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The New York Times online indexes the article "$5 Billion in Grants Offered to Revisit Teacher Policies" as education. It probably should have been listed under politics. After three years of demonizing teachers as the problem with American education with its Race to the Top program, the Obama administration apparently now realizes it will need teacher union support and teacher and public school parent votes to be reelected. Suddenly, Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants to "work with teachers in rebuilding their profession and to elevate the teacher voice in federal, state and local education policy." Other than promising respect, the proposal is called the RESPECT (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching) Project, the Obama-Duncan team is offering teachers very little. The title of the program is apparently taken from a top of the pop charts song sung by Aretha Franklin in the 1960s. What Duncan seems to have missed is that the song is actually a complaint because as a woman she is not receiving any respect.

The chief academic officer of New York City's public schools said on Monday night that principals were not alone in being concerned about the state's new teacher evaluation system: He also has qualms. At a panel discussion on high-stakes testing held at the Brooklyn Secondary School for Collaborative Studies, Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer for the city's Education Department, told a packed auditorium that the new law contained "real risks," for teachers and principals alike.

The architect of many of the metrics the city uses to assess teachers and measure student growth spent Monday evening defending his work against a steady stream of criticism from parents and educators. Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky sat on a three-person panel titled "High-Stakes Testing 101″ hosted at The Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies and The Brooklyn New School. The panel included two principals, Long Island's Sean Feeney and Elijah Hawkes of the James Baldwin School in Manhattan, who have publicly criticized the city's and state's use of testing data to measure student growth and evaluate teacher effectiveness. Hawkes was one of about 170 city principals to sign on to a petition Feeney authored against the state's use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.

A venerable maxim of successful organizational management declares that an executive's authority should be commensurate with his or her responsibility. In plain English, if you are held to account for producing certain results, you need to be in charge of the essential means of production. In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations. Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school's budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government--none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others. In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO's but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that students cheat more in online than in face-to-face classes. The article tells the story of Bob Smith (not his real name, obviously), who was a student in an online science course.  Bob logged in once a week for half an hour in order to take a quiz. He didn't read a word of his textbook, didn't participate in discussions, and still he got an A. Bob pulled this off, he explained, with the help of a collaborative cheating effort. Interestingly, Bob is enrolled at a public university in the U.S., and claims to work diligently in all his other (classroom) courses. He doesn't cheat in those courses, he explains, but with a busy work and school schedule, the easy A is too tempting to pass up. Bob's online cheating methods deserve some attention. He is representative of a population of students that have striven to keep up with their instructor's efforts to prevent cheating online. The tests were designed in a way that made cheating more difficult, including limited time to take the test, and randomized questions from a large test bank (so that no two students took the exact same test). But the design of the test had two potential flaws

I thought testing would help diagnose the problem and help teachers identify kids' needs and that charters would serve the underserved and collaborate with public schools. I was wrong on all accounts, said Diane Ravitch in her Friday keynote speech at the Opportunity to Learn Summit, in Washington, D.C.

Though they are still in negotiations over the details, Chicago Public Schools officials are set to sign on to a national intiaitive that encourages stronger cooperation between charter schools and traditional schools, as well as providing equitable district funding for charters. Nine cities have already signed such agreements, called District Charter Collaboration Compacts, which are being promoted and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. According to a Gates press release, on Tuesday, CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and New Schools for Chicago President Phyllis Lockett will join the leaders of school districts in Houston and Baltimore in a conference call in which two new compact cities will be announced. Baltimore's CEO Andrés Alonso has already committed to the compact.

Charter schools in Chicago would get easier access to facilities and a likely increase in per-pupil funding under a proposed district-charter compact that would also make charters subject to some of the same testing and accountability standards as traditional schools. The draft agreement between CPS and its charters was handed out at a Tuesday conference for participants in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative called "District-Charter Collaboration Compacts." Chicago Public Schools and Spring Branch Independent School District, outside of Houston, are joining the 12 districts across the country that already signed on.

Next spring, we will release the book, Pencils Down: Rethinking High-Stakes Testing and Accountability in Public Schools, edited by Wayne Au and Melissa Bollow Tempel. The following original essay by Rethinking Schools editor Stan Karp will be included in the book. In it, Stan discusses some of the problems with the current conversations around teacher quality, and examines better alternatives.

Among my son's favorite books are the ones in Richard Scarry's Busytown series. In What Do People Do All Day?, Able Baker Charlie puts too much yeast in the dough, resulting in a gigantic, explosive loaf of bread that the bakers (and Lowly Worm) need to eat their way out of. The opposite problem -- a lack of yeast -- is present in Michelle Rhee's recent op-ed in Education Week. In it, she limits her call to "rethink" teaching policy to "how we assign, retain, evaluate, and pay educators" and to "teacher-layoff and teacher-tenure policies." (And she casts the issue of retention purely as one about so-called "last-in, first-out" employment policies rather than about school leadership, collaboration or working conditions.) The utter absence of any focus or mention of teacher development either in this op-ed or in her organization's (StudentsFirst) expansive policy agenda leaves me wondering if Rhee believes that teachers are capable of learning and improving.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the NY Board of Regents approved the state's sharing of student and teacher information with a new national database, to be funded by the Gates Foundation, and designed by News Corp's Wireless Generation. Other states that have already agreed to share this data, according to the NY State Education Department, include Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Louisiana and Massachusetts. All this confidential student and teacher data will be held by a private limited corporation, called the Shared Learning Collaborative LLC, with even less accountability,  which in July was awarded $76.5 million by the Gates Foundation, to be spent over 7 months. According to an earlier NYT story,  $44 million of this funding will go straight into the pockets of Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch's News Corp and run by Joel Klein.

he Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study conducted in the Metropolitan Nashville School System from 2006-07 through 2008-09, in which middle school mathematics teachers voluntarily participated in a controlled experiment to assess the effect of financial rewards for teachers whose students showed unusually large gains on standardized tests. The experiment was intended to test the notion that rewarding teachers for improved scores would cause scores to rise. It was up to participating teachers to decide what, if anything, they needed to do to raise student performance: participate in more professional development, seek coaching, collaborate with other teachers, or simply reflect on their practices. Thus, POINT was focused on the notion that a significant problem in American education is the absence of appropriate incentives, and that correcting the incentive structure would, in and of itself, constitute an efective intervention that improved student outcomes.By and large, results did not confirm this hypothesis

An urban school district and a charter school have forged a successful - and (unusual - partnership to share best teaching practices and collectively support early reading proficiency.

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.

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.

This week, the Wall St Journal reported that the NY Board of Regents approved the state's sharing of student and teacher information with a new national data base, to be funded by the Gates  Foundation, and designed by News Corp's Wireless Generation. All this confidential student and teacher data will be held by a private limited corporation, called the Shared Learning Collaborative LLC, with even less accountability,  which in July was awarded $76.5 million   by the Gates Foundation, to be spent over 7 months.  According to an earlier NYT story,  $44 million of this funding will go straight into the pockets of Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch's News Corp and run by Joel Klein.

Just three years ago, the relationship between the Memphis school district in Tennessee and its teachers' union was fairly typical: The two entities worked together during contract negotiations, and while there were no spectacular disagreements, there weren't any major partnerships, either. Much has changed since that time.

Value-added, or growth, models track individual students' test scores from year to year, which advocates say can help isolate the effect of the instruction that students receive during one school year from their academic backgrounds and prior education experiences. Critics-including many teachers' unions-argue that annual test scores do not give a full picture of student growth, and that the statistical models used for the measures are not designed to evaluate teachers.

Unfortunately, last week's publication of a guest essay by American Enterprise Institute researcher Daniel Lautzenheiser in Rick Hess' EdWeek column marks a return to the simplistic rhetoric and unsubstantiated assertions which Hess himself has warned are becoming too common among self-identified "reformers." In "A Tale of Two Schools," Lautzenheiser makes the claim that Democracy Prep's high test scores come despite its enrollment of "the same kinds of students" as its academically struggling co-located school, the Academy of Collaborative Education (ACE).

"Can a teachers' union successfully be both a hardball-playing defender of its rights and a collaborative force for the common good? It is both a question of philosophy and, increasingly, one of policy direction for the American Federation of Teachers, whose biennial convention here showed delegates grappling with the tension between the two approaches to unionism."