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"From my experience, education reporters are smart, knowledgeable, and attentive to detail. That said, the bulk of the stories about testing data - in big cities and suburbs, in this year and in previous years - could be better. Listen, I know it's unreasonable to expect every reporter and editor to address every little detail when they try to write accessible copy about complicated issues, such as test data interpretation. Moreover, I fully acknowledge that some of the errors to which I object - such as calling proficiency rates "scores" - are well within tolerable limits, and that news stories need not interpret data in the same way as researchers. Nevertheless, no matter what you think about the role of test scores in our public discourse, it is in everyone's interest that the coverage of them be reliable. And there are a few mostly easy suggestions that I think would help a great deal. Below are five such recommendations. They are of course not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather a quick compilation of points, all of which I've discussed in previous posts, and all of which might also be useful to non-journalists."

A recent report from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution examines three school organization reforms that may yield positive results but have not captured the attention of policymakers or the media. The report concludes that at least two these less-publicized organizational reforms deserve greater attention in the education reform discussion. Think Twice think tank review project reviewer Patrick J. McEwan of Wellesley College finds the report to offer a solid, fair presentation of the research. McEwan's review was published today by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

Having opined a good bit about "innovation" (check out Ed Unbound for much of my current thinking), I'm sometimes asked about why it's so hard to scale promising programs, models, pilots, and notions. On that note, I just had the chance to spend a few days with a bunch of terrific folks discussing just this topic at a Kauffman Foundation retreat. Kaufmann will be issuing a synthesis with the collected wisdom that emerged. Meanwhile, I figured I'd share my own thinking with you.

Now, as I ponder a recent CSA member survey, I see how many of you have lost your optimism.   Whether Principals, Assistant Principals or Education Administrators, 48 percent of you were dissatisfied with your jobs in 2009 compared to 59 percent today. Among Principals the rate of dissatisfaction was 68 percent in 2009, which was when the city and state budget cuts began but we were cushioned by President Obama's American Recovery Act. Today, 73 percent of Principals are dissatisfied with their workload, their wages and their job security. As demands on Principals continue to rise and budgets shrink, we better think about how we'll recruit and retain APs, EAs and teachers to fill the Principal pipeline. Back in 2006, when The New York Times reported that a startling number of experienced Principals were fleeing the Bloomberg/Klein school system, the DOE seemed to think the attrition was a normal result of baby boomer burn-out or fear of accountability. Experienced educators were often viewed as enemies of change.

At the suggestion of my colleague Nancy Flanagan, I would like to add my voice to the incredible chorus of school reformers captured by Richard Elmore in the provocative work, "I Used to Think… And Now I Think…"

Look at those numbers above. Think about how many of the Hispanic kids speak Spanish at home. Look at the economic statistics. Think about how this may affect test scores. Charter schools have freedom, all right - the freedom to exclude the most difficult-to-teach students from their rosters. This, apparently, is Christie's great new vision for schools: economic segregation.

Teacher evaluation--with all its multiple facets, blind alleys, disputed data models, technocratic hype and roll-out problems-- is on every principal's mind these days. It would be great to think that principals in states with new evaluation plans are eager to begin this work, now having permission to sink more deeply into their roles as instructional guides, to have productive two-way professional conversations with their teachers, thinking together about improving instruction to reach specific goals. But no. They're worried about another time suck and avalanche of paperwork on top of an already-ridiculous workload. And--you can't blame them. Being a good principal, like being a good teacher, is impossible. There is no way one single human being can cover all the bases, from keeping the buses running on time to staying abreast of the new math curriculum in grades K through 6. Besides, the new evaluation plans have huge problems embedded, beyond the make-work element.

American public school teachers are paid far more than their smarts are worth. That's the provocative conclusion of a new study from two high-profile conservative think tanks. Researchers from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute found that public school teachers take home total compensation that's 52% higher than "fair market levels" for professionals with similar cognitive abilities. Unsurprisingly, their findings have riled the education world. "No, we do not agree that teachers are overpaid," public school reform advocate Michelle Rhee told Politico. "Under the status quo in most school districts, good classroom teachers are not only undervalued in pay, but as professionals generally." Of course, this isn't the final word on teacher pay. It's just the latest word. Big sweeping statements about teachers being overpaid or underpaid are perennial in the think tank world. Here are four of the biggest.

I don't know about you, but I am growing convinced that President Barack Obama doesn't know what Race to the Top is. I don't think he really understands what his own administration is doing to education. In his State of the Union address last week, he said that he wanted teachers to "stop teaching to the test." He also said that teachers should teach with "creativity and passion." And he said that schools should reward the best teachers and replace those who weren't doing a good job. To "reward the best" and "fire the worst," states and districts are relying on test scores. The Race to the Top says they must. Deconstruct this. Teachers would love to "stop teaching to the test," but Race to the Top makes test scores the measure of every teacher. If teachers take the President's advice (and they would love to!), their students might not get higher test scores every year, and teachers might be fired, and their schools might be closed. Why does President Obama think that teachers can "stop teaching to the test" when their livelihood, their reputation, and the survival of their school depends on the outcome of those all-important standardized tests?

"It's widely agreed that American education is in trouble.  What is missed in both the response to the crisis and the cacophony of reform efforts is a true understanding of the nature of the problem. In the early days of public schooling, Horace Mann called the schools the balance wheel of society. It was thought that schools served as a corrective for all kinds of problems ranging from skill gaps that needed to be remedied for the economy to flourish to culture gaps that were created by immigrants that needed to be Americanized. The school never worked in quite that way, but it was part of a web of social institutions that helped build a framework that allowed America to grow both in prosperity and in diversity. We face a lot of social and economic problems; we expect the schools to solve them. When they don't, we think it's a school failure. Instead, the schools are in fact a signal of a breakdown. Nowadays, the balance wheel is not working so well; it would be more accurate to think of public schools as the canary in the mine."

Let me explain a few things to those of you who think that public employees should lose their rights as workers because you think you "pay their salaries"

New York University Professor Diane Ravitch is one of the nation's most prominent critics of the Gates Foundation's approach to education reform - including merit pay for teachers. Ravitch claims, "The movement Bill Gates has launched has created enormous hostility toward teachers." We'll find out why she thinks the Gates Foundation has it wrong on education reform, and what she thinks needs to be done instead.

An often quoted 'statistic' by various 'reformers' is that an effective teacher is three times as good as an ineffective one.  Sometimes it is said that the ineffective teacher gets a half year of progress while the effective teacher gets one and a half years of progress. I don't doubt that there are a small percent of teachers who have little classroom control, mostly new teachers, who only manage to get a half a year of progress.  I also can imagine a rare 'super-teacher' who somehow gets one and a half years of progress.  (I think I'm a pretty good teacher, but I doubt I get a year and a half worth of progress.)  I don't think there is a very accurate way to measure this nebulous 'progress' aside from test scores, but I could still imagine that there is a 'true' number, even if we will never be able to accurately calculate it. As this statistic has been quoted by Melinda Gates recently on PBS and by Michelle Rhee in various places, including the StudentsFirst website I thought, in response to a recent post on Diane Ravitch's blog I would investigate the source of this claim.

"I think the tests are really being used as weapons against teachers and schools to force them to adopt questionable but expensive curriculum being marketed by test prep companies that seem to have enormous influence over politicians. Instead of buying packaged test prep and curriculum programs, New York State can get the best bang for its buck by having students memorize a few simple lower order thinking rules."

"The shift in E.D. Kain's thinking on education reform of late has been an interesting and, I think, beneficent one for reform discourse. Kain basically blanched when he began to perceive he was too strongly in the "anti-reform" camp (few are actually anti-reform, but that's the unfortunate appellation ascribed to opponents of Duncan, et al)."

Will the bigger classes affect achievement? Results from just a single year suggest they will. The UFT Research Dept. looked at fourth grade, where class sizes rose an average of about one-half a child (0.47) last year. Then we divided the fourth grade into schools where class size rose more than the average, and schools where it rose less, and looked at their achievement in math. The difference was pronounced. While the majority of schools improved in math last year, schools where 4th grade class sizes rose by less than the average improved two percentage points more than schools that had larger-than-average class size increases.

Imagine trying to determine international rankings for tennis players or soccer teams entirely by a) determining how they rank relative to the average team or player in their country, then b) having only the average team or player from each country play each other in a tournament, then c) estimating how the top teams would rank when compared with each other based only on how their country's average teams did when they played each other and how much better we think the individual teams or players are when compared to the average team or player in their country? Probably not that precise or even accurate, ya' think?

"If you are one of the millions of people who think teachers make just as much as people working in other comparable professions, you'd better think again."

"Arthur H. Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., suggests a new way to make progress in education policy - through engineering design thinking. "

Last week the New York Times provided valuable, disturbing information by reporting recent research on the growing educational achievement gap between rich and poor students, which has grown substantially over the past few decades, even while the achievement gap between black and white students has narrowed. As the author of one study put it, "family income appears more determinative of educational success than race." Yet, as is often true of the Times, what it gives with one hand, it takes with the other. For example, as the media watchdog group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has long documented, while the paper of record frequently provides factual information about events, its interpretation of the facts buttresses against drawing the "wrong" conclusions about political-economic power relationships.