Reputation

It should be left to the principal to figure that out. Each school is different and they have their own challenges.

It is all about the teachers. The best schools create a culture of excellent teaching and make it clear to everyone that they will accept nothing less

I don't think they were the only cause, but they are a factor. When kids leave an LAUSD school to go to a charter school the funds for that kid go too, and schools can't shrink all their fixed costs (buildings, electricity, support staff, etc).

It makes sense that if you have incentives for better performance, you will get better performance. If college students knew they could make more money being a teacher we'd get more people choosing education degrees, then we'd have a larger pool of teachers to choose from, so you'd expect better teachers would ultimately get hired.

I believe they are focused on doing good work. When it was originally launched as the "Broad Plan" I had some concerns that it was just focused on charter schools, but I like the focus now. If the focus is genuinely on supporting schools and kids/families in the most under-served communities then this is very noble work and all of the donors, volunteers and people dedicating their time to this should be applauded. Thank you!

Yes, but maybe not as frequently as some people suggest. Even countries like Finland (which has some of the best student outcomes in the world while claiming they are against rigorous testing) has a test at Senior year to gauge performance. They also participated in the international PISA test which compares their student learnings to other countries - and they rank highly. But they focus more on making teaching a respected profession and getting the best teachers in front of kids, giving teachers responsibility and authority, and allowing principals to make the decisions on who should be in the classroom. But... They still look at how their kids test to see how the system is working

I think they do a good job of fighting for our teachers and they work hard to make it a good job so we can attract more great teachers. I think you could argue that they fight "too much" and that teachers unions need to compromise more. Tenure needs to be reformed for example - due process for termination is a good thing, but it has gotten much too difficult to terminate a bad teacher. It is virtually impossible and this is proven by how few teachers are terminated for performance (virtually none). We can be that good at hiring ;)

Yes some kids won't test well and they can still thrive in this world, so you don't make a culture of "your score is everything." But you do use it as a tool to see how the school is doing. It isn't an all or nothing solution - tests should be looked at along with many other metrics including parent, student and teacher surveys.