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My unrivaled colleague, Jay Mathews, wrote a column urging Republican Rick Santorum to stay in the presidential race so that he can promote his belief that high schools should discuss alternatives to evolutionary theory. Jay notes that when he suggested in 2005 that high school biology classes would be improved if students debated Darwinism and intelligent design - as if, apparently, they had equal claims of scientific legitimacy - he got a lot of letters telling him he was an idiot, and even a dangerous one. Jay, of course, is the most accomplished education reporter on the planet, which makes this particular line of thinking so unacceptable.

Nicholas Kristoff wrote yesterday about the "landmark" new teacher value-added study from Chetty, Friedman and Rockoff. It's worth being clear about why the study has garnered so much attention. It's not because it shows that teachers matter. Everyone knew or believed that already. It's because it shows that teachers vary in how much they matter. And, for the first time, it takes the value-added debate out of the standardized testing box.

After watching the State of the Union address Tuesday night, I found myself thinking about the differences between President Obama's statements on education and those of California Governor Jerry Brown.

Sharon McNary believes in having tough teacher evaluations. But these days, the Memphis principal finds herself rushing to cram in what amounts to 20 times the number of observations previously required for veteran teachers - including those she knows are excellent - sometimes to the detriment of her other duties. "I don't think there's a principal that would say they don't agree we don't need a more rigorous evaluation system," says Ms. McNary, who is president of the Tennessee Principals Association as well as principal at Richland Elementary. "But now it seems that we've gone to [the opposite] extreme."

Yesterday, I shared some interesting facts from the National Council on Teacher Quality's (NCTQ) October 2011 report, "State of the States: Trends and Early Lessons on Teacher Evaluation and Effectiveness Policies" about the evolution of state educator evaluation systems over the past few years. In particular, we learned that between 2009 and 2011, 33 states changed their teacher evaluation policies. This left me thinking about what has happened with evaluation policy in the other 17 states since NCTQ released their report. After considerable research, I found that there have been some dramatic changes. Here are a few updates

Today, hundreds of state legislators from across the nation will head out to an "island" resort on the coast of Florida to a unique "education academy" sponsored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). There will be no students or teachers. Instead, legislators, representatives from right-wing think tanks and for-profit education corporations will meet behind closed doors to channel their inner Milton Friedman and promote the radical transformation of the American education system into a private, for-profit enterprise.

Unlike many of my colleagues and friends, I personally support the use of standardized testing results in education policy, even, with caution and in a limited role, in high-stakes decisions. That said, I also think that the focus on test scores has gone way too far and their use is being implemented unwisely, in many cases to a degree at which I believe the policies will not only fail to generate improvement, but may even risk harm. In addition, of course, tests have a very productive low-stakes role to play on the ground - for example, when teachers and administrators use the results for diagnosis and to inform instruction. Frankly, I would be a lot more comfortable with the role of testing data - whether in policy, on the ground, or in our public discourse - but for the relentless flow of misinterpretation from both supporters and opponents. In my experience (which I acknowledge may not be representative of reality), by far the most common mistake is the conflation of student and school performance, as measured by testing results.

Noam Chomsky discusses the purpose of education, indoctrination, conformity, and imagination. What do you think of the current educational system? What practical things can be transformed in today's systems?

This Saturday reflection is on grades, test scores, and learning, what I think of them, what it means for me a teacher.

Los Angeles Unified School District is embroiled in negotiations over teacher evaluations, and will now face pressure from outside the district intended to force counter-productive teacher evaluation methods into use.  Yesterday, I read this  Los Angeles Times article a lawsuit to be filed by an unnamed "group of parents and education advocates."  The article notes that, "The lawsuit was drafted in consultation with EdVoice, a Sacramento-based group. Its board includes arts and education philanthropist Eli Broad, former ambassador Frank Baxter and healthcare company executive Richard Merkin."  While the defendant in the suit is technically LAUSD, the real reason a lawsuit is necessary according to the article is that "United Teachers Los Angeles leaders say tests scores are too unreliable and narrowly focused to use for high-stakes personnel decisions."  Note that, once again, we see a journalist telling us what the unions say and think, without ever, ever bothering to mention why, offering no acknowledgment that the bulk of the research and the three leading organizations for education research and measurement (AERA, NCME, and APA) say the same thing as the union (or rather, the union is saying the same thing as the testing expert).  Upon what research does the other side base arguments in favor of using test scores and "value-added" measurement (VAM) as a legitimate measurement of teacher effectiveness?  They never answer, but the debate somehow continues ad nauseum.  

Currently, many states plan to have teachers of non-tested subjects use a make-shift version of value-added measures where teachers identify learning objectives, choose assessments that correspond with these objectives, monitor student progress over the course of the year, and then present that progress as evidence of student growth. While this process may very well improve the overall quality of teaching, it is an ineffective way to evaluate teachers. If it takes complex statistical algorithms to measure student growth for English and math teachers, what makes us think that teachers of non-tested subjects can validly and reliably measure student growth on their own?

As millions of Americans search for work, and millions more scrape by to make ends meet, researchers affiliated with two Washington think tanks -- the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation -- have recently announced a "finding" that defies common-sense: America's teachers are overpaid by more than 50 percent. The new paper from Jason Richwine and Andrew Biggs fails on several levels. First, it asks the wrong question. Second, it ignores facts that conflict with its conclusions. Lastly, it insults teachers and demeans the profession.

"We have a parenting problem, not a poverty problem," Mike Petrilli writes at Flypaper. I agree that parenting matters greatly to a child's academic success or failure, and in fact may be the single largest determining factor. But Petrilli concludes that the best way to solve the "parenting problem" is through cultural messaging promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce, so that kids benefit from growing up in two-income households. This ignores, I think, the concrete reality of life in many low-income neighborhoods, where many women are making a rational choice when they remain single.

n 2007, the city put an end to the diversity-based admissions policies at the East Village Community School and other elementary schools in the neighborhood. Since then, the East Village Community School has seen a rapid influx of white and high-income families, according to parents and Department of Education figures. "Our school has radically changed since they stopped looking at ethnicity," said Kessler, 47, an East Village resident who is co-president of the school's PTA and has two children there. "I think it would be better for my kids to be exposed to a range of people."

This is what privatization looks like. Our public institutions, starved of funds, are desperately kissing up to corporate America. Worse, our expectations are privatized. We're thinking of education as a prize-won by fierce competition or dumb luck-rather than a right. The private money is everywhere. Our neighborhoods continue to be bombarded with charter schools that could not exist without the financial and corporate elites.

Federal school "turnaround" strategies that call for firing teachers, replacing managers, or closing troubled public schools or converting them into charter schools often meet with understandable skepticism, resistance and even anger among the parents whose children attend those schools. How should policymakers react? According to a recent study from the think tank Public Agenda, the answer is to treat the harsh realities caused by turnarounds as a public relations problem. That's the conclusion of a review released today of What's Trust Got to Do With It? A Communications and Engagement Guide for School Leaders Tackling the Problem of Persistently Failing Schools.

Diane Ravitch poses a dozen piercing questions on education and school policy. Some of them turn conventional thinking on its ear, and each could be a starting point for reporting on elections, from the presidency on down to local school boards.

The Republican education commissioner of Texas, Robert Scott, might not be the first person you'd think would find common ground with California's Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, but Scott has savaged high-stakes testing in language that would make Brown smile. Speaking to the Texas State Board of Education late last month, Scott said that the mentality that standardized testing is the "end-all, be-all" is a "perversion" of what a quality education should be. What's more, he called "the assessment and accountability regime" not only "a cottage industry but a military-industrial complex." And he attacked the Common Core Standards Initiative as being motivated by business concerns.

Consider us optimists, but we think the high-stakes test movement has reached its apex and started its decline. It won't happen quickly given the powerful political forces aligned to promote the testing regime, but the test obsessed "accountability" package for education reform won't continue indefinitely. There are too many bad policies (NCLB, Race to the Top), bad performance reports (NAEP, CREDO, last week's Mathematica study), and corruption/cheating/score inflation scandals (ATL, DC, NY, and more). If you need hope, look back at how Diane Ravitch drove an intellectual stake into the heart of the education reform movement on the Daily Show. She asked the audience how they felt about tests. When the crowd booed, Jon Stewart complained that it couldn't be that simple. Tell that to Michelle Rhee now that her reforms have faced the scrutiny of the voting public (in the DC Mayoral race but again this past Tuesday). In a democracy, eventually, the people have their say.

Every year, Mayor Bloomberg's DOE creates a new list of struggling schools. Once the schools have been identified, the DOE generally moves to shut them down. This year of the 21 high schools have landed on Bloomberg's latest struggling schools list, at least 8 (38%) are new schools that were opened on Bloomberg's watch. And, when you consider that Bloomberg's new high schools represent about 40% of all existing high schools,1 you quickly realize that Bloomberg is shutting his new schools at about the same rate that he shuts the older ones. Put another way, this year, DOE is thinking of closing 5.4% of its new schools and 5.8% of its old. Figure out the sense in that. But if you can't (because I can't), read on.