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When Shania started third grade at P.S. 148 last fall, she was thrilled to be back at the Queens public school. An outgoing eight-year-old, she said she was happy to be among her friends again, and she had loved her class the previous year. Her second-grade teacher would take the time to explain tricky topics like addition and subtraction one-on-one. She had even been named "student of the month." But since 2007, as the economy has tanked and expenses for public schools have risen, New York City has made principals cut budgets by 13.7 percent. When budgets are cut, teachers are fired and others aren't replaced -- including at P.S. 148, which has lost at least $600,000 and eight teachers since 2010. When teachers are lost, class sizes balloon. Shania had 31 classmates this past school year, compared to 20 the year before.

"Experienced principal Carol Burris describes how she evaluates teachers at South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York."

Shortly before Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported that criminal charges have been filed against 20 students in an affluent New York suburb for allegedly cheating on the SAT. Some are accused of paying stand-ins up to $3,500 per test to take the exam for them; others accepted payment to take the test. Bernard Kaplan, the principal of Great Neck North High School, which five of the accused students attended, suggested that the experience of his community is the tip of an iceberg. "I think it's widespread across the country," he told The Times. "We were the school that stood up to it." We have every reason to believe he's right. While criminal authorities and the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, investigate, parents and educators should ask: What have we done to lead teens to such an act of desperation?

New York's chief testing and data guru has been forced out after prematurely releasing details of the state's plans to lengthen tests in grades 3 to 8, sources told The Post. David Abrams, the longtime assistant commissioner in the Office of Standards, Assessment and Reporting, resigned just days after sending a memo to principals across the state announcing that annual reading tests would nearly double in length - topping four hours in each grade. Math tests would take roughly three hours over two testing days. The proposal to lengthen the exams, including for kids as young as 8, immediately raised hackles among parents and educators who already feel that kids are over-tested in public schools.

The Obama administration's decision to allow states to request waivers from No Child Left Behind was a step in the right direction, but only a baby step. Four in five schools across the country will be deemed "failing" this coming year if nothing stops the "train wreck" that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will inflict upon the nation's schools. These include schools in which the vast majority of students are proficient in math and English, as well as schools in which students, teachers, and principals are making real progress in the face of formidable challenges: concentrated poverty, large numbers of students with special-needs, and state budget cuts that have severely reduced the resources needed to address the obstacles to learning.

When the Palm Beach Post endorsed Chuck E. Shaw for the Palm Beach County School Board's district 2 seat, they praised the ex-JFK Medical Center Charter School principal for "how well he knows the school district." Shaw knows where the dinero is, too, and he found it with Frank Biden, the VP's younger brother, and Mavericks in Education Florida, a for-profit company fanatic about constructing hundreds of new charter schools.

Faced with mounting policy pressures from federal and state accountability programs, school leaders are reallocating curricula, time, even diet in an attempt to boost student achievement. To explore whether they are using test score data to reallocate their teacher resources as well, I designed a cross-case, cross-sectional study and explored principals' reported staffing practices in one higher performing and one lower performing elementary school in each of five Florida school districts. Findings show that school leaders are "staffing to the test" by hiring, moving, and developing teachers in an effort to increase their schools' overall performance. The paper discusses the implications of evidence-based staffing for policy, practice and future research.

Embattled faculty members at Bronx High School of Science are rejoicing after a state judge ruled to erase an unsatisfactory rating from a former teacher's record. In a decision last Wednesday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Paul Feinman granted a petition to overturn a "U"-rating for Peter Lamphere, which he received from principal Valerie Reidy during the 2008-09 school year.

In the last decade, we have emerged from the Education Stone Age. No longer must we rely on primitive tools like teachers and principals to assess children's academic progress. Thanks to the best education minds in Washington, Albany and Lower Manhattan, we now have finely calibrated state tests aligned with the highest academic standards. What follows is a look back at New York's long march to a new age of accountability.

The U.S. Education Department is offering the waivers to states that adopt an "index" system of multiple measures that go beyond annual test results in determining school performance. These include test score growth over time, graduation rates and other evidence that schools have produced students who are college- or career-ready. States also must show plans for evaluating teachers and principals by multiple measures.

Education is a long way from the perfect pure market of rational consumers that we all learned about in Econ 101. When it comes to choice in education, there are issues of information asymmetries, principal-agent problems, and high transaction costs that make this something other than a perfectly competitive market. Not to mention that education, like health care, carries a deep emotional weight that leads consumers (even super-smart ones) to make decisions based on emotions as well as reason. Not to mention that parents in historically underserved communities have been given only very poor options for so long that they may not even fully grasp what a truly high-quality educational experience for their children can and should look like.

Each day this week I have presented a response to different parts of Governor McDonnell's "Opportunity to Learn" education agenda. On Monday, I gave an introduction and talked about the goal of advancing literacy in the early grades. On Tuesday, I wrote about implications for repealing the unpopular Kings Dominion Law. On Wednesday, I talked about proceeding thoughtfully and carefully with expanding choice in the Commonwealth. On Thursday, I discussed evaluating principals and teachers. This concluding post brings me to the end and back to the place where I started in the first post of this series: Money.

Last week, New York State's education commissioner, John B. King Jr., used perhaps the only leverage he has to compel school districts and their unions to agree on the parameters of an evaluation system for teachers and principals assigned to struggling schools: He shut off the federal grants that were meant to improve them. On Monday, as Dr. King sat on a Board of Regents meeting inside the Education Department offices here, just across from the state's Capitol, protesters convened on the steps outside to decry his decision. The gathering was noticeable not because of its size - there were perhaps 20 people attending - but because it brought together two sides whose disagreements presumably were to blame for the grants' suspension: school officials and teachers' union representatives.

The mainstream media has contributed heavily to the rampant public confusion over the teacher evaluation debate in recent weeks.  Most recently, on Sunday the NY Times featured two superficial accounts of this issue.    The first, by Nick Kristof, told a familiar if touching story about an Arkansas school librarian named Mildred Grady, who bought  some books by a favored author and slipped them onto the shelves to appeal to one particular at-risk student who later became a judge--to prove the  notion that good teachers can change lives.  This story was apparently first told in a Story Corps 2009 piece on NPR radio. Kristof concludes that this example reveals how "we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers."    Not so fast.  The so-called "rigorous" system currently being promoted by the state and the mayor would base  teacher evaluation largely on unreliable test scores, combined with the opinion of a principal only, without any assurances that the sort of librarian described in this story would ever be recognized as "effective" and indeed could be "weeded-out" herself - as many librarians have already, due to recent budget cuts.

The general Finnish educational method is a Dewey-esque learning-then-doing approach, theory then practice model. Teachers are highly professional and professionalized. You need a Master's degree to teach at a higher level than kindergarten. There is great respect for teacher judgment as well as respect and decent wages for teachers as the best people to determine what metrics best account for learning success. They work with principals at coming up with the best ways to determine how to measure success, engage kids and communities, and how to both keep national norms and address local conditions. In immigrant communities, kids are taught all subjects in their first language (including Finnish instruction).

In his State of the State address today, Jerry Brown continues to lead education in a direction that is different from that taken by most of the nation's governors. Like few other leaders, he seems to recognize the flaws in our over-reliance on tests, and the need to shift power back to those in closest contact with our students.

Among the topics are expanding the New Orleans voucher program statewide to funnel state tax dollars to private schools, revising teacher tenure and granting school superintendents and principals hiring and firing authority that now is held by school boards. The plan also alters teacher tenure, making it easier to dismiss teachers not performing well in classrooms

Drawing on a statewide study of Florida middle-school reading coaches, this article examines what constitutes, contributes to, and is associated with high-quality coaches and coaching. Authors find that coaches generally held many of the qualifications recommended by state and national experts and principals and teachers rated their coaches highly on many indicators of quality. However, several common concerns about recruiting, retaining, and supporting high-quality coaches emerged. Estimates from models indicate that a few indicators of coach experience, knowledge, and skills had significant associations with perceived improvements in teaching and higher student achievement, although the magnitude of the latter relationship was quite small. Findings suggest that although possessing strong reading knowledge and instructional expertise may be important for coaching, it may not be sufficient.

South Side High School in Rockville Centre pushed inclusion a step further this school year, requiring all 11th-graders to take the toughest literature course offered -- no matter what their academic standing. Principal Carol Burris said school officials want to elevate standards for everyone, so they're offering only one English class: International Baccalaureate Language and Literature, Higher Level. "The best curriculum you have should be the curriculum for everyone," she said.

In education, teacher evaluations are supposed to gauge what is and isn't working in teachers' practice, and provide feedback to ensure teachers are at the top of their game. Even though administrators have always had this responsibility, teacher evaluations have rarely met that standard. They often are little more than quick snapshots, taken by a principal sitting in the back of the classroom with a checklist once a year. Yet these snapshots-"drive-by evaluations" as they are known-frequently serve as the basis for decisions to keep or dismiss teachers. More recently, so-called reformers have pushed to replace that inadequate snapshot with another kind-once-a-year standardized student test scores in math or English-even though such tests are not designed to evaluate teachers and the majority of educators teach subjects not currently assessed by standardized tests.  Neither of these limited approaches makes any sense-for neither one does anything to improve teacher practice or increase student learning. And after all, isn't that the point?