Media coverage often glosses over the core problem here, which is how you measure teacher performance in the first place. The "value-added" research that is touted by many pundits--using test scores to determine a teacher's effectiveness--is controversial in large part because critics don't think it does what its supporters say it does (not to mention that dramatic swings in such scores from year to year, which can make a teacher "great" one year and below average the next). These are rather important criticisms that value-added boosters should engage.

Or they can be New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. In Kristof's first column on the research (1/12/12), he cheered the study's suggestion that good teachers boost student incomes:

Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime--or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class--all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade. That's right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year's students, just in the extra income they will earn.

There have been several interesting critiques written of this, which was written by Harvard's Raj Chetty and John Friedman and Columbia's Jonah Rockoff, but has not yet been peer-reviewed or published. At the United Federation of Teachers blog (1/8/12), Leo Casey argues that value-added research

assumes that standardized exams are accurate, reliable and robust measures of actual student learning, a necessary assumption if one is to use them as a measure of teacher performance.  It is tautological to claim that an analysis proves what it assumes, especially when that assumption is precisely what is contested in the public debate over standardized tests and value added measures.

Casey goes on to note that the singling out of future earnings--which featured so prominently in the coverage of the study--is also problematic. He cites another critic, education writer and scholar Sherman Dorn, who wrote:

If you want to generalize this claim beyond the data used for the study--associating the group effect scores with teacher quality more generally, making claims about lifetime income, or extrapolating to policy questions--you are making assumptions beyond what the data support.

These are some of the many criticisms of the study. But Kristof's follow-up column (1/22/12) skipped any serious discussion in favor of this caricature:

After I wrote about the study, skeptics of school reform wrote me to say: Sure, a great teacher can make a difference in the right setting, but not with troubled, surly kids in a high-poverty environment.

Who is arguing that poor, "surly" kids can't be reached by good teachers?

Kristof then goes on to find a living, breathing rebuttal to an argument no one is making. "Olly Neal was a poor black kid with an attitude," Kristof tells readers. His life turned around when his teacher, Mildred Grady, started buying books she thought he might enjoy and placing them in the library. That changed Neal's life--he "caught the book bug," went to college and eventually became a judge. And thus, Kristof argues:

To me, the lesson is that while there are no silver bullets to chip away at poverty or improve national competitiveness, improving the ranks of teachers is part of the answer. That’s especially true for needy kids, who often get the weakest teachers. That should be the civil rights scandal of our time.

Sure. But wait:

The implication is that we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers.

It's hard to see how anyone could jump to that conclusion. In the world of value-added research, Grady's work would be judged not by whether she created a new reader who grew up to be a judge, but on the incremental progress of a large group of students that could be seen on a standardized test. If anything, the story suggests--contrary to what Kristof and supporters of value-added research like to claim--that figuring out what makes a great teacher isn't necessarily going to be tied to test scores.

As Times education columnist Michael Winerip put it in his January 16 column:

The danger is that education policy gets driven by teaching methods that can be given a number.

I suspect that Mr. Noyes, my 11th grade Advance Placement American history teacher from 40 years ago, had a low value-added rating. As I recall, no one in our class got a top score of 5; I got a 3. There was no prepared curriculum aligned with the test: Mr. Noyes built the lessons. On any given topic, he would assign us several books that viewed history through different lenses--economics, politics, personality.

I have long ago forgotten the content of those lessons, but Mr. Noyes instilled in us something far more important: the understanding that history does not come from one book. While that idea has served me for a lifetime, I do not believe it is quantifiable.

It's remarkably cynical--and arguably dangerous as well. But that seems to be the approach when it comes to Republican candidate Mitt Romney. As Jim Naureckas already pointed out, there's a tendency in the corporate media to argue that Romney's flipflops are a strength, not a liability.

In the meantime, one should apparently be comforted by the fact that, soon enough, the "real" Romney will prevail. Here's Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen today (1/10/12):

Conservatives fear Romney is not telling the truth about his ideological conviction. Others, such as myself, are counting on it. We will forgive him these trespasses since to want to eliminate much of the Cabinet, reject all science regarding climate change, white-out the Federal Reserve or the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, round up all undocumented immigrants, mindlessly turn education over to local authorities, end the government's role in just about everything, and prohibit abortion, contraception and the errant midday sexual thought (pretty much the entire conservative platform right there) would severely hurt the American economy, not to mention ruining any chance of fun.

And Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times ("Waiting for Mitt the Moderate," 1/5/12):

If we do see, as I expect we will, a reversion in the direction of the Massachusetts Romney, that's a flip we should celebrate. Until the Republican primaries sucked him into its vortex, he was a pragmatist and policy wonk rather similar to Bill Clinton and President Obama but more conservative. (Clinton described Romney to me as having done "a very good job" in Massachusetts.) Romney was much closer to George H.W. Bush than to George W. Bush....

So, in the coming months, the most interesting political battle may be between Romney and Romney. Now, do we really want a chameleon as a nominee for president? That’s a legitimate question. But I'd much rather have a cynical chameleon than a far-right ideologue who doesn't require contortions to appeal to Republican primary voters, who says things that Republican candidates have all been saying and, God forbid, actually means it.

These are remarkable endorsements of a fraudulent and insincere brand of politics.

In case you're having trouble finding it, it's in the lower right-hand corner: a blurb approximately one column inch long, directing people to page A20 to find news about protests in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street in "more than 900 cities in Europe, Africa and Asia."

It wasn't just the Post that was having trouble finding the news in hundreds of protests around the world. NBC's Meet the Press featured Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, former Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty and Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote yesterday (10/16/11), "I do hope that the protesters have lofted the issue of inequality onto our national agenda to stay." Not if the people who set the national agenda have anything to say about it.

Then, on Wednesday in Benghazi, the major city in eastern Libya whose streets would almost certainly be running with blood now if it weren’t for the American-led military intervention, residents held a "thank you rally." They wanted to express gratitude to coalition forces for helping save their lives.

Kristof goes on to write that "a humanitarian catastrophe has been averted for now," and that the air strikes could not wait: "A couple of days of dutiful consultation would have resulted in a bloodbath and, perhaps, the collapse of the rebel government."

At the same time, Kristof acknowledges that "the uncertainties are huge" and that "there are enormous uncertainties," concluding:

But weighed against those uncertainties are a few certainties: If not for this intervention, Libyan civilians would be dying on a huge scale.

It is somewhat jarring to read someone argue that there are many uncertainties about the Libya war, but simultaneously declare that a bloodbath was certain.  However you feel about this war, one could argue that a slaughter in Benghazi was a possibility, or that it was more likely than unlikely. But a certainty?

What is certain is that fighting on the ground is continuing in some Libyan cities. A Times news article today describes the situation:

A pounding from allied warplanes in the rebel-held city of Misurata forced Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's troops to pull back for much of the day, residents said, but by nightfall his forces had renewed their attacks. Government tanks terrorized the city, in one instance firing a shell that landed 20 yards from a hospital door.

It is somewhat unusual for the Times to describe shelling near a hospital as terrorism. Is that label applied consistently? When Israeli forces shelled a UN school in Gaza and killed 40 people in 2009, was it considered to terrorize the local population? Read one of the Times accounts of that attack, and others like it that killed civilians. Or read this one. No doubt in both cases civilians were terrorized. But the label seems to apply in one case more than another.