As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m doing mid-year “The Best…” lists to make it easier for me to do my end-of-the-year ones.

You might also be interested in:

The Best Articles & Posts On Education Policy In 2011 — Part Two

The Best Articles & Posts On Education Polcy In 2011 — Part One

The Best Articles & Posts On Education Policy — 2010

The “Best” Articles (And Blog Posts) About Education Policy — 2009

The “Best” Articles About Education — 2008

The “Best” Articles About Education — 2007

Here are my choices for The Best Articles & Posts On Education Policy In 2012 — So Far (not listed in order of preference):

Guest Post: Here’s What Was Missing From The Wall Street Journal’s Column On Teacher Evaluation is by John Thompson.

Professor Yong Zhao has done a fascinating analysis of the international PISA math assessments, and followed that up with a speech at the ISTE conference:

Professor Zhao has also posted his slide presentation here, and sample chapters of his new book. And he expanded on it in an Education Week commentary, Doublethink: The Creativity-Testing Conflict.

John Thompson published another great post — The Gates Foundation’s Belated Evolution — where he shares his thoughts on this week’s interviews with Melinda Gates and Diane Ravitch on the PBS News Hour. He discusses the work of the Measures Of Effective Teaching project (see The Best Posts On The Gates’ Funded Measures Of Effective Teaching Report) and its videotaping of teachers (see my Washington Post piece on Videotaping teachers the right way (not the Gates way)).

A Significant Error That Policymakers Commit is a new post by Larry Cuban that I’m sure will be a candidate for the best educational commentary of the year. In it, he discusses differences between “good” teaching and “successful” teaching, and describes “successful” learning.

What I believe is the best piece yet published on teacher evaluation was published this year. You can download Linda Darling Hammond’s Creating A Comprehensive System For Evaluating and Supporting Effective Teaching at the website of the Stanford Center For Opportunity Policy In Education.

My Teacher Leaders Network colleague Anthony S. Colucci has written an article titled “The Core Standards That Matter Most In My Classroom” that emphasize the standards that I think we should all be emphasizing, including:

• My class will be engaging.

• I will stress the importance of hard work.

• I will teach my students what it means to be responsible citizens.

• I will encourage my students to find careers they’ll love.

• I will treat my students with respect.

He encourages people to share their own “core” standards, too.

A Lesson in Teaching to the Test, From E.B. White is a must-read commentary over at The New York Times. In it, Anne Stone and Jeff Nichols share a great excerpt from E.B. White’s “The Trumpet of the Swan” and relates it to today’s education policy issues.

Value-Added Evaluation Hurts Teaching is a very important commentary written by Linda Darling-Hammond for Education Week.

“Socrates Fails Teacher Evaluation” is a great post by Heidi_Hayes_Jacobs.

Michael Winerip at The Times wrote an exceptional commentary on the controversial teacher effectiveness study highlighted on the front page of The New York Times earlier this year. You can read all about it at The Best Posts On The NY Times-Featured Teacher Effectiveness Study.

Getting Real About Turnarounds is by Diane Ravitch.

This twelve minute video of Anthony Bryk from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is one of the best things I’ve seen about teacher evaluation. Among other points, he compares summative teacher evaluation with teacher improvement.

I learned about it from Matthew Di Carlo at The Shanker Blog, a “must-read” blog for educators.

It is (Mostly) About Improvement from EdWriters on Vimeo.

Here’s a video of Diane Ravitch’s speech to the American Federation Of Teachers Convention in Detroit:

Responding to the Gates Foundation: How do we Consider Evidence of Learning in Teacher Evaluations? is by Anthony Cody at Education Week Teacher.

I’ve written quite a bit on education policy issues, and here are my three favorite ones — they may, or may not, deserve to be on this list:

Bribing students: Another ‘magical solution’ that doesn’t work is a piece I wrote that was published in The Washington Post.

I wrote Merit pay and ‘loss aversion’ at The Washington Post.

Teaching Students To Teach (& What School Reformers Are Missing) is a post I wrote, but the meat of it is an excerpt from a Larry Cuban post.

Feedback is welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at the 900 other “The Best…” lists and consider subscribing to this blog for free.