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The importance of raising teacher quality and a ramped-up declaration of support for charter schools are the education points getting attention from Bill Gates’ first annual letter about the state of his philanthropic giving. But here’s another really important point that Gates makes about his efforts to improve American education:

Unlike scientists developing a vaccine, it is hard to test with scientific certainty what works in schools. If one school’s students do better than another school’s, how do you determine the exact cause? But the difficulty of the problem does not make it any less important to solve. (Emphasis mine.)

A hint at how the foundation might improve educational research is in my feature on the Gates Foundation’s new direction from late last year:

One initiative will invest about $7 million in a partnership between three research groups, the Educational Testing Service, the Rand Corporation, and a University of Michigan research group, which will study ways to measure teacher effectiveness. The goal is to find “fairer, more powerful, and more reliable measures” than current standardized tests provide, the foundation’s director of education programs, Vicki Phillips, said.

The charter school teacher who goes by Mildly Melancholy first got our attention here when she was unceremoniously fired, in the middle of the school year, after struggling for months with what sounds like precious little support from administrators and fellow staff. Since then, she’s inspired a great debate in the comments section here about what it means to be a teacher, how to measure teacher quality, and whether urban teachers are asked to do too much.

And now, she’s emerged from a period of quiet on the subject of herself to respond to this raging debate. The long response she’s posted is worth a read, especially her disclosure that she’s the third teacher in the grade she taught to be dismissed from this particular school. (Maybe she’s not the one to blame here.)

Here are some other highlights from the robust conversation Mildly Melancholy started. (more…)

• Bad budget news: from Governor Paterson, talking to school leaders. (Daily News)
• Optimistic budget news: from Senator Schumer, talking about a possible federal bailout. (Liz Benjamin)
• Next up for re-zoning (and likely drama): Meet District 2! (Inside Schools)
• The 19-year-old model who is living with a former teacher is now camera-shy. (New York Post)
• The mayor’s popularity has dropped by nine points, according to a poll. (Daily News; NY1)
• Teachers need a “bundle” of traits to be successful, a study of city teachers finds. (Ed Week)
• A special ed parent says standardizing New York’s IEP’s will lead to more inconvenience. (EdNews.org)
• Columbia students are voting on whether to bring a military program to campus. (New York Post)
• Randi Weingarten’s predecessor at AFT is a possible Labor Secretary. (Associated Press)
• City schools are closed tomorrow and Friday for Thanksgiving. (New York Times)