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If you watch the documentary "Waiting for Superman" or read Steven Brill's "Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools," you will learn that many advocates of school reform think they know how to increase teacher productivity: Rate teachers according to their students' performance on standardized tests and fire those who don't make the grade. But economic theory suggests several reasons why this approach will probably backfire.

There have been many individuals with the qualities of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta born in villages like mine in human history, but they have been "educated," in various rigorous ways, to become anything but Lady Gaga. Out of necessity, societies and families must ensure that their future generations have the ability, knowledge, and skills to live a successful life as workers, parents, and citizens. Thus they must have an education, formal or informal, that focuses on cultivating what meets the needs of the society. For a long period of time in human history, many societies have only needed a very narrow spectrum of human talents on a large scale and a very small pool of special talents. As a result, the dominant education paradigm has been to reduce the vast diverse potentials of human talents, interests, and abilities to what the society deems as useful or employable skills and knowledge.

More highly rated teachers in D.C. Public Schools are accepting performance-based bonuses than in the past, American University Radio WAMU reports. Of the 670 teachers eligible for bonuses, 70 percent accepted -- a 10 percentage point increase over the previous year, in which 60 percent of the 636 eligible teachers took the offer, according to WAMU.

New Haven's new method of grading teachers spurred low performers to improve their game-and led 34 others to leave the school district, officials announced Monday in the first test of a nationally watched component of the city's school reform drive.

This new post from Ed News Colorado is in response to my critique of Student Growth Percentiles here: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/take-your-sgp-and-vamit-damn-it/

Educators make bad prognosticators of the future. There is no shame in that. Politicians, stock-market players, CEOs, and gamblers, people with a lot at stake, routinely fail in their predictive efforts. But when school "reformers" try to reorder education based on "21st-century skills," or what some describe as "teaching tomorrow's skills to today's students," they show not only lack of prescience, but also ignorance of the past.

Here is an edited version of a briefing on the right way to evaluate teachers that Stanford University Professor Linda Darling-Hammond and other leading education research experts gave this week on Capitol Hill to policymakers.

Some people must have been startled by President Obama's decision to draw a line in the sand on collective bargaining in his jobs speech to the Congress last week. Specifically, the President said: "I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy." Given the current anti-union tenor of many prominent Republicans, started by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, it seems pretty clear that worker rights is shaping up to be a hot-button issue in the 2012 campaign. Collective bargaining rights as presidential campaign plank? It wasn't that long ago that anything to do with unions was considered to be an historic anachronism - hardly worth a major Republican presidential candidate's trouble to bash. Times have changed.

Gov. Chris Christie has been touting his plans for education overhaul, including the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. It's the first full week of school, a traditional time for politicians to roll out proposed changes. It's also the week a new book on education, Howard Wainer's "Uneducated Guesses," was released by the Princeton University Press. It raises significant questions about the premise on which much of Christie's crusade is based - using student test scores to evaluate teachers.

Have you noticed there's a lot of hullabaloo about Finland's education system lately? I've been paying attention to what the Finns have been doing for a couple years now,  but it is only recently that I've thought to pay attention to Finland's neighbour Norway. Norway and Finland have some similarities. They are neighbouring countries that each take up about 350 000 square kilometres with populations around 5 million and about 10 percent foreign born. A notable difference, however, is that Norway has a significantly higher Gross Domestic Product.

Educational reforms enacted through federal policies are directly impacting the voice of children, teachers, and teacher educators. The recently introduced bi partisan bill "Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies for Teachers and Principals Act" frames a plan for state accreditation for teacher training academies based on student achievement. The newly introduced Race to the Top (RTT) competition, focused on early childhood, includes motivating states to receive some of the $500 million allotted to create ratings systems to score early childhood programs, write standards and related standardized tests, and expectations of what an early childhood teachers should know. Both the proposed bill and RTT competition are positioned to regulate with market driven ideology, reinforcing and reproducing social injustice and undermining democratic ideals.

One aspect of the education reform debate that persistently gives me pause is the claim that the top students are being short-changed in U.S. public education-specifically due to disproportionate time and money being spent on struggling students. I have attempted to address this argument both seriously and satirically, but each approach has brought primarily defense of those neglected top students.

One of the most important guiding principles in education is in loco parentis - we are morally and legally obliged to act "in place of the parent" when children are in our care.  That principle is the main reason for the sharply negative and visceral reaction I had when I read about John F. Kennedy High School using color-coded identification cards based on student test scores, and then a later article describing a similar program at Cypress High School (both in Orange County, California).  According to the Orange County Register, the different cards also led to different privileges around school, discounts on various purchases, and even led an administrator to insult a group of students in an assembly.  The policy has sparked  debate and quite a bit of criticism online (and in rather short order, the district announced that most of the discriminatory practices would be ended).  Anthony Cody wrote about it in his blog and I left some comments there and on Twitter, and the topic has been actively discussed on Huffington Post as well.

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

This paper is designed to help policymakers and accountability professionals wrestle with the challenges of using student performance information as a component of educator evaluations when yearly state standardized tests are not available.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, prodded by the Washington Teachers' Union, has relaxed teacher evaluation rules so that some veterans who receive two consecutive poor appraisals can keep their jobs.

District of Columbia school officials plan to give significant pay bonuses to hundreds of teachers-and to dismiss more than 200 others-based on their performance as measured by the city's teacher-evaluation system, officials announced Friday.