Education Policy Links 3-16-11

For many, "teacher quality" is at the heart of the debate over how to improve schools and close the achievement gap.  A number of reforms are being tried in order to recruit, train, and retain better teachers and fire worse teachers -- one of these is a new charter school in NYC that pays its teachers $125K per year (60 Minutes Video).  The Economist cheers many of these recent reforms, while Diane Ravitch is decidedly more skeptical.

Here's a quick summary of a few of the aspects of NCLB that we discussed in class on Monday.  Cheating on tests is another unintended consequence we didn't discuss.

Robert Samuelson points out that Americans actually don't do too poorly on international assessments if we compare by racial sub-group, arguing that we have a larger problem with culture than with schools.

Incentive pay for teachers is popular reform nowadays, but a just-released evaluation of school-based incentive pay found no positive effects.  The first randomized experiment of performance pay in schools found similar results last fall.