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Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the faculty director for the Center for Education Policy Research, argues in favor of using test scores in evaluating teachers. Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun professor of education and faculty co-director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, Stanford University, argues against.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, often boast that student performance is improving in New York City, as evidenced by the percentage of students passing state exams and graduating from high school. But a new analysis finds that most city students are holding steady, getting very similar test scores between third and sixth grades.

"The education reform debate is fueled by a seemingly endless and even fruitless point-counterpoint among the corporate reformers-typically advocates for and from the Gates Foundation (GF), Teach for America (TFA), and charter chains such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)-and educators/scholars of education. Since the political and public machines have embraced the corporate reformers, GF, TFA, and KIPP have acquired the bully pulpit of the debate and thus are afforded most often the ability to frame the point, leaving educators and scholars to be in a constant state of generating counter-points. This pattern disproportionately benefits corporate reformers, but it also exposes how those corporate reformers manage to maintain the focus of the debate on data. The statistical thread running through most of the point-counterpoint is not only misleading (the claims coming from the corporate reformers are invariably distorted, while the counter-points of educators and scholars remain ignored among politicians, advocates, the public, and the media), but also a distraction. Since the metrics debate (test scores, graduation rates, attrition, populations of students served, causation/correlation) appears both enduring and stagnant, I want to make a clear statement with some elaboration that I reject the "ends-justify-the-means" assumptions and practices-the broader "no excuses" ideology-underneath the numbers, and thus, we must stop focusing on the outcomes of programs endorsed by the GF or TFA and KIPP. Instead, we must unmask the racist and classist policies and practices hiding beneath the metrics debate surrounding GF, TFA, and KIPP (as prominent examples of practices all across the country and types of schools)."

"When Teach for America entered the national stage it was applauded as a fresh, innovative approach to education. Now, well into its second decade of providing teachers to struggling schools across the country, is it still a good idea for our children? Has bringing in smart, young college graduates improved the education that American children are receiving?"

"A recent memo [see in post below this one] from The Broad Center (TBC) proposes a series of strategic shifts in the foundation's education programs designed to "accelerate" the pace of "disruptive" and "transformational" change in big city school districts, and create a "go to group" of "the most promising [Broad] Academy graduates, and other education leaders, who are poised to advance the highest-leverage education reform policies on the national landscape.""

Sunday's newspaper featured a story about full-time public virtual schools, a new model of education that's growing fast even though critics say there's scant evidence that it is an effective way to teach kids. The story focused on Herndon-based K12 Inc., the nation's largest operator of virtual schools. Its schools (which educate about 95,000 students in 29 states and the District) tend to have lower state test scores and graduation rates than brick and mortar schools.

We describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families. Among men, inequality in educational attainment has increased slightly since the early 1980s. But among women, inequality in educational attainment has risen sharply, driven by increases in the education of the daughters of high-income parents. Sex differences in educational attainment, which were small or nonexistent thirty years ago, are now substantial, with women outpacing men in every demographic group. The female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution. These sex differences present a formidable challenge to standard explanations for rising inequality in educational attainment.

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

This was written by Mike Rose, who is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and is the author of "The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker," and "Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us."

Freed - perhaps - of presidential daydreams, freed - perhaps - of desire for another term as mayor, Mr. Bloomberg sounds unburdened by inhibition and convinced that Americans hunger for his insights. Last week he journeyed to M.I.T. to talk entrepreneurship and to distinguish between the private sector (muscular and unsentimental) and the public (flaccid, filled with protesters waving placards and legislators who want only to spend). Then he turned to public school teachers and the silly preoccupation with class size. Most teachers, he said, come from the lowest quarter of their college graduating classes. If he could effect change, he said, "you would cut the number of teachers in half but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers. "Double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for students."

For 10 years Mayor Bloomberg and his aides have been playing a numbers game with the people of New York. When he took over the school system, things were to be magically transformed. Social promotion would be eliminated. Test scores would go up. High school graduation rates would go up. The 1.1 million schoolchildren would be in a better place. Well, it hasn't happened.

Everyone "knows" quality teaching because we were all students at one time. Unfortunately this statement is not at all true and it is many times the root of all evils in whats wrong with education today. The question then is what's quality teaching or, as it's labeled in the world education, MASTERY teaching and how is it recognized? The first misnomer that must be dispelled is that the mastery level can be attained quickly, in just a couple years; and that any successful college graduate can enter a classroom full of students, having read the text book and teach the content well. Teaching mastery is attained over time, it cannot be sped up.

Most of the coverage about the Department of Education's role as a charter authorizer in recent weeks has focused on the management scandals at the Believe Network and the decision to close Peninsula Prep after three years of C's (although interestingly enough, the role of for-profit charter manager Victory Schools has mostly been left out of the Peninsula Prep story, despite quotes from current Victory executive and past DOE Charter Office head Michael Duffy in the Times coverage of the school's closing). Equally important, however, was the DOE's decision to grant a two-year renewal to the third school it had placed on the closure list this year - Opportunity Charter School, a charter founded to serve students with special education needs. The DOE's threat to close Opportunity had inspired a passionate response from the school's community, including powerful presentations of evidence from the district's own progress reports showing its success in helping students with intense special education needs achieve academically and graduate from high school at rates well above other schools in the city.

MIT and Stanford's online schooling initiatives represent a dramatic change in the model of higher education. Since these programs are known for offering the best undergraduate and graduate programs around the world, they are hoping to leverage their name to help expand cutting-edge teaching methods to the internet audience. By making these courses available via online schooling, they can serve a worldwide student base. Furthermore, these free courses will vastly expand the reach of higher education to socioeconomic groups who previously were unable to take advantage of a higher education.

Almost all of us say that as a nation we should work out our differences and unite to solve our problems. But we don't mean it. Exhibit A is the bad blood between the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher union, and Teach for America, the most popular public-service option for graduates of selective colleges.

...In other words: if we restricted teachers to only those who attend the top 50 colleges and universities in the country, we would pretty much have to make every graduate a teacher to meet our current demand.

A scholar who studies and blogs about education finance says improving the state's urban schools will take more money - and that merit pay is not likely to help. Bruce Baker, an associate professor at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education, spoke with The Associated Press for an occasional series of interviews on public education reform in New Jersey.

A handful of the high schools the city wants to "turn around" are already doing a better-than-average job at preparing students for college. The schools all posted graduation rates below 60 percent two years ago, when the state compiled a list of "persistently low-achieving" schools that would receive federal funds in exchange for making substantive organizational and programmatic changes.

The average scores of graduating teacher-candidates on state-required licensing exams are uniformly higher, often significantly, than the passing scores states set for such exams, according to an Education Week analysis of preliminary data from a half-dozen states. The pattern appears across subjects, grade levels, and test instruments supplied by a variety of vendors, the new data show, raising questions about the rigor and utility of current licensing tests.

State officials have instead chosen to use one English test to assess every high school student in the state, which has caused another fairly gigantic problem: How do you create a single graduation exam for 200,000 seniors when some are heading to the Ivy League and others to pump gas? If the standard is set too high, so many will fail - including children with special education needs and students for whom English is a second language - that there will be a public outcry. But if the standard is set too low, the result is a diploma that has little meaning. So far, officials have opted to dumb down the state tests.