New Jersey launches pilot teacher evaluation program, equally weighing tests and class success

New Jersey launches a pilot program today that will evaluate teachers at 10 schools by equally weighing a student’s academic and classroom performance, the Huffington Post reports. In a guest column published in the Star-Ledger Thursday, New Jersey acting Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf writes that about half of a teacher’s evaluation will come from student “learning outcomes” like progress on standardized test scores.

“To avoid penalizing teachers who work with our highest-need students, evaluation criteria should be based on student progress and not absolute performance,” Cerf writes…

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Viewpoint: A rational approach to student-teacher ratios

The "Overall Level of Effort" approach might provide a model for traditional schools to follow—and it suggests that one size need not fit all when it comes to student-teacher ratios.

What number of students should each teacher teach? How many is “too many”?

As a lifelong passionate fan of the teaching profession, I used to believe these questions had a pretty simple answer: The fewer the better. Throughout the class-size debates of the past 15 years, which have led to limits in the range of 20 students per teacher in California, Florida, and elsewhere, I was firmly in the “small is beautiful” camp. And while I still believe in the power of personalized instruction at the hands of a teacher with the time to focus on one student at a time, I have come to regard arbitrary student-teacher ratios as a holdover from the Industrial Age of education. Here in the Information Age, we have more precise instruments at our disposal. It turns out that the right answer is: It depends.

This change in my thinking has come about through my involvement since 2001 in online learning for grades K-12. The company I helped launch and still work for, Connections Education, is known for its high-quality, highly successful Connections Academy virtual schools and now also its Connections Learning line of curriculum and instructional services for school districts, state education departments, and other institutions. As the K-12 online and blended learning field has evolved over this past decade, I’ve found that the first misconception my comrades-in-arms and I have to dispel is that “online” means “teacherless.” Nothing could be further from the truth. National standards of quality for online learning from organizations like the International Association for K-12 Online Learning and the Southern Regional Education Board all stress the central importance of expert teachers in ensuring a successful online experience.…Read More

Democratic Michigan state representative resigns to join Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst

Michigan Democratic state Rep. Tim Melton is leaving office and moving to California to join Michelle Rhee’s education reform group StudentsFirst, the Huffington Post reports. Melton is in his third and last term in Michigan’s state House, and told the Detroit Free Press that a new role at StudentsFirst as the group’s national legislative director is “right in my wheelhouse. I’ll be able to continue to work on the things I’m passionate about.”

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Wisconsin teacher retirements double after cuts to benefits and collective bargaining

Superintendents, experts worry about the loss of veteran teacher knowledge.

When students return Thursday for the first day of school across Wisconsin, many familiar faces will be gone, as teachers chose retirement over coming back in the wake of a new law that forces them to pay more for benefits while taking away most of their collective bargaining rights.

Documents obtained by the Associated Press under the state’s open records law show that about twice as many public school teachers decided to hang it up in the first half of this year as in each of the past two full years, part of a mass exit of public employees.

Their departures came before the new law took effect, changes pushed by Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature that led to weeks of protests at the Capitol.…Read More

RheeFirst, Michelle Rhee attack site, defended by teachers union

In the eyes of Steven Brill, the American Federation of Teachers building a website attacking Michelle Rhee and masking its origins is worse than Rhee’s creating a billion-dollar organization aimed at revamping education that doesn’t disclose its backers, reports the Huffington Post. Brill, author of the recent Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, came to the education beat after writing a piece for the New Yorker about the “Rubber Room,” a place where New York City public school teachers were paid to stay out of classrooms…

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Growth scores give schools No Child Left Behind alternative

Orr Middle School Principal George Leavens isn’t surprised that only half his students tested at grade level in math and reading last school year, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. That’s not unusual for an urban school. He cares about the test results. But he places a higher value on a different measure of academic success. His goal for Orr: “I’d like our growth scores to be above every other school in Las Vegas.” When Leavens talks about growth scores, he means the rate at which the school’s students progress compared to other Nevada students…

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‘Principal pipeline’ project targets six major districts

A new initiative will train effective school principals to determine if this boosts student achievement.

Six school districts will receive funding from a $75 million initiative that will help them develop a much larger corps of effective school principals and determine whether this improves student achievement across the districts, especially in the highest-need schools.

Based on 10 years of research, the Wallace Foundation, the nonprofit educational group spearheading the project, has identified four key parts of a “principal pipeline” that can develop and ensure the success of a sufficient number of school principals to meet district needs: rigorous job requirements, high-quality training, selective hiring, and on-the-job evaluation and support.

The six districts, which serve thousands of low-income students, are Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C.; Denver; Gwinnett County, Ga.; Hillsborough County, Fla.; New York City; and Prince George’s County, Md.…Read More

Ind. vouchers prompt thousands to change schools

Under a law signed in May by Gov. Mitch Daniels, more than 3,200 Indiana students are receiving vouchers to attend private schools.

Weeks after Indiana began the nation’s broadest school voucher program, thousands of students have transferred from public to private schools, causing a spike in enrollment at some Catholic institutions that were only recently on the brink of closing for lack of pupils.

It’s a scenario public school advocates have long feared: Students fleeing local districts in large numbers, taking with them vital tax dollars that often end up at parochial schools. Opponents say the practice violates the separation of church and state.

In at least one district, public school principals have been pleading with parents not to move their children.…Read More

NYC ordered to release teacher performance data

A New York state appellate court has ruled New York City must release reports that measure public school teachers’ effect on their student test scores—complete with the teachers’ names, reports the Wall Street Journal. In a blow to the city’s teachers union, the court ruled Thursday that teachers’ names did not fall within six exemptions that protect personal privacy under the law. Media organizations, including the Wall Street Journal, had requested the data; the union sued to prevent its release…

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15 ways more funding could change education

"I would provide buses that would take less fortunate families on group trips on weekends to enhance their child's education and open our students' eyes to a world of opportunity," said one reader.

If money were no object, what would your “dream school” look like—and what it would offer today’s students and teachers?

In the spirit of creativity, we recently asked in our Question of the Week: “If your school/district/state had unlimited education funds, what’s the one change you’d make and why?”

Perhaps surprisingly, given the whimsical nature of the question, many readers responded with practical, down-to-earth, common-sense ideas—which suggests just how strapped for funding many schools really are.…Read More

Opinion: Why great teachers aren’t enough to make schools work

We love to talk about teachers—good teachers, bad teachers. Our entire narrative about schools seems to revolve around finding good teachers and firing bad ones, says Harold Kwalwasser, former general counsel of the Los Angeles Unified School District, for the Washington Post. In a way, it’s not surprising. We love to reduce complex issues to “people stories,” especially when we can paint one kind of people with white hats and pin black ones on somebody else. As appealing as it is, there are two problems with the “good teacher, bad teacher” narrative. The first is that it plants certain unspoken images in our heads, which we often wind up accepting as true without examination. We unthinkingly know what we know—to our peril…

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