Thanksgiving is like any other meal with my family, a kind of Bizarro Table where religion and politics are the only topics. Well, that's not quite true, but I did get into a spirited debate with my father (a high school English teacher) about whether or not school choice, be it among district schools, charter schools, vouchers, or some combination, has the effect of removing the brightest and most motivated kids from struggling schools and leaving the students who remain in an even worse environment than before. That particular argument went around and around, but with an ever-expanding body of research based on school choice lotteries, we can see where kids given the opportunity to attend a better school do better than kids who aren't, even when both groups' parents were motivated enough to apply to a school choice program and even when they start off comparable in terms of economic status and academic achievement.

Jay P Greene has picked out two studies based on data from Charlotte, NC that suggest the benefits to school choice lottery winners expand beyond academics to other indicators like rates of arrest. Would but I could find a less staunchly pro-choice critic than Jay P. Greene, I would post her review of the studies here, but the findings look exciting to me. Please register or login to share your thoughts below.

Of course, personally, I would be better off today had I not been given the choice to eat that extra slice of pie on Thursday...

During our work on “Policy 2.0: Using Open Innovation to Reform Teacher Evaluation Systems,” the policy team heard from quite a few folks that we ought to think beyond classroom performance to pre-service indicators and differentiating among teacher preparation programs. They’re right.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that even the ideal set of pre-service indicators wouldn’t be a silver bullet – witness pro sports drafts. There are enough 1st round duds and come-from-nowhere heroes to make me wary of relying too much on pre-service stats.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be doing better, and differentiating among teacher preparation programs is a great place to start. Louisiana has been out ahead on this, and it looks like Florida is launching a new initiative.

How do I think you make it work? Include common sense checks and qualitative assessment. Especially as a program like this is getting started, I think it’s worth the money to have people on the ground backing up statistics about student achievement gains with qualitative observations.

Ensure a reasonable distribution among rating categories – labels are useless if quality within the same category varies dramatically. See New York City’s school progress reports and teacher evaluation as a whole for cautionary tales.

Educate the public and stakeholder groups with thoughtful, careful leadership. Differentiating among teacher preparation programs can be thornier than one might assume. Institutions of higher education have long histories and fierce pride. Leadership that can bring everyone to the table around common goals will increase the chances of meaningful and positive change.

What do you think is important when it comes to differentiating among teacher preparation programs? Register or Login to add your comment below!

Strategic Management of Human Capital, a Gates and Carnegie funded task force of education reform leaders, is having it's annual conference in Washington, D.C. today. They are (or will be soon, check the website) releasing a report that is not, apparently, sitting well with the AFT's Randi Weingarten. Steven Sawchuk has the story on his blog - apparently the letter from Weingarten (who was on the task force). It sounds like one of the issues Weingarten has is that the report doesn't place enough emphasis on teachers' environments.

This is one of the big challenges of doing effectiveness reform right. In our report, you can find where we landed in Recommendation 5. The challenge is to acknowledge that school dysfunction will impact teacher effectiveness - that's just common sense. In one of the nation's most watched school turnarounds at Locke High School, for example, many teachers stayed through the transition to Green Dot management. If the school improves, we'll expect those teachers to be more effective in the new environment. But we also know that our worst schools need "whatever it takes, no excuses" teachers who are willing to commit to raising student achievement despite the challenges.

So how do we acknowledge teaching environment without letting teachers off the hook and while ensuring a "whatever it takes" culture?