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"What they saw should chill the ardor of the most doctrinaire followers of Milton Friedman. Vouchers began in Milwaukee nearly 25 years ago based on the claim that they would save poor black children from "failing" public schools. Today, Milwaukee should be a national symbol of the failure of vouchers. Yet state after state is endorsing vouchers, egged on by the Friedman Foundation and rightwing think tanks. Let's be clear. Vouchers, charters, and choice have failed the children of Milwaukee. The city ranks near the bottom of all cities tested by the federal NAEP, barely ahead of Detroit. Black children in Milwaukee score behind their peers in most other cities and states. Study after study shows they don't get better test scores than their peers in public schools."

"The New York Times Magazine has a long article about Eva Moskowitz and her chain of charter schools in New York City. The charter chain was originally called Harlem Success Academy, but Moskowitz dropped the word "Harlem" when she decided to open new schools in gentrifying neighborhoods and wanted to attract white and middle-class families. I spent a lot of time on the phone with the author, Daniel Bergner. When he asked why I was critical of Moskowitz, I said that what she does to get high test scores is not a model for public education or even for other charters. The high scores of her students is due to intensive test prep and attrition. She gets her initial group of students by holding a lottery, which in itself is a selection process because the least functional families don't apply. She enrolls small proportions of students with disabilities and English language learners as compared to the neighborhood public school. And as time goes by, many students leave."

"There was a big to-do recently in New York when new standardized testing results were released and the controversial Success Academies charter chain received very high scores. What, exactly, do the scores really tell us about the schools? Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Washington D.C.-based Albert Shanker Institute, explains. This post appeared on the institute's blog."

"But the biggest thing to keep in mind about these results is that most of the important lessons cannot be gleaned from the results alone. Perhaps the most important considerations is how teachers and other stakeholders (e.g., principals) respond to the system. For example, do teachers change their classroom practice based on the scores or feedback from observations? Do the ratings and feedback influence teachers' decisions to stay in the profession (or in their school/district)? How do these outcomes vary between districts using different measures or scoring? These are also questions that really matter, and they are not answerable in the short-term, and they certainly cannot be addressed looking at highly aggregate distributions across rating categories and imposing one's pre-existing beliefs on how they should turn out."

"New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's school reform proposals have infuriated educators across the state. Award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School is one of them and in this post, she  explains why. Burris, who has written frequently for this blog,  was named New York's 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010, was tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. Burris has been exposing the botched school reform program in New York for years on this blog. Her most recent post was "Principal: 'There comes a time when rules must be broken…That time is now.'" (In this post, Burris refers to "value-added" scores, which refer to value-added measurement (VAM), which purports to be able to determine the "value" a teacher brings to student learning by plopping test scores into complicated formulas that can supposedly strip out all other factors, including the conditions in which a student lives.)"

Would you rather have an actual person score your carefully crafted essay, or an automated software program designed for that purpose? I'd still take the flawed human being any day-assuming, of course, the proper expertise and that he or she is operating on a good night's sleep-but a new study suggests there is little, if any, difference in the reliability and accuracy of the computer approach.

I don't think there's any way to avoid publication, given that about a dozen newspapers will receive the data, and it's unlikely that every one of them will decline to do so. So, in addition to expressing my firm opposition, I would offer what I consider to be an absolutely necessary suggestion: If newspapers are going to publish the estimates, they need to publish the error margins too. Value-added and other growth model scores are statistical estimates, and must be interpreted as such. Imagine that a political poll found that a politician's approval rate was 40 percent, but, due to an unusually small sample of respondents, the error margin on this estimate was plus or minus 20 percentage points. Based on these results, the approval rate might actually be abysmal (20 percent), or it might be pretty good (60 percent). Should a newspaper publish the 40 percent result without mentioning that level of imprecision? Of course not. In fact, they should refuse to publish the result at all. Value-added estimates are no different.

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.

The recent spate of cheating scandals in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington presents an interesting conundrum. Those opposed to education reform schemes tied to the evaluation of student test scores and teacher compensation, or "value added" evaluation, claim that the teachers and administrators who were caught cheating were the victims, compelled to cheat out of fear for their livelihoods. On the other hand, value-added advocates solemnly pronounce that there is no excuse for cheating and that, moreover, cheating teachers and administrators provide the very evidence that reform is necessary. Both positions are valid. Can we work our way out?

A group of local principals is rallying Hudson Valley educators to push for changes to some of the state's education reforms. Six principals from Sleepy Hollow, Scarsdale, Clarkstown and three other other school districts met Thursday at Sleepy Hollow High School to gather support for a petition against a law that makes student test scores a part of teacher and administrator evaluations.

New York State is set to release its annual testing data tomorrow. Throughout the state, and especially in New York City, we will hear a lot about changes in school and district proficiency rates. The rates themselves have advantages - they are easy to understand, comparable across grades and reflect a standards-based goal. But they also suffer severe weaknesses, such as their sensitivity to where the bar is set and the fact that proficiency rates and the actual scores upon which they're based can paint very different pictures of student performance, both in a given year as well as over time. I've discussed this latter issue before in the NYC context (and elsewhere), but I'd like to revisit it quickly.

I am firmly of the belief that you lay out grading expectations for students with as much notice as possible, and so here is my grading scale for reporters and newspapers in handling the value-added scores that the city Department of Education is releasing today, after courts have mandated their release

"Mandated as a condition for states to receive federal Race to the Top (RTTT) funds, many states and districts are concocting schemes to "evaluate" their teachers in large part based on student test scores. These initiatives are inconsistent with strong evidence showing such uses of tests are error-prone and will undermine the quality of teaching and learning. Some states and districts are mandating dozens more exams, so that all teachers can be included in test-based evaluation plans. "

The Department of Education has ordered an investigation of 34 schools for possible cheating after an analysis of standardized test scores revealed irregularities.

Scores for the 2010-11 NYSTP 3-8 ELA and mathematics assessments will be available to schools and districts in the Verification Reports in the Level 2 Reporting (L2RPT) environment (see http://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/level2reports/home.html) and on nySTART (www.nySTART.gov) on August 4, 2011. Data on these assessments will be released publicly by the Commissioner on August 8, 2011. School and district aggregated results are embargoed until the Commissioner's public release. Data under embargo cannot be discussed at public meetings or released to the public or the media.

In education policy debates, the phrase "what works" is sometimes used to mean "what increases test scores." Among those of us who believe that testing data have a productive role to play in education policy (even if we disagree on the details of that role), there is a constant struggle to interpret test-based evidence properly and put it in context. This effort to craft and maintain a framework for using assessment data productively is very important but, despite the careless claims of some public figures, it is also extremely difficult.

The school voucher debate is shifting, in part, a new study released today concludes, because participating students' test scores are not.

Teacher-coaching linked to a well-known teaching framework paid dividends for student achievement in the secondary grades, according to a study published today in Science magazine. In all, the study found a 0.22 standard deviation increase in the scores of students taught by teachers who received a special form of teacher-coaching-roughly the equivalent of an increase from the 50th to the 59th percentile-relative to the students taught by teachers in a control group.

Students receive abundant information about their educational performance, but how this information affects future educational-investment decisions is not well understood. Increasingly common sources of information are state-mandated standardized tests. On these tests, students receive a score and a label that summarizes their performance. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we find persistent effects of earning a more positive label on the college-going decisions of urban, low-income students. Consistent with a Bayesian-updating model, these effects are concentrated among students with weaker priors, specifically those who report before taking the test that they do not plan to attend a four-year college.

State education officials say an Orange County high school that issued color-coded identification cards to students this year based on their standardized test scores is violating the students' privacy and the unlawful practice should be curtailed. Kennedy High School in La Palma is requiring students to carry school ID cards in one of three colors based on their performance on the California Standards Tests - black, gold or white - plus a spiral-bound homework planner with a cover of a matching color. The black card, which is the highest level, and the gold card give students a range of special campus privileges and discounts, while the white card gives students no privileges and forces them to stand in a separate cafeteria lunch line.