Call for Federal Charter Transparency Law

We've been here before. For instance, in 2015 while Congress was wrestling with what would eventually become ESSA, Sherrod Brown introduced the Charter School Accountability Act, which had some modest goals-- require greater charter transparency, mandate some reporting from charter authorizers, and compel charter operators to talk to the community before opening up. The bill was promptly sent to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, to never be heard from again.

But Congress has yet an other chance to get it right.

Representative Rashina Tlaib (D-Michigan) is introducing the Charter Oversight, Accountability, and Transparency (COAT) Act (how many person-hours do you suppose are used up trying to give bills names that spell something cute?).

This bill is pretty simple, and is asking for, well, transparency about what happens to public taxpayer dollars once they disappear into the charter school system. To keep their ESSA money, states would have to insure that every contract between a charter school and a charter management organization (the businesses that charter schools hire to actually run the schools) would have to require the following:

* How much of the money is being used to actually operate the school (by amount and percent)

* How much of the money is being used to run the CMO (by amount and percent)

* Salaries for CMO executives

* Public CMO meetings

* Whether the CMO is for-profit or non-profit

* The list of LLC's doing business with the CMO

It's a pretty pedestrian list; there's nothing here that is not also required of public school systems. Some civilians would be surprised to discover that this information is not available already. In particular, this is a good way to pull back the curtain on faux non-profits, where the East Egg Academy is a non-profit charter school, operated by East Egg Charter Management, which is a for-profit business that is pocketing $60K of that money.

It is hard to see how any reputable charter operation could object to this bill, but I guess we'll see. In the meantime, the bill has to somehow navigate the House before it can go to languish on Grim Reaper McConnell's giant mountain of Senate do-nothingness.

But in the meantime, you should send out the word of support to your Representative and suggest they might want to co-sponsor the bill. That includes those reps who are conservative or GOP, because despite its origin, this is not a bill calling for some sort of bleeding heart liberal twinkie handout-- this is a bill that simply demands that the taxpayers get to know what the hell the government did with our hard-earned money. It is, in fact, exactly the sort of thing that conservative lawmakers in another time and place would have introduced themselves.

Charters that are operating responsibly have nothing to fear, and the taxpayers deserve basic information. You can use the action network to send your message, or you can go old school, look up your rep and then send your own peresonal message.

Montana and the Wall Between Church and State

Sarah Vowell is a fave of mine, with a fabulous grasp of US history and that special gift of being able to illuminate big ideas with the perfect specific detail, plus she has the gift of balance, of being able to recognize the god and the not-so-good, and most of, the gift of recognizing the humanity of the people she writes about. Her writing about colonial US history is excellent-- if you need a place to start, I'd go with The Wordy Shipmates, a look at the Puritans in America. For an extra treat, get her audiobooks-- she does her own reading and it's great. I would be quite happy if I grew up to be Sarah Vowell.

Sarah Vowell

I bring Vowell up because she was born in Oklahoma, but grew up and attended college in Montana. Last week, she wrote a piece for the New York Times about the Espinoza case, the case that will allow the Supreme Court to legitimize the use of public tax dollars for private religious schools (or not-- the Supremes could totally surprise me and go the other way).

If you are able to get past the paywall, you should go read the piece, because there's a whole  chunk of background that virtually every commenter on the case has simply missed.

Do Mr. Roberts and his eight co-workers fully appreciate the public-spirited grandeur of the winter of 1971-72, when 100 Montanans, including housewives, ministers, a veterinarian and a beekeeper, gathered at the state capital, Helena, for the constitutional convention, affectionately nicknamed the “Con Con”?

That was the occasion for the writing of the Montana constitution, the document that includes the idea that public money should not pay for private sectarian schooling. That's the law the Espinoza suit aims to gut, and voucher fans have characterized as "antiquated" and "Jim Crow for Christians." The lawsuit has been described as standing up to Blaine amendments, laws adopted by states that are pretty clearly anti-immigrant by way of being anti-Catholic. But that's not what was going on in Montana at Con Con, says Vowell.

The representatives arranged themselves not by party, but sat alphabetically, whioch strikes me as an awesome way to reorganize Congress or any other legislature. And they were not particularly God-averse-- many of the major players were clergy. Witness the very first sentence in the document:

We the people of Montana grateful to God for the quiet beauty of our state, the grandeur of our mountains, the vastness of our rolling plains, and desiring to improve the quality of life, equality of opportunity and to secure the blessings of liberty for this and future generations do ordain and establish this constitution.

What Con Con was particularly focused on was the public versus the private. You've heard of company towns, but Montana was viewed as a company state that wore the "copper collar" and controlled by the Anaconda Company. The Con Con delegates were committed to the public interest, and so public funds were to be spent only on public agencies.

Vowell points out that the dynamics of public education are different out West:

Article X, Section 1, of the ’72 Constitution proclaims that it is the duty of the state to “develop the full educational potential of each person.” That is an expensive ideal in a desolate wasteland. Public schools are supposed to be a volume business, but tell that to the Great Plains. The state of Montana has about 60,000 fewer inhabitants than the number of students enrolled in New York City’s public school system.

Kendra Espinoza

In Montana, the poorest schools have the smallest class size. Rural schools have single-digit class sizes-- not like single digit English class, but single digit sophomore class. Vowell recalls a friend who, as a first grader, rode her horse to a school where she and her brother were, one year, half the student body.

Espinoza, who wants to send her children to a private religious school that charges more for tuition than the University of Montana, says that public schools "have plenty of money." But Vowell points out that a surge in vouchers will not just move money from public schools to private schools, but from the rural areas to the cities.

The public schools the framers conjured ask the taxpayers to splurge on fairness, not privilege, to pull together, not away. That beekeeper, those clergymen and moms chartered a state in a republic where a first grader on horseback is supposed to be as big and important as the mountains.

If the result of Espinoza is a wave of voucher money, the result will be a Montana where your available choices for school will very much depend on your zip code.

ICYMI: So Long, February Edition (2/22)

A reminder that you can help amplify the voices that you think need to be heard. Go to the original post and share with your network. Do your part to make sure folks are heard whose message speaks to you. Now for this week's list.

Borrowing a Literacy Strategy from Band 

An interesting notion from Edutopia. After all, reading music is readin. "Reading in band has an additional hitch: Students have to read their parts while hearing several other parts at the same time, which requires them to be strong, independent readers—"

The Death of the Crossing Guard

Mr Bob was 88 years old when he saved two children's lives at the crosswaklk. From Washington Post.

How Play Is Making a Comeback in Kindergarten

Actually from a couple of weeks ago in Hechinger, this is an encouraging addition to the "Yes, play is important" file.

High Stakes Tests Aren't Better- And They Never Will Be

Lelac Almagor (an English teacher at a charter school) writes for the Boston Review, explaining how testing damages education, particularly for the non-wealthy.

Will Software Start Helping Students Cheat On Papers?

No, no it won't. At least not well.  But here's one more consideration of the computer role in cheating.

Betsy DeVos's Voucher Boondoggle

Business writer Andrea Gabor takes a look at the voucher con job behind the DeVos budget proposal. In Bloomberg.

Ending High Stakes Testing and Improve Education

A Florida teacher writes about how removing the Big Standardized Test as a graduation requirement would improve the system.

New Mexico Sues Google

The state has decided to go after the tech giant for collecting student data through the ubiquitous Chromebooks. The Verge has the story.

Don't Mess With Texas Schools

Have You Heard travels to Texas, where GOP candidates are trying had to look like they support public education even as a long series of fora have been held bringing Rs and Ds together to talk ab out education. How's that working out (transcript available for those of us who never have time to listen to podcasts).

People Are Not Cattle

G F Brandenburg offers a quick refresher about William Sanders and the origin of value-added measurement in the world of farming.

Getting Rid of Gym Class

Do you not yet subscribe to Nancy Flanagan's blog? Because you should. Here is some history and thought about what should be included in the required core of classes.

I Love Teaching, Even When It Doesn't Love Me Back   

The most-read of the week is a piece by Jose Luis Vilson. "Teaching from l;ove isn't perfec t, but neither are we."

Social and Emotional Learning Is Drawing Fire

I told you so.

If you are of a Certain Age, you remember Outcome Based Education, the Next Big Education Thing of the 1990s. Its basic idea was to reduce education to observable behaviors-- all those lesson plans with "The Student Will Be Able To...," are artifacts of OBE. The architects were intent on reducing all learning to something cold, hard and observable instead of fuzzy objectives like "After we've covered this unit, the students will kn ow stuff."

This was not necessarily a terrible thing. But the architects made one crucial mistake. They decided that they would include non-cognitive objectives-- having self-esteem, making sound decisions, tolerance, all that good soft skill squishy stuff.

Social conservatives freaked out. Phyllis Schafly, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and a host of others sounded the alarm about government indoctrination, and ultimately, OBE was stomped into the dirt.

This stuff-- what we now call social and emotional learning-- is a really hard needle to thread in education policy. Almost like someone took a third rail and bent it into an eye-of-a-needle shape.

On the one hand, it's absolutely necessary stuff. Young humans have to learn how to interact with other humans, and many of them, for reasons ranging from family of origin to simple biology, aren't very good at it. This becomes a problem in life that overwhelms other issues (I once had a student who couldn't hold a job, regularly quitting with the complaint "that guy thinks he can just boss me around," and "that guy" was always his actual boss).

It seems like learning things like "be responsible" and "work with others" and "don't be an asshat" would be unobjectionable, and as I've pointed out before, 95% of the "This Teacher Changed My Life" stories focus not on content, but on SEL stuff.

But as soon as you start trying to turn it into curriculum, you get into trouble, and I have for years now been expressing my disbelief and how blithely folks like the personalized [sic] learning crowd have been pushing SEL programs.

And here comes the backlash. Meet Jennifer McWilliams.



So let's tug on this thread and see what we find. Jennifer stood up against the indoctrination of a SEL program and was fired "on the spot" (and yes, that means that either there are some pieces missing from this story, or Jennifer's union is terrible even by Indiana standards).

Jennifer is wearing her Purple for Parents t-shirt. That's a group that started in Arizona in response to Red for Ed. While they say they're pro-teacher, they are not such fans of the NEA, and they have some thoughts about what Red for Ed is "really" about:

This sinister agenda is really about turning America into a socialist-dependent nation, by turning our children into social justice warriors who will vote to change the Constitution and our founding American principles.

So many of the old issues are here-- the evil union with its leftist agenda, creeping communism, and of course the Common Core. And the usual opposition to federal involvement in education; one such group may have provided the text that got McWilliams in trouble.

McWilliams has been giving some interviews to like-minded groups, like "Freedom Project Media," which explain further what the issue is:

Also deeply troubling to the Indiana teacher was the use of an “SEL” program known as Leader in Me, which she said has “taken over the school.” “It is on all of the bulletin boards, in the language of EVERYTHING, determines praise and awards, literally everything,” she continued, adding that the school does not have the right to teach children controversial values.

One of her big concerns was that the SEL programs trains children to “compromise” on “everything.”

And Rebecca Friedrichs, the anti-union teacher turned lawsuit face turned activist, has picked up the story and passed it along on the interwebz. And McWilliams has a Go Fund Me, because nothing fights creeping socialism like collective action, I guess.

The objections to "government schools," the claims of Christian persecution, the charges of indoctrination-- none of this is new, but Social and Emotional Learning has become the "and now" in many of these stories, the final proof that public school is Very Naughty. And the SEL blowback is showing up in more soberly way right wing publications like the Federalist. Tennessee and Georgia have both backed away from the CASEL initiative.

It's a somewhat discouraging issue because there's nobody to cheer for here. The far-right fear that everything is a conspiracy between evil unions and evil communists to destroy this great nation from the inside so that the Illuminati can install godless papists to drain our precious bodily fluids is tiresome and unhelpful because we need to talk about conditions on this planet. Meanwhile, SEL is hugely important in education and probably almost impossible to implement in any kind of formal manner that tries to extract the human element from teaching young people how to be better humans. Does it belong in schools? Of course-- you can't have humans together and not have some sort of SEL occurring. Should it be formalized with a curriculum and tests and data collection? Are you nuts? You can't and you shouldn't try to set up a program based on your idea of a standardized decent human being.

And education policy folks keep making the same damn mistake, from OBE to Common Core to, now, SEL, and it keeps getting worse, because every time the far-out-in-right-field crowd sees it as one more piece of proof of a wider and more complex conspiracy against them and gets triggered all over again.

In the meantime, we can follow this story and enjoy the irony of someone who feels she lost her job unjustly, but who opposes the existence of a union that could have offered her protection from unjust firing if she weren't living in a right to work state.

Common Core Is Dead. Long LIve Common Core.

The Common Core State Standards are dead. Done. Finished. Authorities have told us so.

Betsy DeVos delivered a brief eulogy at the American Enterprise Institute back in January. “And at the U.S. Department of Education, Common Core is dead,” she declared.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis just announced that the work of “rooting out all vestiges of Common Core” done, and new standards would now replace the old, unloved ones.

So is that it? Can we get out our forks and prepare to stick them in the Common Core? Or have the reports of their death been greatly exaggerated? Sad to say, it’s probably that second one. The Common Core may very well be shambling along, zombie-like, at a school district near you. Here are the factors that may be keeping it up and shambling.

Yeti Repellant

When Betsy DeVos says the federal government isn’t supporting the Core any more, she’s being disingenuous. The Department of Education never officially endorsed or required the standards. It used winks and nudges and the extortion-style leverage that came from No Child Left Behind requirement that all states get all students to achieve above-average scores by 2014. But to “root out” Common Core at the federal level, all the current administration had to do was... nothing.

Likewise, many opponents of the Core developed a picture of it that was not closely related to reality (”Common Core will turn your children into anti-Christian commies”). This has provided politicians with a ready-made straw man that they can “vanquish” without actually touching the Common Core at all. A good example would be former Florida Governor Rick Scott, who “replaced” the Common Core Standards with Florida standards that were almost identical.

So we end up with people selling yeti repellant. You can tell it “works” because when you look out in the front yard, you don’t see any yeti. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t big bears hiding in your back yard.

The Ghost In The Machine

If your state or district adopted some nifty teaching software in the last decade, then Common Core is embedded in your schools.

Retired teacher and blogger Nancy Bailey points out that a huge number of Florida schools use the iReady program for math and reading, and as the program’s own website boasts, “iReady was built for the Common Core.” A long-time education observer, she’s unconvinced that Florida has killed anything.

For the past decade, “aligned with the Common Core” has been a regular marketing point for most ed tech products. Those products are organized around assessing, testing, and teaching the Common Core standards. The state can change the standards, but until the software manufacturers change the standards, students will still be sitting down for screen time with the Common Core.

Test Test Test

High stakes testing has been with us longer than the Common Core, but part of the concept of Common Core was to get all fifty states testing the same thing. The PARCC and SBA tests were built to test how well schools were teaching Common Core Standards, and while many states dumped them, they replaced them with tests that were similarly aligned. Those test results were in turn used to evaluate districts, schools and teachers, and because the stakes were high, it’s those tests, more than any other single factor, that gave the Common Core power over what happens in the classroom. Even the SAT and ACT have become more Common Core friendly (the head of the College Board, producers of the SAT, is David Coleman, an architect of the Common Core).

As long as a state uses high-stakes testing as the foundation of its education evaluation program, whatever the test is aligned to will drive the school bus— and right now, all of those tests are aligned to the Common Core Standards.

Your Principal’s Principles

One of the great irony of the Common Core Standards is that there is no standardized way to align to them. When they rolled out, teaching staffs across the nation were piled into professional development sessions to learn how to “unpack” the standards and translate them into classroom pedagogy. Meanwhile, the folks who wrote the standards dispersed almost immediately releasing the Core into the wild; if you want to call an authority who can answer your questions about the standards, there is no such number, no central office working to insure that the standards are properly understood and applied.

This meant that local districts were on their own pretty much from Day One, which has meant that implementation has ranged from directives like “We will follow these standards to the letter” all the way to “Just get the standards blanks on lesson plans filled in.” Some administrators have held a strong line in defending their staff’s right to use their own best professional judgment, while others have aggressively championed the standards. It’s also worth noting that for a bad administrator, who lacks the knowledge or comfort level to deal with the messy and complex business of teaching, the standards were an easy out, a handy list to carry around.

High stakes testing has driven much of the standards adoption. For example, the ELA standards include some talking and listening standards, but those are never on the test, so many schools simply ignore them. How embedded the Core is in your school also depends on how concerned your administrators are about the test. In the early days, teachers heard a lot of, “Just teach the standards well, and the test scores will take care of themselves.” That turned out to be exceptionally untrue. So your administration may have implemented all sorts of programs to boost passing rates. All of these programs are tied to the Core.

In short, your district administration may have tried to limit the intrusion of Common Core, or they may have ground it into the district’s DNA. Both what they’re enforcing and how hard they’re enforcing it vary with location.

The Actual Classroom

There’s no way to collect hard data, but I’d wager that roughly 99% of the teachers in U.S. public schools have personally modified the standards, and that includes the ones who say they really like Common Core and enjoy using it.

A decade ago, the number would have been lower, because most teachers are good team players who will try what they’re commanded to try. But teachers are also likely to change what observably fails in the classroom. If whatever Common Core authority they’re following (and there are many) tells them to do X, they may try it a few times, but if it fails and fails and fails, they’ll change their practice. They may do it with administrative support or not. If administration enforces the Core with an iron hand, it may be hard to fight against being required to commit educational malpractice (and for the effects of that, I refer you to our teacher “shortage”), but all alignment to the Core really requires is some paperwork. And as a classroom teacher, you can claim just about anything is aligned to the Core.

The above factors will define the size of the cage that a teacher has been confined to, but for the final word on how much Common Core your child is really getting, a frank conversation with the classroom teacher is necessary.

Despite reports to the contrary, the Common Core is only mostly dead, more dead in some schools than in others.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

OH: Whose Gold Makes That Parachute?

It turns out there's one more problem with the kind of autocratic corporate-style takeover that Ohio implemented under HB 70.

You may recall that Lorain, Ohio, is one of three districts to be placed under the control of an all-powerful CEO. It was not pretty. An Ohio-style school CEO has all the powers of a school board and a superintendent, less the ability to levy taxes but plus the power to arbitrarily rewrite contracts. The job requires such a super-human level of expertise that it's unlikely that anyone could really do it well-- but Lorain was saddled with David Hardy, Jr., a guy who was especially not-superhuman. Hardy was relieved of his duties last November, effective the beginning of January.

David Hardy was yet another example of someone who built a career as an education expert based on his two year stint as a Teach for America guy. And he used his position of power in Lorain to bring along a bunch of his old TFA friends, including Arliss Prass, who he apparently knew from way back when they TFAed together, and Jacqueline Younker, a TFA alum who was brought in to handle HR as "Chief People Officer."

Some eyebrows went up when Younker got a hefty raise, but apparently there were other surprises in the administrators' contracts.

Both women had clauses in their contracts that automatically terminated their employment if the CEO was replaced. The new CEO didn't discover this until late in January. And the contracts also included some shiny gold parachute language, a promise of severance pay of basically $493 a day for 120 days. Almost $60K, plus health insurance.

The current CEO and his legal team think that handing over taxpayer money for people to not work is not okay. Prass disagrees, and she has filed a complaint with the state supreme court-- it's lawsuit time. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. Can an all-powerful CEO commit taxpayers to pay for golden parachutes for his staff, or can an all-powerful CEO erase contractual obligations entered into by the previous all-powerful CEO?

Avoiding Teacher Compensation

Erik Hanushek has been at this for a while, and his shtick is pretty well polished. With Raj Chetty, he's been making the assertion that having a good teacher will make a student wealthier. While he can occasionally seem like a champion of teachers and teaching, he also lapses often into the old reform whinge that teachers don't really want to be held accountable for their performance, and that such strict, measurable accountability is possible because teaching's not really any different than any other job. What he mostly means is good old value-added test scores. Hanushek, it turns out, also helped cook up the idea of "days of learning" aka "change in test score" which was popularized by CREDO (Hanushek is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, a right-tilted thinky tank housed at Stanford, while CREDO is an ed reform-tilted research group at Stanford; it is also run by Hanushek's wife).

Did I mention that Hanushek is an economist? I'm not sure what strange attraction the world of education holds for economists, but Hanushek most often seems to be trying to solve a problem popular with economists-- how can we get more education and pay less for it.

Hanushek often turns up on op-ed pages, but this time he's issuing a full-on policy analysis from the Hoover Education Success Initiative-- "The Unavoidable: Tomorrow's Teacher Compensation." The Initiative is a gathering of the usual suspects-- the executive committee is Hanushek, Chester Finn (Fordham Institute boss-emeritus), Paul Peterson, and Margaret Raymond (CREDO chief and Hanushek's wife). It's a good solid summary of Hanushek's policy ideas, and so I am unsurprised to find that I disagree with almost all of it. But let's take a look.

He opens with some classic Chicken Littling (the NAEP scores!! Oh nooss!) and uses that to set up the scary idea that being behind on test scores means our economy will be overtaken any day now, a threat that Reformsters have been trumpeting since A Nation at Risk. Thirty-seven years later and we're still being told we're in danger of being economically dominated any day now.

Hanushek, as is his wont, can lead teachers to think he's a supporter. He notes that teachers pay an economic penalty, that they could have made more by entering different fields. He notes that teacher pay has been stagnant for too long. And he touts teachers as super-important to what happens in schools. He goes out of his way not to blame teachers for school issues-- "Teachers are not to be blamed for the current shortcomings of US schools."

The "unavoidable" seems to refer to a need to pay teachers more, but Hanushek is, as usual, looking for a way to pay teachers more without paying teachers more. He suggests that existing research provides some "clear guidelines," but much of the research he cites is actually his own, while other sources include articles from Education Next. At any rate, the clear guidelines include the following ideas for dealing with the unavoidable.

* Scrap pay policies that are unrelated to "educator effectiveness."  Longevity and advanced degrees aren't proven to raise test scores, so nerts to those things.

* So, obviously, we'll want to pay based on "educator effectiveness." He's concerned that some policies under consideration will give teachers raises before they can prove they've got the stuff to raise test scores. That seems a bad way to attract new teachers to the fold.

* Shift compensation from retirement to current salary. This is idea is floating around in reform circles, particularly over at Bellwether with Chad Aldeman. This seems part of a larger movement to privatize pensions and just generally save businesses the expense. And maybe you can con some twenty-two year old recent grad into thinking that he can do his own investing and cleverly beat the results that a pension fund would have provided. But mostly the dodge seems to be about cutting costs for something that is so far down the road that privatizers are betting that most young teachers won't think about it. This is also a reform that is cynical as hell because by the time the nation is awash in old people with no retirement safety net, the people who sold the safety net will be dead and gone.

Hanushek does get one thing right here. Defined-benefits programs, the best of the best (old PA teachers have them, but young PA teachers don't), encourages older teachers to retire. For my last few years of teaching, it was literally costing me money to stay in the classroom. He suggests big bonuses--but only for the teachers who are keeping those test scores up.

* Teacher shortages need to be addressed "explicitly, not generally." I think he might mean "specifically." His point is that just because you're short a bunch of math teachers is no reason to run off and start offering lots of money to everybody. He makes the bold assertion that "there are not shortages in terms of total numbers of teachers," and an assertion is all it is because he doesn't have any research data to back it up. He also tosses out the "fix" that the best teachers (check them test scores again) could be paid extra to take on larger classes. Because a teacher who's effective with twenty students will be equally effective with 75? This is a really dumb idea.

* Local districts need flexibility. In other words, when you hand out money that is all tied up in rules and regulations, you tie the hands of the local people who probably know best how the money should be used. This is not a bad point, but sadly he uses the super-sizing of classes as an example, reminding me that local flexibility could be used for really dumb reasons.

* Disadvantaged schools need directed teacher quality programs. This has been a reform dream for years; in fact, Race to the Toppers had to promise to find a way to make it happen. Ste One: use VAM sauce to find your bestest teachers. Step Two: convince them to go teach at your most disadvantaged schools. There are a variety of problems with this concept (beyond the fact that rendering teachers is largely frowned on. The bigger problem is that we already know that test scores mostly represent the socio-economic level of the students, meaning that whoever teaches those students will be rated ineffective. So you have on school with a roof, and one school with no roof, and it's raining, and your solution is, "Let's find the driest teachers and send them to the school with no roof-- maybe they will be bring dryness to the wet school." Nope.

* Evaluation systems can be flexible, but they must be used to be effective. This section contains the rightest sentence that Hanushek has ever written. He even italicizes it:

Without a workable evaluation system, none of the policy proposals built on teacher effectiveness are possible.

Which is, of course, pretty much where we are as a nation. He cites IMPACT from DC, but IMPACT has been changed big time, repeatedly, and is currently being viewed as a problem, not a success.  He cites Dallas-- also not exactly a huge hit. He even brings up NMTEACH, the New Mexico model that is notoriously lousy. And he makes an oblique reference to other options, "some more sophisticated than others," but that footnote leads to a 2017 report from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group whose record on evaluating teacher evaluation is just flat-out bad.

In the end, Hanushek is simply arguing for test-driven compensation policies. He does offer one other intriguing observation in his wrap-up:

No decisions about school policy are more important than personnel decisions.

That's one to really chew on. Are curriculum and content more important? Is school climate and culture more important? Is having an administration that supports and develops teachers so they can continue to improve and do their best work--is that important, or is it a personnel decision?

But it's just a way-station on the path to summing up. Hanushek says that "improved compensation policies" are a win for everyone, but by "improved" he means more money "accompanied by a tilt in compensation toward the more effective teachers."

There are so many problems here-- more than I'm going to address in detail. But first, this assumes that "effective teacher" is a constant, solid state, that a good teacher is good for all students on all days in all settings every year. That is not how human beings work, especially human beings whose entire work rests on a foundation of relationships. Finding all the "good" teachers is not like finding all the blue-eyed teachers or all the teachers taller than six feet or all the teachers who speak French.

That fuzzy human quality continues to thwart reform efforts to come up with a evaluation tool that actually works, and in the vast majority of school districts, teachers are currently evaluated by a tool based heavily on a measurement that we already know does not work-- a single two-subject standardized test run through some VAM sauce. And as Hanushek himself says, if you can't start with an evaluation that is actually valid, none of the rest of these ideas even make sense.

But the dream remains alive. If we could just sort out the good teachers from the bad teachers, then we could pay good teachers really well and the rest really mediocre (and  somehow the lesser-paid teachers would stick around for it and the teacher pool would be happy never knowing from year to year what their pay would be) and the test scores would go up and we would finally kick  Estonia's butt on the PISA scores and rising NAEP scores would usher in an era of awesome prosperity (because if NAEPs went up, employers would pay their workers more, for reasons) and China and Russia would yield to us because, you know, test scores and the best part would be that none of this would require us to raise taxes or spend more on public education, because avoiding spending more on teachers and schools would be awesome.