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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.

I have been writing critically about states' school rating systems (e.g., Ohio, Florida, Louisiana), and I thought I would find one that is, at least in my (admittedly value-laden) opinion, more defensibly designed. It didn't quite turn out as I had hoped. One big starting point in my assessment is how heavily the systems weight absolute performance (how highly students score) versus growth (how quickly students improve). As I've argued many times, the former (absolute level) is a poor measure of school performance in a high-stakes accountability system. It does not address the fact that some schools, particularly those in more affluent areas, serve  students who, on average, enter the system at a higher-performing level. This amounts to holding schools accountable for outcomes they largely cannot control (see Doug Harris' excellent book for more on this in the teacher context). Thus, to whatever degree testing results can be used to judge actual school effectiveness, growth measures, while themselves highly imperfect, are to be preferred in a high-stakes context. There are a few states that assign more weight to growth than absolute performance (see this prior post on New York City's system). One of them is Colorado's system, which uses the well-known "Colorado Growth Model" (CGM).

One big idea animates virtually all of today's earnest education reformers: the conviction that great schools can spur social mobility. Voucher supporters, charter advocates, standards nuts, teacher-effectiveness fanatics-we all fundamentally believe that fantastic schools staffed by dedicated educators can help poor kids climb out of poverty and compete with their affluent peers. And then Charles Murray comes along and throws cold water all over the idea.

"The organization that was launched to serve public schools so poor or dysfunctional they couldn't attract qualified teachers now sends fully a third of its recruits to privately run charter schools, many with stellar academic reputations, flush budgets and wealthy donors. TFA also sends its rookies, who typically have just 15 to 20 hours of teaching experience, to districts that have recently laid off scores of more seasoned teachers."

"Why are the corporate reformers creating schools for poor and/or minority children that engage in practices that affluent parents would never accept for their own kids?"

"New York state published a list of schools based on measures like test scores and graduation rates. At the top are "reward" schools. At the bottom are "priority" schools. This is the amazing discovery. The schools that enroll mostly white and Asian students in affluent neighborhoods are doing a great job; they get a reward. The schools that enroll mostly black and Hispanic students in poor neighborhoods are doing a bad job; they are in line to get sanctions, interventions."

"I must wonder how my public commentary and scholarship have come to be seen as "hostile rhetoric," how the working poor and working class in the U.S. have come to be characterized as lazy, and how we justify telling children trapped in poverty to suck it up, work twice as hard, and above all else, do as you are told."

Three West Harlem secondary schools are on the chopping block for poor performance and in danger of being closed. All three schools are, or will soon be, sharing buildings with charter schools belonging to the Success Academy Network. Some in the community think their schools are being sacrificed to allow for the expansion of the well-funded and politically potent Success Academy Network. They say the DOE has not done enough to support the struggling schools. The DOE is "starving these schools so they have an excuse to shut them down," said Noah Gotbaum, a representative for Community Education Council 3 who attended public hearings about the future of all three schools.

The rules under which charter schools operate - Federal, state and local - are supposed to ensure equal access to charters and to prevent discrimination.  In theory preference should be given to those in the local area, which then in theory should provide a student body with demographics very much like those of surrounding neighborhood schools from which their students are drawn.

Amid the debates about our public schools and the need for education reform, the impact of poverty on student learning outcomes seems to be missing. Research has established a clear link between poverty and student performance. Yet many critics of public schools deride the poverty-achievement link as an excuse for poor teaching. What do the data show about the relationship between student poverty levels and schools' performance?

On Alexander Russo's This Week in Education blog, I read a really interesting e-mail written by Whitney Tilson who is a founder or president or something or other of DFER. You should read it and then read the comments. The two main points he makes can be encapsulated in the following quotes

Education is a long way from the perfect pure market of rational consumers that we all learned about in Econ 101. When it comes to choice in education, there are issues of information asymmetries, principal-agent problems, and high transaction costs that make this something other than a perfectly competitive market. Not to mention that education, like health care, carries a deep emotional weight that leads consumers (even super-smart ones) to make decisions based on emotions as well as reason. Not to mention that parents in historically underserved communities have been given only very poor options for so long that they may not even fully grasp what a truly high-quality educational experience for their children can and should look like.

The role of poverty in shaping educational outcomes is one of the most common debates going on today. It can also be one of the most shallow. The debate tends to focus on income. For example (and I'm generalizing a bit here), one "side" argues that income and test scores are strongly correlated; the other "side" points to the fact that many low-income students do very well and cautions against making excuses for schools' failure to help poor kids. Both arguments have merit, but it bears quickly mentioning that the focus on the relationship between income and achievement is a rather crude conceptualization of the importance of family background (and non-schooling factors in general) for education outcomes.

First of all I am not talking about the highly profitable non-profit known as "Teach for America" or TFA, an organization which sends "corps members" (their words) into poor schools doing very little for children (as demonstrated by peer-reviewed research) but definitely making the executive board very, very rich...using your tax dollars to boot!

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo presented his budget to the state on Tuesday, he promised a windfall of school aid for poor districts. After years of cuts worth billions of dollars, education advocates hailed the $805 million school aid increase in the governor's spending plan as a restoration sorely needed in classrooms that have lost teachers and programs in recent years. But a closer look shows relief for high-needs districts is still far off, as much of that 4 percent increase will go to mandated expenses and a competition that will render some districts losers. Officials in some districts don't think the tiny increases they will see this year will even cover the jump in employee benefits.

The mainstream media has contributed heavily to the rampant public confusion over the teacher evaluation debate in recent weeks.  Most recently, on Sunday the NY Times featured two superficial accounts of this issue.    The first, by Nick Kristof, told a familiar if touching story about an Arkansas school librarian named Mildred Grady, who bought  some books by a favored author and slipped them onto the shelves to appeal to one particular at-risk student who later became a judge--to prove the  notion that good teachers can change lives.  This story was apparently first told in a Story Corps 2009 piece on NPR radio. Kristof concludes that this example reveals how "we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers."    Not so fast.  The so-called "rigorous" system currently being promoted by the state and the mayor would base  teacher evaluation largely on unreliable test scores, combined with the opinion of a principal only, without any assurances that the sort of librarian described in this story would ever be recognized as "effective" and indeed could be "weeded-out" herself - as many librarians have already, due to recent budget cuts.

Darling-Hammond zeroes in on how new federal programs - the proposed Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Race to the Top guidelines - deal with schools in the bottom 5%. Federal policy now formally redlines these schools, she concludes, just as banks have used a red line on a map to exclude some poor and minority communities from any kind of investment, mortgage or commercial loan.

The sun had not yet risen on Washington Irving High School when students, teachers and parents began gathering on the school's steps on Tuesday morning to protest its likely closing. Their school, which is located in the middle of Manhattan's upscale Gramercy Park neighborhood, is one of 25 public schools the city's Department of Education is proposing to close over the next several years for poor performance. But the group that assembled on the school's steps in the cold morning air was determined to have it otherwise.

As discussed in a previous post, roughly half of Americans believe that government should take some active role in reducing income differences between rich and poor, though, as one would expect, this view is less prevalent among Republicans, more educated and higher earning survey respondents. These data, however, lack a frame of reference. That is, they don't tell us whether American support for government redistribution is "high" or "low" compared with that in other nations. The conventional wisdom in this area is that Americans generally prefer a more limited government, especially when it comes to things like income redistribution. It might therefore be interesting to take a quick look at how the U.S. stacks up against other nations in terms of these redistributive preferences.

Ensuring that all students in America's public schools are taught by good teachers is an educational and moral imperative. The teacher is the most important school-based influence on student achievement, and poor children and those of color are less likely to be taught by well-qualified, experienced, and effective teachers than other students. Yet teacher incentive proposals - including those promoted by President Obama's Race to the Top program - are rarely grounded on what high-quality research indicates are the kinds of teacher incentives that lead to school excellence and equity. Few of the current approaches to creating teacher incentives take into account how specific conditions influence whether or not effective teachers will work in high-need schools and will be able to teach effectively in them. This review of research finds little support for a simplistic system of measuring value-added growth, evaluating teachers more "rigorously", and granting bonuses. Instead, the brief supports four recommendations: use the current federal Teacher Incentive Fund to attract qualified, effective teachers to high-needs schools, expand incentives by creating strategic compensation, create working conditions that allow teachers to teach effectively, and more aggressively promote the best practices and policies that spur school excellence and equity. The accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement these recommendations.