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This Commentary from NEPC Director Kevin Welner is a version of a piece that was published as part of series called "America the Fixable" at the Atlantic.com.  The edits made for the Atlantic.com version change the framing (no cupcakes!) and remove most of the links to research.

Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards-not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states-the study foresees little to no impact on student learning. That conclusion is based on analyzing states' past experience with standards and examining several years of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

One big idea animates virtually all of today's earnest education reformers: the conviction that great schools can spur social mobility. Voucher supporters, charter advocates, standards nuts, teacher-effectiveness fanatics-we all fundamentally believe that fantastic schools staffed by dedicated educators can help poor kids climb out of poverty and compete with their affluent peers. And then Charles Murray comes along and throws cold water all over the idea.

"New York state published a list of schools based on measures like test scores and graduation rates. At the top are "reward" schools. At the bottom are "priority" schools. This is the amazing discovery. The schools that enroll mostly white and Asian students in affluent neighborhoods are doing a great job; they get a reward. The schools that enroll mostly black and Hispanic students in poor neighborhoods are doing a bad job; they are in line to get sanctions, interventions."

This was written by John Kuhn, the superintendent of a small public school district in Texas.

My theme for today: Whose children have been left behind?

he results are now public from the 2011 federal testing program known as NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And once again, schools on the nation's military bases have outperformed public schools on both reading and math tests for fourth and eighth graders.

America does not have a general education crisis; we have a poverty crisis. Results of an international student assessment indicate that U.S. schools with fewer than 25 percent of their students living in poverty rank first in the world among advanced industrial countries. But when you add in the scores of students from schools with high poverty rates, the United States sinks to the middle of the pack. At nearly 22 percent and rising, the child-poverty rate in the United States is the highest among wealthy nations in the world. (Poverty rates in Denmark and in Finland, which is justifiably celebrated as a top global performer on the Program for International Student Assessment exams, are below 5 percent). In New York City, the child-poverty rate climbed to 30 percent in 2010.

"We have a parenting problem, not a poverty problem," Mike Petrilli writes at Flypaper. I agree that parenting matters greatly to a child's academic success or failure, and in fact may be the single largest determining factor. But Petrilli concludes that the best way to solve the "parenting problem" is through cultural messaging promoting marriage and stigmatizing divorce, so that kids benefit from growing up in two-income households. This ignores, I think, the concrete reality of life in many low-income neighborhoods, where many women are making a rational choice when they remain single.

"I received the following description of the appearance of Michelle Rhee and her husband at the University of Hawaii, where they lectured on "Ethics and Education." Rhee paused briefly from her national campaign to raise $1 billion to remove teachers' collective bargaining rights, to strip them of tenure and seniority, and to promote vouchers and charters, to share her wisdom about American education."

"Whither Opportunity? is a powerful statement from some of the best scholars in the country that popular bipartisan slogans like "no excuses" are backed by little to no research. The nature of educational inequality is shifting, from race to class, and if we want to make a difference in schools, we cannot ignore what goes on outside them."

Remember Bizarro World from the comics? Where everything is opposite from the way it is on Earth? Such is the world I entered listening to the hearing on Governor Malloy's education "reform" bill, S.B. 24. In order to get the topsy-turvy experience, let's review facts about education in Connecticut.

In today's reform narrative, schools are supposed to single-handedly overcome poverty. But paradoxically, the very means of our salvation are eliminated or reduced in statehouses and in Washington. Instead of support, they substitute punishments (such as the federal school "turnaround" strategies) and chant vague claims that market forces will improve our schools. Alas, market forces have scant success in resolving social problems says the Director General of the World Health Organization.

"The uproar over high-stakes testing associated with Common Core in New York State and complaints that children are being tested on things they were not taught, has obscured the deepening of racial, ethnic and class divisions in education in New York and the United States. Not only are the tests unfair, but according to a new study by the National Urban Research Group (NURG), math instruction and the educational system in the United States are deeply unfair, especially to Black and Latino students from poorer families."

On June 29th 2011, two of the most important people in the current ed reform debate squared off for a 'discussion' at the Aspen Ideas Festival.  As they are opposed on many of the vital issues, this had the makings of a heavyweight title fight.

While the U.S. Department of Education warns that a majority of schools are falling behind in meeting the student-progress targets required under the No Child Left Behind Act, a new analysis suggests that students who participate in the law's largest education program, the Title I program for disadvantaged students, are making strides in mathematics and reading.

Since 1968, the black middle class in America has quadrupled, Henry Louis (Skip) Gates told a packed house at the Edgartown Whaling Church on Thursday evening. But that was the only positive news in an otherwise bleak survey of the state of black education by a panel of experts convened by Professor Gates and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

It has been a difficult year for public education.  A fiveyears' overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and  Secondary Education Act, whose 2002 version we call  No Child Left Behind (NCLB), languishes in a divided  Congress.  Now Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says  he will grant states unilateral waivers from the law's most  punitive consequences, but the catch is that to qualify,  states must present accountability plans based on Duncan's  own favorite punishments for schools unable quickly  to raise scores-including sanctions like merit pay and  reduction of due process for teachers, school closure, and  rapid charterization.  The rhetoric of  school reform has little to do with the  lives of children or the daily work of  teachers.  Meanwhile a deplorable wave  of scapegoating school teachers continues  unabated.  

The American political discussion has finally turned to the right target: jobs.

Anybody paying attention to the course of modern school reform will not be very surprised by this news: Newly released SAT scores show that scores in reading, writing and even math are down over last year and have been declining for years. And critical reading scores are the lowest in 40 years.