The latest news from North Carolina:
“A victory this evening. The nine-member Wake County NC (16th largest district in the U.S., 150K students) unanimously passed a resolution opposing legislation that requires local Boards of Education to offer four-year contract to only 25% of teachers of all who are deemed “effective.” No one supports this divide and conquer strategy aimed at killing teacher career status in our state.”
The North Carolina legislature seems to have nothing better to do than to dream up new laws to demoralize teachers. Not long ago, it decided to replace teacher tenure (aka, the right to due process) with short-term contracts. School boards are supposed to identify the “top” 25% of teachers and offer them a bonus in return for abandoning their tenure rights. Thanks to this and many other equally injurious laws passed in the last two years, experienced teachers are leaving North Carolina, once the South’s most forward looking state, now engaged in a race to the bottom with Louisiana and Tennessee. Teacher pay is now 46th in the nation, as is per-pupil spending. Meanwhile, the legislature has authorized more charters and vouchers, which will not be held to the same standards as public schools.
Thank you, Wake County, for not letting the legislature bully your teachers!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Wake County….for standing up for our students and their families, our teachers, and the principle of a free and vibrant public education system that our great nation was founded on.
You are a beacon of light for all!
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This proposal from the NC legislature may have been conjured from a ridiculous report from the Brookings Institution. The report offers “insights” from the DC insider Grover Whitehurst and a group of economists and statisticians. The report claims that districts could improve their tests scores by (a) using value-added (VA) scores exclusively as the means to identify the most effective teachers–irrespective of subjects and grade-levels, and b) firing up to 25% of teachers who had the lowest VA scores. Such firing should be routine, with the possible exception of teachers in special education. See Croft, M., Glazerman, S., Goldhaber, D., Loeb, S., Raudenbush, S.,Staiger, D., & Whitehurst, G.R. (2011). Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems The Brookings Brown Center Task Group on Teacher Quality, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Correlation, Para 5. http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2011/04/26-evaluating-teachers
This is a stupid proposal. It has no basis in the real world of schools. Never mind.
Among the co-authors of this “25% reduction in force” proposal is Douglas Staiger, co-author with fellow Harvard economist Thomas Kane of the flawed $64 million Gates-funded study titled “Measures of Effective Teaching.”
By the way, Thomas Kane is giving “expert” testimony on teacher evaluation in California’s Vergara trial intended to eliminate due-process rights for teachers. I hope that Jesse Rothstien demolishes the legitimacy of Thomas Kane’s support of VA scores and uses basic math to show that Raj Chetty’s inferential leaps correlating teacher VA measures and student life-long earnings are not credible.
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