An interesting article in the February, 2010, technology-focused JSD ($$, see list of contents) from the National Staff Development Council. Viewer Discussion is Advised describes video clubs that focus teacher discussion on student learning:
Each month, these seven teachers get together and watch video clips from their classrooms on computer monitors or television screens….A video club [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Teacher Evaluation'
Teacher Video Clubs
QUICK Hits
Think teachers will never stand for any link between student performance and teacher evaluations? Think again. (Public Agenda)
Is the ed reform debate ideological? Yglesias doesn’t think so. (Matt Yglesias)
What’s the profile of Hispanic Serving Institutions? (Inside Higher Ed)
Would cutting student loan subsidies save taxpayers billions? CNN consults Erin. (Political Ticker)
Highly Qualified Effective Teachers
The intrepid EdWeek bloggers Alyson Klein and Stephen Sawchuk caught a passage in President Obama’s latest budget proposal that would require states to, “develop a definition of ‘effective teacher’ that is based in significant part on student learning, and to put in place a system that links the academic achievement and growth of students to [...]
Fun With Words
Yesterday Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, gave a speech calling the process to remove teachers “glacial” and reiterating that student test scores should be a part of teacher evaluations. How did the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher’s union respond? Jay Matthews has it:
[The NEA's director of teacher quality] said [...]
This Week’s Sign of the Apocalypse
It’s well known how difficult it is to fire a teacher in New York City. The process is lengthy: if a teacher receives a series of poor evaluations, the teacher is shipped off to the infamous “rubber rooms” where they wait for an offer to work at another school. If the offer never comes, and [...]
Superlatives and Scales
A friend from the business world responds to my recent post on teacher evaluations in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to describe her company’s personnel assessments:
We rate employees on a 5 point scale with 1 being the best. So, say out of 100 employees, maybe 10 would be a 1. There would be a lot of [...]
The Other Lake Wobegon
There are a lot of cute references to No Child Left Behind as some sort of Lake Wobegon law, because of its provision that all children must be “proficient” by 2014. The reference is to Garrison Keillor’s famous book by the same name, where all the children from the town of Lake Wobegon are above [...]
The Gladwell/ Kane Theory of Teacher Recruitment
Overheard: a business CEO will hire any Harvard MBA before they even begin the program. It isn’t the education itself that makes them valuable employees, in this estimation, it’s the screen that let them in that proves their quality. In education, it turns out all of our traditional screens, and even some untraditional ones, don’t [...]
Enlightened Leadership
We released a report recently on the troubled state of teacher evaluation in public education, in which we suggested that a few local teacher unions are supporting comprehensive evalution systems with teeth, but that most aren’t. So it has been encouraging that a number of union leaders have written to compliment the report. One union-created [...]
education, baseball, tomato, tomahto
Those who couldn’t get enough of my extended baseball metaphor vis a vis the recent NYC teacher evaluation contretemps can read a new version in the New York Daily News here.
Cutting it at the Front of the Classroom
The American Federation of Teachers has released a statement on a report we published yesterday. The report’s called “Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education.” As the title suggests, it looks at the ways school systems figure out who’s cutting it at the front of the classroom and who isn’t. It’s a pretty important [...]
Distorting RAND
About a month ago, I wrote a long post on the topic of “value-added” measures of teacher effectiveness. With such measures getting a high-profile endorsement from the Aspen Commission on NCLB, I wrote, it was a safe bet that opponents of tying teacher evaluation to student tests scores would be mischaracterizing the conclusions of a [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman Aldeman's False Fronts is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
03/08/10 | Andrew Rotherham's Eduwonk post on RTT finalists is quoted on Class Struggle.
03/07/10 | Andrew Rotherham is quoted on the success of MATCH in The Times-Picayune.
03/06/10 | Eduwonk's reaction to Ohio's status as a RTT finalist is cited in a Wall Street Journal editorial.
03/05/10 | Andrew Rotherham's reaction to New York's status as a Race to the Top finalist is cited on National Journal.