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Given the challenges facing American public education today, identifying effective teachers is a more vital task than ever before. A wide body of research shows that teachers are the most important school-based factor related to student achievement. Policymakers and taxpayers want to know what factors create effective teachers-not only for the sake of their own children's educations but also because teacher salary and benefits represent the nation's single largest educational expenditure. And school administrators need to identify teachers who will be successful over the long term before those teachers earn the ironclad job protection of tenure.

The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute have put out a report purporting to show that public school teachers are overpaid. It's 23 pages of elaborate statistical justification of right-wing beliefs, all built on a foundation of right-wing assumptions. The basic claims are that while teachers are underpaid relative to other people with similar levels of education, in fact they are overpaid because education programs are easier than other majors and also, teachers are stupid; that public school teachers earn more than private school teachers and this shows they earn more than the market should support; and that people who leave teaching earn less while people who enter teaching earn more, therefore teachers are overpaid.

Although most new teacher evaluations are still in various phases of pre-implementation, it's safe to say that classroom observations and/or value-added (VA) scores will be the most heavily-weighted components toward teachers' final scores, depending on whether teachers are in tested grades and subjects. One gets the general sense that many - perhaps most - teachers strongly prefer the former (observations, especially peer observations) over the latter (VA). One of the most common arguments against VA is that the scores are error-prone and unstable over time - i.e., that they are unreliable. And it's true that the scores fluctuate between years (also see here), with much of this instability due to measurement error, rather than "real" performance changes. On a related note, different model specifications and different tests can yield very different results for the same teacher/class. These findings are very important, and often too casually dismissed by VA supporters, but the issue of reliability is, to varying degrees, endemic to all performance measurement. Actually, many of the standard reliability-based criticisms of value-added could also be leveled against observations. Since we cannot observe "true" teacher performance, it's tough to say which is "better" or "worse," despite the certainty with which both "sides" often present their respective cases. And, the fact that both entail some level of measurement error doesn't by itself speak to whether they should be part of evaluations.*

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet with one of the Department of Education's Teaching Ambassador Fellows to give feedback on a not-yet-public draft of the policy proposal before it is offered to schools. While there was much to like about the proposal, it also contained some poorly conceived ideas that would be ineffective at best, and at worst could further damage the nation's education system. Project RESPECT calls for a three-pronged reform of the teaching profession. It envisions a reorganization of schools that would use technology and aides to put more effective teachers in front of more students, coupled with a longer school day to give teachers more time for professional growth. To find more effective teachers, it calls for an expansion of entry points into the profession, with a higher bar for earning a permanent position. Finally, it calls for increased compensation for career teachers who both stay in the classroom and take on various teacher-leader roles.

This spring, the West Side Highway's typical advertising fare also includes a political message that seems aimed at teachers unions. A billboard advertising Kenneth Cole - the clothing company owned by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's brother-in-law - puns to southbound commuters, "Shouldn't Everyone Be Well Red?" In smaller lettering, the billboard says, "teachers' Rights Vs. Students' Rights …" The second line evokes a tension drawn out repeatedly by some critics of teachers unions, including Cuomo, who say that unions' support for teachers' job protections can stand in the way of students' education. The billboard also invites viewers to visit WhereDoYouStand.com, a website maintained by the city-based company, to weigh in on "Issue in the News." This spring, one of the issues is "Should underperforming teachers be protected?"

Value-added has been getting a lot of media attention lately but, unfortunately, most stories are missing the point.  In Gotham Schools I read about a teacher who got a low score but it was because her score was based on students who were not assigned to her.  In The New York Times I read about three teachers who were rated in the single digits, but it was because they had high performing students and a few of their scores went down.  In The Washington Post I read about a teacher who was fired for getting low value-added on her IMPACT report, but it was because her students had inflated pretest scores because it is possible that the teachers from the year before cheated. Each of these stories makes it sound like there are very fixable flaws in value-added.  Get the student data more accurate, make some kind of curve for teachers of high performing students, get better test security so cheating can't affect the next year's teacher's score.  But the flaws in value-added go WAY beyond that, which is what I've been trying to show in my posts - not just some exceptional scenarios, but how it affects the majority of teachers.

Education reformers have attempted to improve the quality of teachers by changing public policy with questionable initiatives and by insisting, falsely, that educators are to blame for many of the public education system's - and the country's - problems. School reformers - and some of the billionaires who fund their efforts - have ignored research about the factors that go into student achievement and have decided to impose their own "magic formulas" for determining who is a good teacher and who is a bad one. Of course everyone wants all students to have great teachers, and it is important to work towards that goal. It is important, too, to recognize that family structure, poverty, and other outside influences are equally if not more influential in how well a student does in school. The bottom line is that what is being done in the name of school reform is creating a profession where the quality of teachers is decreasing. Let's look at five ways school reform is hurting teacher quality

There's some research that shows charter schools suffer from higher teacher turnover than traditional public schools do. One recent estimate put turnover in charters at 25 percent per year, compared with just 14 percent in traditional public schools. Several explanations have been offered for this attrition. Charter school teachers, for instance, tend to be relatively young, and more susceptible to making quick exits from the profession, some studies suggest. Dissatisfaction with working conditions, and lack of administrative support have also been cited as reasons why charter teachers tend to head for the door. A new paper, based on research as well as a survey of charter school teachers, offers school leaders and charter management organizations advice on how they can keep more charter school teachers in the fold. Released by a Boston nonprofit called Teach Plus, the paper says charter schools can reduce teacher turnover by taking four steps.

How to improve our schools? Let's start with what we know: Teachers are the most important factor in a child's schooling, and many of our Teachers are not very good. But wait a moment. How do we know that? Given the current fascination with education policies that focus on Teachers - typically market-oriented policies such as pink slips for bad Teachers and bonuses for good ones - it would be wise to make certain that Teachers are the problem we think they are.

The Boston Teacher Residency is an innovative practice-based preparation program in which candidates work alongside a mentor Teacher for a year before becoming a Teacher of record in Boston Public Schools. We find that BTR graduates are more racially diverse than other BPS novices, more likely to teach math and science, and more likely to remain teaching in the district through year five. Initially, BTR graduates for whom value-added performance data are available are no more effective at raising student test scores than other novice Teachers in English language arts and less effective in math. The effectiveness of BTR graduates in math improves rapidly over time, however, such that by their fourth and fifth years they out-perform veteran Teachers. Simulations of the program's overall impact through retention and effectiveness suggest that it is likely to improve student achievement in the district only modestly over the long run.

Regarding teachers' unions with a certain distaste, maintaining the belief that they exist to champion inadequacy, is now virtually required for membership in the affluent, competitive classes, no matter an affiliation on the right or left. Over the past two weeks, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have aggressively pushed for phasing in a new, more rigorous teacher evaluation process - with tens of millions of dollars in state and federal aid to schools at stake - they have deployed a rhetoric of enmity, one meant to suggest that the state's teachers' unions are committed to keeping talentless hacks in jobs they can't handle. As the governor put it on Monday, "Our schools are not an employment program." What has been lost in these performances of reproach and imperiousness is the extent to which the city and state, and the related unions (the United Federation of teachers in the first instance and New York State United teachers in the second) are generally in agreement over how classroom evaluations ought to be held and what, in fact, constitutes sound teaching. As it happens, the state union was at work devising substantive evaluation reform more than a year before Mr. Cuomo even took office.

I would also ask you to please stop promoting the myth that unions are abusive and make it impossible to fire bad teachers. Unions only ensure that all teachers have due process to protect them from abusive admin. (And no, I am not saying that admin. is abusive, but just as there are poor teachers out there… there are poor administrators.) It is not the unions job to evaluate teacher performance. But it is the unions job to be be sure that disciplinary action is justified by requiring proper steps to be taken.

During the current tumultuous debate on determining which teachers must be fired for incompetence, the New York City and State teachers' unions are fiercely resisting the insistence of Governor Cuomo (now a self-declared lobbyist for students) and Mayor Bloomberg (always a lobbyist for himself) that a significant measuring base for teacher competence is student test scores. Indeed, the ultimate decider, the boss-State Education Commissioner John King-has decreed, no matter what compromises are achieved, "teachers whose students don't improve on standardized tests are prohibited from receiving good ratings."</> So, there will be no input from students with long-range direct knowledge of their teachers.

American teachers unions are increasingly the target of measures, authored by friends and foes alike, intended to limit their power, or even eviscerate them. Looking at this scene, one would never guess that the countries that are among the top 10 in student performance have some of the strongest teachers unions in the world. Are those unions in some way different from American teachers unions? Do unions elsewhere behave differently from American teachers unions when challenged to do what is necessary to improve student performance? To explore these questions, I compare teachers and their unions in Ontario, Canada and Finland with their U.S. counterparts.

It's not often that you hear teachers should be paid less. In fact, it's almost always the exact opposite. From teachers unions to education reformers to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the refrain that teachers are underpaid is a constant. So, when conservative thinkers at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation issued a paper on Tuesday arguing not only that teachers are overpaid, but when you factor in pensions, health care and other benefits, that total compensation for teachers is 52% higher than fair market value, it was bound to be controversial.

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) has a new, highly-publicized report about what it calls "irreplaceables," a catchy term that is supposed to describe those Teachers who are "so successful they are nearly impossible to replace." The report's primary conclusion is that these "irreplaceable" Teachers often leave the profession voluntarily, and TNTP offers several recommendations for how to improve this. I'm not going to discuss this report fully. It shines a light on Teacher retention, which is a good thing. Its primary purpose is to promulgate the conceptual argument that not all Teacher turnover is created equal - i.e., that it depends on whether "good" or "bad" Teachers are leaving

In part 1 I demonstrated there was little correlation between how a teacher was rated in 2009 to how that same teacher was rated in 2010.  So what can be more crazy than a teacher being rated highly effective one year and then highly ineffective the next?  How about a teacher being rated highly effective and highly ineffective IN THE SAME YEAR. I will show in this post how exactly that happened for hundreds of teachers in 2010.  By looking at the data I noticed that of the 18,000 entries in 2010, about 6,000 were repeated names.  This is because there are two ways that one teacher can get multiple value-added ratings for the same year.

We know that the flawed New York City teacher ratings data that was released last week is broadly unreliable, with a high margin of error and rating teachers not just by how well their students did on tests, but by how well their students did in relation to an algorithm's sometimes unreasonable expectations of how the students would perform. That's information that's widely known and indisputable. Yet the teacher rankings are still being used to publicly vilify low-rated teachers without even a cursory investigation of whether the data's many known flaws may have made a good teacher look bad.

The recent agreement to clarify and refine the New York teacher evaluation law took up an issue that has a special importance for New York City public school educators- the appeals process for ineffective ratings on end-of-the-year summative evaluations. Readers of Edwize know that last December the ship of teacher evaluation negotiations for the 34 Transformation and Restart schools sunk on the rocky shoals of this very issue, when Mayor Bloomberg and the NYC Department of Education refused to negotiate a meaningful and substantive appeals process. For there to be renewed progress on those negotiations, as well as on the negotiations for the evaluations of all New York City public school educators, the issue of the appeal process had to be resolved. The agreement settled the issue of the appeals process for New York City by guaranteeing vital and indispensable due process rights in the teacher evaluation process. With these rights, the educational integrity and fairness of the teacher evaluation process are secure. To understand the importance of the appeals process, and why the agreement secured what New York public school teachers need from due process in such a process, we must first examine the background and context of this issue.

"The 2013 Attack on Teachers included the vicious slow impoverishment of elderly retired Teachers. By attacking the earned delayed compensation (pensions) of active and retired Teachers, the corporate led war against public education hits a terrorist level of ruthlessness. Who wishes to teach if they are assured of having their paychecks cut and plundered by corporate controlled legislators when they become old? Yes, this is The Shock Doctrine applied to Teachers in state after state. Teachers, students, parents, taxpayers and the future of America are victims on the sacrificial altar of Insane Profit."