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A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I did my own analysis of the 1997 study which is always quoted by Rhee about how 3 effective teachers in a row vs. 3 ineffective teachers in a row is life changing.  Now, as someone who considers himself an effective teacher, and someone who has been taught by effective teachers and also by ineffective teachers, I'm very aware that there is a difference.  The question is whether or not this difference really shows up in standardized test scores accurately enough so that districts can use them reliably as part of evaluations which can lead to teachers getting fired over them.

"As part of Wal-Mart's back-to-school marketing efforts, the company recently launched a series of teacher appreciation videos, ads, hashtags and discounts. teachers--who routinely dig deep into their own pockets to pay for supplies and materials for their students--are grateful for appreciation in all its forms. They are understandably less pleased when half-hearted discounts come from a company with a terrible track record for respecting its own employees and are accompanied by a large-scale effort to dismantle our nation's public education system and silence their voice. In fact, teachers are so offended by the so-called education reform agenda promoted by Wal-Mart's owners, the Waltons, that one teacher recently launched a petition calling on his peers not to shop at Wal-Mart this back-to-school season. More than 5,000 teachers have already added their names to his pledge. A closer look at the Walton family's massive investment in "education" paints a clear picture of why teachers are so upset. Since 2000, the Walton Family Foundation has given more than $1 billion to destabilize public education--draining funds from students and closing neighborhood schools, and instead supporting corporate-style education policies in an attempt to bring Wal-Mart's business model to classrooms across the country."

"Some see us as education's odd couple-one, the president of a democratic teachers' union; the other, a director at the world's largest philanthropy. While we don't agree on everything, we firmly believe that students have a right to effective instruction and that teachers want to do their very best. We believe that one of the most effective ways to strengthen both teaching and learning is to put in place evaluation systems that are not just a stamp of approval or disapproval but a means of improvement. We also agree that in too many places, teacher evaluation procedures are broken-unconstructive, superficial, or otherwise inadequate. And so, for the past four years, we have worked together to help states and districts implement effective teacher development and evaluation systems carefully designed to improve teacher practice and, ultimately, student learning."

Over at The Nation I have a new piece looking at surveys of public school teachers, one of which found job satisfaction at its lowest point since 1989. The most important thing to note is that polling shows teachers are not unhappy because they resent new accountability policies like the more stringent teacher evaluations instituted in response to President Obama's Race to the Top program. In fact, most teachers support using multiple measures of student learning to assess educators, and most believe it should take longer to earn tenure (an average of 5.4 years according to the Gates/Scholastic poll) than it currently does (an average of 3.1 years across all states). 

Most teachers in the US not only voted for President Obama, they spent considerable time and money campaigning for him. Like many other Americans, they thought the Obama presidency would bring new initiatives to help working families and help people rise out of poverty after 8 years of policieswhich favored large corporations and concentrated wealth among top earners. However, they were shocked when President Obama appointed Arne Duncan, a man who had never been a teacher, as Secretary of Education,and when policies began emanating from the new administration favoring charter schools over public schools, requiring student test scores as a basis of teacher evaluation, and encouraging "school turnaround"strategies which led to mass firing of teachers. Worse yet, the rhetoric emanating from Mr Duncan often portrayed "bad teachers" ratherthan deeply entrenched poverty, as the reason for race and class inequities in educational achievement, and for poor US performance globally on standardized tests, a concern heightened when Mr Duncan praised the mass firing of teachers in Central Falls Rhode Island and called Hurricane Katrina " the best thing that had happened to education in New Orleans" because it allowed local officials to replace public schools with charter schools

As public school principals lead a growing insurgency against the state's new teacher-evaluation system, some teachers are beginning to question why their largest state union is defending the system and not supporting the principals' movement. Several presidents of local teachers unions told The Journal News that there is a growing dissatisfaction within their ranks with union leadership on the controversial system, which will grade teachers on a 100-point scale based in part on how their students progress on state tests.

I often hear the following argument: Improving teacher quality is more cost-effective than other options, such as reducing class size (see here, for example). I am all for evaluating policy alternatives based on their costs relative to their benefits, even though we tend to define the benefits side of the equation very narrowly - in terms of test score gains. But "improving teacher quality" cannot yet be included in a concrete costs/benefits comparison with class size or anything else. It is not an actual policy. At best, it is a category of policy options, all of which are focused on recruitment, preparation, retention, improvement, and dismissal of teachers. When people invoke it, they are presumably referring to the fact that teachers vary widely in their test-based effectiveness. Yes, teachers matter, but altering the quality distribution is whole different ballgame from measuring it overall. It's actually a whole different sport.

...the available body of evaluation research on alternative teacher compensation programs does not consistently suggest financial incentives improve teacher retention. In some cases incentives appear to be associated with small increases in retention; in other cases, incentives appear to be associated with decreased retention. The majority of evaluations, however, either found financial incentives had no effect on teacher retention or did not include an examination of retention at all. Accordingly, there is little reason to assume the availability of financial incentives will result in improved teacher retention. If anything, the research to date suggests that other considerations, such as working conditions and leadership, are more important factors in teachers' decisions to stay, move, or leave the profession entirely.

You're Fired! What prevents an unpopular teacher from losing their job for holding firm on class standards, procedures and/or guidelines: teacher Tenure. It is in many ways vital to the educators ability to work effectively in much the same manner to that of a Justice on the US Supreme Court. The main purpose of life appointments or terms for Supreme Court Justices is to allow them to make decisions based on moral and ethical reasoning regardless of whether it is popular or unpopular publicly. The object of job security is to allow for "politics" to not influence the management of a situation. Educators, while their work does not impact the entire judicial system as that of the US Supreme Court, it does impact the lives of those involved. Many times teachers are faced with having to address or confront others with observations that may be unfavorable. As professionals they cannot avoid confronting these individuals for fear of losing their job. Truthfulness, honesty and accountability in a profession can often times be interpreted in alternative ways that result in retribution toward the educator. teacher tenure allows instructors to do what is morally correct even when it's results or outcomes are not enjoyable. The other area that is upsetting to the vast majority of the public is the belief that tenure safe guards bad teachers from losing their jobs.

he Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study conducted in the Metropolitan Nashville School System from 2006-07 through 2008-09, in which middle school mathematics teachers voluntarily participated in a controlled experiment to assess the effect of financial rewards for teachers whose students showed unusually large gains on standardized tests. The experiment was intended to test the notion that rewarding teachers for improved scores would cause scores to rise. It was up to participating teachers to decide what, if anything, they needed to do to raise student performance: participate in more professional development, seek coaching, collaborate with other teachers, or simply reflect on their practices. Thus, POINT was focused on the notion that a significant problem in American education is the absence of appropriate incentives, and that correcting the incentive structure would, in and of itself, constitute an efective intervention that improved student outcomes.By and large, results did not confirm this hypothesis

Regrettably, with the onset of the New Year, the debate on how to improve our public schools and student learning was once again marked by baseless attacks and a relentless effort to demonize teachers and the unions that represent them. Last week, Mayor Bloomberg repeatedly attacked the United Federation of teachers (UFT) in his State of the City address over issues like holding teachers accountable and paying some teachers more if student test scores go up. MSNBC's "Morning Joe," picked up the next day where the Mayor left off and attacked teachers unions for "being out of touch" and supporting "mediocrity." Both are ridiculous and uninformed statements. Sadly, the Mayor and our newscasters should know better.

Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers ("ProComp") is one of the most prominent alternative Teacher compensation reforms in the nation.* Via a combination of ten financial incentives, ProComp seeks to increase student achievement by motivating Teachers to improve their instructional practices and by attracting and retaining high-quality Teachers to work in the district. My research examines ProComp in terms of: 1) whether it has increased retention rates; 2) the relationship between retention and school quality (defined in terms of student test score growth); and 3) the reasons underlying these effects. I pay special attention to the effects of ProComp on schools that serve high concentrations of poor students - "Hard to Serve" (HTS) schools where Teachers are eligible to receive a financial incentive to stay. The quantitative findings are discussed briefly below (I will discuss my other results in a future post).

In this paper we consider the challenges involved in evaluating teacher preparation programs when controlling for school contextual bias. Including school fixed effects in the achievement models  used toestimate preparation program effects controls for school environment by relying on differences among student outcomes within the same schools to identify the program effects. However, identification of preparation program effects using school fixed effects requires teachers from different programs to teach in the same school. Even if program effects are identified, the precision of the estimated effects will depend on the degree to which graduates from different programs overlap across schools. In addition, if the connections between preparation programs result from the overlap of atypical graduates or from graduates teaching in atypical school environments, use of school effects could produce bias. Using statewide data from Florida, we show that teachers tend to teach in schools near the programs in which they received their training, but there is still sufficient overlap across schools to identify preparation program effects. We show that the ranking of preparation programs varies significantly depending on whether or not school environment is taken into account via school fixed effects. We find that schools and teachers that are integral to connecting preparation programs are atypical, with disproportionately high percentages of Hispanic teachers and students compared to the state averages. Finally, we  find significant variance inflation in the estimated program effects when controlling for school fixed effects, and that the size of the variance inflation factor depends crucially on the length of the window used to compare graduates teaching in the same schools.

In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher effects on past student achievement, a finding that obviously cannot be viewed as causal. This is the basis of a falsification test (the Rothstein falsification test) that appears to indicate bias in VAM estimates of current teacher contributions to student learning. More precisely, the falsification test is designed to identify whether or not students are effectively randomly assigned conditional on the covariates included in the model. Rothstein's finding is significant because there is considerable interest in using VAM teacher effect estimates for high-stakes teacher personnel policies, and the results of the Rothstein test cast considerable doubt on the notion that VAMs can be used fairly for this purpose. However, in this paper, we illustrate-theoretically and through simulations-plausible conditions under which the Rothstein falsification test rejects VAMs even when students are randomly assigned, conditional on the covariates in the model, and even when there is no bias in estimated teacher effects.

In August 2010 the Los Angeles Times published a special report on their website featuring performance ratings for nearly 6,000 Los Angeles Uni!ed School District teachers. The move was controversial because the ratings were based on so-called value-added estimates of teachers' contributions to student learning. These estimates statistically account for the different academic backgrounds children bring to teachers' classes, but they are estimates nonetheless, and opaque ones at that. (see text box below) But the newspaper maximized the controversy - and perhaps the number of hits it drew to web pages with advertising - by attaching teachers' names to the ratings. Parents and other interested members of the public could look up specific teachers in the database and see how they ranked in both math and English, from least effective to most e#ective.

As New York City parents and teachers struggled Monday to make sense of recently published schoolteacher rankings, education officials considered making future releases illegal to protect a fragile truce on a new statewide system. Legal experts said a series of court rulings have made it increasingly clear that statistics-based portions of teacher evaluations are public information, unlike those of police officers, firefighters and other public workers specifically protected under state law. Only a change in law, experts said, would change that. Shielding teacher rankings from public view is likely to become a new pressure point in the debate over how to measure the effectiveness of teachers, lawmakers and officials said Monday. Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, which sets education policy, said that while she backs using tests scores to hold teachers accountable, she would support changing state law to hide their rankings from public view.

So-called value-added rankings-which rank teachers according to the recorded growth in their students' test scores-are an important indicator of teacher effectiveness, but making them public is counterproductive to helping teachers improve. Doing so doesn't help teachers feel safe and respected, which is necessary if they are going to provide our kids with the positive energy and environment we all hope for. The release of the rankings (which follows a similar release last year in Los Angeles) is based on a misconception that "fixing" teachers is the solution to all that ails our education system.

"There is no doubt that teacher evaluation systems in the U.S. are broken: teachers, administrators, parents, and policymakers agree that most districts fail to measure teaching well, help teachers improve, or dismiss those who are failing. Most teachers are tenured without a rigorous examination of their competence, and those who are struggling are often left to struggle indefinitely, while their students suffer. The vast majority of teachers, who are working hard and want to continue to improve, get little help to do so."

"This brief describes the prevalence of highest-performing teachers in ten purposely selected districts across seven states. The overall patterns indicate that low-income students have unequal access, on average, to the district's highest-performing teachers at the middle school level but not at the elementary level. However, there is evidence of variation in the distribution of highest-performing teachers within and among the ten districts studied. Some have an under-representation of the highest-performing teachers in high-poverty elementary and middle schools. Others have such under-representation only at the middle school level, and one district has a disproportionate share of the district's highest-performing teachers in its high-poverty elementary schools."

"When given the opportunity, many teachers choose to leave schools serving poor, low-performing, and nonwhite students. While a substantial research literature has documented this phenomenon, far less research effort has gone into understanding what features of the working conditions in these schools drive this relatively higher turnover rate. This paper explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover decisions by other teachers within the same school. teachers' perceptions of the school administration have by far the greatest influence on teacher-retention decisions. This effect of administration is consistent for first-year teachers and the full sample of teachers and is confirmed by a survey of teachers who have recently left teaching in New York City."