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"A systematic search of the research literature from 1996 through July 2008 identified more than a thousand empirical studies of online learning. Analysts screened these studies to find those that (a) contrasted an online to a face-to-face condition, (b) measured student learning outcomes, (c) used a rigorous research design, and (d) provided adequate information to calculate an effect size. As a result of this screening, 50 independent effects were identified that could be subjected to meta-analysis. The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The difference between student outcomes for online and face-to-face classes-measured as the difference between treatment and control means, divided by the pooled standard deviation-was larger in those studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face. Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se. An unexpected finding was the small number of rigorous published studies contrasting online and face-to-face learning conditions for K-12 students. In light of this small corpus, caution is required in generalizing to the K-12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education)."

Despite increasing evidence that collaboration is one of the keys to a school's success in improving student performance and closing achievement gaps, policymakers at national and state levels, including New York, are moving toward teacher evaluation systems that attempt to attribute student progress to the efforts of individual teachers.

Now, regarding the "no evidence" claim, I would recommend reading this article from Teachers College Record, this year, which summarizes a multitude of rigorous empirical studies of state school finance reforms finding generally that increased funding levels have been associated with improved outcomes and that more equitable distributions of resources have been associated with more equitable distributions of outcomes.

Reformers are convinced they can create a network of charter schools that can provide a quality education and in the process post a nice profit. They've been able to sell their idea to investors who sense an opportunity to do good and to do well at the same time. But the evidence to date shows they are wrong. The latest involves two marquee-names: Tom Vander Ark, who handed out more than $1.6 billion from the Gates Foundation between 1999 and 2006, and Chris Whittle, whose Edison Schools were supposed to revolutionize public education. The track record of both men serves as a cautionary tale at this crossroads in educational history.

Now that I have suggested shifting the discourse about poverty and education away from the chick-and-egg problem to the role of sustaining and tolerating poverty for the benefit of the ruing elite, let's look at the central role testing plays in maintaining the status quo of power in the U.S. And let's build that consideration on a couple pillars of evidence.

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 challenge of designing effective performance measurement and incentives is a general one in economic settings where behavior and outcomes are not easily observable. These issues are particularly prominent in education where, over the last two decades, test-based accountability systems for schools and students have proliferated. In this study, we present evidence that the design and decentralized, school-based grading of New York's high-stakes Regents Examinations have led to pervasive manipulation of student test scores that are just below performance thresholds. Specifically, we document statistically significant discontinuities in the distributions of subject-specific Regent scores that align with the cut scores used to determine both student eligibility to graduate and school accountability. Our results suggest that roughly 3 to 5 percent of the exam scores that qualified for a high-school diploma actually had performance below the state requirements. Moreover, we find that the rates of test manipulation in NYC were roughly twice as high as those in the entire state. We estimate that roughly 6 to 10 percent of NYC students who scored above the passing threshold for a Regents Diploma actually had scores below the state requirement.

"The Broader Bolder Approach to Education is a national campaign that acknowledges the impact of social and economic disadvantage on schools and students and proposes evidence-based policies to improve schools and remedy conditions that limit many children's readiness to learn."

Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual utility. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Our information treatment doubles the fraction of employees using the website, with the vast majority of new users accessing data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. We find an asymmetric response to the information treatment: workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. Our findings indicate that utility depends directly on relative pay comparisons, and that this relationship is non-linear.

The judge also wrote that Regents and the state Education Department cannot prescribe that a certain portion-two-thirds-of the remaining 60 points have to be based on classroom observations and no more than 5 points on evidence that teachers set and pursue professional growth goals.  He said those aspects of the regulations are invalid. Also invalid is the part of the regulations that would result in a teacher's being evaluated as "ineffective" solely based on the results of one student test. Teachers who receive composite scores under 65 would be deemed "ineffective."

It is a truism that when an attorney does not have the evidence, he or she argues the law. When lawyers do not have the facts or the law on their side, they tell a good story. Steve Brill's new book, Class Warfare, exemplifies that principle when indicting teachers and unions.

Uniform use in public schools is rising, but we know little about how they affect students. Using a unique dataset from a large urban school district in the southwest United States, we assess how uniforms affect behavior, achievement and other outcomes. Each school in the district determines adoption independently, providing variation over schools and time. By including student and school fixed-effects we find evidence that uniform adoption improves attendance in secondary grades, while in elementary schools they generate large increases in teacher retention.

Recent analyses challenge common wisdom regarding the superiority of private schools relative to public schools, raising questions about the role of school processes and climate in shaping achievement in different types of schools. While holding demographic factors constant, this multilevel analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics data on over 270,000 fourth and eighth graders in over 10,000 schools examines differences among schools on five critical factors: (1) school size, (2) class size, (3) school climate/parental involvement, (4) teacher certification, and (5) instructional practices. This study provides nationally representative evidence that both teacher certification and some reform-oriented mathematics teaching practices correlate positively with achievement and are more prevalent in public schools than in demographically similar private schools. Additionally, smaller class size, more prevalent in private schools, is significantly correlated with achievement.

For decades, policymakers have promulgated legislation that requires schools to hire effective teachers in all classrooms. Simultaneously, the education research community has attempted to define what effective teachers do in the classroom. A decade ago, No Child Left Behind provided a framework for defining effective teachers as "highly qualified," which required schools to ensure all of their teachers fit the new standard. This standard, however, is no longer appropriate, as continued evidence indicates that the relationship between credentials and achievement is tenuous. Therefore, policymakers and researchers need to revise the term "highly qualified," and, by utilizing the advances in educational accountability over the previous decade, replace it with a term grounded in practice and directly connected to achievement and effectiveness.

Education reform proposals are often based on high-profile or dramatic policy changes, many of which are expensive, politically controversial, or both.  In this paper, we argue that the debates over these "flashy" policies have obscured a potentially important direction for raising student performance-namely, reforms to the management or organization of schools. By making sure the "trains run on time" and focusing on the day-to-day decisions involved in managing the instructional process, school and district administrators may be able to substantially increase student learning at modest cost.In this paper, we describe three organizational reforms that recent evidence suggests have the potential to increase K-12 student performance at modest costs: (1) Starting school later in the day for middle and high school students; (2) Shifting from a system with separate elementary and middle schools to one with schools that serve students in kindergarten through grade eight; (3) Managing teacher assignments with an eye toward maximizing student achievement (e.g. allowing teachers to gain experience by teaching the same grade level for multiple years or having teachers specializing in the subject where they appear most effective). We conservatively estimate that the ratio of benefits to costs is 9 to 1 for later school start times and 40 to 1 for middle school reform. A precise benefit-cost calculation is not feasible for the set of teacher assignment reforms we describe, but we argue that the cost of such proposals is likely to be quite small relative to the benefits for students. While we recognize that these specific reforms may not be appropriate or feasible for every district, we encourage school, district, and state education leaders to make the management, organization, and operation of schools a more prominent part of the conversation on how to raise student achievement.

DOE is not in compliance with the SED's Physical Education Regulations for elementary-level students and middle-level students in elementary schools. DOE does not have an overall written physical education plan nor does it monitor schools' compliance with the regulations. Therefore, DOE has no assurance that the students in elementary schools are receiving the minimum required physical education. In fact, our review of a sample of 31 elementary schools found limited evidence that any of the sampled schools were in compliance with the SED physical education requirements for all of its students.

The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism. Though Klein's book provides much evidence of the Shock Doctrine, the Disaster Capitalists rarely come out and acknowledge their strategy. That's why Watkins' outburst of candor, buried in this front-page New York Times article yesterday, is so important: It shows that the recession and its corresponding shock to school budgets is being  used by corporations to maximize revenues, all under the gauzy banner of "reform."

A recent Monmouth University poll of New Jersey residents is being widely touted by Governor Chris Christie and his supporters as evidence that people support his education reform plans. It's hardly unusual for politicians to ignore the limitations of polling, but I'd urge caution in interpreting these results as a mandate.

The past decade has seen increased testing of students and the concomitant proliferation of computer-based systems to store, manage, analyze, and report the data that comes from these tests. The research to date on teacher use of these data has mostly been qualitative and has mostly focused on the conditions that are necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) for effective use of data by teachers. Absent from the research base in this area is objective information on how much and in what ways teachers actually use student test data, even when supposed precursors of teacher data use are in place. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by analyzing usage data generated when teachers in one mid-size urban district log onto the web-based, district-provided data deliver and analytic tool. Based on information contained in the universe of web logs from the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 school years, I find relatively low levels of teacher interaction with pages on the web tool that contain student test information that could potentially inform practice. I also find no evidence that teacher usage of web-based student data is related student achievement, but there is reason to believe these estimates are downwardly biased.

I am in the middle of a lot of the debates going on throughout the country about education today. On one hand I am encouraged by the fact that we are focused on learning, although too often I would say that gets translated as a focus on achievement. And they're not quite the same. When you focus on achievement, you focus on test scores and you could miss out on whether or not the kids are actually learning. And we have ample evidence, based on the test scores, that sometimes the kids still aren't learning