For 10 months, Carolyn Abbott waited for the other shoe to drop. In April 2011, Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, received some startling news. Her score on the Teacher Data Report, the New York City Department of [...]

(The fable below will make more sense if you know the following: Last week, New York eighth-graders taking the state’s English Language Arts assessment were subjected to six exam questions based on a bizarre and incomprehensible passage featuring a talking pineapple. State Education Commissioner John King Jr. defended the passage, but said that these questions [...]

What can one say about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s leadership of the New York City public schools that hasn’t been said before? After nearly a decade of mayoral control, the Bloomberg regime is the status quo. Through most of that time, Bloomberg has justified mayoral control as a mechanism for focusing accountability for the achievement of [...]

Each fall, thousands of runners descend on the Big Apple to run the New York City marathon. They’ve trained hard all year, and give their all on the course. Long after the elite runners have finished, they stream across the finish line in clumps, exhausted at the end of their 26.2-mile journey. In the middle [...]

The word rigor comes up a lot in teacher-evaluation systems. It’s akin to motherhood, apple pie and the American flag. What policymaker is going to take a stand against rigor? But the term is getting distorted almost beyond recognition. In science, a rigorous study is one in which the scientific claims are supported by the [...]

I’ve been relatively quiet in the ongoing debate about how best to evaluate teachers in New York City and across New York State. I’m not close to the negotiations and can claim no expertise on the political machinations outside of public view. At its heart, this seems to me a dispute over jurisdiction: Who has [...]

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.

We live in an age of accountability and transparency – and yet some school districts seem not to be playing by the rules. I recently wrote about the lack of accountability in the way districts report how they calculate teacher “value-added” measures that are used for medium-stakes and high-stakes personnel decisions (such as granting teachers tenure or firing them).

Last Friday, Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, announced the firing of 165 teachers, based on their performance on IMPACT, the District’s spanking-new performance assessment system. IMPACT has several components, depending on a teacher’s classroom assignment. All teachers are evaluated according to a Teaching and Learning Framework, and there are other [...]