Proceed with Caution: Using Standardized Test Scores in High-Stakes Decisions is the title of a good post by Anne O’Brien at The Learning First Alliance. It shares links to stories about recent problems with New York and Florida state standardized tests, and discusses that problems like these wave a caution flag to notions like teacher merit pay.

I’m adding the link to The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation.

As readers may know, both Secretary Duncan and President Obama have been talking a lot about their efforts to identify better forms of testing.

Three groups of states have applied to a $350 million fund to develop this “new generation” of testing. You can read more about them and the funding program at Three Groups Apply for Race to Top Test Grants.

Reading through the actual proposals, however, can be pretty painful.

Happily, the Center for K-12 Assessment and Performance Management, a new group set-up by the Educational Testing Service, has created graphic representations of two of the proposals. They will be posting one for the third group soon. You can see them here:

The Partnership for Readiness for College and Career (PARCC)

The SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC)

Thanks to Curriculum Matters for the tip.

You might also be interested in:

The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation

The Best Resources For Learning About Effective Student & Teacher Assessments

President Obama spoke at the Urban League today on education reform. You can read his speech here (and you can read what I had hoped he might say here).

I know the President and Secretary Duncan keep on saying they don’t think charter schools are the answer, only part of the answer, and that they are only talking about “good” charter schools.

Well, the President highlighted one of those supposedly “good” charter schools in his speech. Here is what he said:

So, no, I don’t support all charter schools, but I do support good charter schools. I’ll give you an example. There’s a charter school called Mastery in Philadelphia. And in just two years, three of the schools that Mastery has taken over have seen reading and math levels nearly double –- in some cases, triple. Chaka Fattah is here, so he knows what I’m talking about. One school called Pickett went from just 14 percent of students being proficient in math to almost 70 percent. (Applause.) Now — and here’s the kicker — at the same time academic performance improved, violence dropped by 80 percent -– 80 percent. And that’s no coincidence. (Applause.)

Now, if a school like Mastery can do it, if Pickett can do it, every troubled school can do it.

The problem is that Pickett did it with a 42% student attrition rate, which I also pointed out when TIME wrote a laudatory article about the school earlier this year.

Come on! Kicking-out “low-performing” students is an effective way to increase school scores, but is that really the model the President wants to raise up?