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Charter schools were developed, in part, to serve as an R&D engine for traditional public schools, resulting in a wide variety of school strategies and outcomes. In this paper, we collect unparalleled data on the inner-workings of 35 charter schools and correlate these data with credible estimates of each school's effectiveness. We find that traditionally collected input measures -- class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of teachers with an advanced degree -- are not correlated with school effectiveness. In stark contrast, we show that an index of five policies suggested by over forty years of qualitative research -- frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time, and high expectations -- explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness. Our results are robust to controls for three alternative theories of schooling: a model emphasizing the provision of wrap-around services, a model focused on teacher selection and retention, and the "No Excuses'' model of education. We conclude by showing that our index provides similar results in a separate sample of charter schools.

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.

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 conventional wisdom among many education commentators is that U.S. public school teachers "come from the bottom third" of their classes. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took this talking point a step further, and asserted at a press conference last week that teachers are drawn from the bottom 20 percent of graduates. All of this is supposed to imply that the U.S. has a serious problem with the "quality" of applicants to the profession. Despite the ubiquity of the "bottom third" and similar arguments (which are sometimes phrased as massive generalizations, with no reference to actual proportions), it's unclear how many of those who offer them know what specifically they refer to (e.g., GPA, SAT/ACT, college rank, etc.). This is especially important since so many of these measurable characteristics are not associated with future test-based effectiveness in the classroom, while those that are are only modestly so. Still, given how often it is used, as well as the fact that it is always useful to understand and examine the characteristics of the teacher labor supply, it's worth taking a quick look at where the "bottom third" claim comes from and what it might or might not mean.

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.

In Wisconsin, there has been a bigger push to adopt merit pay ever since Scott Walker limited the collective bargaining rights for teacher unions.  Merit pay sounds like a good idea in concept, especially to those in the business world, but most teachers know that it is a crock.  In theory, merit pay, would work in a way that you determine the quality of the teacher and reward them based on that quality.  This brings about many problems.  The biggest of which is how do you determine the quality of teachers? This has been a widely debated topic in many of the recent educational reform debates.  Should we measure based solely on standardized tests? This would result in more teaching to the tests, a narrowing of curriculum, and most likely cheating to ensure the bonuses as we have seen in Atlanta and DC.

As Chicago Public Schools officials begin heated negotiations over teacher evaluations, a study that will be released by the district Monday shows teachers strongly oppose tying student achievement to their own performance.

The Mayor's statement that teachers represent the "bottom 20%" of our society  is so outrageous, so disdainful and so demonizing of teachers and the teaching profession as to merit a defamation suit.  And the policies which have been generated by these beliefs so destructive and demoralizing to those teachers, to our children, to our schools and to our communities as to merit a recall. 

Public school teachers have voted overwhelmingly against a six-year contract that proposed the transition to performance-based raises starting in July 2013. Sixty-seven percent of teachers voted against the contract, the Hawaii State teachers Association announced tonight.

Hawaii is already in big trouble with the U.S. Department of Education for failing to hit key milestones the state promised to deliver as part of its $75 million Race to the Top prize. At stake is roughly $72 million that's left of the state's award, which federal officials are threatening to take back. Things were looking up in the Aloha State, when earlier this month the state and its teachers' union reached a tentative contract deal to end the stalemate and put in place a new teacher-evaluation system based in part on student growth-a key component of its Race to the Top plan. Hawaii's rank-and-file teachers had other ideas.

As teacher evaluations are becoming more prevalent in schools across the country amid a growing debate on how best to grade teachers, a new report out today adds to the growing number of studies concluding that student test scores should be one of several determinants in measuring student effectiveness. Instead, teachers should be assessed based on a combination of classroom observations, student feedback and value-added student achievement gains, according to the Measures of Effective Teaching project's paper, "Gathering Feedback for Teaching." Educators should be observed by certified raters through multiple, high-quality observations with clear standards.

This study examines and compares the recruitment and retention of minority and White elementary and secondary teachers and attempts to empirically ground the debate over minority teacher shortages. The data we analyze are from the National Center for Education Statistics' nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey and its longitudinal supplement, the teacher Follow-up Survey.  

America's public school teachers are seeing their generations-old tenure protections weakened as states seek flexibility to fire teachers who aren't performing. A few states have essentially nullified tenure protections altogether, according to an analysis being released Wednesday by the National Council on teacher Quality.

Yesterday, I shared some interesting facts from the National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ) October 2011 report, "State of the States: Trends and Early Lessons on Teacher Evaluation and Effectiveness Policies" about the evolution of state educator evaluation systems over the past few years. In particular, we learned that between 2009 and 2011, 33 states changed their Teacher evaluation policies. This left me thinking about what has happened with evaluation policy in the other 17 states since NCTQ released their report. After considerable research, I found that there have been some dramatic changes. Here are a few updates

As millions of Americans search for work, and millions more scrape by to make ends meet, researchers affiliated with two Washington think tanks -- the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation -- have recently announced a "finding" that defies common-sense: America's teachers are overpaid by more than 50 percent. The new paper from Jason Richwine and Andrew Biggs fails on several levels. First, it asks the wrong question. Second, it ignores facts that conflict with its conclusions. Lastly, it insults teachers and demeans the profession.

Last week, the Education Week Teacher online site reported on a new study that used federal wage, benefit, and job-security data, along with measures of cognitive ability, to argue that Teachers are overpaid compared to what they would earn in the private sector. The study, authored by Andrew G. Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Jason Richwine, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, challenged the refrain that Teachers are, in the words of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, "desperately underpaid." I suppose it's because Biggs is a colleague of mine at AEI, but many have wondered about my thoughts on the study.

Both a value-added method and principal observations tied to a teaching framework identified the same teachers as particularly high or low-performing under Chicago's teacher-evaluation pilot, a new study concludes. But principals struggled to provide high-quality "coaching" and support to teachers based on the results, the report says-a finding indicates just how difficult it will be to use the systems to improve teaching and learning.

Using a unique identification strategy, and two classes of fixed-effects regression models, this study presents the cleanest estimates to date of a direct effect of teacher turnover on student achievement. Three research questions guide the investigation: What is the average effect of teacher turnover on student achievement? Are the effects different for different kinds of schools? What explains the relationship between teacher turnover and student achievement

"Teachers, parents, and the public who are genuinely concerned about public school quality must enter directly the Teacher evaluation/pay debate, but do so informed with the following foundational facts, messages, and questions:"

Could teacher evaluations begin to offer us the best portrait yet of what instruction actually looks like in America's classrooms? And what changes might such information spur in teacher preparation and on-the-job training? Those are implications raised by a couple of different papers looking at teacher evaluations. I've written about them on this blog before, but only from the technical aspects of the systems. In reviewing the reports again, it strikes me that they also have a lot to say about instructional quality-some of which seems frankly troubling.