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This is a great visual representation of the impact of poverty on New York Regent's Exam scores for 2009 by school.

"Everybody was in fear," another teacher said in the report. "It is not that the teachers are bad people and want to do it. It is that they are scared."

Bad Teacher offers the most straightforward accounting of the underlying assumptions of paying-for-scores that I've yet seen, in print or on screen. A lousy, unmotivated teacher who desires breast implants is inspired to work much harder to earn the cash. There you go: honest, straightforward, incentive-driven--and utterly disinterested in social justice or the larger purposes of schooling. She changes her behavior because there are rewards for doing so. There's no expectation that the change is permanent, that it alters the content of her character, or even that she'll teach any better--only that she'll teach harder. And, it should come as no surprise that she looks for an opportunity to cheat when her other efforts aren't getting it done. At the same time, for all these thorny issues, I'd absolutely argue that her kids are better off after she learns about the bonus than they were before.

This was written by Carol Corbett Burris, the principal of South Side High School in New York.  She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

An even hotter spot should be reserved for those adults who knowingly cheat children out of a decent education and lie to them about their achievements.

Research on teacher productivity, and recently developed accountability systems for teachers, rely on value-added models to estimate the impact of teachers on student performance.  The authors test many of the central assumptions required to derive value-added models from an underlying structural cumulative achievement model and reject nearly all of them.  Moreover, they find that  teacher value added and other key parameter estimates are highly sensitive to model specification.  While estimates from commonly employed value-added models cannot be interpreted as causal teacher effects, employing richer models that impose fewer restrictions may reduce  the  bias in estimates of teacher productivity.  

Although it may be satisfying to blame the individuals involved, doing so frames the problem as one of individual personality and moral character, ignoring a critical fact: These are examples of organizational misconduct-when individuals acting in their organizational roles violate internal or external rules, regulations or laws in furtherance of organizational goals.

School Reform is the American Elite's preferred response to poverty and inequality, a strategy that requires no sacrifice, no redistribution nor any self-organization by America's disfranchised groups. Every day, it is proving itself a dismal failure.

If you're concerned about the troubled educational system in New York, you might recall a classic scene in the movie "Casablanca."

This is the latest in a back-and-forth between Joel Klein, former New York City Schools chancellor, and Aaron Pallas, a Teachers College professor and statistician.

Brooks criticizes Ravitch and lauds the success of charters

California Gov. Jerry Brown wrote a tough indictment of data-based school reform in a message he wrote vetoing a bill that would have changed the state's accountability system for public schools.