Today's question of the day comes from the Sacramento Bee in this article about the STAR score release. The question and answer section they included this question:

Should Californians be concerned about a 50 percent proficiency rate?

To answer their question..... YES! Yes, California taxpayers and parents should be concerned about the fact that only about half of our students are at grade-level each year. If we continued to gain 2 percentage points a year (the amount of this year's gain) it would take us more than 20 years to get almost all of our students to grade-level. That's a whole generation of our students. Read the rest of this post!

Probably the biggest story in education this week is the value-added analysis done by the Los Angeles Times looking at the impact of individual teachers on student academic performance.

Though the government spends billions of dollars every year on education, relatively little of the money has gone to figuring out which teachers are effective and why.

Seeking to shed light on the problem, The Times obtained seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used the information to estimate the effectiveness of L.A. teachers — something the district could do but has not.

The Times used a statistical approach known as value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students' progress on standardized tests from year to year. Each student's performance is compared with his or her own in past years, which largely controls for outside influences often blamed for academic failure: poverty, prior learning and other factors.

Though controversial among teachers and others, the method has been increasingly embraced by education leaders and policymakers across the country, including the Obama administration.

In coming months, The Times will publish a series of articles and a database analyzing individual teachers' effectiveness in the nation's second-largest school district — the first time, experts say, such information has been made public anywhere in the country.

This article examines the performance of more than 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers for whom reliable data were available.

The Los Angeles Times is creating a database of their findings so that parents can look up the teachers in their neighborhood school and see which class they want their child to be in. They also shared some general findings: Read the rest of this post!

I thought this op ed by Jane Hathaway in the USA Today was an interesting perspective on teacher evaluation.

Washington, D.C., is front and center taking on the challenge. For decades here and in school districts coast to coast, seniority provided what seemed to be a fair, transparent and moderately efficient layoff strategy. Years in the classroom can be counted with little dispute. Districts viewed teachers as largely interchangeable, and students were presumed to be largely untouched by personnel matters.

If anything, more experienced teachers — those protected by seniority — were assumed to be better than younger instructors. Meanwhile, greater employment security rewarded loyal employees, no doubt fostering good management and teacher relations. It all worked smoothly.

That was then. Today, things are different. Thanks to more and better data about individual students and teachers, we can base policies on a truer understanding of what goes on in schools.

We know, because of research from the federally funded National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) — and elsewhere, that the differences in teacher effectiveness, as measured by tested student achievement gains, are huge. Strong teachers get nearly triple the results that weak teachers get with their students.

So which teachers stay and which leave matters.

The Assembly Republican Caucus released this document providing statistics on "California Private Sector Job Loss vs. State Employee Job Cost." The key numbers are:

Real Facts: California Private Sector Job Loss vs. State Employee Job Cost

12.3%	California Unemployment Rate
2.24M	Californians currently listed as unemployed
-1,298,700	Private sector jobs lost in California since 2005
+38,100	State government jobs added since 2005
$55,000	Average California private sector job salary
$3,600	Average state taxes paid by each private sector employee
$90,000	Average cost to taxpayers to pay salary and benefits for each California government job
25	Private sector jobs it takes to support one government job

I'm on vacation in Colorado visiting some friends this week. While checking out a game store, my wife Grace found a new game Urban Myth and brought it home for us to play. We had a group of 13 people, ages from 12-46. I have to say we had a really fun time. I think what made the game were the "urban myths" that the players had to read. There were some pretty amazing facts/myths. The basic premise of the game is that you read the cards and guess whether situation or "fact" is truth or myth. If you guess right and you're on the right square on the board you get to keep the card, which has a letter on it. With the cards you spell "True" or "Myth" to win. We had to play on teams because the game is designed for up to 6 players and it isn't a short game by any means. It was definitely a fun family game. I'd recommend you take a look at it.