New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last week that if it were up to him, he’d double class size and fire the 50 percent of teachers who are in the bottom half of effectiveness ratings:  “doubl[ing] the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students.” Bloomberg, in his inimitable way, breezily [...]

The 2011 results are out on the Nation’s Report Card—also known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—and the headlines emphasize the stability in student performance over the past few years in reading and math across the 50 states and Washington, D.C. To be sure, more states posted gains than losses, and a few [...]

“Poverty isn’t destiny,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is fond of saying. Taken literally, it’s a ridiculous statement. If “destiny” is defined as an inevitable or predetermined end state, it only takes one instance of someone escaping poverty to refute the claim that poverty is destiny. Race isn’t destiny, either; but that’s little consolation for [...]

I’m beginning to think that the District of Columbia isn’t that serious about evaluating its teachers. Sure, D.C. has its vaunted IMPACT evaluation system that combines value-added measures of teachers’ contributions to their students’ mastery of reading and mathematics with observations of teachers’ practices inside and outside the classroom. And DCPS has used IMPACT to [...]

What do the Atlanta test-score scandal and the British tabloid phone-hacking scandal have in common? Both cases are widely publicized instances of wrongdoing, appearing to emanate from the top of the organization, and pressing downward. We know that some individuals were involved in the transgressions, but not others. Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that [...]

Two old jokes about doctors and medical school: Joke #1:  50 percent of all doctors finish in the bottom half of their medical school class. Joke #2:  Q: What do you call the person who finishes last in his or her medical school class?  A:  “Doctor.” Why do we laugh at these jokes? (At least, [...]

Here’s what you need to know about Waiting for “Superman.” It’s not a film—it’s a propaganda campaign. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The term “propaganda” has gotten a bad rap, ever since its association with 20th-century totalitarian governments promoting troubling political objectives. But there is a long and honorable tradition of propaganda in the genre [...]

My post last week on the recent firing of 241 teachers in the D.C. public schools elicited some strong reactions. I had argued that school districts such as those in D.C. and New York City, which are using “value-added” measures for high-stakes personnel decisions (like deciding which teachers to grant tenure, lay off or fire), have an obligation to make the technical features of these measures available for public scrutiny.