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In the last year there has been quite a bit of media and policy attention put on urban education reform. Feel-good stories about the success of certain charter school models like the Harlem Children's Zone's Promise Academy, The Uncommon Schools network, and the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) abound. These schools, the media narrative goes, are poor, black and brown kids' great hope - promoting higher test scores, increasing high school graduation rates and advocating for higher levels of college attendance. They are certainly newsworthy, but a closer look reveals that the story of their success is more complex than portrayed. According to research available on the KIPP website, though almost 85 percent of the students graduating from their schools go to college, only 30 percent actually graduate. Of course, high school graduation is a worthy goal, and some college-level work is better than none. But according to the 2011 College Board report, in order to impact poverty rates, increase the qualified workforce for American businesses and ensure economic growth nationwide, college graduation is key.

After scoring a legislative win with a recently-enacted state law limiting teacher tenure and strike rights, the well-heeled education advocacy group Stand for Children is turning its attention to issues specific to Chicago-including school turnarounds. On Wednesday, the group announced that it is launching a radio campaign to "educate Chicagoans about the value of public turnaround schools." Group leaders also plan to host "telephone town hall meetings" where CPS officials and community leaders can discuss with residents of the South and West sides the "need for quality schools."

"When we sit down with the UFT, there are two groups in the room: the UFT and our school children," Mayor Bloomberg said, adding that the latter group is "who we work for…We have an obligation to stand up for their lives, their futures." He called for merit pay, for more a more stringent teacher evaluation system, more (union-free) charter schools. "It's a legacy thing. Remember, 'I am the education mayor.' Two years left and [test] scores have been flat the whole time. Closing schools has not really worked out. We have the warehousing of students," said Mr. Mulgrew. "Those are problematic, so I'm sure he's worried about his legacy."

Paul G. Vallas, an education reformer who has led some of the nation's most troubled school systems, including the New Orleans district after Hurricane Katrina devastated that city, is taking on a new challenge: The Bridgeport school district. Vallas, 58, was named Tuesday as interim superintendent in the state's largest city, whose district has some of the state's lowest test scores and deepest poverty. He starts Jan. 1, and will inherit both a $6 million budget gap and a state-appointed school board whose very existence is being weighed by the state Supreme Court.

Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer's new study of 35 New York City charter schools attempts to find a preliminary answer to the question of how different practices within charters are correlated with student progress on math and ELA tests. In general, this study's premise and methods represent a promising shift away from just looking at test scores to measure school quality; it acknowledges variations between charters and gets to the issue of what policies and practices are actually happening inside these schools.

My four children have all attended public schools in our middle-class suburban district. When my oldest was in fourth grade, in 1998, he took the state tests, and I was not even aware of it. Later, he said the tests were kind of fun; he got to miss his regular classes. Six years later, in 2004, our daughter was in fourth grade. Long before the state tests, a letter came home. Prep classes were being offered before and after school. While the sessions were not mandatory, students were strongly urged to attend. Eventually the results were printed in our local newspaper. The news was grim; the nearby districts, in wealthier towns, had creamed us. The following year, our middle school added a mandatory course to prep for the state English test. That 1998/2004 divide - what happened in the interim was the 2002 No Child Left Behind law - should be kept in mind when analyzing a new, widely publicized study that closely tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years to determine whether teachers who helped raise children's test scores have a lasting effect on their lives. The researchers conclude that having such a teacher improved students' odds of going to a good college, the quality of the neighborhoods where they lived and their lifetime earnings.

Education reformers and traditional public school proponents are engaged in a battle over two proposed Mayoral Academies the city hopes to open in 2013 and 2014. The schools would be operated by Achievement First (AF), a nonprofit charter management organization that has been praised for raising test scores in several high-poverty areas in Connecticut and New York. It would accept students from Providence, Warwick, Cranston and North Providence.

New York State's education commissioner threatened on Tuesday to withhold tens of millions of dollars in federal grants to struggling schools in New York City and nine other districts statewide if they do not prove by Saturday that they will carry out new evaluation systems for teachers and principals. Officials and union leaders in each district must first agree on the details of the evaluation systems, like how much weight students' standardized test scores will have on the annual ratings that teachers and principals receive. Compromise has thus far proved elusive.

This paper describes an experiment designed to investigate the impact of aligning student, parent, and teacher incentives on student achievement. On outcomes for which incentives were provided, there were large treatment effects. Students in treatment schools mastered more than one standard deviation more math objectives than control students, and their parents attended almost twice as many parent-teacher conferences. In contrast, on related outcomes that were not incentivized (e.g. standardized test scores, parental engagement), we observe both positive and negative effects. We argue that these facts are consistent with a moral hazard model with multiple tasks, though other explanations are possible.

In education, teacher evaluations are supposed to gauge what is and isn't working in teachers' practice, and provide feedback to ensure teachers are at the top of their game. Even though administrators have always had this responsibility, teacher evaluations have rarely met that standard. They often are little more than quick snapshots, taken by a principal sitting in the back of the classroom with a checklist once a year. Yet these snapshots-"drive-by evaluations" as they are known-frequently serve as the basis for decisions to keep or dismiss teachers. More recently, so-called reformers have pushed to replace that inadequate snapshot with another kind-once-a-year standardized student test scores in math or English-even though such tests are not designed to evaluate teachers and the majority of educators teach subjects not currently assessed by standardized tests.  Neither of these limited approaches makes any sense-for neither one does anything to improve teacher practice or increase student learning. And after all, isn't that the point?

Regrettably, with the onset of the New Year, the debate on how to improve our public schools and student learning was once again marked by baseless attacks and a relentless effort to demonize teachers and the unions that represent them. Last week, Mayor Bloomberg repeatedly attacked the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in his State of the City address over issues like holding teachers accountable and paying some teachers more if student test scores go up. MSNBC's "Morning Joe," picked up the next day where the Mayor left off and attacked teachers unions for "being out of touch" and supporting "mediocrity." Both are ridiculous and uninformed statements. Sadly, the Mayor and our newscasters should know better.

Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers ("ProComp") is one of the most prominent alternative teacher compensation reforms in the nation.* Via a combination of ten financial incentives, ProComp seeks to increase student achievement by motivating teachers to improve their instructional practices and by attracting and retaining high-quality teachers to work in the district. My research examines ProComp in terms of: 1) whether it has increased retention rates; 2) the relationship between retention and school quality (defined in terms of student test score growth); and 3) the reasons underlying these effects. I pay special attention to the effects of ProComp on schools that serve high concentrations of poor students - "Hard to Serve" (HTS) schools where teachers are eligible to receive a financial incentive to stay. The quantitative findings are discussed briefly below (I will discuss my other results in a future post).

This year, the gloves came off, as teachers faced unprecedented attacks on our right to collective bargaining, as well as continued attempts to tie our pay and job security to test scores. Some of these attacks were blatant, as in Wisconsin, but most were veiled behind a cloak of rhetoric about education reform. Today I want to review some of the posts that attempted to bell the corporate education reform cat.

In response to low take-up, many public schools have experimented with moving breakfast from the cafeteria to the classroom. We examine whether such a program increases performance as measured by standardized test scores, grades and attendance rates. We exploit quasi-random timing of program implementation that allows for a difference-in-differences identification strategy. Our main identification assumption is that schools where the program was introduced earlier would have evolved similarly to those where the program was introduced later. We find that in-class breakfast increases both math and reading achievement by about one-tenth of a standard deviation relative to providing breakfast in the cafeteria. Moreover, we find that these effects are most pronounced for low performing, free-lunch eligible, Hispanic, and low BMI students. We also find some improvements in attendance for high achieving students but no impact on grades.

America does not have a general education crisis; we have a poverty crisis. Results of an international student assessment indicate that U.S. schools with fewer than 25 percent of their students living in poverty rank first in the world among advanced industrial countries. But when you add in the scores of students from schools with high poverty rates, the United States sinks to the middle of the pack. At nearly 22 percent and rising, the child-poverty rate in the United States is the highest among wealthy nations in the world. (Poverty rates in Denmark and in Finland, which is justifiably celebrated as a top global performer on the Program for International Student Assessment exams, are below 5 percent). In New York City, the child-poverty rate climbed to 30 percent in 2010.

Just this week, Florida announced its new district grading system. These systems have been popping up all over the nation, and given the fact that designing one is a requirement of states applying for No Child Left Behind waivers, we are sure to see more. I acknowledge that the designers of these schemes have the difficult job of balancing accessibility and accuracy. Moreover, the latter requirement - accuracy - cannot be directly tested, since we cannot know "true" school quality. As a result, to whatever degree it can be partially approximated using test scores, disagreements over what specific measures to include and how to include them are inevitable (see these brief analyses of Ohio and California). As I've discussed before, there are two general types of test-based measures that typically comprise these systems: absolute performance and growth. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Florida's attempt to balance these components is a near total failure, and it shows in the results.

There is a widespread consensus among practitioners, researchers, and policy makers that current teacher evaluation systems in most school districts do little to help teachers improve or to support personnel decision making. For this reason, new approaches to teacher evaluation are being developed and tested.  There is also a growing consensus that evidence of teachers' contributions to student learning should be a component of teacher evaluation systems, along with evidence about the quality of teachers' practice. Value-added models (VAMs) for examining gains in student test scores from one year to the next are promoted as tools to accomplish this goal. Policy makers can benefit from research about what these models can and cannot do, as well as from research about the effects of other approaches to teacher evaluation. This background paper addresses both of these important concerns. 

One of the highest compliments a teacher can get from a student is to be told that she or he is fair. When students believe their teacher is fair, they accept test grades, homework assignments, and discipline without drama. Teachers, like their students and like people in other professions, appreciate fairness and should expect it. With that in mind, I am not surprised by the pushback on new evaluation systems from teachers in Hawaii, New York, Tennessee, and many other state and local school districts. Using student test scores from flawed standardized tests as a measure of teacher evaluation does not meet the fairness test for teachers who have had to endure "reform du jour' for the last decade. It does not look like a fair deal for teachers, and fairness is one of the strongest core values of teachers.

In the world of value-added research, Grady's work would be judged not by whether she created a new reader who grew up to be a judge, but on the incremental progress of a large group of students that could be seen on a standardized test. If anything, the story suggests--contrary to what Kristof and supporters of value-added research like to claim--that figuring out what makes a great teacher isn't necessarily going to be tied to test scores.

Clearly our emphasis on testing and the consequent narrowing of the curriculum contributes to the problem.  School have, as George Wood of the Forum for Education and Democracy notes, "a perverse incentive to allow or encourage students to leave" especially if they are likely to be low scorers on the tests by which schools are evaluated.  Anyone who doubts this need merely look at the track record of Texas during the Governorship of George W. Bush, when its claimed remarkable improvements in state test scores later became the basis of the perversely named legislation No Child Left Behind.  In Texas, sometimes students were held back in 9th grade multiple times because the state tests were given in 10th.  After a second holding back students might be encouraged to leave, hiding the dropout rate by listing the child as having gone to an alternative educational program because s/he said s/he might eventually get a GED.  Or after being held back once, the child would be told s/he had made so much progress s/he was being skipped directly to 11th, and thus not tested.  Rod Paige became U. S. Secretary of Education, after being honored as supposedly the best Superintendent in the nation by a professional organization, largely on claims of more than a 90% graduation rate in Houston schools, at a time when only around 40% of those who entered in 7th grade graduated on time with their cohort.  Those forced out or held back and then skipped were heavily from poor families that were African-American or Hispanic.