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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.

A paradox of American higher education is this: The expectations of leading universities do much to define what secondary schools teach, and much to establish a template for what it means to be an educated man or woman. College campuses are seen as the source for the newest thinking and for the generation of new ideas, as society's cutting edge.

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.

Where is the tipping point for education reform? The fact that we even use the term "reform" speaks to the utter victory of their propaganda campaign. Reformers are fresh with innovative ideas that inject new life into stale institutions. The deformers have injected poison into education, causing it to go backwards towards a musty and oppressive era of segregation. The blame is squarely on their shoulders, since they are the status quo.

The idea of using testing results as a criterion in the awarding of grants is to reward those districts that are performing well. Unfortunately, due to the choice of measures and how they are used, the 50 points will be biased and to no small extent based on chance.

Welcome to Part IV of my response to Governor McDonnell's "Opportunity to Learn" education agenda-we're almost to Friday, folks! On Monday, you read about advancing literacy. On Tuesday, you read about extending the school day/ year. Yesterday, you read my thoughts on expanding school choice in Virginia. Today, I'll share my thoughts about McDonnell's ideas for evaluating, retaining, and recruiting teachers.

Public discussion about school reform often positions charter schools and district schools in opposition to each other; if you're in favor of one, you're against the other. But the Annenberg Institute has found that in what we call a "smart district," charters can work with district schools to provide a laboratory for new ideas that can be scaled up to benefit all of the district's schools.

On the positive side, the Austin Inde­pen­dent School District's agreement to bring the IDEA Public Schools charter program into the Eastside certainly gave its students an instant education in local politics - of the grimly practical sort not generally available in classrooms. That may be the only good news to come out of the controversy, which featured the most spectacularly bungled adoption and public outreach process managed by a local government in quite some time. By the time the board of trustees made its formal adoption vote after midnight Monday, the board majority and Superintendent Meria Carstarphen had succeeded in alienating virtually everyone with some interest in the matter - most particularly those Eastside parents and students to be directly affected by IDEA's arrival at Allan Elementary next fall. Had the district been trying to intentionally undermine IDEA's potential relationships with the community, they couldn't have done a better job.

We are now three decades into a huge effort to improve our schools using standards and tests. This project has become the status quo, but it has failed to live up to its promise. I spent the past 24 years teaching science in an urban school district, where I experienced this all first-hand. The students that were supposed to be served are still being "left behind." Let's take a look at some of the big ideas that have become the status quo in education, contrasted with what I believe to be more meaningful reforms.

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." When Oscar Wilde wrote those words in The Picture of Dorian Gray 120 years ago, he had no idea that they would eventually apply to public schools. I thought of the connection after reading "Critical Issues in Assessing Teacher Compensation" by Jason Richwine and Andrew G. Biggs that was released on Jan. 10 (Backgrounder No. 2638, The Heritage Foundation).

Columnist Alan Chartock ("Cuomo the students' lobbyist? Not really," Jan. 15) rightly points out Gov. Cuomo's surplus confidence in claiming to be the lobbyist for the state's students.  He correctly observes the "terrible situation" that Chancellor Merryl Tisch and the Board of Regents will be in if Cuomo sets up another education commission, stripping them of much or perhaps all of their authority. He affirms that the Regents offer protection from a political takeover of public schools, saying, "the whole idea was to get the traditional grubby politicians out of the game." However, he fails to point out that both Tisch and the Regents have not done a good job representing the best in public education lately.

As a reporter from the Voice of San Diego quickly found, no one was critical of the idea of inclusion at the time the district wanted to make the shift. In fact, inclusion is widely regarded as the attitude districts should have and what is best for students, and when districts segregate too much, they may be punished. But San Diego parents, who had advocated for more inclusion, were alarmed by the district's approach, which has turned out to be problematic in practice. Now three years into the shift to inclusion, parents and educators are wondering: Did San Diego move too fast? One parent, who oversees special education in a nearby district, reacted by plucking his young son with autism out of the district before the switch.

Disruption as a goal is not a positive one for education. I don't care what kind of school they're in, kids and their families, especially those with enough disruption, crisis, and loss in their lives already, shouldn't be forced to play musical schools to the tune of "Get Those Test Scores Up." If that's our idea of reforming education, we're in big trouble.

The state's private-school voucher program in New Orleans -- the test case for Gov. Bobby Jindal's new statewide voucher push -- has yet to produce enough raw data to show whether it is really boosting student achievement. The governor's office is backing the voucher idea with figures that appear to show impressive test results for New Orleans students who get state aid to pay private school tuition. But in truth, limited test-score data and the lack of comparable public school numbers make the program's effectiveness almost impossible to judge, according to some of the country's leading number-crunchers in the education field. At best, state data offer only a snapshot of how those students are doing, and even then results are mixed.

What counts as a "fact"? New York State Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Kern's ruling on the release of the New York City Teacher Data Reports reflects a view very much at odds with the social science research community. In ruling that the Department of Education's intent to release these reports, which purport to label elementary and middle school teachers as more or less effective based on their students' performance on state tests of English Language Arts and mathematics, was neither arbitrary nor capricious, Kern held that there is no requirement that data be reliable for them to be disclosed. Rather, the standard she invoked was that the data simply need to be "factual," quoting a Court of Appeals case that "factual data … simply means objective information, in contrast to opinions, ideas or advice." But it is entirely a matter of opinion as to whether the particular statistical analyses involved in the production of the Teacher Data Reports warrant the inference that teachers are more or less effective. All statistical models involve assumptions that lie outside of the data themselves. Whether these assumptions are appropriate is a matter of opinion.

Perhaps the most controversial issue in Ed Reform is whether or not it is fair to tie teacher evaluation to their 'performance' as defined by reformers as how their students do on standardized exams.  Since even reformers acknowledge that teachers aren't able to take students from a low starting score to any absolute target of high performance, they have devised something that is intended to be fair.  It is known as 'value-added.' The idea, which has been around for about 30 years, is that there could be a way to compare how a teacher's students do on some test with how those same students would have done in a parallel universe where they had an 'average' teacher instead.  If it is possible to make such a measurement, it would determine that teacher's individual contribution to his student's 'learning.' To someone who is not a teacher, this sounds reasonable enough.  When you've spent time in schools, though, you know some of the basic problems with standardized tests.

If ever proof were needed for the notion that it's a good idea to look before you leap, it's the implementation of Race to the Top in Tennessee. "I don't know why they felt they had to rush," said Tim Tackett, a member of the school board here who was a teacher and principal for 32 years. "Clearly this wasn't well thought out."

Last week, more than 400 principals on Long Island, N.Y., signed a letter of public protest against the state's new and untried teacher evaluation system. The signatories, drawn from elementary, middle, and high schools, represent two-thirds of all principals on Long Island, which includes Nassau and Suffolk counties. Their letter is historic. It's the first time that a large number of administrators have spoken out in opposition to bad ideas. It represents hundreds of educators who are willing to stick their necks out, hundreds of educators willing to speak truth to power, hundreds of educators who put their name on a statement to the state's highest education officials, with this simple message: "Stop! What you are doing is wrong. What you are imposing on us is untested. We believe it will be harmful to our students. It will undermine education quality. It will hurt teachers and ruin morale. You are treating us like lab rats. Stop. Respect the lives that are in your keeping."

Thanks for the news from San Diego. We can use happy stories. One of my favorite educators, Anthony Alvarado, was out there for a while, and it wasn't one of his shining success stories. Tony was a brilliant, young superintendent of a fairly autonomous New York City district in the 1970s and early 1980s-East Harlem. He launched a "reform" that consisted mostly of encouraging and supporting teachers with interesting ideas-and then freeing them to start their own schools. He used his power to find ways to help them get around foolish rules. It was a decade of creativity and enthusiasm throughout the district. He and his assistant, Sy Fliegel, ran their own creative noncompliance regime, and they extended that mindset down to the rank and file. It paid off. Some of the innovations that came out of that period are still alive and kicking (like Central Park East), outlasting him in New York by several decades and outliving one after another draconian reorganization and top-down reform waves.

We use several data sets to consider the effect of teaching practices on student beliefs, as well as on organization of firms and institutions. In cross-country data, we show that teaching practices (such as copying from the board versus working on projects together) are strongly related to various dimensions of social capital, from beliefs in cooperation to institutional outcomes. We then use micro-data to investigate the influence of teaching practices on student beliefs about cooperation both with each other and with teachers, and students' involvement in civic life. A two-stage least square strategy provides evidence that teaching practices have an independent sizeable effect on student social capital. The relationship between teaching practices and student test performance is nonlinear. The evidence supports the idea that progressive education promotes social capital.