Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (September 18, 2011), featured a cover story entitled “The Character Test”, suggesting that our kids’ success, and happiness, may depend less on perfect performance than on learning how to deal with failure.  The two schools profiled were Riverdale, one of New York City’s most prestigious private schools, and KIPP Infinity Middle School, a member of the KIPP network of public charter schools in New York City.  The common factor in each of these schools is a headmaster or charter school superintendent whose leadership is focused on providing an educational experience for the students he serves that encompasses more than academic rigor and achievement.  Their strategies are based on the work of Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, whose scholarly publication, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, documents 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras.  The importance of these strengths does not come from their relationship to any system of ethics or moral laws but from their practical benefit:  cultivating these strengths represent a reliable path to “the good life,” a life that is not just happy but also meaningful and fulfilling. ...

This week, the American Education Research Association and National Academy of Education hosted Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Challenge for Policy Makers, which highlighted concerns of education researchers with using value-added modeling (VAM, a model that measures a teacher's contribution to student test scores) in teacher evaluations.

The consensus of the research community: Most believe VAM is not appropriate as a primary measure for evaluating individual teachers. The standardized test score data used in these models is just not reliable, given issues with the small sample size of classrooms, the nonrandom assignment of students to classrooms, and the fact that while a student might, for example, work on reading skills with a teacher, a parent, a tutor and a paraprofessional, the only one who gets credit (or blame) is the teacher.

Two studies were cited that I found particularly disturbing: One found that 27% of teachers who get an “A” rating one year on a VAM-based system get a “D” or “F” rating the next – and that 30% of “F” teachers get an “A” or “B” the next. Another found that these models predict the influence of a 5^th grade teacher on their students 4^th grade test scores – scores received prior to the teacher even meeting the students.*

Despite the concerns of the research community, districts all over the country are including VAM in teacher evaluations – and ...

Fall’s arrival heralds the start of school and classroom teachers are excited to welcome back their students for another year of learning. At the same time, they are faced with the reality that students seem to know less than they did last spring. On average, all students lose ground and begin the year a month behind where they performed in the spring. One study suggests that two-thirds of the achievement gap for low-income students entering ninth grade can be attributed to summer learning loss. The gap is particularly pronounced in reading, where low-income students lose ground, as opposed to high-income students who maintain or gain ground.

The achievement gap is a widely recognized reality in American public education. It is troubling, persistent, and continues to elude remedy. When a potential solution arises, it is difficult to maintain realistic expectations, and that is exactly what must be done when it comes to summer learning programs. We can take heart that evidence from studies to evaluations shows the promise of such programs in reducing the achievement gap that separates low-income and minority youth from their more privileged peers. ...

As the only person working in the LFA office who was alive for both the assassination of President John F. Kennedy AND the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, I was assigned the reflective activity in remembrance of that challenging time ten years ago when our sense of safety and security was seriously damaged.  Like all natives of Washington, DC, I was struck by the contrast between the sheer physical beauty of the day… blue skies, low humidity, gentle sunlight, soft breeze, one of those days that remind you how good it feels to be alive… and the horror of attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, using commercial airplanes as human filled bombs.  As adults we know, but fail to remember on a daily basis, that evil does exist in the world, and as educators who work with young people, we struggle to balance how we talk about that evil in our work with students.

What I initially felt that day was fear, and like many others I know, I worked hard to work through that fear and regain a sense of security and safety.  One of the things we as educators don’t want to impart to the students we work with is fearfulness, because fear of ...

Updated 9/20/2011

Last night, President Obama revealed the American Jobs Act, a framework that calls for strategic investments intended to both put Americans back to work and rebuild critical components of the country’s infrastructure.

One clear winner in his proposal is education.  The President calls for $30 billion in new money to ward off teacher layoffs and $30 billion to modernize America’s schools. Administration officials estimate the money could save as many as 280,000 educators’ jobs and pay for makeovers to at least 35,000 public schools.

We at the Learning First Alliance applaud the President’s call to invest in schools and teachers. We support the President’s plan to put teachers back to work and invest in education infrastructure to make schools more efficient and innovative, and we urge Congress to support this plan, which will help improve public education for all children. Read our entire statement here.

What did others in the education community (and LFA network) have to say?  

Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association: President Obama clearly understands that quality education is the key to our nation’s future. He’s putting America’s unemployed construction workers back on the job to help modernize our aging K-12 schools and community colleges. We are pleased and encouraged that the President continues to demonstrate his commitment to the success of all students by helping to make sure they have  the best possible learning environment—a key element of quality education. Read more...

Anne Bryant, Executive Director of the National School Boards Association: In the face of massive budget shortfalls and education layoffs at school districts across the country, this new funding would provide necessary aid to America's schools. Our school children deserve a quality education and ...

Last weekend, Matt Richtel wrote a piece for the New York Times that has lit up the education blogosphere: “In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores.”

In it, Richtel questions the shifting of public tax dollars towards education technology when those technologies have not been proven to improve student standardized test scores. Some are outraged, claiming that money could be spent lowering class sizes or on other proven strategies for school improvement.

My immediate reaction was, “But current standardized tests are not a good measure of what we expect children to know in the 21^st century.” And several bloggers have responded to this piece with similar sentiment.  

My next thought was concern about how some education “advocates” and watchdog groups who track public spending will use this information to bolster their argument against funding education technology. And I found myself wondering what kind of schools their children attend.

That took my mind back to a piece I remember from School Finance 101 last July. In it, Bruce Baker explains his decision to send his children to private independent schools while being a staunch defender and supporter of the public system. While ...

Editor's Note: Our guest blogger today is Patricia D. Gill, Senior Program Associate, National Collaborative on Workforce & Disability for Youth at the Institute for Educational Leadership’s Center for Workforce Development. She directs RAMP (the Ready to Achieve Mentoring Program), a high tech career-focused mentoring program for youth with disabilities involved with or at-risk of becoming involved with the juvenile justice system. Today she reflects on the program, its outcomes, and what has been learned over its first few years.*

As the Ready to Achieve Mentoring Program (RAMP) enters its third year, community partnerships have emerged as an important component to making the program work in all communities.  With support from the Institute for Educational Leadership, the 12 RAMP sites around the country provide career-focused mentoring for youth with disabilities who are at-risk of or currently involved in the juvenile justice system. Unfortunately, as youth with disabilities are highly overrepresented in the juvenile justice system, all youth with disabilities – especially those with learning disabilities or mental health needs – are at-risk of becoming involved in the system. The RAMP programs place special emphasis on engaging youth with disabilities with a history of high truancy rates, low grades, or school discipline incidents.

Through a mix of education, employer, and community partnerships, RAMP sites have succeeded in providing career-focused mentoring to these youth with outstanding results! In the first year, 95% of the youth enrolled in the program engaged in ...

In a recent Slate article, Dana Goldstein argues that “Michele Bachmann's growing popularity among the Republican base signals . . . a sea change in the party's education agenda.” I would add the same goes for Rick Perry’s popularity, and for the general abundance of Tea Party affiliated candidates among GOP nomination hopefuls.

Goldstein contrasts the common Republican positions of a decade ago—an era defined largely by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind—as often bipartisan, and emphasizing standards-and-accountability in order to make America more competitive in the global marketplace. Now, however, Goldstein notes that the GOP has shifted to cater to “the anti-government, Christian-right view of education epitomized by Bachmann, in which public schools are regarded not as engines for economic growth or academic achievement, but as potential moral corrupters of the nation's youth.” ...

You might assume that people with children would be more informed on education issues than those without. But a recent survey on school communication by the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) suggests otherwise.

More non-parents (65%) than parents (47%) feel very well informed or pretty well informed about the issues impacting education in their local district. 59% of non-parents feel that way about state education issues, compared to just 39% of parents.

While at first glance that seems a bit counterintuitive, survey authors offer several possible reasons for these findings. Perhaps parents are mainly focused on classroom and school-level issues. Maybe they have busier lives, juggling careers with children, and have less time to spend informing themselves. Or perhaps non-parents are simply more concerned with big-picture issues, such as the tax burden and impact of district performance on their property values.

Regardless of who knows more and why, none of those numbers bode particularly well for public education at a time when budgets are strained at both the state and local levels. If citizens are not informed about education issues, they cannot be advocates for ...

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is David L. Kirp, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and author of Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives and America’s Future (2011).

Schools are just beginning to open their doors, but the education food fights are already underway. I’m not thinking about kids in the cafeteria but adults wielding books and blogs. Amid this tomfoolery among the grownups the critical needs of children are going ignored.

On the one side of the current fight stands the “no excuses” crew, personified by Michelle Rhee, the broom-wielding ex-superintendent of the Washington D.C. schools. To them, and to the producers of “Waiting for Superman,” retrograde unions and bloated bureaucracies are biggest impediments to reform. Turn the schools over to the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school network, make every teacher as well-pedigreed as those recruited by Teach for America and our education problems will be solved. Diane Ravitch was once a dues-paying member of this group. She switched sides—detailed in her recent book The Death and Life of the Great American School System—and since has been on the warpath, staunchly defending the contributions of teachers unions and the quality of public school teachers. From the outset this fight has been nasty, and with the recent publication of Steven Brill’s Class Warfare it has turned downright vicious. Brill makes a big deal of the fact that Ravitch is earning a bundle by (shock, shock!) being handsomely paid to give speeches to organizations that share her beliefs; Ravitch, saying that Brill has got his facts wrong, is threatening a defamation suit. Oy!

What gets lost amid all this “he said, she said” squabbling are the needs of kids. Little attention is getting paid to what’s important, not only to