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The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as "ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective." Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents. But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: "Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall." What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.

As students across the country stage a national day of action to defend public education, we look at the nation's largest school systems - Chicago and New York City - and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In Chicago, the city's unelected school board voted last week to shut down seven schools and fire all of the teachers at 10 other schools. In New York City, many educators are criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration after the release of the names of 18,000 city teachers, along with a ranking system that claims to quantify each teacher's impact on the reading and math scores of their pupils on statewide tests. "The danger is that if teachers and schools are held accountable just for relatively narrow measures of what it is students are doing in class, that will become what drives the education system," says Columbia University's Aaron Pallas, who studies the efficiency of teacher-evaluation systems. "The effects of school closings in [New York City] is one of the great untold stories today," says Democracy Now! education correspondent Jaisal Noor. "The bedrock of these communities [has been] neighborhood schools and now they're being destroyed." Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union says, "When you have a CEO in charge of a school system as opposed to a superintendent - a real educator - what ends up happening is that they literally have no clue how to run the schools." Lewis recounts a meeting where she says Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told her that, "25 percent of these kids are never going to amount to anything."

The information below comes from Elizabeth Phillips, principal of P.S. 321 in Park Slope, N.Y., about how badly the newly released rankings of New York City public school teachers reflect the reality at her school. Phillips wrote that she is "absolutely sick" about the public release of the Teacher Data Reports (TDR) of some 18,000 teachers based entirely on student standardized test scores. And, she said, the amount of data that is wrong is "staggering." This same information was posted earlier on the New York City Publbic School Parents blog.

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.

In our nation's public schools, March Madness has taken on a whole new meaning. It is test prep time in America. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is fond of saying that we should not teach the test. At the same time, there are huge consequences for schools, teachers and principals that do not raise test scores. The NCLB waivers allow states to eliminate Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the majority of schools, but huge pressure will still be applied to the bottom tier of schools, those with high poverty and large numbers of English learners. And new policies mandated by the NCLB waivers require the inclusion of test scores in teacher and principal evaluations. As the month of March begins, across the country schools are in the midst of the most pressure-packed time of the year. We have just a few short weeks before the tests will be given that determine the fate of our students, our schools, our principals and ourselves. It is test-prep time.

The numbers fell so drastically because, as announced last summer, state officials toughened the standards, paying more attention to grammar and spelling as well as to the factual accuracy of supporting details in essays. But they did not change the scoring system, resulting in a public relations disaster. What to do? They could live with the results - that after 15 years of education reform, three-fourths of Florida children could not write. Or they could scale the results upward after the fact, an embarrassment, but people probably would not be so angry if they had good scores.

The media react with alarm every time the NAEP scores appear because only about one-third or so of students is rated "proficient." This is supposed to be something akin to a national tragedy because presumably almost every child should be "proficient." Remember, under No Child Left Behind, ALL students are supposed to be proficient in reading and math by the year 2014. Since I served on NAGB for seven years, I can explain what the board's "achievement levels" mean. There are four levels. At the top is "advanced." Then comes "proficient." Then "basic." And last, "below basic."

"Rooted in the gospel tradition, the song "We Shall Overcome" became an anthem of the African‑American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and then an assertion of struggle and solidarity worldwide. Solidarity is at the heart of both the song and the phrase "we shall overcome." Given that history, it's both perverse and predictable that Philanthropy magazine titled its spring 2013 cover story "They Shall Overcome." The long article-written by then editor-in-chief Christopher Levenick-profiles five of the wealthiest backers of free-market K-12 public education reform (publicly funded but privately run charter schools, publicly funded vouchers for private schools, evaluating teachers and schools based on students' standardized test scores, closing large numbers of schools based on test scores or to save money, and the like)."

"In this post, teacher Maria Baldassarre-Hopkins describes the process in which she and other educators participated, setting cut scores for the new Common Core tests in New York. She signed a confidentiality agreement, so she is discreet on many questions and issues."

"New scores from standardized tests   aligned with the Common Core State Standards were released earlier this month in New York, and, as expected, the number of students who did well plummeted. This decline was predicted by New York State officials. How did they know? Here to explain in an eye-opening piece is award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, who has for more than a year chronicled on the test-driven reform in her state"

"So I looked carefully at the data and found that these test scores do, in fact, prove there was some lying going on.  But it is not the lie that that Klein and Duncan were talking about.  The lie that these test scores reveal is the one about charter schools being better than public schools."

"Funny, I kept thinking about this famous speech of student leader Mario Savio, who led the Berkeley student protests in the 1960s. And a reader read my mind after reading Liz Rosenberg's post where she explained that she and her partner would not look at their child's test scores. They don't care. They don't matter. They don't care if their child has higher or lower scores than children of the same age in Hong Kong or France. Stop the machine."

"Scores on tests of students' academic achievement are currently widely used in educational accountability systems. This use typically rests on two assumptions: that students' scores are a reasonable measure of educational output, and therefore that holding teachers accountable for them will provide appropriate incentives to improve the performance of teachers and the functioning of schools. This paper explains why neither of this commonsensical assumptions is warranted and argues that over-reliance on achievement tests in accountability systems produces perverse incentives. Better incentives may require that test scores be used along with numerous other measures, many of which are more subjective than test scores are."

"I'm an advocate for charter schooling. Regular readers of RHSU know that this is not because I'm convinced they're the answer to the "achievement gap" or to driving up math and reading scores, but because chartering offers an opportunity to rethink how we go about teaching, learning, and schooling. In that context, I've long been concerned that our rethinking is almost entirely focused on reading and math scores and graduation rates and the result can yield a reflexive, frail conception of schooling. If we're going to reinvent schools, I'd like us to do so in a manner that respects the broad purpose of the schoolhouse, which means paying due attention to the arts, to a rich curriculum, and, perhaps most important of all, to helping students develop as moral individuals and citizens. "

Over the past decade I have served as a mentor teacher to more than a dozen beginning teachers in the challenging schools of Oakland. Most of them have been interns, fresh out of college, with just a few weeks of summer training, and a "bag of tricks" that they were given by their only slightly more experienced trainers. They are trained to focus on the data. Start testing early, and make sure the students understand how important those scores are. Set BIG goals, such as that 80% of your students will score well. Track progress using big graphs on the wall with each student's name or number. Develop reward systems to manage behavior. Step into one of these classrooms, and you will find elaborate systems that are designed to "incent" good behavior, and impose costs on bad. You may even find a whole economy, complete with currency - the "behavior bucks," handed out in $100 bills prepared on the school photocopier.

The school-by-school 2011 DC CAS data released Tuesday tell a more revealing story than the aggregate numbers reported last month. Those figures showed DCPS elementary scores remaining essentially flat, with public charter schools producing modest but notable gains.

As a growing number of states move toward legislation that would institute teacher merit pay, the debate around whether and how to use student test scores in high-stakes staffing decisions has become even more hotly contested. The majority of merit pay initiatives, such as those recently proposed in Ohio and Florida, rely to some extent on value-added estimation, the method of measuring a teacher's impact by tracking student growth on test scores from year to year. We recently exchanged e-mails with Steven Glazerman, a Senior Fellow at the policy research group Mathematica. Glazerman specializes in teacher recruitment, performance management, professional development, and compensation. According to Glazerman, a strong understanding of the constructive uses and limitations of value-added data can prove beneficial for district-level human resources practitioners.

The use of value-added models in education research has expanded rapidly. These models allow researchers to explore how a wide variety of policies and measured school inputs affect the academic performance of students. An important question is whether such effects are sufficiently large to achieve various policy goals. For example, would hiring teachers having stronger academic backgrounds sufficiently increase test scores for traditionally low-performing students to warrant the increased cost of doing so? Judging whether a change in student achievement is important requires some meaningful point of reference. In certain cases a grade-equivalence scale or some other intuitive and policy relevant metric of educational achievement can be used. However, this is not the case with item response theory (IRT) scale-score measures common to the tests usually employed in value-added analyses. In such cases, researchers typically describe the impacts of various interventions in terms of effect sizes, although conveying the intuition of such a measure to policymakers often is a challenge.   

A WBEZ analysis of 2010 test scores showed longer school days and longer school years common at charter schools do not necessarily guarantee better test scores.

"Over the past year or two, roughly 15-20 states have passed or are considering legislation calling for the overhaul of teacher evaluation. The central feature of most of these laws is a mandate to incorporate measures of student test score growth, in most cases specifying a minimum percentage of a teacher's total score that must consist of these estimates."