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"If the mayor's proposed budget goes through and the promised 4,000 New York City teachers are laid off (costing the city 6,000 jobs, with attrition), P.S. 41, in the heart of Greenwich Village, will lose 12 teachers. That is more than the number of teachers now teaching the school's fourth and fifth grades. "

Yesterday, the state finally released school test scores; for NYC schools they are posted here.   Individual student test scores will only be made available August 17 - through the ARIS system, for which you will need your child's OSIS number.  Although the city showed gains of a few percentage points, the results were nothing to write home about: only 43.9 percent of city students in grades 3-8 met the standards in reading and 57.3 percent in math.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about our schools' "secret success." Simply stated, poor and minority students are achieving at dramatically higher levels today than they were two decades ago-in some cases two or three grade levels higher. And while we can't be sure what led to this academic acceleration, test-based accountability was probably the most important factor. Or so I argued.

Coherence is the core principle underlying standards-based educational reforms. Assessments aligned with content standards are designed to guide instruction and raise achievement. The authors investigate the coherence of standards-based reform's key instruments using the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum. Analyzing 138 standards-assessment pairs spread across grades and the three No Child Left Behind tested subjects, the authors find that roughly half of standards content is tested on the corresponding test and roughly half of test content corresponds to the standards. A moderate proportion of test content is at the wrong level of cognitive demand as compared to the corresponding standards, and vice versa. Between 17% and 27% of content on a typical test covers topics not mentioned in the corresponding standards. Policy and research implications are discussed.

By estimating differences in long-run education and labor market outcomes for cohorts of students exposed to differing state-level primary school retention rates, this article estimates the effects of retention on all students in a cohort, retained and promoted. We find that a 1 standard deviation increase in early grade retention is associated with a 0.7 percent increase in mean male hourly wages. Further, the observed positive wage effect is not limited to the lower tail of the wage distribution but appears to persist throughout the distribution. Though there is an extensive literature attempting to estimate the effect of retention on the retained, this analysis offers what may be the first estimates of average long-run impacts of retention on all students.

As New York City, where I live and teach, works to shut down more and more schools, I just discovered a truly bizarre use of this kind of 'value-added' process which factors highly into the annual school report card grade which, in turn, factors highly into the decision to shut down schools.

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.   

According to data recently released by the city, students graduating from the high schools created under Bloomberg are less prepared for college than the students in older schools with similar populations. In fact, on average, older schools outperform newer ones by 40%. Even though students in newer schools are less prepared for college, they are being awarded classroom credits more quickly. Credit accumulation matters for Bloomberg's high-stakes accountability formulas. College-readiness does not.

After years of work and more than $250 million in federal support, nearly all states and many districts have established longitudinal student data systems for accountability, yet many of those systems, even within the same state, still can't talk to each other, nor easily provide data to answer daily instructional questions from educators and policymakers. The Austin, Texas-based Michael and Susan Dell Foundation is hoping its new Ed-Fi data standard, released this morning, will allow educators and researchers to access information on kindergarten through 12th grade from state and local systems even before the systems have been aligned.

Because The Academy made high academic growth on the ABCs of Public Education last year and met federal standards for Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the school received a new charter from the N.C. State Board of Education this summer. The Academy had to meet this condition or demonstrate at least 70 percent of its students performing at proficiency on end-of-grade tests to renew its charter, according to a settlement that the school reached with the state last summer.

Math teacher Antoine Joseph already had been thinking of leaving Miami Norland Senior High School, so when its annual grade from the state dropped from a D to an F nine years ago that just solidified his decision.

Teacher-coaching linked to a well-known teaching framework paid dividends for student achievement in the secondary grades, according to a study published today in Science magazine. In all, the study found a 0.22 standard deviation increase in the scores of students taught by teachers who received a special form of teacher-coaching-roughly the equivalent of an increase from the 50th to the 59th percentile-relative to the students taught by teachers in a control group.

Federal and state laws hold schools accountable for the achievement of all students, including those who have disabilities such as Mattox. In South Carolina, that means all third- through eighth-grade students must take the state Palmetto Assessment of State Standards. Few exceptions are permitted, and Sarah Johnson, Mattox's mother, believed it would hurt her son to take an exam for which he was unprepared. School officials said that would violate state and federal laws, but Johnson refused to do what she said amounted to putting the law before her son.

Annual allegations of test-tampering and grade-changing by educators have more than tripled since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of New York City's school system, outpacing a broader increase in complaints of adult misconduct in schools during the same period, according to the special commissioner of investigation.

With a daughter entering the seventh grade, Noemi Gonsalez dreams of her child's college years. She said her best hope is with a proposed mayoral academy for Providence and Cranston students.

Despite a strong body of research on the value of internal strengths, we continue to measure kids using standardized, quantitative tests. Why? Because skills like critical thinking, curiosity, and collaboration are much more difficult to measure quantitatively across large populations. So we tend to measure what can most easily be measured - reading, math, and science knowledge.

Uniform use in public schools is rising, but we know little about how they affect students. Using a unique dataset from a large urban school district in the southwest United States, we assess how uniforms affect behavior, achievement and other outcomes. Each school in the district determines adoption independently, providing variation over schools and time. By including student and school fixed-effects we find evidence that uniform adoption improves attendance in secondary grades, while in elementary schools they generate large increases in teacher retention.

PAA co-founder Pamela Grundy has a son in fifth grade in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. So we finally won the Broad Prize. After two stints as a finalist, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools took home this year's prize, which the Charlotte Observer termed "the nation's top award for urban education." CMS leaders celebrated. Our mayor called the prize "a huge shot in the arm." I have mixed feelings.

The goal of our recent report "Incomplete: How Middle-Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade" was to jumpstart a national conversation around the state of middle-class schools. Given the response, it looks like we're off to a good start. We've received a wide range of feedback from educators, policymakers, and thought leaders who share a common purpose-getting our kids ready to succeed in the 21st century. Since a portion of the response has focused on our definition of "middle-class" or our approach to school-by-school data, we wanted to take a moment to tackle some of the issues that have been raised.

It was right there for all to see. Whitney, whining and thinking he knows what is best for boys and girls of color blabbered; On average, poor, minority kids are much more likely to be taught by teachers who: Didn't major or minor in the field they are teaching Are inexperienced Did poorly on SATs and other standardized tests Got poor grades in high school and college Attended noncompetitive colleges In the immortal words of Arte Johnson, verrrry interesting. But shall we break this apart and yet again show and immortalize the ignorance of Whitney? Sure, why not?