The Ultimate $uperpower • Supersized Dollars Drive Waiting for ‘Superman’ Agenda

"Education’s role in strengthening our democratic institutions is a long-standing tradition in this country; it isn’t a mistake that the right to a free public education is enshrined in every state constitution in the country. Yet many charter school promoters don’t feel the need to make even a rhetorical nod toward democratic concerns.

As educational historian Diane Ravitch notes, the corporate-based reform agenda undermines community and democracy and is subject “to the whim of entrepreneurs and financiers.” The obsession with schools as a business, she notes, “threatens to destroy public education.”"


Continue Reading:
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/25_02/25_02_miner.shtml

Superhero School Reform Heading Your Way • Now Playing in Newark, NJ

"Additional clues about where this policy train is headed come from Andy Smarick, one of Christie’s newly installed assistant education commissioners. Smarick is a former George W. Bush education official who served as a policy analyst for the American Enterprise and Fordham institutes, where he proposed replacing “failing schools” and districts with market-based reforms inspired by the corporate world. He came to New Jersey because, he said, “I’m especially excited to get to lend a hand to the effort to improve Newark’s schools. The city has a set of superb charter organizations, a remarkably strong nonprofit support infrastructure, and a hard-charging mayor.”

Smarick’s signature ideas are that investing in low-performing schools is a “waste of human capital” and that charters are “the wave of the future.” He has written that “our relentless preoccupation with improving the worst schools actually inhibits the development of a healthy urban public education industry.” Key to developing this “industry” is the rapid expansion of charter schools and government subsidies for private and religious schools. To clear the way for innovation, Smarick says schools that do not meet the test scores targets in the federal No Child Left Behind law should be given “only one option . . . closure.”

Smarick does not see charters as a vehicle for improving existing schools and districts or even a compatible coexisting sector. “Chartering’s potential extends far beyond the role of stepchild or assistant to districts,” he says. “The only course that is sustainable, for both chartering and urban education, embraces a third, more expansive view of the movement’s future: Replace the district-based system in America’s large cities with fluid, self-improving systems of charter schools. The system is the issue. The solution isn’t an improved traditional district; it’s an entirely different delivery system for public education: systems of chartered schools.”"

Research-Based Reasons Why High-Stakes Tests Should Not Be Used to Evaluate Teachers

"One would think that all of the policy makers, politicians, pundits, superintendents, talk show hosts, documentary movie makers, business leaders, and philanthropic foundations so in love with the idea of using test score data to evaluate teachers would be equally as passionate about accuracy. People’s lives are at stake, and yet the “data” underlying important decisions about teacher performance couldn’t be shakier.

The shakiness of test-based VAM data illustrates that the current fight over teacher “accountability” isn’t really about effectiveness. The more substantial public conversation we should be having about rising poverty, the racial resegregation of our schools, increasing unemployment, lack of health care, and the steady defunding of the public sector—all factors that have an overwhelming impact on students’ educational achievement—has been buried. Instead, teachers and their unions have become convenient scapegoats for our social, educational, and economic woes.

Yes, teachers’ performance needs to be evaluated, but in a manner that is fair and accurate. Using high-stakes standardized tests and VAM to make such evaluations is neither."

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http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/25_02/25_02_au.shtml

How Much Is A Good Teacher Worth?

In this NPR podcast, they consider a plan to dramatically grow the U.S. economy. The plan has nothing to do with banks, stimulus, tax cuts or the Federal Reserve. Instead, the plan focuses entirely on — public school teachers.

Economist Eric Hanushek has been researching education and the economy for four decades. In a recent study, he tried to put a monetary value on good teaching.

Hanushek says a good teacher's contribution to the economy could be as much as a half a million dollars per year.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/01/25/133215055/the-tuesday-podcast-how-much-is-a-good-teacher-worth

The Meaning of Overpaid

"Teachers, as a class, can't be underpaid, because the salaries they earn were ipso facto adequate to attract them to do the job. You're defining the issue of the social value of the work out of the question. For instance, in December, as Planet Money reported, economist Eric Hanushek published  a paper for the NBER finding that:

'A teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates marginal gains of over $400,000 in present value of student future earnings with a class size of 20 and proportionately higher with larger class sizes.'

From society's point of view, one might conclude that teachers are seriously underpaid."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/02/economic_morality

Florida is Moving to Merit Pay

"There are no reliable ways yet to evaluate teachers consistently, outside of testing, which does not necessarily capture a teacher’s worth. In addition, they say, the shift to yearly contracts will lead to hiring teachers on the cheap and will do little to attract the best candidates."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/education/09florida.html?src=recg

Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie

"...You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.

...According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.

...That’s not the only problem Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile has caused. If the mayor and governor have their way, and layoffs are no longer based on seniority but instead are based on the city’s formulas that scientifically identify good teachers, Ms. Isaacson is pretty sure she’d be cooked.

She may leave anyway. She is 33 and had a successful career in advertising and finance before taking the teaching job, at half the pay.

...Moreover, as the city indicates on the data reports, there is a large margin of error. So Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile could actually be as low as zero or as high as the 52nd percentile — a score that could have earned her tenure."

Read the Full Article:
 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/education/07winerip.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1