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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.

Video of panel discussion and links to resources. This briefing was sponsored by the Office of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), in partnership with the Coalition for Teaching Quality.

Here is Ellen McHugh's account of the controversial Cobble Hill charter co-location hearing, more description and video of which is here.  Ellen is head of Parent to Parent - NYS, and a member of the Citywide Council for Special Education

Video interview.

Mulgrew expressed hope that Governor Cuomo's call to school districts to adopt new evaluation systems for teachers or risk losing a portion of their state funding would put pressure on the mayor and the DOE to return to the bargaining table and negotiate an evaluation system for 33 restart and transformation schools.

Video.

As I'm sure many have already heard, yesterday the Board of Regents voted to approve Achievement First's application to establish a franchise network of "no excuses" charter schools in Providence. I've been pretty outspoken on this issue already, and there's a lot more I'd like to talk about (for example, how can a proposal that will drain so much money from Providence be given the thumbs up just hours after the city announced that it might not have enough money to finish out the year?). But my voice has already been heard enough in this debate. Now that the Board's decision has been made, my only hope is that the parents of Providence learn exactly what they are getting themselves into when Achievement First's well-financed PR campaign turns towards recruitment and its glossy posters and inspirational videos start appearing. Towards that end, I want to share a letter recently written by a former Achievement First parent who felt the need to warn families in Rhode Island about the damage an Achievement First education has the potential to inflict on their children.

Talitha cumi, Damsel arise, was the rallying cry among nineteenth century feminists, the words were used to lead the campaign for educating women. It would be appropriate for use today to combat the attacks on teachers. In his State of the Union message President Obama avers "stop bashing teachers." (see video clip here) 3.6 million elementary and secondary school teachers were engaged in classroom instruction in fall 2010, some 76 percent of public school teachers are female. The attack on teachers, to use the president's words, the "bashing of teachers," is an attack on women who make up the vast majority of teachers.

CNN's Fareed Zakaria focused on education during his Sunday morning show GPS and had a prime time special with expanded coverage.  The prime time show kicked off with a video review of South Korea's pressure-cooker test-driven system.  Fareed contrasted the Korean system with Finland's lack of testing and focus on great teachers Fareed interviewed Bill Gates who discussed the foundation's focus on teacher effectiveness. There was a little footage of teachers from grantee district Hillsborough FL that appreciated improved performance feedback. The morning show (CNN's FAREED ZAKARIA GPS) and the evening special featured a great interview with Secretary Arne Duncan.

Khan's idea does not represent a "revolution." Posting video tutorials online is a great idea, and I have no doubt that some teachers find value in "flipping" the curriculum so that students can utilize class time to get one-on-one help. But to suggest that this is a revolution-or that it will have even a modest impact on our overall education system-is pure delusion.

"Education is a not a scientific enterprise. The purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it, to make it more similar to some ideal that we envision. (I wrote about this distinction at some length in my new book. I also discussed on this brief video.) Thus science is ideally value-neutral. Yes, scientists seldom live up to that ideal; they have a point of view that shapes how they interpret data, generate theories, etc., but neutrality is an agreed-upon goal, and lack of neutrality is a valid criticism of how someone does science. Education, in contrast, must entail values, because it entails selecting goals. We want to change the world - we want kids to learn things --facts, skills, values. Well, which ones? There's no better or worse answer to this question from a scientific point of view."

"Our latest Storify gives some context to the ongoing media coverage of the Khan Academy. At first almost exclusively heralded as having the potential to be an education game-changer, the videos-and Salman Khan himself-have recently come under fire for what some say is questionable pedagogy."

"This is must see though I know it is long. This workshop led by Mike Klonsky and featuring his brother Fred, Dr. Michael A. Walker-Jones, Executive Director, Louisiana Association of Educators, along with one of my Chicago pals Xian Barrett is loaded with meat. Even Leo Casey makes an appearance with a comment that may cause some comments. In the audience were John Elfrank-Dana, CL of Murry Bergtraum HS and Arthur Goldstein, CL of Francis Lewis HS."

"Speaker: Anthony Bryk, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Video 9 of 13 This presentation was a part of "Tomorrow's Teacher: Paths to Prestige and Effectiveness," a session held May 18, 2012 at EWA's 65th National Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. Program description America's teaching corps has become the focus of intense reform activity in recent years. A single, but by no means simple, question sits at the center of much of this work: How can we transform teaching into a prestigious profession? In this special plenary session, a succession of expert speakers delivers succinct talks over the course of the morning on various aspects of this critical topic."

Videos of testimonies.

Value added measures sound fair, but they are not. In this video Prof. Daniel Willingham describes six problems (some conceptual, some statistical) with evaluating teachers by comparing student achievement in the fall and in the spring.

This morning, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott appeared at an American University forum with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and the mayors and school superintendents from Chicago and Los Angeles. A video of the forum is here. Bloomberg defended giving out invalid and inaccurate Teacher Data Reports as providing "information" to parents, saying it was "arrogance" to suggest that peddling wildly inaccurate information was a bad idea. He made a feeble attempt at backtracking from a prior statement that in his ideal world, he would fire half of the teachers and double class size. "Class size is important," he opined, but not as important as other things such as teacher quality. At the very end of the program, Bloomberg displayed his education acumen and keen political ear by declaring that "teaching to the test is exactly what we should do." And in defense of this position, he invoked a Pete Seeger song, "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy."

"This bizarre video got me thinking about a series of previous posts where I've looked across numerous indicators to try to tease out the relationships among them, across states.  I've selectively scoured scatterplots of relationships between various state level indicators and outcome measures, but have not for a while now, simply stepped back and evaluated the correlations across all of them, and then tried to tease out what states, if any really do stand out."

"New Jersey's current commissioner of education seems to stake much of his arguments for the urgency of implementing reform strategies on the argument that while New Jersey ranks high on average performance, New Jersey ranks 47th in achievement gap between low-income and non-low income children (video here: http://livestre.am/M3YZ). To be fair, this is classic political rhetoric with few or no partisan boundaries."

"In a recent lecture before the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Harvard law professor Larry Lessig argued that the current infrastructure for scholarly communication is not consistent with the objectives of The Enlightenment (see video of lecture below). Rather, the system is more consistent with the reality of the "elite-nment." That is, for the most part, knowledge created by academics is placed mostly in outlets that can be accessed only by "the knowledge elite.""