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Policymakers, administrators, and advocacy groups have correctly diagnosed a major problem plaguing the teaching profession-high rates of teacher attrition-but have missed the mark in their prescriptions for fixing it, concludes a new report released this morning by the New York City-based TNTP, formerly The New Teacher Project. In essence, it contends, most school leaders fail to identify and encourage the very best teachers to stay in schools. In part, it says, that's because of the K-12 field's tendency to uncouple decisions about retention from discussions of teacher quality. The consequences of these practices, according to the report, has particularly affected low-performing schools, where a revolving door gradually makes it harder to develop a critical mass of effective teachers to sustain improvements. In such schools, the report estimates, a high-performing teacher who leaves will be replaced by an equally effective peer less than a tenth of the time.

"Pity the new district superintendent. Like any responsible educational leader, he'd like to be sure that his district's curricular materials and interventions are grounded in solid scientific research. But no sooner does he start talking with his staff, his teachers, and various and sundry "experts" than he finds that everything is "research-based," including approaches that are clearly very different from those employed by his teachers. Should he let well enough alone, or should he introduce programs that seemed to work fine in the last district he was in? Neither. Instead, he should go read Dan Willingham's ingenious new book, When Can You Trust the Experts? The book won't tell him which programs to use, but it will help him think through -- and, in some cases, see through -- the claims their creators make on their behalf. An accomplished cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author of the must-read Why Don't Students Like School? (as well as an NCTQ advisory board member), Willingham aims to make district superintendents, principals, teachers and parents into educated consumers of education research."

"The modernization of teacher evaluation systems, an increasingly common component of school reform efforts, promises to reveal new, systematic information about the performance of individual classroom teachers. Yet while states and districts race to design new systems, most discussion of how the information might be used has focused on traditional human resource-management tasks, namely, hiring, firing, and compensation. By contrast, very little is known about how the availability of new information, or the experience of being evaluated, might change teacher effort and effectiveness. In the research reported here, we study one approach to teacher evaluation: practice-based assessment that relies on multiple, highly structured classroom observations conducted by experienced peer teachers and administrators. While this approach contrasts starkly with status quo "principal walk-through" styles of class observation, its use is on the rise in new and proposed evaluation systems in which rigorous classroom observation is often combined with other measures, such as teacher value-added based on student test scores."

A recent article about the implementation of new teacher evaluations in Tennessee details some of the complicated issues with which state officials, teachers and administrators are dealing in adapting to the new system. One of these issues is somewhat technical - whether the various components of evaluations, most notably principal observations and test-based productivity measures (e.g., value-added) - tend to "match up." That is, whether teachers who score high on one measure tend to do similarly well on the other (see here for more on this issue).

raduating from Buffalo State College in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in math, Sara has a burning desire to teach. She's grateful to land a position fresh out of college, even in a troubled high school at low starting pay. It's been four years since the task report A Nation at Risk sounded the rallying call for change, and Sara is ready for the challenge. Unmarried, childless, and full of youthful vigor, she devotes lots of extra time to her job, even as she pursues her master's degree during the evenings. Students identify with Sara, who is young and cute, and Principal Bell makes sure the new teacher isn't assigned many "problem" kids. He urges Sara to take on extra volunteer work: chaperoning dances, serving on committees. For untenured teachers, these are offers you can't refuse.

Facing a flood of criticism from teachers and principals, the city's Education Department is trying to distance itself from the release of 18,000 teachers' individual performance rankings to the press. That has not always been so.

Outside the doors of the Tweed Courthouse, the headquarters of the city's Education Department, there were few champions on Friday of the release of individual performance rankings of 18,000 public school teachers. Although city officials chose to release the teacher reports on the Friday of a week-long break, when many teachers and principals were on the beach and out-of-reach, the publication of the reports was greeted with an outpouring of criticism.

Steve Ball, executive principal at the East Literature Magnet School in Nashville, arrived at an English class unannounced one day this month and spent 60 minutes taking copious notes as he watched the teacher introduce and explain the concept of irony. "It was a good lesson," Mr. Ball said. But under Tennessee's new teacher-evaluation system, which is similar to systems being adopted around the country, Mr. Ball said he had to give the teacher a one - the lowest rating on a five-point scale - in one of 12 categories: breaking students into groups. Even though Mr. Ball had seen the same teacher, a successful veteran he declined to identify, group students effectively on other occasions, he felt that he had no choice but to follow the strict guidelines of the state's complicated rubric.

"If you want to attract and retain talent, you have to pay for it," founder and principal Zeke Vanderhoek, a Yale grad who was featured in The New York Times before his school opened and soon after, told "60 Minutes." So far, results at the 480-student middle school have fallen short compared to other district schools, with 31 percent of TEP's fifth-graders passing state tests.

The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as "ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective." Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents. But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: "Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall." What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

How, for example, if I was the principal of a given, average sized school in NYC, might I use the VA data on my teachers to council them? to suggest personnel changes? assignment changes, or so on? Would these data, as they are, provide me any useful information about my staff and how to better my school? For this exercise, I've decided to look at the year to year ratings of teachers in a relatively average school. Now, why would I bother looking at the year to year ratings when we know that the multi-year averages are supposed to more accurate - more representative of the teacher's over time contributions? Well, you'll see in the graphs below that those multi-year averages also may not be that useful.

Are doctors denigrated for the high rates of diabetes? Are the police officers responsible for crimes? Why are teachers responsible for the lack of parenting? For the impact of poverty? How can teachers be "graded" on student progress when we have no control over students out of school experiences? Why aren't "they" listening to us? The educational community: parents, principals, teachers and advocates all feel the current government education policies are seriously flawed; no matter how much they express their opinions no one seems to be listening to their cries.

The key element in the agreement reached between the New York City teachers' union and the city's Education Department last Thursday was given a closer look, as The New York Times and Gotham Schools examined the role to be played by so-called "independent validators" in rating teacher effectiveness. As part of the deal reached between the city Education Department and the United Federation of Teachers, independent observers will be brought into New York City's classrooms "to monitor the weakest teachers and provide a second opinion to supplement observations by the school principal," writes Winnie Hu in The Times.

Last week, Leo Casey gave Edwize readers the real story of Pascal Mauclair, whom the NY Post declared was the "at the bottom of the heap" when the DOE released the Teacher Data Reports to the press. The DOE gave Ms. Mauclair a "0" on her report, but the results seemed, to put it mildly, arbitrary. As Casey pointed out, Ms. Mauclair was graded on a small number (11) of high-need (ESL) students who were compared to other students learning in very different, departmentalized, classrooms. Aside from that, Ms. Mauclair has a reputation as an excellent teacher. As her principal said, "I would put my own child in her class." All this alone should be enough to clear Ms. Mauclair's name. But this week fresh evidence shows that Ms. Mauclair's report should be declared invalid altogether by the DOE.

For full disclosure, I am a principal of a low needs school, although with all the budget cuts rural schools are facing, we will be high needs soon enough. Many of our students come in with a variety of experiences and they are well-prepared to learn. We have an average number of students who struggle and we try to find diverse ways to educate them. Unfortunately, as the years have gone by we all worry about what high stakes testing will show. We are told not to worry because they will "only" count for 20% of an educator's evaluation. However, for those who have their names published in the New York Post, that 20% might seem like a much larger number these days.

By the end of her second year at MacFarland Middle School, fifth-grade teacher Sarah Wysocki was coming into her own. "It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined," Assistant Principal Kennard Branch wrote in her May 2011 evaluation. He urged Wysocki to share her methods with colleagues at the D.C. public school. Other observations of her classroom that year yielded good ratings. Two months later, she was fired. Wysocki, 31, was let go because the reading and math scores of her students didn't grow as predicted. Her undoing was "value-added," a complex statistical tool used to measure a teacher's direct contribution to test results. The District and at least 25 states, under prodding from the Obama administration, have adopted or are developing value-added systems to assess teachers.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has declined to release to The Times the names of teachers and their scores indicating their effectiveness in raising student performance. The nation's second-largest school district calculated confidential "academic growth over time" ratings for about 12,000 math and English teachers last year. This fall, the district issued new ones to about 14,000 instructors that can also be viewed by their principals. The scores are based on an analysis of a student's performance on several years of standardized tests and estimate a teacher's role in raising or lowering student achievement.

When I became a principal, nearly thirteen years ago, the era of high-stakes testing known as NCLB was just beginning. I was in a doctoral program at Teachers College at the time. I would argue with great passion for why we needed NCLB and testing to close the achievement gap. I can remember many a discussion with former commissioner, Thomas Sobol, who was one of our professors, on the topic of high stakes testing.  Frankly, Dr. Sobol was right, and I was wrong.  The downside of high-stakes standardized testing has far outweighed the good.

"The latest issue of the AFT American Educator publication contains an article that presents "Myths of the Common Core" and responds to each one with "facts." Tim Farley, principal of the Ichabod Crane Elementary/Middle School in Valatie, New York, did not agree with the publication's definition of the facts. Here is his rebuttal"

"On the very eve of the weekend celebrating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Newark's state-appointed superintendent showed the citizens of Newark that they have no votes and they have no voice when it comes to the fate of their schools."