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We sorely need a smarter, more coherent vision of the federal role in K-12 education. Yet both parties find themselves hemmed in. Republicans are stuck debating whether, rather than how, the federal government ought to be involved in education, while Democrats are squeezed between superintendents, school boards and teachers' unions that want money with no strings, and activists with little patience for concerns about federal overreach. When it comes to education policy, the two of us represent different schools of thought. One of us, Linda Darling-Hammond, is an education school professor who advised the Obama administration's transition team; the other, Rick Hess, has been a critic of school districts and schools of education. We disagree on much, including big issues like merit pay for teachers and the best strategies for school choice. We agree, though, on what the federal government can do well. It should not micromanage schools, but should focus on the four functions it alone can perform.

On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-October, between 40 and 50 Cedarburg School District educators sat in a small auditorium to hear about plans that could change the way they earn an income. Instead of pay raises awarded on the basis of education credits and years of experience-long a hallmark of teachers union salary structures-Superintendent Daryl Herrick said the district wanted to distribute annual bonuses to teachers based on the quality of their work. Educators' ranking on Cedarburg's 6-year-old, multipronged performance evaluation system would determine the size of their bonuses.

The role of poverty in shaping educational outcomes is one of the most common debates going on today. It can also be one of the most shallow. The debate tends to focus on income. For example (and I'm generalizing a bit here), one "side" argues that income and test scores are strongly correlated; the other "side" points to the fact that many low-income students do very well and cautions against making excuses for schools' failure to help poor kids. Both arguments have merit, but it bears quickly mentioning that the focus on the relationship between income and achievement is a rather crude conceptualization of the importance of family background (and non-schooling factors in general) for education outcomes.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, directly confronting leaders of the teachers' union, proposed on Thursday a merit-pay system that would award top performers with $20,000 raises and threatened to remove as many as half of those working in dozens of struggling schools.

There is huge pressure from all sides - the federal government, Governor Cuomo, and Mayor Bloomberg - on the UFT, the NYC teachers union, to agree to a test-based teacher evaluation and compensation system in NYC. Similar pressures are being exerted on teachers throughout the US, as a result of "Race to the Top" and the corporate reform agenda being promoted by the Gates Foundation and the other members of the Billionaire Boys Club.  In his State of the City address, Bloomberg also proposed that teachers rated highly through such a system should  get a salary increase of $20,000 a year.  Merit pay has been tried in many cities, including NYC, and has never worked to improve student outcomes.  When challenged about the evidence for such a policy, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson tweeted a link to a recent NY Times puff piece about DC's Impact system, in which a couple of teachers who had received bonuses after being rated "highly effective" were interviewed as saying that this extra pay might persuade them to stay teaching longer.    Stephanie Black is a former teacher in Washington DC.  In both 2010 and 2011 she was rated "effective" by the DCPS evaluation system.  She is now living in Chicago where she tutors math and coaches in an after school program.  Here is her story.

Much like the brief torrential rain which drenched New Yorkers on Thursday morning, Mayor Bloomberg's Thursday afternoon State of the City Address received a deluge of media attention. Today, the print and electronic media feature talk of his jeremiad against the UFT, of his attempted resurrection of 'market reforms' such as merit pay which have been discredited even in 'reform' circles, as study after study has shown them ineffective, and of his claims that he will introduce a new evaluation system by fiat. Tellingly, nowhere will you read an account of what the Mayor's proposed imposition of closure under the Turn-Around model would mean for the PLA schools, were he to be successful in implementing it. Consider what is happening to just a few of the PLA schools. Note that we use here the performance data that, the DoE insists, informs their decisions on the future of schools.

A scholar who studies and blogs about education finance says improving the state's urban schools will take more money - and that merit pay is not likely to help. Bruce Baker, an associate professor at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education, spoke with The Associated Press for an occasional series of interviews on public education reform in New Jersey.

Kristof buries the fact that the study is based on value-added methodology and conflates student performance on test scores with good teaching. He alludes to value-added in the 11th paragraph, but never actually addresses the fact that test scores and value added analysis aren't infallible. The study authors (and this piece shouldn't detract from the worth and value of the study, which merits a read) are clear on this, even though Kristof is not.

For the past couple of months, Steve Brill's new book has served to step up the eternally-beneath-the-surface hypothesis that teachers' unions are the primary obstacle to improving educational outcomes in the U.S. The general idea is that unions block "needed reforms," such as merit pay and other forms of test-based accountability for teachers, and that they "protect bad teachers" from being fired. Teachers' unions are a convenient target. For one thing, a significant proportion of Americans aren't crazy about unions of any type. Moreover, portraying unions as the villain in the education reform drama facilitates the (mostly false) distinction between teachers and the organizations that represent them - put simply, "love teachers, hate their unions." Under the auspices of this dichotomy, people can advocate for changes , such as teacher-level personnel policies based partially on testing results, without having to address why most teachers oppose them (a badly needed conversation).

There is some controversy over the fact that Florida's recently-announced value-added model (one of a class often called "covariate adjustment models"), which will be used to determine merit pay bonuses and other high-stakes decisions, doesn't include a direct measure of poverty. Personally, I support adding a direct income proxy to these models, if for no other reason than to avoid this type of debate (and to facilitate the disaggregation of results for instructional purposes). It does bear pointing out, however, that the measure that's almost always used as a proxy for income/poverty - students' eligibility for free/reduced-price lunch - is terrible as a poverty (or income) gauge. It tells you only whether a student's family has earnings below (or above) a given threshold (usually 185 percent of the poverty line), and this masks most of the variation among both eligible and non-eligible students. For example, families with incomes of $5,000 and $20,000 might both be coded as eligible, while families earning $40,000 and $400,000 are both coded as not eligible. A lot of hugely important information gets ignored this way, especially when the vast majority of students are (or are not) eligible, as is the case in many schools and districts. That said, it's not quite accurate to assert that Florida and similar models "don't control for poverty." The model may not include a direct income measure, but it does control for prior achievement (a student's test score in the previous year[s]). And a student's test score is probably a better proxy for income than whether or not they're eligible for free/reduced-price lunch.

John P. Reilly, KIPP Tech Valley Charter School board chairman, in his commentary ("A truce in the city school wars," Feb. 21) suggests that the Albany School District be viewed as a "portfolio" district with district-operated and charter schools being treated more equally. This idea is without merit, as it ignores the substantial differences between public and charter schools. Charter schools are privately run and may exercise discretion regarding the children they educate. This makes them more akin to private schools despite their public funding.

As student learning is the primary goal of teaching, it seems like common sense to evaluate teachers based on how much their students gain on state standardized tests. Indeed, many states have adopted this idea in response to federal incentives tied to much-needed funding. However, previous experience is not promising. Recently evaluated experiments in Tennessee and New York did not improve achievement when teachers were evaluated and rewarded based on student test scores. In the District of Columbia, contrary to expectations, reading scores on national tests dropped and achievement gaps grew after a new test-based teacher-evaluation system was installed. In Portugal, a study of test-based merit pay attributed score declines to the negative effects of teacher competition, leading to less collaboration and sharing of knowledge. I was once bullish on the idea of using "value-added methods" for assessing teacher effectiveness. I have since realized that these measures, while valuable for large-scale studies, are seriously flawed for evaluating individual teachers, and that rigorous, ongoing assessment by teaching experts serves everyone better. Indeed, reviews by the National Research Council, the RAND Corp., and the Educational Testing Service have all concluded that value-added estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make high-stakes decisions about teachers. Why?

One common strain of modern education reform has a direct, yet familiar logic: An education crisis persists despite more spending, smaller classes, or curricular changes. We have ignored the major cause of student achievement: teacher quality. Seniority and tenure have diluted the pool of talented teachers and impeded student learning. Reformers such as Michelle Rhee have acted on this assumption, implementing test-based accountability measures, merit pay, and lesser job protections. Unfortunately, the current educational reform movement shares its logic with the early-twentieth-century American eugenics movement, which in efforts to improve our gene pool, wrote a horrific chapter in our history. In suggesting this provocative comparison, I hope to guide readers through three shared errors. Both eugenics and modern school reform view education too deterministically, share a faith in standardized tests, and exaggerate the fixedness of traits.

"Almost nothing gets education arguments roiling from reasonable to rancorous like charter schools. Through one lens, charters are "aggressive and entrepreneurial…[and] loosely regulated" institutions that are ultimately a "colossal mistake" undermining traditional public education. Through another, they're transformational places "generating extraordinary academic success with the most disadvantaged children," in sharp contrast to moribund traditional public schools. Easy as it is to fall into one or the other of these positions, each contributes to paralyze discussions of charters' flaws and merits. It would be nice if we could answer the question empirically. That's a perfectly intuitive starting point: how do charters perform vis-à-vis traditional public schools? Unfortunately, national data on charter school performance is mixed at best."

"If the mission of the education system is to serve the economy, and that means maximizing profits, then those profits will be highest if we have an overabundance of college graduates to do the technical work that must be done to keep the machinery of production running. And we have low wage service sector that is unable to raise its wages because they are unorganized and have no political clout. Those who are unemployed are informed over and over again by the school system that they are inadequate because they cannot pass the tests, and therefore to perceive their status as being the result of their own failure to make themselves useful to employers. They are unemployed not because manufacturing has been outsourced to cheap labor overseas, but because they were not "career ready," as proven by their failure to pass the new, much more "rigorous" Common Core aligned tests. Education reform becomes an exercise in rationalizing the shift of half the nation's workers into "surplus" status. It creates a new meritocracy, based on a false paradigm that defines the ability to do well on tests as merit."

"We seem to be setting ourselves up for disaster education. Efforts are underway not only to adopt value-added models to rate the effectiveness of individual teachers, but to use these models to identify those at the very bottom who might later lose their positions and those at the very top who might then be eligible for merit pay. Yet in all the policy discussions and public commentary, there's been little focus on learners and on how, precisely, we define the qualities of a good teacher."

"SAVANNAH: At the summer conference of the Georgia School Boards Association this morning in this port city, noted education researcher Diane Ravitch lambasted most of the reforms du jour in education today, merit pay, value-added teacher evaluations, charter schools, vouchers and testing."

"Follow the money" can be good advice. Knowing who is footing the bill--for a political campaign, policy notion, or advocacy group--doesn't tell you all you need to know; candidates, policies, and organizational platforms need to be judged ultimately on their own merits. But you're right to put on your skeptic's glasses if Walton Family Foundation is sponsoring a conference on elected school boards; if the American Federation of Teachers is funding a study of charter schools; or if Eli Broad is supporting a grassroots group advocating for mayoral control.

Back in April, New York's classy commissioner of education David Steiner discreetly announced that he'd be stepping down in July. This was shortly after Cathie Black's tumultuous departure as NYCDOE Chancellor, so David's announcement drew less attention than it probably merited. A lifelong academic, with a philosophy degree from Oxford and a doctorate in political science from Harvard, Steiner may have been the most erudite state chief in recent memory. Before taking the appointment, he'd previously served as the dean of the education school at Hunter College, where he oversaw the creation of the heralded Teacher U training program. (Back in February, Teacher U split off into its own degree-granting institution, Relay School of Education, designed to train current teachers in 10 U.S. cities.) During his two years as commissioner, Steiner helped New York develop tougher standards and guided the state to a successful Race to the Top round two victory. As he returns to Hunter, I thought it timely to chat with David about a few of his takeaways and lessons learned from his time running the New York state education agency. This is a topic that's been particularly on mind, given our just-issued Center for American Progress-AEI study on the challenges of SEAs and what it'll take for them to succeed in an era of increasing responsibilities.