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The long-term goal of many education reformers is to create a teaching force in which nearly all teachers are high-performing. However, in New York City's rankings - which rated thousands of teachers who taught in the system from 2007 to 2010 - teachers were graded on a curve. That is, under the city's formula, some teachers would always be rated as "below average," even if student performance increased significantly in all classrooms across the city.

But we principals, too, are part of the problem. Not because we have promoted the use of bad data to rate teachers, but because we may have allowed our attention to stray from our chief job of promoting professional growth, training staff, documenting teacher performance, creating community and defining what quality teaching and learning look like in our schools. Newly necessary distractions like marketing and fund-raising and data analysis may have seemed more important than getting into classrooms and working with teachers on how to plan lessons and ask questions. But if we let our attention waiver from those things which we know should be our primary focus, if we asked "How can we help students earn more credits?" instead of "How can we help students learn more?" then some of the distrust we see driving this new agreement is our fault, even if we believe that is what the school system and the general public wanted us to do. We may have felt less incentive to concentrate on the quality of classroom instruction in our schools because we are rated on other things, but we know our jobs. If we chose to focus on tasks outside of instruction, it makes sense that the void such a choice created was filled by psychometricians.

McKinsey's experience with school systems in more than 50 countries suggests that this is an important gap in the U.S. debate. In a new report, "Closing the Talent Gap: Attracting and Retaining Top-Third Graduates to Careers in Teaching ," we review the experiences of the top-performing systems in the world-Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. These countries recruit, develop, and retain the leading academic talent as one of their central education strategies, and they have achieved extraordinary results. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent in high poverty schools, where the difficulty of attracting and retaining talented teachers is particularly acute. The report asks what it would take to emulate nations that pursue this strategy if the United States decided it was worthwhile. The report also includes new market research with nearly 1,500 current top-third students and teachers. It offers the first quantitative research-based answer to the question of how the U.S. could substantially increase the portion of new teachers each year who are higher caliber graduates, and how this could be done in a cost-effective way.

"A group of expert researchers have published a new collection of articles about teacher evaluation and high-stakes testing and their consequences. The collection appears online in the teachers College Record. It is called "High-Stakes teacher Evaluation: High Cost, Big Losses.""

"Teachers working in charters in an unnamed poor, rural Texas charter school district reported holding higher expectations of students and enjoying a more supportive teaching environment than colleagues who were working in traditional schools in the neighboring district. But the charter Teachers had fewer opportunities for professional development and generally felt that the evaluation process was less fair, according to a new study that attempts to correct some of the problems with the existing research on differences between Teachers in charters and traditional schools. "

"We are at a tipping point in Philadelphia. I say this as a teacher, fully committed to the promise of public education for all the young people living in this city I love, who has felt the repeated stab of the School District's systemic dysfunction and the State and City's structural abandonment. I say this as a teacher activist, who is engaged in the community-wide fight for public education.  I am a part of teacher Action Group-Philadelphia (TAG) a member-run grassroots organization of educators working to strengthen our influence on the decisions that most affect us - how schools are run, funded, and governed - so that community control, equity, and fairness are back at the center of public education."

"Through storytelling and sobering statistics, American Teacher explores the mismatch between the value of effective Teachers and the United States's history of disinvestment in Teacher salary, support, and status."

"Lost in the exaggerated claims of "bad" teachers being at the core of all that ails education and the concurrent calls for greater teacher accountability, often linked to student test scores, is a careful consideration of why we have universal public education in a free society and what the role of the teacher is within that purpose."

"The Los Angeles Unified School District squanders more than $500 million a year on an academic-improvement strategy that has consistently proven to be ineffective, researchers concluded in a report released Tuesday. The nation's second-largest school system spends 25% of its teacher payroll ($519 million a year) to compensate teachers for completing graduate coursework. These courses are a primary means by which teachers earn credits that translate to raises. Yet such training has shown no overall benefit in improving student performance, said Kate Walsh, president of the Washington-based National Council on teacher Quality, which conducted the research."

"You don' t need to be a policy analyst to know that huge changes in education are happening at the state- and local-levels right now - teacher performance pay, the restriction of teachers' collective bargaining rights, the incorporation of heavily-weighted growth model estimates in teacher evaluations, the elimination of tenure, etc. Like many, I am concerned about the possible consequences of some of these new policies (particularly about their details), as well as about the apparent lack of serious efforts to monitor them."

"Many of us have had at some point in our lives a wonderful teacher, one whose value, in retrospect, seems inestimable. We do not pretend here to know how to calculate the life-transforming effects that such teachers can have with particular students. But we can calculate more prosaic economic values related to effective teaching, by drawing on a research literature that provides surprisingly precise estimates of the impact of student achievement levels on their lifetime earnings and by combining this with estimated impacts of more-effective teachers on student achievement."

Recently, we were reflecting on the portrayal of teachers on screen these days. There's the animated "dance of the lemons," and Michelle Rhee's teaching bashing in "Waiting for Superman." Now comes Cameron Diaz in "The Bad teacher." What happened to the teacher as guide? Or the teacher as inspiration? What happened to Miss Frizzle?

I had a twitter argument the other day about a blog posting that compared the current debate around "de-selection" of bad teachers to eugenics. It is perhaps a bit harsh to compare Hanushek  (cited author of papers on de-selecting bad teachers) to Hitler, if that was indeed the intent. However, I did not take that as the intent of the posting by Cedar Riener.  Offensive or not, I felt that the blog posting made 3 key points about errors of reasoning that apply to both eugenecists and to those promoting empirical de-selection of fixed shares of the teacher workforce.

Thank goodness that dirty hippie bloggers like yours truly have "serious" "liberals" like Jon Chait to save us from ourselves: It's certainly nice that Damon wants to defend teachers. But, first of all, the fact is that not all teachers are dedicated and good. A few are lazy and bad. Their badness and laziness has serious consequences for children, because it is extremely hard in practice to fire even obviously incompetent teachers. Chait, like so many other psuedo-libs, knows for a fact that there are bad, tenured teachers; he just won't say how many there are, or how big of an impact they make, especially compared to other factors. So he says, "a few are lazy and bad." Welcome to the human race, Jon; what's your point?

A recent discussion between David K. Cohen of the University of Michigan and the Fordham Institute's Chris Tessone used the term infrastructure. Cohen, in an earlier post on ShankarBlog (from the American Federation of Teachers' Shankar Institute), argued that individual reforms such as the DCPS IMPACT Teacher performance review system were insufficient to fix the system overall. Cohen argues that what is needed is an instructional infrastructure that provides Teachers with tools for their job.

Along comes neo-liberal education reform, built around the idea that the invisible hand of markets and competition can solve educational problems.  A whole raft of activity follows.  Reformers talk about billions spent each year compensating teachers for master's degrees that are disconnected from student outcomes.  Municipalities and school boards balk at funding automatic step raises on the grounds that longevity does not equal quality.  The linchpins of tenure and seniority come under assault on the somewhat contradictory grounds that tenure protects bad teachers and seniority encourages the mal-distribution of good teachers.

Yes it is time to rethink teacher education. However, I recommend we start where future teachers take the bulk of their coursework -- in schools of arts and sciences and in schools of liberal arts. My fellow teacher educators and I can't spend an entire semester trying to reteach all the content from the disciplines and also help future teachers understand how this knowledge translates into material to be introduced to children in pedagogically powerful ways.

"A good teacher is the most important factor in a child's academic learning" Every time I hear this statement, my blood pressure goes up. I usually respond by saying that yes, a child's teacher is very important. But teachers have a relatively small effect on children's academic success when compared to the effect of out-of-school factors like economic insecurity, poor health care, unhealthy diet, homelessness and all the other ills of society. Educational "reforms" that ignore these factors are tarnished silver bullets, doomed to fail. Years of this type of wishful thinking has diverted Americans from having the undistorted, fact-based conversation we must have before educational outcomes can improve.

With ever-declining budgets, education administrators across the nation have been struggling for years with an increasing teacher turnover rate. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found that race may play a role in teacher turnover. Lael Keiser, an associate professor at the Truman School of Public Affairs and an associate professor in the department of political science in the College of Arts and Science, and Jason Grissom, who is now an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, found that turnover rates are lower among teachers who are of the same race as their school principals.

Last September NBC brought us the first Education Nation, developed in coordination with the release of the pro-charter documentary, Waiting For Superman. The network ran into a few bumps in the road, catching flak when it was pointed out that panels were loaded with "superheroes" like Michelle Rhee, and critical voices like Diane Ravitch, and those of classroom teachers, were largely absent. This year, NBC has made an effort to be a bit more balanced and inclusive of teachers voices, and the teacher Town Hall yesterday made a start in that direction.