By Sabrina Stevens Shupe The Huffington Post

The recent release of two important reports led me to ask this question.

The National Education Policy Center shared a brief that reviews available research on several different aspects of teacher evaluation and makes recommendations for a comprehensive approach to teacher evaluation. If different measures, like observation (by peers and principals), teacher self-reports, student surveys, classroom artifacts, portfolios and value-added assessment are used, then the weaknesses of one measure can be offset by the strengths of another.

Meanwhile, the much-anticipated PISA rankings came out, revealing that America is (still) in the “middle of the pack” of international rankings of 15-year-old performance in reading, science and math. Putting anxious hand-wringing and concerns about representativeness and meaning aside, if we take the rankings at face value, then there is merit in examining how more successful school systems work, and learning from what makes them so successful.

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By SAM DILLON, The New York Times

How useful are the views of public school students about their teachers?

Quite useful, according to preliminary results released on Friday from a $45 million research project that is intended to find new ways of distinguishing good teachers from bad.

Teachers whose students described them as skillful at maintaining classroom order, at focusing their instruction and at helping their charges learn from their mistakes are often the same teachers whose students learn the most in the course of a year, as measured by gains on standardized test scores, according to a progress report on the research.

Financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the two-year project involves scores of social scientists and some 3,000 teachers and their students in Charlotte, N.C.; Dallas; Denver; Hillsborough County, Fla., which includes Tampa; Memphis; New York; and Pittsburgh.

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by Herbert J. Walberg and Marc Oestreich, National Education Policy Center

This review examines the Heartland Institute’s report ranking states on student achievement, education expenditures, and adherence to learning standards, as well as a ranking based on an average of the first three. The rankings are based on indices created by the report’s authors, and the report highlights the top- and lowest-performing states for each of the indices. The report assigns letter grades to each of the states (plus DC), with a forced distribution: 10 states are assigned A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s, and 11 states must get F’s. The report explains how the indices were devised but does not cite any research or provide rationales to support the methodological approach used in their creation. The report acknowledges that it does not control for state variations in demographic or other factors. It nevertheless presents conclusions concerning quality, and it recommends school choice as a remedy. The report’s policy recommendations are undermined by the flaws in the report’s methodological approaches, its limited and partisan selection of research references, and a clear disconnect between the recommendations and the report’s findings.

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By Julian Baggini, Financial Times

Genius of Britain: The Scientists Who Changed the World, by Robert Uhlig, Collins RRP£20, 352 pages

The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution and the Twentieth Century, by Peter Watson, Simon & Schuster RRP£30, 992 pages

The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent and Intelligence is Wrong, by David Shenk, Icon RRP£14.99, 320 pages

Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs by Andrew Robinson, Oxford University Press

At the age of 14, in 1846, James Clark Maxwell published his first scientific paper in a learned journal, having already seen his poetry printed in the Edinburgh Courant. In 1864, he went on to write the classic A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, which gave a unified account of electricity, magnetism and light in just four equations. Einstein later remarked that he stood on the shoulders of not Newton but Maxwell.

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By Hechinger Report, The Hechinger Report

Justin Snider of The Hechinger Report sat down today with Dr. Pasi Sahlberg, Director General of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture. An edited version of their conversation follows.

Sahlberg, who has trained teachers, coached schools and advised policymakers in more than 40 countries, is also a former Washington-based World Bank education specialist. Earlier this week, Finland was once again among the top-scoring nations on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam given to 15-year-olds around the world. U.S. students were in the middle of the pack for science and literacy but below average in mathematics.

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by Alex Molnar, Bill Koski, Faith Boninger, National Education Policy Center

This policy brief describes the growth of schoolhouse advertising and marketing activities in the last few decades, assesses the harms associated with commercial activities in schools, and provides advocates, policymakers, and educators with a policy framework and model legislative language designed to protect children and the integrity of education programs from advertising and marketing in schools.

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By ALISON LEIGH COWAN, The New York Times

Michael R. Bloomberg, in his successful bid to become mayor, sold himself as an expert manager, a businessman who had made a fortune in private industry. He has now named Cathleen P. Black, a magazine executive, to be the next chancellor of New York City’s public schools. Why?

“Cathie Black is a superstar manager who has succeeded spectacularly in the private sector,” Mayor Bloomberg said this month. “She is brilliant, she is innovative, she is driven — and there is virtually nobody who knows more about the needs of the 21st-century work force for which we need to prepare our kids.”

Ms. Black also has virtually no professional experience in education — not at the head of a classroom, not in charge of a school district, certainly not responsible for 1.1 million children.

Is it, then, a sure thing that an expert manager in one field can succeed in another? The New York Times asked four prominent experts in business management what they made of the mayor’s choice, and his confidence in her transferable skills. As a group, they were not put off by the idea. They held up several examples of corporate chieftains who hopscotched successfully from industry to industry, people like Louis V. Gerstner Jr., who went from RJR Nabisco, a maker of food and cigarettes, to I.B.M, a maker of computer equipment.

But the management gurus stopped short of echoing Mr. Bloomberg’s view that Ms. Black was indeed the perfect choice.

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By Matt Richtel, The New York Times

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

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