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October 2011 Steven Glazerman Hanley Chiang Alison Wellington Jill Constantine Dan Player

Thomas Knudsen, the man who was temporarily put in charge of Philadelphia schools in January, was running late to last Monday's press conference. He had been delivering the same presentation all day, and doomsday rumors had already leaked: The plan he was about to lay out would dismantle the central office and parcel out school management, at least in part, to private companies. Knudsen, paid $150,000 to hold the newly created post of Chief Recovery Officer through June, made a point of shaking the hand of every single reporter in the room before beginning his presentation. "Philadelphia public schools is not the school district," he announced, laying out the five-year plan before the School Reform Commission (SRC). "There's a redefinition, and we'll get to that later." He got to it, using terms like "portfolios," "modernization," "right-sizing," "entrepreneurialism" and "competition." In short, it was a plan to shutter 40 schools next year, and an additional six every year thereafter until 2017. The remaining schools would be herded into "achievement networks" of 20 to 30 schools; public and private groups would compete to manage the networks. And the central office would be reduced to a skeleton crew of about 200. (About 1,000-plus positions existed in 2010, and district HQ has already eliminated more than a third of those.) Charter schools, the plan projects, would teach an estimated 40 percent of students by 2017.

Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards-not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states-the study foresees little to no impact on student learning. That conclusion is based on analyzing states' past experience with standards and examining several years of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Any number of educators-principals, personnel directors, superintendents-can be called upon to evaluate teachers. But one school district in Indiana, Anderson, has decided that another group has perhaps the best expertise to judge quality teaching: other teachers. This type of peer review is catching on nationally but is rare in Indiana. That might soon change.

Talk K-12 education for more than five minutes, and inevitably, the conversation turns to charter schools-those publicly funded, privately administered institutions that now educate more than 2 million American children. Parents wonder if they are better than the neighborhood public school. Politicians tout them as a silver-bullet solution to the education crisis. Education technology companies promote them for their profit potential. Opponents of organized labor like the Walton family embrace them for their ability to crush teachers unions. But amid all the buzz, the single most important question is being ignored: Are charter schools living up to their original mission as experimental schools pioneering better education outcomes and reducing segregation? That was the vision of the late American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker when he proposed charters a quarter-century ago-and according to new data, it looks like those objectives are not being realized.

Technical problems erupted as soon as Wyoming switched to online testing in 2010. Students were unable to submit their tests after spending hours taking them. At times the questions wouldn't load on the screen. And ultimately the scores were deemed unreliable. "We had so many poor kids who had to take the test again," said Gordon Knopp, technology director of Laramie County School District No. 1, the largest school district in Wyoming.

"In 1954 the Supreme Court declared that public education is "a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."That landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education stood for the proposition that the federal government would no longer allow states and municipalities to deny equal educational opportunity to a historically oppressed racial minority. Ruling unanimously, the justices overturned the noxious concept that "separate" education could ever be "equal." Yet today, nearly 60 years later, our schools remain separate and unequal. Almost 40 percent of black and Hispanic students attend schools where more than 90 percent of students are nonwhite. The average white student attends a school where 77 percent of his or her peers are also white. Schools today are "as segregated as they were in the 1960s before busing began." We are living in a world in which schools are patently separate."

For this podcast, we spoke with Jack Buckley, commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, the center which administers the NAEP test. He took Early Ed Watch on a tour of the data from the most recent NAEP scores. Among the highlights is a trend that Buckley says suggests that students who are both at the top and bottom of their grade level may be improving-a finding contrary to the notion that No Child Left Behind has led teachers to focus on low-performing students at the expense of high-performing ones.

I'm skeptical when folks who've seemed to drag their heels offer up nifty new proposals and innovations. So, I don't want to sound all "gee, whiz" here. At the same time, it's important that skepticism not morph into reflexive dismissal. With that in mind, we've seen a couple noteworthy developments from the AFT and NEA in recent days.

It's been long suspected that schools serving low-income students receive less money to pay their teachers than those in nearby affluent schools. Now there's data from the U.S. Department of Education to back that claim up.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other city leaders have long heralded charter schools' innovative approach to education, but new research suggests many charters in Chicago are performing no better than traditional neighborhood schools and some are actually doing much worse.

This study uses data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Birth (ECLS-B) Cohort to estimate associations between two important indicators of family socioeconomic status - family income and maternal education - and children's school readiness measured by academic skills, behavior, and physical health at school entry.

Much of Brooklyn's school District 15-which includes Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, and Red Hook-is a comfortable, brownstone-studded idyll, with schools so popular that they drive up real estate values and boast long waiting lists. Many of the district's parents are privileged and have, commendably, used their advantages to improve their local public schools, insulating them from the budget cuts that devastate the rest of the borough. But an escalating charter school battle serves as a jarring reminder that even District 15 parents are still only the 99%-and that it's the 1% that runs the show.

In the age of accountability, measuring teacher effectiveness has become king. But it's not enough merely to measure effectiveness, according to many leading thinkers and policymakers; personnel decisions-from pay and promotions to layoffs and outright firings-should be based on teacher-effectiveness data, they say.

District Awards for Teacher Excellence (D.A.T.E.) is a state-funded program in Texas that provides grants to districts for the implementation of locally-designed incentive pay plans. All districts in the state are eligible to receive grants, but participation is voluntary. D.A.T.E. incentive pay plans were first implemented in Texas districts during the 2008-09 school year, and the program is currently in its third year of operation during 2010-11 with approximately $197 million in annual state funding. 

After the second year of CPS rolling out TAP, we found no evidence that the program raised student test scores. Student achievement growth as measured by average math and reading scores on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) did not differ significantly between TAP and comparable non-TAP schools.We also found that TAP did not have a detectable impact on rates of teacher retention in the school or district during the second year it was rolled out in the district. We did not find statistically significant differences between TAP and non-TAP retention rates for teachers overall or for subgroups defined by teaching assignment and years of service in CPS.