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In today's New York Times there was a story about a research study which supposedly proved that students who had teachers with good value-added scores were more successful in life. This inspired me to complete something I have been working on for several months, off-and-on, a detailed analysis of the raw data supplied in the most quoted value-added study there is, a paper written in Dallas in 1997. This is the paper which 'proved' that students who had three effective teachers in a row got dramatically higher test scores than their unlucky peers who had three ineffective teachers in a row.  I've written about it previously much less formally here and here. The New York Times story frustrated me since I know that value-added does not correlate with future student income. Value-added does not correlate with teacher quality. Value-added doesn't correlate with principal evaluations. It doesn't correlate with anything including, as I'll demonstrate in this post, with itself.

Being a teacher can be difficult: low pay, long hours, and the many challenges students bring into the classroom. If our teachers are going to be effective educators, we need to do a better job of keeping them happy. But what would teachers like to change to make their work life better? These are some of their responses.

Teacher evaluation--with all its multiple facets, blind alleys, disputed data models, technocratic hype and roll-out problems-- is on every principal's mind these days. It would be great to think that principals in states with new evaluation plans are eager to begin this work, now having permission to sink more deeply into their roles as instructional guides, to have productive two-way professional conversations with their Teachers, thinking together about improving instruction to reach specific goals. But no. They're worried about another time suck and avalanche of paperwork on top of an already-ridiculous workload. And--you can't blame them. Being a good principal, like being a good Teacher, is impossible. There is no way one single human being can cover all the bases, from keeping the buses running on time to staying abreast of the new math curriculum in grades K through 6. Besides, the new evaluation plans have huge problems embedded, beyond the make-work element.

Tennessee's new teacher evaluation system has hit an unexpected snag. With teacher tenure and job retention riding on a top score, Williamson County is banning student teachers from working in core subjects in high school and suggesting individual principals not allow them in grades 3-8. Even though they're not under formal policies, other principals and teachers statewide who formerly volunteered to take student teachers are backing off, too.

"No one knows who I am," exclaimed a senior in a high-poverty, predominantly minority and low-performing high school in the Austin area. She explained, "I have been at this school four years and had four principals and six algebra I teachers." Elsewhere in Texas, the first school to be closed by the state for low performance was Johnston High School, which was led by 13 principals in the 11 years preceding closure. The school also had a teacher turnover rate greater than 25 percent for almost all of the years and greater than 30 percent for 7 of the years. While the above examples are rather extreme cases, they do underscore two interconnected issues - teacher and principal turnover - that often plague low-performing schools and, in the case of principal turnover, afflict a wide range of schools regardless of performance or school demographics. In recent years, those seeking to improve schooling through efforts to increase teacher effectiveness and build teacher capacity have quickly realized that such efforts rely heavily on principal capacity and stability.

"Yesterday, a variety of edu-Tweeps engaged in a lengthy debate over due process in instances when a teacher is investigated for inappropriate sexual misconduct with students. At issue is a New York legislative proposal that would give administrators the final word in firing teachers in such instances. (The current process depends heavily on arbitrators jointly selected by the teachers' union and the district.) Of course, as this was a Twitter debate, it's only right that we should share some of that thread as it unfolded. So here I present a Storify of the debate, which was primarily between American Federation of teachers President Randi Weingarten and former CNN personality Campbell Brown."

Deborah Gist, Rhode Island's Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, has implemented some major reforms since assuming her role in 2009. She has raised the score required to pass teacher-certification tests and allowed a superintendent to fire all of the teachers at a school that was resisting reforms. Perhaps most notably, she has overseen the implementation of a new teacher-evaluation system. The Hechinger Report recently interviewed Gist about her state's new approach to evaluating teachers.

Steve Ball, executive principal at the East Literature Magnet School in Nashville, arrived at an English class unannounced one day this month and spent 60 minutes taking copious notes as he watched the teacher introduce and explain the concept of irony. "It was a good lesson," Mr. Ball said. But under Tennessee's new teacher-evaluation system, which is similar to systems being adopted around the country, Mr. Ball said he had to give the teacher a one - the lowest rating on a five-point scale - in one of 12 categories: breaking students into groups. Even though Mr. Ball had seen the same teacher, a successful veteran he declined to identify, group students effectively on other occasions, he felt that he had no choice but to follow the strict guidelines of the state's complicated rubric.

The latest serving of data-driven mania from the city Education Department will likely produce screaming headlines about the city's "worst teachers." This virtual wall of shame (and fame) will live online for years to come. But does it actually help parents to find the best schools and teachers? Not really. Here's why. The ratings are based on a complicated formula that compares how much 4th through 8th-grade students have improved on standardized tests compared with how well they were predicted to do. The system tries to take into consideration factors like race, poverty and disabilities. teachers are then graded on a curve. It's known as "value-added," because it tries show how much value an individual teacher has added to a student's test scores. Here are our top five reasons they won't help and why you won't be seeing them on Insideschools. Please add your own, or tell us why you think they will be useful.

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.

The finding -- reported by the Times this weekend -- that really good, and really bad, teachers are evenly distributed around New York City is jaw-dropping news. It upends everything we thought we knew about teacher quality, especially the notion that our achievement gap is caused in large part by a "teacher quality gap," with the worst teachers clustered in the neediest schools. But they aren't. So now what?

In the current discourse on teacher-evaluation systems, however, an evaluation system is deemed rigorous based either on how much of the evaluation rests on direct measures of student-learning outcomes, or the distribution of teachers into the various rating categories, or both. If an evaluation system relies heavily on NCLB-style state standardized tests in reading and mathematics-say, 40 percent of the overall evaluation or more-its proponents are likely to describe it as rigorous. Similarly, if an evaluation system has four performance categories-e.g., ineffective, developing, effective and highly effective-a system that classifies very few teachers as highly effective and many teachers as ineffective may be labeled rigorous. In these instances, the word rigor obscures the subjectivity involved in the final composite rating assigned to teachers.

The key element in the agreement reached between the New York City teachers' union and the city's Education Department last Thursday was given a closer look, as The New York Times and Gotham Schools examined the role to be played by so-called "independent validators" in rating teacher effectiveness. As part of the deal reached between the city Education Department and the United Federation of teachers, independent observers will be brought into New York City's classrooms "to monitor the weakest teachers and provide a second opinion to supplement observations by the school principal," writes Winnie Hu in The Times.

In a post over a year ago, I discussed the common argument that dismissing the "bottom 5-10 percent" of teachers would increase U.S. test scores to the level of high-performing nations. This argument is based on a calculation by economist Eric Hanushek, which suggests that dismissing the lowest-scoring teachers based on their math value-added scores would, over a period of around ten years  (when the first cohort of students would have gone through the schooling system without the "bottom" teachers), increase U.S. math scores dramatically - perhaps to the level of high-performing nations such as Canada or Finland.* This argument is, to say the least, controversial, and it invokes the full spectrum of reactions. In my opinion, it's best seen as a policy-relevant illustration of the wide variation in test-based teacher effects, one that might suggest a potential of a course of action but can't really tell us how it will turn out in practice. To highlight this point, I want to take a look at one issue mentioned in that previous post - that is, how the instability of value-added scores over time (which Hanushek's simulation doesn't address directly) might affect the projected benefits of this type of intervention, and how this is turn might modulate one's view of the huge projected benefits. One (admittedly crude) way to do this is to use the newly-released New York City value-added data, and look at 2010 outcomes for the "bottom 10 percent" of math teachers in 2009.

As a party to the agreement (I was personally at the table throughout the negotiations), NYSUT sought to maintain principles that are good for students and fair to teachers. We believe we succeeded. This agreement creates a thoughtful, collaborative framework that allows teachers, principals and parents to develop a majority of the evaluation measures through conversation and negotiation. It recognizes the complexities involved in teacher evaluation and emphasizes the continual improvement of teaching skills in ways that benefit all children. At a time when poverty and the wealth gap widen the achievement gap, this agreement strives to strengthen public education by building on collaboration to help every child succeed.

Over the past two years of gut-punching, teacher job satisfaction has fallen from 59 percent to 44 percent. That's according to the annual ­ MetLife Survey of the American teacher. While this 15-point plummet is no doubt caused in part by the bad economy and budget cutting, it's also hard to overlook things like Waiting for Superman , the media deification of Michelle Rhee, and the publishing of flawed "scores" that purport to evaluate teachers based on students' test results - an offense first committed by the Los Angeles Times and now taken up by the New York Times and other New York papers. teachers knew these evaluations were unreliable and invalid even before researchers documented those problems.

"Much has been made of late regarding the erroneous classification of 44 teachers in Washington DC as ineffective, thus facing job consequences. This particular erroneous rating was based on an "error" in the calculation of the teachers' total ratings, as acknowledged by the consulting firm applying the ratings. That is, in this case, the consultants simply did not carry out their calculations as intended. This is not to suggest by any stretch that the intended calculations are necessarily more accurate or precise than the unintended error. That is, there certainly may be far more - are likely far more than these 44 teachers whose ratings fall arbitrarily and capriciously in the zone whereby those teachers would face employment consequences. So, how can we tell… how can we identify such teachers."

"The conventional wisdom has always been that schools and students need experienced teachers committed to a career in education. But many charter networks are depending on young, inexperienced teachers who quit after only two to five years. Officials of the schools believe the young teachers remain motivated and energetic, unlike more experienced teachers at many public schools who might stay on even after they've burned out. Are they onto something?"

"The idea that teachers have the summer off is something of a myth. I recently spent a few days with several thousand teachers -- not at the beach, but at TEACH, the AFT's largest gathering of educators focused on their professional practice and growth. teachers spent long days learning from fellow educators and other experts about concrete ways to improve teaching and learning. Many teachers told me how they were spending the rest of their summer: writing curriculum aligned to the new, challenging Common Core State Standards; taking classes, because teachers are lifelong learners; and working with students -- in enrichment camps and in programs to stem summer learning loss. So much for the dog days of August. But our conferees did much more. We also committed to reclaim the promise -- the promise of public education. Not as it is today or as it was in the past, but as what public education can be to fulfill our collective obligation to help all children succeed."

"In American public opinion it almost goes without saying that teachers should be paid more. The public is especially supportive of increasing compensation for accomplished teachers, teachers dedicated to working in hard to staff subjects, and teachers committed to closing the achievement gap."