School districts are under pressure from the federal government, foundations, and states to include value-added assessment as a part of a teacher’s evaluation to meet the widely supported policy goal of identifying the most effective and the least effective teachers in a school system. On its face, the argument for value-added models (VAM) seems to make sense. How well a student does after a year with a teacher should serve as an indicator of how effective that teacher was. But by what measures? How valid are those measures? If the student measure is a score on a standardized test, what evidence do we have to indicate the standardized test accurately measures teacher effectiveness? Which students are being compared?

Yes. I used the forbidden phrase. But let’s use those two words as if Common Core State Standards (CCSS) had never existed.  Recently we have seen weak attempts by both Congress and some states to pull back from their initial  “gung ho” approach to both standardized testing and CCSS because of a huge parental and teacher uproar. Unfortunately, even with these supposed pull-backs, teachers still feel like caged birds, unable to sing out. Hopefully this continued push back will make the policy makers pull even farther back and put education back in control of the professionals and communities they serve. In fact we might even go back to what the true common core of teaching should be.

Jan 8, 2016 · by Beth Fertig
From: WNYC
Attorneys for New York students with autism and other disabilities claimed a major victory this week, after a federal judge granted class action status to a case that alleged the denial of education services. The ruling could affect more than 20,000 New York City students.
The original plaintiffs, eight New York City students and their parents, sued in 2013 to prevent the loss of services including individualized instruction, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and support staff.

Edtech startups succeed when they respect teachers’ expertise, avoid talking down to educators, and build solutions that truly support classroom needs.

Dr. Lawrence Mussoline has worked in Pennsylvania private and public education for 36 years as a teacher and administrator. A superintendent of schools in three Pennsylvania Districts for the past …

By Anthony CodyAbout a month ago, the New York Times carried a story with a familiar refrain.  The headline read: “Closing Education Gap Will Lift Economy, a Study Finds.”  In the article, journalist Patricia Cohen tells us, “When it comes to math and science scores, the United States lags most of the other 33 advanced industrialized countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, dy.