry Cuban wrote a wonderful blog post recently, one that I've been planning to discuss in more detail, though now I'm going to bring it up in a way I hadn't originally intended.  In "Jazz, Basketball, and Teacher Decision Making" Cuban offers interesting analogies and scientific studies to illuminate just how complex teaching really is.  Teachers make several dozen instructional decisions every hour, hundreds per day.  For those decisions to be effective in promoting student learning, teachers need to know the difference between the meaningful information and the meaningless "noise" that we take in every second as we observe a classroom.  We need a clear sense of priorities for each student and for each moment - and though this idea will shock some people who barely understand teaching - the top priority is not always to stick to the lesson plan.  (More on that idea in a blog post coming soon).  In order for each decision to be the best it can be, we need to have a variety of options and approaches, and both the theoretical and practical background to weigh those options and make the right selection in a moment's time, and then constantly adjust.

"The video below is a short preview of the 34-minute video "School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias."  Private schools receiving funding through "school choice" programs are using A Beka Book, Bob Jones University Press, and other Protestant fundamentalist curricula.  The textbooks in these series teach that dinosaurs lived on earth with humans; deny global warming; promote hostility toward other religions and other sectors of Christianity (particularly Roman Catholicism); provide a biased and often factually incorrect version of history; and teach extreme laissez-faire economics, claimed to be biblically-based."

Bad Teacher offers the most straightforward accounting of the underlying assumptions of paying-for-scores that I've yet seen, in print or on screen. A lousy, unmotivated teacher who desires breast implants is inspired to work much harder to earn the cash. There you go: honest, straightforward, incentive-driven--and utterly disinterested in social justice or the larger purposes of schooling. She changes her behavior because there are rewards for doing so. There's no expectation that the change is permanent, that it alters the content of her character, or even that she'll teach any better--only that she'll teach harder. And, it should come as no surprise that she looks for an opportunity to cheat when her other efforts aren't getting it done. At the same time, for all these thorny issues, I'd absolutely argue that her kids are better off after she learns about the bonus than they were before.

There will be no courses at the Relay Graduate School of Education, the first standalone college of teacher preparation to open in New York State for nearly 100 years. Instead, there will be some 60 modules, each focused on a different teaching technique. There will be no campus, because it is old-think to believe a building makes a school. Instead, the graduate students will be mentored primarily at the schools where they teach. And there will be no lectures. Direct instruction, as such experiences will be called, should not take place for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time. After that, students should discuss ideas with one another or reflect on their own.

On Monday, October 3rd, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) produced a live webcast to launch its new guide to teacher evaluation, titled Getting It Right.  As a National Board Certified Teacher and someone who has worked on producing a similar policy guide on teacher evaluation (see Publications, above), I tuned in to see what the National Board had to say.  After all, no organization has a clearer picture of what quality teaching really should look like

The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute have put out a report purporting to show that public school teachers are overpaid. It's 23 pages of elaborate statistical justification of right-wing beliefs, all built on a foundation of right-wing assumptions. The basic claims are that while teachers are underpaid relative to other people with similar levels of education, in fact they are overpaid because education programs are easier than other majors and also, teachers are stupid; that public school teachers earn more than private school teachers and this shows they earn more than the market should support; and that people who leave teaching earn less while people who enter teaching earn more, therefore teachers are overpaid.

"Why are school districts paying millions in "finder's fees" to an organization that places people without education degrees to teach in urban schools-even where applications from veteran teachers abound?"

"Some see us as education's odd couple-one, the president of a democratic teachers' union; the other, a director at the world's largest philanthropy. While we don't agree on everything, we firmly believe that students have a right to effective instruction and that teachers want to do their very best. We believe that one of the most effective ways to strengthen both teaching and learning is to put in place evaluation systems that are not just a stamp of approval or disapproval but a means of improvement. We also agree that in too many places, teacher evaluation procedures are broken-unconstructive, superficial, or otherwise inadequate. And so, for the past four years, we have worked together to help states and districts implement effective teacher development and evaluation systems carefully designed to improve teacher practice and, ultimately, student learning."

"What makes Union City remarkable is, paradoxically, the absence of pizazz. It hasn't followed the herd by closing "underperforming" schools or giving the boot to hordes of teachers. No Teach for America recruits toil in its classrooms, and there are no charter schools. "

For years teachers had been through educational trends that were here today and gone tomorrow. So, NCLB was viewed just another fad. Educator cooperation should be easy. But what was hidden from sight would be the insidious impact that fear and threats would have on teaching and learning as reliance on test score results and interpretations dominated school life from the classroom to staff meetings and teacher-administrator interactions.

I may not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students' test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores. The problem is that low-income students, who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary and are less able to comprehend complex sentences than their more privileged peers, are also less likely to read at home. Many will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort. But those are the same students who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep. By "using data to inform instruction," as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck's novels of the opportunity to read them. It is ironic, then, that English Language Arts exams are designed for "cultural neutrality." This is supposed to give students a level playing field on the exams, but what it does is bleed our English classes dry. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level - not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous. These are literary qualities, and they are more or less absent from testing materials.

This second report from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project offers ground-breaking descriptive information regarding the use of classroom observation instruments to measure teacher performance. It finds that observation scores have somewhat low reliabilities and are weakly though positively related to value-added measures. Combining multiple observations can enhance reliabilities, and combining observation scores with student evaluations and test-score information can increase their ability to predict future teacher value-added. By highlighting the variability of classroom observation measures, the report makes an important contribution to research and provides a basis for the further development of observation rubrics as evaluation tools. Although the report raises concerns regarding the validity of classroom observation measures, we question the emphasis on validating observations with test-score gains. Observation scores may pick up different aspects of teacher quality than test-based measures, and it is possible that neither type of measure used in isolation captures a teacher's contribution to all the useful skills students learn. From this standpoint, the authors' conclusion that multiple measures of teacher effectiveness are needed appears justifiable. Unfortunately, however, the design calls for random assignment of students to teachers in the final year of data collection, but the classroom observations were apparently conducted prior to randomization, missing a valuable opportunity to assess correlations across measures under relatively bias-free conditions.

There is a small but growing body of evidence about the (usually test-based) effectiveness of teachers from Teach for America (TFA), an extremely selective program that trains and places new teachers in mostly higher needs schools and districts. Rather than review this literature paper-by-paper, which has already been done by others (see here and here), I'll just give you the super-short summary of the higher-quality analyses, and quickly discuss what I think it means.

I could, of course, create longer rubrics that attempt to cover every eventuality, but such beasts would probably be too thick to attach to a student's paper without leaning my full weight upon the stapler. And even with such a rubric, it's inevitable that some students would still come up with things I never anticipated, because great writing is nuanced, complex and much larger than the sum of the component parts of any rubric humans could devise. This is essentially my complaint about the Danielson framework that will now form the basis of teacher observations in New York State. It features a beast of a rubric that has all the stapler-bending properties mentioned above, coupled with the daunting task of somehow reducing "good teaching" to its component parts so that it can be quantified and evaluated.

Randomized trials are a common way to provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of education programs. This article discusses the trade-offs associated with study designs that involve random assignment of students within schools and describes the experience from one such study of Teach for America (TFA). The TFA experiment faced challenges with recruitment, randomization of students, and analysis. The solutions to those challenges may be instructive for experimenters who wish to study future interventions at the student or classroom level. The article concludes that within-school random assignment studies such as the TFA evaluation are challenging but, under the right conditions, are also feasible and potentially very rewarding in terms of generating useful evidence for policy.

Recently, there's been controversy over the motion picture "The Hunger Games" and the casting choice for Rue, a character that the book's author, Suzanne Collins, intended to be dark-skinned at the very least. Amandla Stenberg, a young black actress, plays Rue in a cast that also includes rocker Lenny Kravitz and actress Kimiko Gelman. Some fans expressed disappointment all over social media that they didn't think the character should be black and that they hadn't envisioned a black child as this character to whom they gravitated to so ardently in print. One search on Twitter for Rue leads to a set of tweets ranging from subtly questionable to strangely racist. Teens are the predominant target group for this movie. At some point, don't we as a society have to step in and question what we're teaching our children about race?

Over the past several months, I have featured a number of posts that were critical of Teach For America (TFA). We had education professor Phil Kovacs, who wrote several articles reviewing the research cited by TFA on their web site, and heard concerns from current TFA corps member Jameson Brewer. Last month, fellow Education Week blogger Rick Hess carried an interview with Heather Harding, TFA's vice president in charge of research, responding to some of these posts. I wrote to Ms. Harding and asked if she would answer some followup questions. Here is the result.

...In light of current controversies around testing and teacher evaluation, let's do a little thought experiment. How would Miss Snug have handled this lesson if it were occurring just before a round of standardized testing? Would she not have had to interrupt the children's speculations and instructed them that actual circumstances in word problems must be completely disregarded, because the point is to arrive at the answer the test designers have in mind? After all, how could test designers anticipate the lines of thought that spontaneously erupted in her classroom? Real life, and real thought, are too complicated to be foreseen - and so need to be put aside at testing time.

The Fordham Institute's Teachers in the Age of Digital Instruction, an advocacy document outlining a vision for how technology might transform the teaching profession, provides little or no empirical research evidence to support its central claim that digital age technologies will improve the education system, according to a new review. The report was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project by Luis Huerta of Teachers College at Columbia University. The review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.