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The union for Los Angeles teachers has suspended its legal challenge to a pilot evaluation program that includes using standardized test scores as part of a teacher's performance review. The union also reserved the right to reactivate the case should talks with the district sour. A joint statement released by L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy and United Teachers Los Angeles President Warren Fletcher said the two sides agree that current teacher evaluation procedures need improvement.

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.

Philissa Cramer, managing editor at Gotham Schools.org, talks about disputes over teachers: principals are objecting to test scores for evaluations and Mayor Bloomberg has a modest proposal for class sizes. 

There are many ways to use student test scores to evaluate schools. This paper defines and examines different estimators, including regression-based value-added indicators, average gains, and successive cohort differences in achievement levels. Given that regression-based indicators are theoretically preferred but not always feasible, we consider whether simpler alternatives provide acceptable approximations. We argue that average gain indicators potentially can provide useful information, but differences across successive cohorts, such as grade trends, which are commonly cited in the popular press and used in the Safe Harbor provision of federal school accountability laws, are flawed and can be misleading when used for school accountability or program evaluation.

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Long governed largely by inertia and school convention, teacher evaluation has recently become a focal point of education reform. Many states, under prodding from the federal Race to the Top program, have begun to implement new, comprehensive evaluation systems that incorporate student test-score data and more rigorous observation protocols. School systems are also working to tie evaluation results more closely to teachers' tenure status and professional advancement.

New York has the most effective school-choice system of any of the nation's largest school districts, allowing students and parents the most freedom and providing them with the most relevant information on educational performance, according to a new Brookings Institution report scheduled for publication online Wednesday. But even New York got a B under the report's A-to-F grading system, with Brookings saying the city provided the least useful online information for comparing schools and giving it low scores in several other categories.

The Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers union have agreed to a new pact granting local schools more autonomy over hiring, curriculum and work conditions and virtually ending a 2-year-old policy that allowed charter operators and others to take over low-performing and new campuses. The agreement, tentative until union members vote on it, doesn't resolve key contract disputes, including whether teacher evaluations should include students' standardized test scores, a provision L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy is seeking. And teachers will continue to work under the terms of the larger labor contract that expired July 1.

The State Education Department official who has supervised the state's testing program since 2004 - through skyrocketing scores, a brutal crash, and the dawn of an overhaul - has resigned. David Abrams, the State Education Department's assistant commissioner for standards, assessment, and reporting since 2004, announced his resignation today. His resignation is effective immediately, shocking some people who had expected to participate in meetings with him this week.

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state's high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he'd make his scores public.

I think it is safe to say that most educated people understand that student achievement scores have been, and continue to be, manipulated for political ends. I suspect the truth lies somewhere between genuine concern for improving public education and an insidious desire to destroy public education. On that issue, I will leave you to decide. I would, however, like to give you an insider's view of a state supported scheme to shift our tax dollars to private companies at the expense of our students.

For a generation of Newark students, every education decision, including choices on curriculum, spending and superintendent, has been made by state officials in Trenton. That level of state involvement has made the 39,000-student district an attractive laboratory for Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican seen as a national leader on education reform, and for prominent donors, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who have pledged $148 million to remake this city's failing schools. But the influx of money, and the attendant national spotlight, has galvanized a growing movement of parents, educators and elected officials who want the schools returned to local control 16 years after they were taken over amid low test scores, crumbling buildings and charges of mismanagement.

Faced with mounting policy pressures from federal and state accountability programs, school leaders are reallocating curricula, time, even diet in an attempt to boost student achievement. To explore whether they are using test score data to reallocate their teacher resources as well, I designed a cross-case, cross-sectional study and explored principals' reported staffing practices in one higher performing and one lower performing elementary school in each of five Florida school districts. Findings show that school leaders are "staffing to the test" by hiring, moving, and developing teachers in an effort to increase their schools' overall performance. The paper discusses the implications of evidence-based staffing for policy, practice and future research.

Uh oh! The speculators are speculatin' and the short-sellers are short selling. K-12 Inc. stock is in free-fall and Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk (who denies holding any shares) sound downright panicky and hedgey. While he is not currently contracting with K-12, his Bellweather consulting company has done work with them in the past. The stock market is to edu-profiteers like Rotherham, what standardized test scores are to DOE bureaucrats and big-city mayors, indicators of their future employment and marketability.

Math teachers trained through the Boston Teacher Residency program are, on average, initially less effective at raising student scores in that subject than other novice teachers. But within five years, their instruction in that subject improves rapidly enough to surpass the effectiveness of their colleagues, a new study concludes.

The darling of education reformers insists she welcomes a probe of student scores during her tenure as D.C. schools chancellor-but admits to no mistake. Rita Beamish on how it's complicating her legacy.

Through the years there have been many bitter teacher strikes and too many student protests to count. But a principals' revolt? "Principals don't revolt," said Bernard Kaplan of Great Neck North High School on Long Island, who has been one for 20 years. "Principals want to go along with the system and do what they're told." But President Obama and his signature education program, Race to the Top, along with John B. King Jr., the New York State commissioner of education, deserve credit for spurring what is believed to be the first principals' revolt in history.

The U.S. Education Department is offering the waivers to states that adopt an "index" system of multiple measures that go beyond annual test results in determining school performance. These include test score growth over time, graduation rates and other evidence that schools have produced students who are college- or career-ready. States also must show plans for evaluating teachers and principals by multiple measures.

If 2010 was the year of the bombshell in research in the three "major areas" of market-based education reform - charter schools, performance pay, and value-added in evaluations - then 2011 was the year of the slow, sustained march. Last year, the landmark Race to the Top program was accompanied by a set of extremely consequential research reports, ranging from the policy-related importance of the first experimental study of teacher-level performance pay (the POINT program in Nashville) and the preliminary report of the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching project, to the political controversy of the Los Angeles Times' release of teachers' scores from their commissioned analysis of Los Angeles testing data. In 2011, on the other hand, as new schools opened and states and districts went about the hard work of designing and implementing new evaluations compensation systems, the research almost seemed to adapt to the situation. There were few (if any) "milestones," but rather a steady flow of papers and reports focused on the finer-grained details of actual policy.

In response to my Nation piece on achievement gaps in Washington, D.C. district public schools, commenter E.B. wondered how things would look different if we measured student proficiency instead of raw NAEP scores. This is a great question, since proficiency--defined as "solid academic performance"--is the standard to which we should hold most children.