That is exactly what happened a few months ago, when dedicated teacher-readers approached us about how they could help support GothamSchools. Please join us and them for conversation and drinks Friday, Feb. 10, from 4 to 6, at Professor Thom’s bar in Manhattan.

We want to know what you think of what’s going on, what you think of our coverage, and what you think we should cover more. We also want to know you! Oh and: first 20 drinks are on us.

Details:

The study measured teachers against the criteria in Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Effective Teaching rubric, which is used in New York as a tool for observing teachers. Teachers scored better at classroom management than they did on measures of higher-order instructional challenges, such as asking productive questions.

A historic look inside the nation’s classrooms, including some in New York City, painted a bleak picture, according to a report released by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation today.

The second installment of the foundation’s ambitious Measures of Effective Teaching study, the report focuses on the picture of teaching yielded by five different classroom observation tools. It also scrutinizes those tools themselves, concluding that they are valuable as a way to help teachers improve but only useful as evaluation tools when combined with measures of student learning known as value-added scores.

The conclusion is a strong endorsement of the Obama administration’s approach to improving teaching by implementing new evaluations of teachers that draw on both observations and value-added measures. New York State took this approach to overhauling its evaluation system when it applied for federal Race to the Top funding.

Among the group of five observation tools the foundation studied is the rubric now being piloted in New York City classrooms as part of stalled efforts to implement the changes to teacher evaluation, Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Effective Teaching.

Through all five lenses, instruction looked mediocre in an overwhelming majority of more than 1,000 classrooms studied, the report concludes. There were some bright spots. Many teachers were scored relatively well for the aspect of teaching known as “classroom management” — keeping students well-behaved, making sure they are engaged.

But teachers often fell short when it came to other elements of teaching, such as facilitating discussions, speaking precisely about concepts, and carefully modeling skills that students need to master. These higher-order skill sets, the report notes, are crucial in order for students to meet the raised standards outlined in the Common Core.

The study is the most expansive known examination of instruction in the U.S., reviewing more than 1,000 teachers for this report and nearly 3,000 for the study. Its lead authors are the economists Thomas Kane, of Harvard, and Douglas Staiger of Dartmouth, although more than a dozens researchers contributed to the study.

The evaluations were conducted by trained evaluators, who watched clips from videotape of more than 1,000 teachers around the country and then judged whether the teaching exhibited certain traits outlined in the observation tools.

One complicated aspect of the study is that it doesn’t just ask what the observation tools have to say about teaching; it also asks whether those observation tools are good ways to measure teaching at all. The question is crucial to the contentious teacher quality debate.

Motivated by the Obama administration’s focus on improving teaching by improving the way teachers are evaluated, the teacher quality debate has been dominated by a search for a better evaluation tool. The idea is that if school districts could have a better way to sort teachers, then they could increase quality by rewarding those who are most effective and improving or removing those who are less effective.

The study offers a qualified endorsement of the five observation tools it studied, saying that they should be one of multiple evaluation measures but that no one observation tool should be a sole measure. While the study found that all five observation tools had a positive association with student achievement as measured by value-added scores, the associations were not perfect.

And the tools’ reliability was relatively low — lower, in some cases, than the famously volatile judgments of value-added measures. When different observers used the same tool to evaluate the same teacher, they sometimes gave very different scores.

But the report does endorse using the observation tools in combination with value-added measures, as New York’s new evaluation system does. When researchers combined multiple observation tools’ judgments of teachers together — and then combined those with the teachers’ value-added scores, the result was a view of a teacher that was more able to predict future student achievement, the report says.

A final complication worth noting is that the study’s ultimate arbiter of what makes a good evaluation tool is itself under heavy scrutiny. That arbiter is a teacher’s value-added score, an estimate that attempts to extrapolate the amount of student learning for which a teacher can be held responsible, excluding other factors such as a student’s family income level.

A study that was the subject of a story in today’s New York Times found that value-added scores indeed are useful predictors not only of student achievement, but other measures of life success. Researchers have cast doubts on value-added measures’ validity, citing a host of concerns from the measures’ volatility to whether a high value-added score reflects true student learning or simply effective test prep.

Though an overhaul of teacher evaluation in New York has been stalled by the failure of teachers unions and school districts to agree on how to conduct it, both the New York City teachers union and the Department of Education agreed to participate in the Gates Foundation study when it launched in 2009. The union helped recruit teachers to join, and ultimately, teachers from about 100 schools signed up to have their lessons videotaped and analyzed.

“It takes the politics out of what’s being measured,” UFT president Michael Mulgrew said when the union first agreed to participate. “Teachers are very frustrated with the political debate. They are always saying, ‘why don’t you just come into the classroom?’ That’s what this is doing.”

Since then, the politics over teacher quality has grown even more heated.

Last summer, a GothamSchools reader who had worked in a school piloting the Danielson evaluation said it was very hard for teachers to be rated “effective.”

I visited under the influence of two powerful works: “Big Bird Goes to Japan” and “The Teaching Gap,” the 1999 book by James Hiebert and James Stigler. “The Teaching Gap” elevates a relatively obscure professional development practice native to Japan — “lesson study” — as a major solution to the American educational dilemma.

I wanted to see if Stigler and Hiebert were right. The following is the first in a series of posts describing what I found.

One slide in a presentation by the vice principal of the University of Tokyo's Attached Secondary School.

TOKYO — Before I visited Japan, another journalist I know who had just traveled there urged me to be skeptical. The Japanese make a lot of promises, he said, but dig just a little bit, and you’ll find that most claims don’t hold up.

I had this in mind on my first school visit, to the University of Tokyo’s attached secondary school. I had heard about attached schools, fuzokukou in Japanese. They were like the old “practice” or “laboratory” schools in the U.S., I was told, where those studying to become teachers learned from master teachers who used their classrooms, in turn, to hone ever-better teaching practice. (I described one such school in this article; search for “Cook County Normal School.”)

Fuzok teachers were supposed to be true masters, so talented that some became famous, attracting hundreds of admiring teachers to the public lessons that are common in Japan. Maybe most intriguing, fuzokukou schools’ close ties to university teacher training programs suggested an interest in teaching that persisted even in the ivory tower.

I did ultimately find evidence that schools like this exist in Japan. But the University of Tokyo’s attached secondary school was not one.

As it turns out, the country’s most prestigious national university — the Harvard of Japan, as several people described it to me, with a front gate made famous by how difficult it is to enter — does not train teachers at all. And while it does act as a site for research about how to improve teaching, the school’s vice principal was just as proud of another feature of the school, which he highlighted in an introductory presentation to me and other attendees of the World Association of Lesson Study’s annual conference.

The school, whose admission is based on an application process, collects twins! “I do not think that there is another school that collects twins,” the vice principal said with a smile.

The photo above, from his presentation, shows all the twins that attend the school. Identical twins are on the right and fraternal twins are on the left. At least twice, when an attendee asked a question about lesson study, the vice principal offered an answer about twins instead.

Twins, he explained, are rare in Japan, occurring in 1 in only 170 births, and they often do not like the attention that comes with being unusual. This school allows the twins to feel normal. “It’s like X Men!” said a man sitting behind me. As a rule, twins are kept in separate classes. Meanwhile, the parents of the twins form a Twin Parents Association.

What exactly the research on these twins has yielded I have not yet figured out. A cursory search of research journals turned up very little, and the vice principal said that the data set is actually too small to conclude much.

Next, I’ll talk about what we saw in classrooms at the school, where the focus was different: on encouraging less teacher and more student talk via small-group instruction.

Read more about my trip to Japan here.

Thanks to your support, the scrappy site we started in 2008 is now an institution that thousands of New Yorkers depend on for smart, trustworthy information. We want to keep up the good work in 2012, and also to get even stronger. As always, that will require help from our readers.

And so we’re asking you to consider making a donation to ensure that our reporting only gets stronger in 2012.

Here’s a brief review some of what we were able to do in 2011:

• We informed more than 500,000 people who visited GothamSchools directly. We informed more when our stories got picked up in media outlets, such as the New York Times, the WPIX nightly news, and the national radio show “This American Life.” 
• Our community grew through social media. NBC New York appointed us to its list of “voices leading the conversation.”
• Our stories often led to real-world change, from investigations of grade-changing scandals to reports on innovative practices.
• We graduated two reporters to new positions where they are expanding the universe of high-quality education reporting about the communities most in need. We also brought on two stellar new staff reporters, Geoff Decker and Rachel Cromidas.
• In a survey conducted by the Bridgespan Group, our readers — yeah, that’s you — reported that our news offerings were vital as they navigated the public school system.
• We launched a partnership with Education News Colorado that we hope will accelerate our path to sustainability and help us grow.

This holiday season, please consider joining the readers who have already made donations to GothamSchools. You can make a donation here. There are other ways to support us, too: “Like” us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and tell your friends in the education world who aren’t reading already about what they are missing.

Happy holidays, and here’s to an even more informed 2012!

That’s the conclusion of a report issued today by the Special Commissioner of Investigation, which is charged with looking into allegations of fraud and malfeasance in the school system.

Last year, the state’s Teachers Retirement System tipped off city investigators that checks issued to Maria Sicardo, a Bronx teacher who retired in 1993, were being cashed by someone else. Investigators discovered that not only had Victor Rosa begun cashing Sicardo’s checks after her death in April 2000 but that he had repeatedly submitted paperwork to the state and teachers union certifying that she was still alive. Employees at a check-cashing company in the Bronx told investigators that after they challenged Rosa, he took the checks elsewhere.

In total, Rosa pocketed about $241,000 over a decade from the state and from the UFT’s Welfare Fund, the union’s health fund for current and retired teachers. SCI is recommending that the pension system move to recoup the funds and has referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

The full report is below.

Should we export GothamSchools to other cities? Should we do more coverage out of Albany? Is the comments section a welcome forum for honest conversation and real accountability — or did reading that description make you laugh out loud? What about the Community section?

These questions and more are part of a new survey that we’d love for you to take. The survey, meantime, is part of our ongoing efforts to keep GothamSchools alive and well. Lately, we’ve been working with a partner in that endeavor: EdNews Colorado, a news site covering education in Colorado (think RockyMountainSchools-dot-org), and this survey is one of our joint efforts.

We believe strongly that we should not have any beliefs about education (and indeed, the last time we surveyed you, we found that a majority of you agree with us that we have succeeded at being objective). But the one belief that we and EdNews unashamedly share is that successful school improvement efforts will require high-quality, independent journalism. And we know that far too little such journalism exists today. But we need your help figuring out how to build up education’s Fourth Estate.

Please take the survey, and leave any other thoughts (as always) in the comments section.

The suit aimed at forcing New York City to dedicate a certain pot of state funds toward making class sizes smaller. The union charged that the city misused the funds, sending them to offset budget cuts rather than using them as they were intended — as a means of reducing class sizes. The NAACP also signed onto the suit.

But in a decision handed down today, an appeals court unanimously dismissed the union’s suit, saying that the union must take its complaints to the State Education Department before going to court. (Read the full decision below.)

The union president, Michael Mulgrew, vowed to continue protesting rising class sizes. “Lowering class size is a key issue for the parents and teachers of New York City and we intend to pursue it vigorously,” Mulgrew said in a statement this afternoon.

The appeals court did not address the heart of the disagreement: whether the city actually did, as the union charges, improperly fail to lower class sizes — and use Contracts for Excellence funds instead to stave off budget cuts. At issue is the state Contracts for Excellence funding stream, and in particular, a specific clause forcing New York City to write a plan to reduce class sizes.

What’s not disputed is that class sizes have creeped up for the last two years even as funds aimed at bringing them down have flooded into schools. Class sizes for the coming school year aren’t yet available, but all signs point to likely increases, which principals are preparing for. It’s not clear, however, that the Department of Education deliberately sought to prevent schools from lowering class sizes by sending funds elsewhere.

The Contracts for Excellence funds go straight to school principals, who can decide how to allocate them. The Department of Education argues that it’s possible for schools to invest the funds in exactly the kind of policies that should reduce class sizes — like hiring new teachers — and still fail to reduce average class sizes. Here’s an example offered by an official in 2009:

Take Bronx elementary school PS 57, which reported that it spent $190,000 to open new classes. Let’s be generous and say that the money could pay for three additional teachers. That could go a long way toward reducing class sizes in three grade levels. But would it necessarily lower the entire school’s average class size?

No. That would depend on how many students enrolled at the school, especially in grades and subjects that didn’t get new teachers. It would also depend on the rest of the school’s budget outlook, which, as school officials pointed out when they first released basic class-size data, has not been so good lately. And it would require the school to hire only inexpensive, and therefore inexperienced, teachers. In fact, PS 57 did see its average class size drop by more than one student. But another school, PS 54 in the Bronx, received $185,000 but saw class sizes shoot up on average by about 3 students per class.

Supporting the union’s argument, on the other hand, is a report by Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News suggesting that the city revised its class-size reduction plan in response to the tough budget climate. The report cites a letter from then-state education commissioner David Steiner signing off on the changes.

The letter, obtained by GothamSchools, signs off on the changes, with two caveats that are a bit too bureaucratic for me to summarize right now. Read the letter here.

In a statement, Chancellor Dennis Walcott said that the Department of Education has “remained committed to minimizing the growth of class size in all of our schools.” He cited as evidence the fact that the state approved the city’s Contracts for Excellence plans while the law was in effect. (It went off the books this past school year.)

The dismissal is the second legal defeat for the union and the NAACP in the last week. On Friday, a judge rejected the groups‘ suit asking courts to stop the city from closing struggling schools and giving charter schools district space.

The full decision:
Appellate Court Dismissal UFT Class Size Suit

Rupert Murdoch takes a strong interest in his newspapers' education coverage. (Photo by WorldEconomicForum on Flickr)

How involved is Rupert Murdoch at the newspapers he owns? When the subject is education, Murdoch’s views directly influence the coverage in the New York Post and, at the least, the sorts of meetings taken at the Wall Street Journal.

Azi Paybarah at the Observer reports today that at the New York Post, education stories are ordered up according to Murdoch’s visits:

One former reporter said his own editor requested a week’s worth of stories about the New York City public schools because “Rupert was going to be in town.” It was coveted real estate in the paper, and the reporter reluctantly obliged.

We have previously chronicled the Post’s open campaigning on behalf of the Bloomberg administration’s education policies and its effort to renew mayoral control. The coverage prompted Education Secretary Arne Duncan to praise the newspaper for its “leadership” in covering mayoral control.

There are some exceptions — New York City education beat reporter Yoav Gonen is even-handed and columnist Michael Goodwin takes no prisoners. But on and off the editorial page, the newspaper often matches Murdoch’s education views: aggressively dismissive of the teachers union and ridiculing of critics of the mayor.

At the Wall Street Journal, the line between news and opinion and newspaper boss seems to be thicker. But it has some holes. Last week, the New York Times reported on a meeting arranged between Joel Klein, then still the schools chancellor, and reporters:

When Mr. Klein visited The Journal last year to discuss education issues with news and opinion writers, Mr. Murdoch interrupted to lavish praise on the chancellor, much to the surprise of the writers. “Just listen to everything that Joel is saying,” Mr. Murdoch insisted, according to one person who attended the meeting.

A person who attended the meeting confirmed the account. The same story reported that Murdoch relished his access to Journal reporters, with whom he sometimes discussed education issues.

Not everyone at News Corp followed lockstep with Murdoch. When Department of Education officials met with the editorial boards of papers across the city to persuade them of their success at raising achievement, editors at the New York Post’s editorial page were skeptical, a former Bloomberg administration official said.

“We worked hard to get them on board with our numbers,” said the source. “I’m telling you, it was easier with the Times.”