More than 12,000 New York City Teacher Data Reports will be released today, after a judge ruled Tuesday against the United Federation of Teachers’ argument that disclosing the ratings violates the teachers’ privacy rights. The Teacher Data Reports look like this. The ratings are based on value-added scores. They do not include value-added as one of several measures of performance. Although thisContinue Reading »

Isn’t Friday supposed to be “take out the trash” day in the news cycle?  Instead, today has been chock full of major education news stories.  Here are the highlights:

A new study by Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff found that elementary and middle school teachers who raised their students’ standardized test scores seem to have long-term positive effects on their studentContinue Reading »

Tomorrow, the LA Times will release data on teacher value-added test scores for elementary teachers in LA Unified. My colleague, Elena Silva lays out some of the details (here). While I acknowledge that I have and always will be a data geek, I think that this move will have lasting impact in the education world. Just as school accountability systems have lead to parents and real estate agents fContinue Reading »

Research has shown time and again that experience matters in good teaching. What it hasn’t shown is that every experience matters equally. In fact, a teacher’s first few years on the job are by far the most important, and it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the vast majority of teaching improvement comes in the first few years on the job.

Unfortunately, districts have yeContinue Reading »

The House Appropriations committee passed a version of the FY 2007 federal education budget earlier this week (details here). There weren’t a lot of differences from the budget President Bush submitted earlier this year. But one small change is worth noting.

The administration’s proposal to increase funding for state data systems from $24 million to $54 million was reduced toContinue Reading »