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I don’t spend much time debunking our most powerful educational fad: value-added assessments to rate teachers. My colleague Valerie Strauss eviscerates value-added several times a week on her Answer Sheet blog with the verve of a Samurai warrior, so who needs me?

Unfortunately, value-added is still growing in every corner of our nation, including D.C. schools, despite all that torn flesh and missing pieces. It’s like those monsters lumbering through this year’s action films.We’ve got to stop them! Let me fling my small, aged body in their way with the best argument against value-added I have seen in some time.

It comes from education analyst and teacher trainer Grant Wiggins and his “Granted, but . . .” blog. He starts with the reasons many people, including him and me, like the idea of value-added. Why not rate teachers by how much their students improve over time? In theory, this allows us to judge teachers in low- and high-income schools fairly, instead of declaring, as we do, that the teachers in rich neighborhoods are better than those in poor neighborhoods because their students’ test scores are higher.

“I have seen this sham firsthand over many years,” Wiggins writes. “Lots of so-called good N.J. and N.Y. suburban districts are truly awful when you look firsthand (as I have for three decades) at the pedagogy, assignments and local assessments; but those kids outscore the kids from Trenton and New York City, even though both city systems have a number of outstanding schools and teachers.”

Teacher, writer and lawyer Patrick Mattimore, a frequent contributor to my Class Struggle blog, suggested last month that readers send in effective teaching strategies. Sure, I said. Many great ideas arrived. Now we’d like you to pick your favorite.

Here are the three finalists Mattimore and I selected, all from teachers, listed in alphabetical order. Vote below as a comment or send me your pick via e-mail at mathewsj@washpost.com. I am just going to quote from their entries so you won’t have to put up with intrusive analysis from me.

Karen Craig, eighth-grade language arts and social studies, Connelly School of the Holy Child, Potomac

“The Immigration Unit is studied in language arts, social studies, science and foreign language. The students are grouped into families, and they pretend that they are immigrating to the United States around 1900. They are assigned a country from which to emigrate, as well as given an economic background. However, they are responsible for deciding how the family is related and what struggles they endure on the journey.

“In language arts, the students blog about their experiences throughout the unit, using their growing writing skills and vocabulary to help convey their thoughts and emotions. In science, biology is studied through the different diseases that could prevent a potential immigrant in the early 20th century from being allowed into the United States. In social studies, the laws and acts that were aimed at preventing immigration are examined, and in foreign language, the different countries the students could potentially emigrate from are highlighted.

“The unit culminates in an Ellis Island Day, where the students pack a suitcase with what they would bring to their new country, and they are processed through a mock-up of Ellis Island itself. The next day, a field trip to Ellis Island in New York takes place.”

Trayce Diskin, ninth-, 10th- and 12th-grade college prep literacy, Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring

“Choral reading works best with a poem or short prose passage. All each student needs is a copy of the text and a highlighter. As the teacher reads the text out loud, students highlight two or three sentences or phrases that resonate for them. . . . I encourage my students to choose lines that seem particularly powerful, significant, confusing or relevant to them.

“Now the choral reading begins. The teacher reads the passage out loud again, but this time, students join in on the lines they highlighted. As soon as the reading begins, the class can hear which portions of the text resonated the most. The reading itself — both an impromptu performance and an automatic conversation with the text — is a pretty rewarding experience for the class. . . . Almost always a rich and engaging discussion of the passage begins.”

Debbie Pakaluk, eighth-grade chemistry, Norwood School, Bethesda

“Every spring students participate in the Sludge Project, which requires them to separate a mixture of unknowns (they don’t even know how many substances it contains) and then test the properties of each of the components (density, boiling point, solubility, flammability, as well as odor and appearance). Each pair of students gets a plastic cup with a different 100-ml mixture. Students use separation techniques that they have studied previously . . . as well as ones they think of on the spot. Each pair works independently (I enforce safety measures but do not otherwise help them) for about three weeks, and then each student writes a paper summarizing his or her work.

“After the project is completed, we finish the year by studying compounds, elements and finally atoms.”

I like all of these. We will reveal the results in a month. I will also describe some of the other intriguing ideas we received.

After a two-year absence, the U.S. News & World Report Best High Schools rankings are back, a happy event for me and other members of the School Ranking Scoundrels Club.

We are not popular in some quarters. How dare we try to compare one school to another with numbers and miss their indefinable essences? But U.S. News and its list guru, Robert Morse, have been ranking schools, starting with colleges, for 30 years. They have proven that readers appreciate such lists.

I was inspired in part by the U.S. News college list to create the first national high schools list, the Challenge Index, in 1998. That list was in Newsweek until 2010, when I moved it to The Washington Post just before the Washington Post Co. sold Newsweek. The 2012 edition of our list, which we call the High School Challenge, will be out soon, as will a new high school list started last year by the new management of Newsweek, the Daily Beast.

The U.S. News list has data on nearly 22,000 high schools and ranks 2,008 of them based on several factors, including state test scores overall, scores of disadvantaged students and Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate participation and success rates. It is a complicated formula, so you have to read the methodology carefully. But it’s worth your attention. The American Institutes for Research crunched the numbers with financial support from Dell.

When the first U.S. News high school list appeared in 2007, the page views on my list shot up.. Were readers making comparisons? Were they just confused? The U.S. News folks and I think differently about what best defines a high school, but the debate is a good way to help our schools get better.

Take a look at theirs, and then look at ours. We have a new element this year never seen before in a high school list.

Several students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County noticed their linear algebra teacher was struggling this semester. They said he made mistakes, erased his work without explanation and seemed confused.

Then it got worse. He quit in mid-March. The administration had to scramble. Retired math chair Jerry Berry, with no experience teaching linear algebra, kept an eye on student progress while a George Mason University graduate student provided the instruction. The graduate student look a leave when his wife had a baby. Another graduate student replaced him. A substitute teacher without much linear algebra experience replaced Berry as supervising teacher, telling students he would do his best.

This happens in regular schools, but Jefferson is the least regular school imaginable. It is our nation’s most selective high school, with an average SAT score of 2,218, serving a broad swath of Northern Virginia. It is known for its great faculty and splendid equipment. “Multiple teachers is not ideal, and almost unheard of at TJ,” said Myra Spoden, who teaches other linear algebra classes at the school.

Phil Cox, a sharp-eyed newspaper reader, sent me a link to a provocative story in the San Mateo County Times, a newspaper I delivered when I was 12. It reports that parents of a student at Sequoia High School in Redwood City sued when their son was removed from a sophomore honors English class for copying and sharing homework.

This is relevant to the college admissions process because one of the parents’ concerns is that this will put a black mark on the student’s high school transcript and kill his chances of attending his first-choice college. High school counselors, particularly in affluent neighorhoods, have told me their own stories of lawyers being called in by parents to erase any sign of disciplinary action from anything college admissions offices might see.

Does this make sense to you? Should the high schools risk lawsuits in order to protect their records? Should wealthy families be allowed to distort the admissions process in this way? Or are they right to argue that the offense is often minor --- like what Jack Berghouse’s son did at Sequoia High — and the high school should not sacrifice the kid’s future to its rules?

“What university will it keep him out of?” Berghouse said, according to Times reporters Sharon Noguchi and Bonnie Eslinger. “Will that have far-ranging consequences in what kind of job he can get?”

I personally know of a student who managed to get into Princeton after the family’s lawyer successfully pressured the high school to remove any hint of her cheating on a test. Teenagers will make mistakes, but bad deeds should have consequences. Is bringing in the lawyers the right way for a parent to go, and what should the high school do when threatened in this way?