Dwayne Betts, a D.C. school teacher, has an interesting and thoughtful post on school reform on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog over at The Atlantic. Betts has a small quibble with Jay Mathews, who profiled the Knowledge Is Power Program of charter schools, or KIPP, in his latest book, "Work Hard. Be Nice." Betts wants to know what happens to kids that aren't in these programs.

A few weeks ago, Jay Mathews asked readers a tough question in his Admissions 101 forum - which is better: an A or B in a regular course or a C in a more challenging course like an AP or IB class? Jay sided with AP, saying that all students interested in tier 1 or tier 2 schools should take at least 2 AP or IB courses. Even if that means a C on a high school transcript, Jay argued, colleges will appreciate a student who is willing to take on a challenge. Reader reactions have been pouring in ever since:

eloquensa: “My strategy suggestion is a little different from yours - I don't know about the college front in the C-in-AP/IB-or-A-in-regular argument, but if the student is a little more strategic in course and teacher selection it's a lot easier to avoid that dreaded C.

When I first met him a dozen years ago, Mike Durso struck me as an okay principal. He didn't say much about himself, but his school, Springbrook High in Silver Spring, was well-run. The students liked him. He had been around a long time, another good sign.

It took some time to realize how badly he had deceived me. His adopted persona, good ol' boy administrator, hid something more important. I began looking for clues to how amazing Durso was, what an impact he was having on the region with his phenomenal eye for talent, while he pretended to be like everybody else, just getting through the day.

Editor's Note: If you like cool online-polling devices, feel free to skip to the bottom of this column, make some clicks and then circle back for Jay's Take....

Those of us who spend our days mesmerized by discussions of summer learning loss, looping and longitudinal analysis need a summer break, just like everybody else. We are readers, so on vacation we are likely to have a book in our hands, or if we are very old, a newspaper. For me, bestselling thrillers are too predictable and mysteries too complex. I need something different, something weird, something fresh that taps into my essential nerdiness, and I have found it. “Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality,” by Gerald W. Bracey.

The first few chapters are familiar, if you, like me, are a fan of the irascible Bracey and his assaults on the conventionally wise among our education leaders. But in chapter 10 he does something totally unexpected. He resurrects The Eight-Year Study, a 70-year-old corpse, and makes me want to talk about it, even with that guy sprawled out on the next beach towel.

Mike Klonsky has some strong words for Jay Mathews on his recent column about unions and charter schools. In the piece, Jay argues that union demands might swamp the progress that one Baltimore KIPP school has shown under the direction of KIPP founder Jason Botel.

In his blog Small Talk, Klonsky, an educator and activist, argues Mathews is ignoring the difficult conditions many KIPP teachers work under:

"(Mathews has) become an important part of a national campaign aimed at discouraging and defeating activist KIPP teachers, who are finally standing up to abuse from Botel and company and organizing for collective barganing rights.

KIPP-AMP teachers in New York, for example, are currently part of a new movement among charter school teachers, asking for the union recognition long denied them. They got a majority of KIPP teachers to sign union cards only to have their pro-union colleagues fired, threatened and intimidated by KIPP management. The teachers want an end to 16-hour teacher work days (which Mathews thinks are good for kids), lousy pay and benefits (while KIPP founders rake in millions), and firings of pro-union teachers.

Botel claims that KIPP can't afford to pay teachers properly. He claims that African-American kids learn better with overworked teachers who burn out in three years. A good journalist would question those claims.

My colleague Dan de Vise provides an intriguing look at teacher support efforts on our front page Monday, in what many seasoned educators think is the best way to help bad teachers--regular counseling and review by experts.

His subject is the Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) program in Montgomery County, a wealthy suburb that can afford the $2 million annual cost. Teachers who are ineffective in the classroom, and all new teachers, are assigned a classroom expert who watches them in action and meets with them regularly, making suggestions and seeing if they work. A 16-person panel---8 principals appointed by the school system and 8 teachers appointed by the union--makes the final decision on whether to keep the teachers or dismiss them so they can seek more congenial employment.

This seems to produce more, rather than fewer, dismissals of ineffective teachers than Montgomery had before. But that is a misleading figure because before PAR, under-performing teachers were often hectored into quitting, and didn’t show up on the stats as being dismissed. The teachers union designed the plan. The superintendent likes it.

My only qualm is that the panel pays little attention to test score data or parental opinions---both of which teachers' unions tend to ignore anyway. Many parents, including me, think those factors should get more weight.

Sometime last year, while negotiating a teacher contract for the KIPP Ujima Village charter middle school in Baltimore, founder Jason Botel pointed out that his students, mostly from low- income families, had earned the city's highest public school test scores three years in a row. If the union insisted on increasing overtime pay, he said, the school could not afford the extra instruction time that was a key to its success, and student achievement would suffer.

Botel says a union official replied: "That's not our problem."

Such stories heat the blood of union critics. It is, they contend, a sign of how unions dumb down public education by focusing on salaries, not learning.

Baltimore Teachers Union President Marietta English, who was at the meeting, denied Botel's account. But, she added, teacher salaries and working conditions are her priority as a negotiator. I think the union leader is right.

American teachers organized in the last century because of terrible pay and working conditions. They loved kids. They wanted to help them learn. But they could not do that if spouses demanded that they get better-paying jobs, or if principals disciplined them for complaining about rotting blackboards and unheated classrooms.

Teacher salaries are better now. Working conditions are still a problem, but in a different way. We now know, from the success of schools like Ujima Village, that letting strong and imaginative teams decide how to teach and giving them more time to do it can raise student achievement significantly, even in our worst neighborhoods. Neither school boards nor unions, in most cases, have figured out what to do with this information. That is why Ujima Village finds itself forced to cut Saturday classes, trim its school day and make other changes that put its survival at risk.

It's hard for any of us to change how we do our jobs. We are learning this in the newspaper business, like others in the auto and banking businesses. Public education is no different.

English and the Baltimore union's outside counsel, Keith Zimmerman, convinced me they are sincerely committed to making Ujima Village and all other Baltimore schools wonderful places to learn. But they did not once mention an important motivator for union members such as Brad Nornhold, 31, a star math teacher at Ujima Village.

"I appreciate what the union has tried to do for me," Nornhold said, "but we weren't necessarily contacted before they started these negotiations. This is a school of choice for teachers, too. I knew what I was getting into."

Ujima Village teachers were already the highest-paid in Baltimore for their experience level, and the union's demands seem to overlook the appeal of what Nornhold called "the freedom to teach the way I want to teach." The union ignores the lure of a school that supports teachers and structures their day so they can raise student achievement to levels rarely seen in their city. "To teach in a school that works, that's nice," Nornhold said.

I asked English what she thought of Botel's argument. By forcing Ujima Village to cut back its nine-hour school days and Saturday classes, is she making her members at that school less effective? "I disagree with that," she said. "Effective teachers can get the same results in a seven-hour-and-five-minute day."

To that I say: Show me. English should do what her national union president, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, has done. Weingarten has started two charter schools in New York City to prove that union-run schools can be as effective as schools like Ujima Village. She also signed a labor agreement with a new charter school in New York managed by the successful Green Dot organization that will have a longer school day and year and will pay teachers an extra 14 percent for their time.

The New York and Baltimore situations are very different. But it seems relevant to note that Green Dot, with union blessing, will be paying less than the additional 18 percent Ujima Village teachers were getting, and which the Baltimore Teachers Union said was not enough.

Weingarten, the nation's most interesting union leader, also appears to be making progress in negotiations with D.C. public schools. D.C. Deputy Chancellor Kaya Henderson, the school system's chief negotiator, and a Weingarten aide said talks are going very well, a sign that important innovations may be coming.

Baltimore could use some of the Weingarten magic, and fast. If the city's highest-achieving middle school loses its edge or closes because of union demands, that will tarnish not only AFT's reputation but its ability to fend off efforts to change Maryland's pro-union state charter law. Unlike their counterparts in the District and most states, Maryland's charter school teachers are subject to union agreements.

Teachers like Nornhold have learned how effective they are when their creativity is unleashed in a longer school day. It will be hard to keep their trust unless union leaders can prove that they understand teaching as well as their members do. How much students learn has become everyone's problem. Those who overlook that are going to lose the argument.

I’m not saying Juliet Good is the best teacher I ever saw, but she is way above average. So why did Richard Montgomery High School, a splendid institution in a wealthy Maryland suburban school system, tell her they no longer had room for her?

Of course with budgets tight, schools are nudging lots of teachers out the door. One of the favorite words for this, the one Good’s supervisers used with her, is “surplussed,” as in “the district reduced the number of teachers allowed at that school and so she had to be surplussed.” (My dictionary says this isn’t a verb, but perhaps that will change soon.)

I know Good. I have spoken to her class -- a unique program called Rocket Corps for high school students interested in teaching. She is very energetic and imaginative. She invented the program in 2001. It not only brought in expert speakers but gave students significant classroom experience at the school, as tutors and sometimes presenting to full classes. But many other fine teachers are being let go, even in school systems as well funded as Montgomery County's. It didn’t strike me as news.

Then the e-mails and letters started pouring in, from Good’s students, their parents, her colleagues, her alumni, a lot of e-mails and letters. They were addressed to her and her supporters, and people campaigning for her reinstatement sent copies to me.

Every year, Jay Mathews compiles The Challenge Index, a ranking of schools based on a simple formula - the number of AP, IB, and other college-level tests given out at any given high school divided by the total number of graduating seniors from that school year. The index is not meant to be comprehensive but to give parents, teachers, and students an idea of how much a high school challenges its students.

This week, the blog Schools Matter featured an essay by user teacherken calling foul on Jay's index. Teacherken, who says he is a high school AP U.S. Government and Politics teacher and actually graded AP tests this year, makes a case against The Challenge Index, arguing that schools challenge students in many more ways than just through AP and IB tests:

One can certainly argue for students being challenged. I do not believe an Advanced Placement course is the only way to accomplish that. In fact, I have found teaching AP to 10th graders has in some ways restricted my ability to challenge my students as much as I did when I taught the course to 9th graders, and did not have to worry about "coverage" - the amount of material my students had to learn to be prepared for what might appear on the AP exam. To give just one example, there is no defined universe of Supreme Court cases that could appear. I cover in some form or other almost 100. Yet this is not a course in legal history or in the Supreme Court.

Mathews does not currently include cross-registered courses in the calculation of his index. We have students who run out of the math, including Calculus B/C, sometimes by their sophomore year, often by the junior year. This is one case where we offer courses through cross registration with local universities. We have a man from Catholic U who teaches Calculus III and Differential equations. These course do not get a weighted GPA, nor do they count as part of the Challenge Index. Thus even though we are definitely challenging these students, the Index gives us no credit for doing so…

I am not opposed to Advanced Placement. I would not continue to teach my three sections, which next year may contain over 100 students, if I did not find value in the program. I know that some students sign up for the course for the weighted grade. Others do hope to receive the college credit. And a few sign up because they want me as a teacher, particular those who are younger siblings of students I have previously taught - although in a few cases that decision is made by the parent rather than the student. I always have some students who really are not prepared to do the work required. Still, I believe that I am able to stretch the vast majority of my students, and I always especially enjoy those who stretch me as a teacher - that helps keep me fresh. Insofar as I am challenging my students, Mathews is right about his emphasis on AP, although I believe I could challenge them even absent the AP designation…

I do hope we do not continue down the path of our current obsession, believing that more AP is inevitably better. The quality of the instruction is not necessarily better nor more challenging merely because the course has an AP designation - after all, one can have the most wonderful syllabus and still not be able to communicate its contents to the students, nor to engage the students in the process of learning.

And I wish, almost certainly futilely, that we would stop distorting the meaning of AP by using it as a means of 'ranking' schools.

You can read teacherken's full entry here.

Jay posted a true quandry in Admissions 101: Is it better for students to get good grades in easy classes, or mediocre grades in tough ones? Jay is specifically talking about AP and IB classes and how top tier schools view mediocre grades in these classes.

Jay's take:

"My view is that a student wanting to attend any school that accepts less than half of applicants should take at last two AP courses and tests, since not to do so would make them look weak and since they are going to need that experience to adjust to such colleges' standards."

Newspaper reporters, a group to which I belonged until recently, usually don’t write about old reports, unless of course the documents have been suppressed for years by nefarious government minions. If a reporter tells her editor she has found a neat piece of research from 2007 in the bottom of her drawer, the editor will tell her it isn’t news and advise that she put a calendar in her cubicle.

We columnists, on the other hand, are free to roam the past, particularly when we stumble across something as remarkable as “Investigating the Alignment of High School and Community College Assessments in California,” a 41-page report by Richard S. Brown & David N. Niemi, published by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in June 2007.

I know. The title is sleep-inducing. But for the millions of people who care about community colleges -- including the nearly half of all U.S. college students who attend them -- it is a must-read.

You are wondering: Why haven’t you heard about it before and why am I writing about it so long after its appearance? Those are easy questions to answer. We education writers, with rare exceptions, don’t care about community colleges and don’t cover them. The only reason this report caught my eye is that Stanford education and business professor Michael Kirst sent it to me. It was so intriguing I was jarred out of my usual apathy about two-year colleges.

I have wondered, without ever stirring myself to investigate, how community colleges decide who gets to take their for-credit courses, the ones that can put a student on a path to a degree, and who will be consigned to their remedial courses, which earn no credit but still cost money to take. Community college courses are inexpensive, I know, a pittance compared with tuition at Georgetown or Johns Hopkins or Duke, but many community college students are barely making ends meet, so the $96-per-credit tuition at Prince George’s Community College, for instance, is serious money to them. Remedial courses cost less, but they still take both time and money.

The 2007 report by Brown and Niemi, testing experts at the University of Southern California and UCLA respectively, confirmed my guess. Community colleges in California, like everywhere else, give placement tests to incoming students. If you make a certain score, you can take the for-credit course. If not, it’s remedial education for you. There are, I gather, chances to appeal, but students new to higher education, from families with few or no college graduates, tend not to know that.

I assumed that a big state like California with long experience running community colleges (both of my parents attended what were then called California junior colleges in the 1930s) would have a well-proven system of placement tests and qualifying scores that was fair to everyone. Brown and Niemi startled me by revealing this to be far from the truth. They looked at California’s 109 community college campuses and found 94 different placement assessments. Try to enroll in two different community colleges, and the chances are that not only will you be given different placement tests, but the magic number of right answers that gets you into for-credit courses will also be different.

This is a problem, for California and the many other states that have similarly chaotic systems. A student who qualifies for credit courses at one community college could, conceivably, fail to qualify for credit courses at the community college in the next town with the same score on the same test (if by some weird chance they gave the same test). That important moment in his life might be decided by a few points, conceivably, at least in some cases, forcing him to spend money for a course he probably didn’t need.

I was surprised that the community colleges, and their students, were tolerating such a situation, because so far they are not having much success in qualifying new students for credit classes. Over 70 percent of them are forced to take remedial math, and 42 percent must take remedial English.

In their paper, Brown and Niemi closely analyze the placement tests to see whether they match the standards for high school learning in California. It turns out that they do, but this is small comfort, because so few of the students who show up at community college have mastered those standards. In 2006, they report, only 46 percent of students tested proficient on California’s Summative High School Mathematics test, and only 36 percent were proficient on the Grade 11 English Language Arts test.

The high schools have to do a better job, a frequent topic of this column. But it would help if the community colleges could get together and decide on a set of tests, and a consistent set of passing scores, so students sent off to remedial work have a clearer idea of how much they have to improve. I would also like to hear more about efforts to get students near the passing mark over this hump more quickly and cheaply. The data show that students consigned to remedial courses -- which can be dreary -- are far less likely to succeed in community college than those who start for-credit courses right away.

Terri Carbaugh, vice chancellor for communications for the California Community Colleges, said the state is looking at the issues raised by Brown and Niemi. She said state officials agree that a standardized system might not only help students but save money. She said some schools already provide quick refresher courses to students close to passing the placement tests, but others do not.

The greater problem, clearly, is the large number of students arriving at community college with no chance of passing any placement tests. Brown and Niemi say “one suggestion for improving the disjunction between high school and community college is to make clear to students early in their educational careers, perhaps as early as middle school, what is expected of them upon enrollment at the community colleges by developing continuity across the high school, community college and four-year college systems.”

Exactly. One goal could be a more consistent series of placement tests, and a greater effort to help those close to passing. That would give the placement system more clarity, and make it easier to see what must be done to help those students who need the most help.