School "Reformers" most went to private schools

In Public School Efforts, a Common Background: Private Education

by Michael Winerip  New York Times  April 18, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/education/18winerip.html

Ten years ago, the No Child Left Behind bill was passed by
the House of Representatives, 384 to 45, marking the first
step toward a major transformation of public education in
America. The law has ushered in what its supporters like to
call the "reform movement."


No longer did a person with a clipboard have to spend days
observing a school to determine whether it was any good.
Because of the law, it is now possible for an assistant
secretary of education to be sitting in his Washington
office and, by simply studying a spreadsheet for a few
minutes, know exactly how a school in Juneau is performing.

Each year since then, researchers have found new things to
assess. The New York City Department of Education, a pioneer
in the science of value-added assessment, can now calculate
a teacher's worth to the third decimal point by using a few
very long formulas. (No word yet on whether department
researchers have developed a very long formula to assess
chancellors and mayors.)

For a while it appeared that the Republicans were way ahead
on the reform front, but in 2007, Whitney Tilson, a hedge
fund manager and Democratic fund-raiser, founded Democrats
for Education Reform to help his party catch up. By all
accounts, it has worked. Today, the consensus is that there
is little difference between President Obama and former
President George W. Bush when it comes to education policy.
Nor is it easy to distinguish differences between the
secretary of education under Mr. Bush, Margaret Spellings,
and the current secretary, Arne Duncan.

Those who call themselves reformers are a diverse group, men
and women of every political stripe and of every race and
ethnicity.

But there is one thing that characterizes a surprisingly
large number of the people who are transforming public
schools: they attended private schools.

Which raises the question: Does a private school background
give them a much-needed distance and fresh perspective to
better critique and remake traditional public schools? Does
it make them distrust public schools - or even worse -
poison their perception of them? Or does it make any
difference?


Your call.

Following is a list of some of these national leaders and
the private schools they attended:

*  Senators Judd Gregg (Phillips Exeter, Exeter, N.H.) and
Edward M. Kennedy (Milton Academy, Milton, Mass.) and
Representative John A. Boehner (Archbishop Moeller High
School, Cincinnati) were three of the four Congressional
sponsors of the education legislation, which was signed into
law by Mr. Bush (Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.) on Jan.
8, 2002. (Representative George Miller was the fourth
sponsor.)

*  Mr. Obama (Punahou School, Honolulu) will be remembered
for his signature education program, Race to the Top. This
program rewards states with hundreds of millions of dollars
in grants if they develop systems to rate teachers based on
their students' test scores and if they agree to fire
teachers and principals based on those scores. In contrast,
Michelle Obama, who attended public schools (Whitney Young
High, Chicago), has frequently spoken out against the
education law's reliance on testing. "If my future were
determined by my performance on a standardized test," Mrs.
Obama has repeatedly said, "I wouldn't be here, I guarantee
that."

Michelle A. Rhee (Maumee Valley Country Day School, Toledo,
Ohio), the former Washington schools chancellor and a
founder of StudentsFirst, an advocacy group, is probably the
No. 1 celebrity of the reform movement. She is education's
Sarah Palin.

*  As governor, Mitt Romney (Cranbrook School, Bloomfield
Hills, Mich.) brought accountability to Massachusetts.

*  Bill Gates (Lakeside School, Seattle) has donated
billions of dollars to public schools with the proviso that
they carry out his vision of reform, including tying teacher
tenure decisions to students' test scores. In November, Mr.
Gates and Mr. Duncan (University of Chicago Laboratory
School) called on public school leaders to increase class
size as a way of cutting costs in these hard times. The two
men suggested that schools could compensate by striving to
have an excellent teacher in every classroom. The private
school Mr. Gates attended has an average class size of 16,
according to its Web site. The home page says the best thing
about Lakeside School is it "promotes relationships between
teachers and students through small class sizes." Mr.
Duncan's private school has an average class size of 19.

*  Jeb Bush (Phillips Andover), the former governor of
Florida and the founder of the Excellence for Education
Foundation, is responsible for making Florida a pioneer in
the accountability movement by issuing report cards for
every school based on test results. In the process he had to
overcome many obstacles, including how to explain why his
state's rating system was so badly out of whack with the
federal government's rating system. One year the state
report cards gave two-thirds of Florida's schools A's or
B's, while the federal system rated two-thirds of Florida
schools as failing. As a result, there was widespread
confusion among parents who couldn't tell if their child's
school was succeeding brilliantly or failing miserably.

*  Chester E. Finn Jr. (Phillips Exeter) is the president of
the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow of the
Hoover Institution, two of the country's leading
conservative research groups. Mr. Finn is the scholarly
counterpart of Ms. Rhee. Early on, he supported the
privatization of public education, the use of vouchers and
the development of a national core curriculum, which could
possibly mean every public school would be teaching the same
thing at the same time. His recommendation for reforming the
public school system: "Blow it up and start over."

*  David Levin (Riverdale Country School, the Bronx) is a
co-founder of KIPP, the nation's biggest charter chain.

*  Cathleen P. Black (Aquinas Dominican High School,
Chicago), the former chancellor of New York City schools,
had just 95 days to put her reform agenda into place before
she was asked to leave.

*  Merryl H. Tisch (Ramaz School, Manhattan), chancellor of
the New York State Board of Regents, along with David M.
Steiner (Perse School, Cambridge, England), the New York
state education commissioner, have fine-tuned the state's
extensive testing system pioneered by the former state
commissioner, Richard Mills.

*  Steven Brill (Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Mass.) is
perhaps the charter school movement's most literary
advocate. He is working on a book about public school
reform.

*  Marc Sternberg (Episcopal School, Baton Rouge, La.), a
New York City deputy chancellor, has been a path finder in
the practice of moving charter schools into district school
buildings.

*  Davis Guggenheim (Sidwell Friends School, Washington) is
the producer and director of "Waiting for Superman," the
widely acclaimed 2010 film that championed charter schools
and dismissed traditional public schools as dropout
factories. Mr. Guggenheim's film begins with him driving his
children to their private school and feeling guilty about
all the bad Los Angeles public schools he is passing. This
is not the first time this happened to Mr. Guggenheim. As a
child, he passed bad Washington public schools on his way to
Sidwell Friends.

When President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind
legislation, he expressed his hope that it would combat the
"soft bigotry of low expectations." Indeed, the law could
not have higher expectations: every child in the nation is
required to be proficient in math and English by 2014.
Schools that do not meet their proficiency goals, which are
raised every year, are labeled as failing.

Last month, Mr. Duncan predicted that by the end of this
year, 82 percent of schools will miss their goal. At this
rate, it is highly likely that in a few years, every single
public school in the United States will be labeled a
failure.

This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:

Correction: April 20, 2011

The On Education column on Monday, about leaders of the
public school "reform movement" who attended private
schools, misstated the name of the advocacy group founded by
one such leader, the former Washington, D.C., schools
chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. It is StudentsFirst, not
Sunshine First. The column also misstated the name of the
organization founded by Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager
and Democratic fund-raiser. It is Democrats for Education
Reform, not Democrats for Educational Reform. In addition,
the article misspelled the given name of the chancellor of
the New York State Board of Regents. She is Merryl Tisch,
not Merryll Tisch.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18,
2011, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Public School Efforts, a Common Background: Private
Education.

==========

Race to the Bottom: Obama school reform gone wrong

By Roger Bybee <http://www.inthesetimes.com/community/profile/6566>

Diane Ravitch, author of /The Death and Life of the Great American
School System/.

President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have
formed an alliance with billionaire "school reformers" whose agenda
is to downgrade U.S. public education and blame its shortcomings on
"bad teachers," warns educational historian Diane Ravitch.

Ravitch spoke Thursday night before a crowd of more than 1,000 education
professors, students, public school teachers, and community activists at
the University of Wisconsin.

"These corporate reformers are pursuing a strategy based on ideology,
not on evidence," she charged. "It is demoralizing teachers and setting
up public schools to be de-legitimized, as they are called upon to meet
impossible goals. This is not an improvement strategy, it is a
privatization strategy."

Ravitch, once assistant secretary of education under George W.
Bush, has undergone a remarkable transformation after observing how
the education system became fixated on test results, the scapegoating of
teachers and the promoting of a privatized approach to education.

She has now emerged as one of the leading critics of the Obama-Duncan
approach to public education, which has been driven by funding from
several huge foundations--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli
and Edith Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family foundation.

The essence of this corporatized approach to public education is
"choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based
decision-making," as Joanne Barkan summarizes it an important /Dissent/
<http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781> article.

With progressive reforms for education generating little attention, the
corporate model has managed to make surprising inroads among some
liberals who have become persuaded that a market-driven education system
is key to America's future.

The corporate style of reform began with "No Child Left Behind" enacted
under George W. Bush, which promoted a preoccupation with standardized
testing and the conclusion that children's failure to measure up was a
direct result of inferior teachers.

This was followed by Duncan's "Race to the Top" program which embraced
the same core beliefs, including the closing of "failed schools." Duncan
and Obama, for example, applauded the decision of the Central Falls,
Rhode Island School Board to close the high school and fire all 91 staff
members, absurdly including the cafeteria and maintenance staff, based
on the assumption that low test scores reflected the failures of the
teachers.

The poverty of the students and the fact that a high percentage were
immigrants learning English were seen as irrelevant to the low test
scores. Eventually, both Duncan and the local school system were forced
to back off due to public outcry.

But Duncan, along with the three huge foundations, is still pressing
ahead with imposing what Ravitch calls their "punitive" and
"market-based" assumptions on the nation's schools.

However, as both Ravitch and Barkan have pointed out, all the major
studies show that the key elements of corporate-style education reform
are simply not working:

*No improvement in learning* The most comprehensive study of
de-regulated "charter" schools, conducted by conservative economists at
Stanford University, examined education results among students at 2,400
charter schools nationally. They found 83% of charter schools perform
either worse or no better than public schools.

*Merit pay* The new wave of corporate reformers have argued that
merit pay is vital to incentivize" and reward better-performing
teachers. But a 2010 Vanderbilt University study clearly demonstrated
that merit pay does not generate higher standardized testing.

A National Research Council report, backing up numerous other studies,
found that standardized test scores fail to effectively measure student
learning The main result observed by Ravitch has been the tendency of
school curriculums to get narrower and narrower, focusing almost
exclusively on "teaching to the test" in reading and math. Supposed
"success" stories of market-based, mayor-driven "reform" in Chicago and
New York quickly unraveled once newspapers began independently
evaluating the test scores of students.

Nonetheless, the combined PR clout of the Gates, Broad, and Walton
foundations has generated a massive wave of favorable publicity for
their crusade against what Ravitch called "the Bad Teacher Syndrome."
This included a cover story in Newsweek, a weeklong series on NBC that
"celebrated privatization and scapegoating teachers," as Ravitch put it,
and two segments of Oprah devoted to discussing Waiting for Superman, which Ravitch called a badly-biased documentary.

All of these high-profile attacks on teachers, their unions, and
union-won rights avoid the real causes of poor school performance. "Most
of the nations that the US is comparing itself with have much lower
rates of poverty among their children. It's 20% nationally here, and I
know it's much higher in this community." (32 percent of children in
Milwaukee are poor.)

"Poor performance is mostly due to poverty and racial isolation," Raitch
said. Barkan further illuminated this point in /Dissent:/

The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in US
schools where the poverty rate was less than 10% rnked first in
reading, first in cience, and third in math. But as the poverty rate
rose till higher, students ranked lower and lower.

Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75%. The
problem is not public schools; it is poverty.

And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical,
and social development between children in poverty and middle-class
children is set by age three.

The over-emphasis on testing, the targeting of teachers, the senseless
closing of schools, and the substitution of a market model for the basic
democratic right of public education are all generating an increasingly
vocal backlash from both teachers and parents.

"Teachers are going to be marching on Washington D.C. July 28 to 30 to
protest the 'testing and punishment' regime in education," Ravitch
announced.

The top-down corporate-style reform championed by Obama and the
billionaires threatens a further deterioration of education for poor
kids, and is an imminent threat to America's democratic traditions,
Ravitch concluded.
Reprinted with permission from In These Times.

No 1 in the World, Mr. Duncan? Really ?

Number 1 in the World, Mr. Duncan? Really? You Have Got to Kidding Me 
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/02/number-1-in-world-mr-duncan-really-you.html
By Jim Horn
Arne Duncan proclaimed a couple of days ago that he wants the U. S. to be #1 in educational achievement but that we have "a long way to go."  But that's okay, boys, we're in a hole, so keep digging.

Since Duncan came to Washington to sit as ED's titular CEO while the Gates and Broad Foundations runs the show, the hole has gotten deeper as new shovels are brought in to replace the old ones.  The urban schools that were blown apart by NCLB's ticking time bomb have been turned into corporate segregated charters run like prisons, and more public schools are exploded each spring as the scores come in, telling us where the poorest children in America will be added to the penal charter list, as two-year temps from TFA and alt-cert neophytes take over the duties of teachers. 

Meanwhile, the Gates-Broad team hire the high priest of the stats world to devise ways to use unreliable and invalid tests to keep or fire teachers, despite the mountain of scientific evidence and common sense that tells the rest of us that this is unfair, unethical, and just a bad idea.  Other Gates goons are working to shut down or re-make teacher education programs to focus on those same test scores.  Still others are being farmed out to conservative and neolib state legislators and governors looking for ways to take away teachers' collective bargaining rights, due process, and any remaining shreds of academic freedom.

Meanwhile back at the school children are choking on the growing mountain and tests that fatten the corporate leeches who publish them.  Children learn to read by racing through nonsense syllables and despise reading by the time they get to junior high. Librarians are fired and book collections dumped or allowed to collect dust.  Students are paid to graduate a year early to save money, while class sizes swell to overflowing.


read the entire piece here.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/02/number-1-in-world-mr-duncan-really-you.html

Obama Admin misleads on education reform - Krashen

The feds have spelled out their plans in detail, in their technology report, in the Blueprint, and in Duncan's speeches. It is a top-down, purely data-driven system with more testing than ever seen in history, with all tests, interim, summative, and maybe even pre-tests in the fall, closely linked to national standards. If the LEARN Act is ever part of this, we will also have a skills + test approach to everything in language arts, K-12. That's what in the documents.

In response, the professional organizations are eagerly supporting this brutal approach, or saying nothing. When challenged, they say they want a "seat at the table," which I suspect also means "a piece of the pie."

Instead of leading the way in education, they are doing what they can to allow the ignorant and uninformed to prescribe educational practice.


Don't take my word for it. Read the documents. A few samples: 

1. Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology (http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010)
Discussion of ongoing assessment during the school day, an unprecedented amount of control, even keeping track of how much time students take to solve parts of a problem:
"Learning science and technology combined with assessment theory can provide a foundation for new and better ways to assess students in the course of learning (xvii)"
There will be "technologies to “instrument” the classroom in an attempt to find out what students are thinking" while doing projects ("Assessing in the classroom" pp. 29-30)

"As students work, the system can capture their inputs and collect evidence of their problem-solving sequences, knowledge, and strategy use, as reflected by the information each student selects or inputs, the number of attempts the student makes, the number of hints and type of feedback given, and the time allocation across parts of the problem."
(pages 29-30: "Assessing during online learning") 


2. The Blueprint A Blueprint for Reform 
The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act 
United States Department of Education  March 2010

"States may also use funds to develop or implement high-quality, rigorous statewide assessments in other academic or career and technical subjects, high school course assessments, English language proficiency assessments, and interim or formative assessments." (page 11)

3. September 9, 2010. Beyond the Bubble Tests: The Next Generation of Assessments -- Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks to State Leaders at Achieve's American Diploma Project Leadership Team Meeting: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/beyond-bubble-tests-next-generation-assessments-secretary-arne-duncans-remarks-state-l.
"For the first time, teachers will consistently have timely, high-quality formative assessments that are instructionally useful and document student growth—rather than just relying on after-the-fact, year-end tests used for accountability purposes."
"Not enough is being done to assess students' thinking as they learn to boost and enrich learning, and track student growth."
The new tests will provide "multiple opportunities throughout the school year to assess student learning."

4. Various coalitions are developing tests to be given several times during the academic year: States work together to create new academic tests By DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP (AP) – June 23, 2010

5. The secretary has firmly supported the use of value-added testing, as was done in LAUSD and reported in the LA Times: Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock, Arkansas 
August 25, 2010 
http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/secretary-arne-duncans-remarks-statehouse-convention-center-little-rock-arkansas


Stephen Krashen.

Obama's truce with teachers

Obama's truce with teachers By: Kendra Marr August 22, 2010 05:00 PM EDT

In the past few weeks, President Barack Obama delivered two major speeches touting education reforms. He invited teachers to the Rose Garden and pushed the House to pass an emergency spending bill saving thousands of school jobs. This week, his education chief is traveling on a cross-country bus tour to highlight school success stories. “Teachers,” Obama said in Ohio Wednesday, “are the single most important ingredient in the education system.” The White House says it’s a back-to-school message that fits squarely into the president’s plan for economic recovery, stressing the role of educators in shaping a competitive American work force. But all this apple-polishing hasn’t gone unnoticed by teachers unions, which have had a rocky relationship with the White House from the start over Obama’s unflinching support for reforms that unions view as an affront. After 18 months of frosty relations that at times bordered on outright hostility, it seems that Obama has called a truce — one that several education experts noted comes just in time for the midterm elections, when teachers unions can be a powerful Democratic ally. Education Secretary Arne Duncan disputed that there’s any political motivation. “This is part of that continued outreach,” he told POLITICO. “That’s the furthest thing from our mind.” Yet, as Obama’s outreach has continued, tensions have simmered down. “In the last month, there’s been a shift in tone,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Obama’s recent speeches, she said, have “made it clear that his strategies were not about firing teachers.” National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel — whose group’s recent convention included several speakers calling for Duncan to resign — downplays the notion of a major mood swing, but said that Obama’s recent pro-teacher language has been appreciated. “He’s recognizing that the very thing he cares most deeply about can’t happen without the involvement and collaboration of those people who are teaching,” Van Roekel said. “I like the message he’s sending.” The politics of education can be as complex as multivariable calculus. Obama and Duncan have presided over historic increases in school financing and hastened changes, such as new teacher evaluation systems in states and school districts, often with the cooperation of local unions. At the same time, this Democratic president has aggressively confronted teachers unions with a spate of reforms out of a Republican playbook: more charter schools, merit pay for teachers and firing educators in failing schools. Nationwide outrage among teachers exploded in March when both Obama and Duncan justified the mass firings of educators at a failing Rhode Island school. (Teachers ultimately kept their jobs in a concession deal.) “The administration has strong reformist credentials, but this went way too far for many people,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who studies teachers unions. “I think the average American who worries about getting laid off unfairly could relate to the teachers.” Just last month, delegates at the NEA convention took a position of “no confidence” on Race to the Top, the administration’s multi-billion-dollar sweepstakes to encourage schools to adopt Obama-backed policies. “Today, our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced,” Van Roekel told thousands of attendees. But the union president has since dialed it back. “Everyone assumed I was only talking about the Obama administration,” he told POLITICO. “I was talking about states, too.” Duncan expects to join Van Roekel in Albany, N.Y., as he travels on his bus tour at the end of the month. The secretary will also drive through Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and the District of Columbia. Teachers have long been among the foot soldiers of the Democratic Party. For decades, they’ve walked precincts, knocked on doors and staffed phone banks for candidates. And while Duncan contests the idea that the administration is pacifying teachers unions before midterms, improved relations are important. The two national teachers unions’ combined 4.6 million members spent tens of millions of dollars to help elect Obama and other candidates in 2008. “The danger is not that they go help Republicans but, rather, that they sit on their hands and don’t get involved in the election,” Kahlenberg said. “And that would be a disaster for Democrats.” “Given the stakes on the table in November and given there’s a number of things they can agree on together, they’re in this delicate dance of trying to make it work,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Duncan, who visited 39 states last year, said he will use his bus trip to listen to suggestions and complaints about all of the administration’s programs, including its crown jewel, Race to the Top. “We’ll spend a lot of time talking to teachers,” Duncan said. “What’s working? What’s not? And how can we help?” “The best ideas in education are never going to come from me. They never come from Washington,” said Duncan, who is planning events with both top union leaders throughout the year. “We can’t do enough to support great, great teachers.” Holding an informal town hall in an Ohio family’s backyard, Obama made his own promise to strengthen science and math education, as well as to forge new partnerships between community colleges and businesses. “What we need to do is tailor people’s education so that they are linked up with businesses who say, we need this many engineers, or we need this kind of technical training,” he said. Over the next few months, the Education Department is injecting up to $20 billion into the nation’s education system, a chunk of which aids reforms chasing the president’s goal of leading the world in college graduates by 2020. “Education is the economic issue of our time,” Obama told the University of Texas at Austin on Aug. 9. “It’s an economic issue when the unemployment rate for folks who’ve never gone to college is almost double what it is for those who have gone to college. Education is an economic issue when nearly eight in 10 new jobs will require workforce training or a higher education by the end of this decade. Education is an economic issue when we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that countries that out-educate us today, they will out-compete us tomorrow.” The president will continue to talk up his education reforms, like cutting out the middleman for student loans, White House officials said. Duncan aims to disburse a $10 billion education jobs fund over two weeks. And the Education Department will soon release federal dollars for the winners of Race to the Top and other grant programs. Next up: Congress will take on Obama’s blueprint for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind law. While Obama’s proposal maintains the spirit of the Bush-era annual testing and data-driven accountability, it adds resources and flexibility to help students prepare for college. Already, conflict is beginning to bubble up, though Democrats express confidence they can get bipartisan support. Leaders of the two national teachers unions flanked and applauded Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), a member of the Education and Labor Committee, as she unveiled her own framework in May giving individual districts the power to decide how to fix schools, a measure she believes will stop the teacher blame game. “If teachers really felt like input was valued and could be implemented, I think we’d see a huge difference in our schools,” she told POLITICO. And a handful of civil rights groups have joined teachers unions in calling for more equity and better initiatives to close the achievement gap. “We need to work through the details. But those details can’t mask our overall united front,” Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) told POLITICO. “This is the best chance in 50 years to get constructive federal involvement in moving our schools forward.”

© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC

Arne Duncan endorses printing teachers "evaluations"

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says parents have a right to know how effective teachers are at raising student test scores. "What is there to hide?" he says.

By Jason Felch and Jason Song, Los Angeles Times
8:07 PM PDT, August 16, 2010

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children's teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students' test scores.

"What's there to hide?" Duncan said in an interview one day after The Times published an analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second largest school system. "In education, we've been scared to talk about success."

Duncan's comments mark the first time the Obama administration has expressed support for a public airing of information about teacher performance — a move that is sure to fan the already fierce debate over how to better evaluate teachers.


Spurred by the administration, school districts around the country have moved to adopt "value added" measures, a statistical approach that relies on standardized test scores to measure student learning. Critics, including many teachers unions and some policy experts, say the method is based on flawed tests that don't measure the more intangible benefits of good teaching and lead to a narrow curriculum. In Los Angeles, the teachers union has called public disclosure of the results "dangerous" and "irresponsible."

Duncan said public disclosure of the value-added results would allow school systems to identify teachers who are doing things right.

"We can't do enough to recognize them, reward them, but — most importantly — to learn from them," he said.

California Secretary of Education Bonnie Reiss also weighed in Monday, saying that the state will encourage districts to develop and release value-added scores for teachers.

"Publishing this data is not about demonizing teachers," Reiss said. "It's going to create a more market-driven approach to results."

Reiss said the data would give administrators a better idea of which instructors need professional development. It's unclear how quickly a statewide value-added system could be built, but Reiss said districts, especially the larger ones, should be able to move quickly.

"The data is there," Reiss said.

The comments from Reiss, appointed by a Republican governor, and Duncan, appointed by a Democratic president, show how the use of data for teacher accountability has become a bipartisan issue.

The value-added method tracks a student's performance on standardized tests year after year. Because the student's performance is measured against his or her own record, the method adjusts for many of the differences among students that teachers have no control over.

The Times used the approach to analyze seven years of test scores in math and English to estimate the impact individual elementary school teachers had on their students. The analysis found huge disparities among teachers, sometimes just down the hall from one another. Students with the most effective teachers consistently made huge strides in a single year, despite challenges such as poverty or limited English skills.

Researchers have consistently found that within a school, teacher effectiveness is the single most important factor in a child's ability to learn. But across the country, parents have no access to objective information about teacher effectiveness, and many districts have opted to ignore the data.
From the Los Angeles Times.

Later this month, The Times will publish a database of more than 6,000 elementary school teachers ranked by their ability to improve students' scores on standardized tests, marking the first time such information had been released publicly. Already, roughly 700 teachers have requested and received their scores, enabling them to comment before publication.