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Late yesterday, the New Jersey Department of Education Released its long awaited report on the state school finance formula. For a little context, the formula was adopted in 2008 and upheld by the court as meeting the state constitutional standard for providing a thorough and efficient system of public schooling. But, court acceptance of the plan came with a requirement of a review of the formula after three years of implementation. After a change in administration, with additional legal battles over cuts in aid in the interim, we now have that report.  The idea was that the report would suggest any adjustments that may need to be made to the formula to make the distributions of aid across districts more appropriate/more adequate (more constitutional?). I laid out my series of proposed minor adjustments in a previous post. Reduced to its simplest form, the current report argues that New Jersey's biggest problem in public education is its achievement gap - the gap between poor and minority students and between non-poor and non-minority students.  And the obvious proposed fix? To reduce funding to high poverty, predominantly minority school districts and increase funding to less poor districts with fewer minorities. Why? Because money and class size simply don't matter. Instead, teacher quality and strategies like those  used in Harlem Childrens' Zone do! Here's my quick, day-after, critique

A good seven miles from Gov. Rick Perry's much-anticipated prayer rally, an even larger crowd of Houstonians gathered in preparation for another sacred event: the first day of school. Some families camped out for hours to gain admittance into Houston's first-ever, citywide back-to-school event at George R. Brown Convention Center, where free backpacks, school supplies, uniforms, haircut vouchers, immunizations and fresh produce were provided.

Kelly Fischer, one of the plaintiffs in a special-education discrimination lawsuit against the state of Louisiana, says last year she was discouraged by a number of charter schools from enrolling her now 10-year-old son Noah, who is blind, autistic and eats from a tube. While charters are free from many of the bureaucratic constraints of traditional districts, such as union contracts and limits on the length of school days, they must follow U.S. antidiscrimination laws, just like other public schools.

I knew that if I had enough patience the corporate reformers would eventually let slip some data which would prove, once and for all, how unscientific are the metrics they've been using to shut down schools. That day came earlier this week. I'll encourage anyone to recheck my calculations, just in case, but if I've found what I think I've found, it will be the 'death blow' to the New York City 'value-added' model they use to rate and close down schools.

Students with disabilities won't be automatically banned from getting into a Los Angeles magnet school simply because they can't participate in a particular program for at least half the school day or because they require services in a separate classroom, the school district told a federally appointed monitor in a letter this week.

The nation has just celebrated Labor Day, yet few Americans have any idea why. As high school students, most were taught little about unions-their role, their accomplishments, and how and why they came to exist. This is one of the conclusions of a new report, released today by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center. The report, "American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor's Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks," consists of a review of some of the nation's most frequently used high school U.S. history textbooks for their treatment of unions in American history. The authors paint a disturbing picture, concluding that the history of the U.S. labor movement and its many contributions to the American way of life are "misrepresented, downplayed or ignored." Students-and all Americans-deserve better.

Following is another in my school finance geeky series of straight-up analyses of state school finance formulas. I wrote about New Jersey's funding formula few days ago. This analysis focuses specifically on the cuts levied across NY school districts for 2011-12 and the underfunding of the foundation formula for select districts.

Chicago Public School officials today announced plans to extend the shortest school day in the nation by an additional 90 minutes and two weeks to provide the critical instructional time needed to boost student achievement and ensure students graduate college and career-ready.

Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel has taken a page from the Koch Bros. book of tricks by using the "research says" tactic to push his longer-school-day campaign on resistant city schools. As I have shown numerous times on this blog and elsewhere, there is no reliable or valid research to support Rahm's claim that more seat time in school produces better learning outcomes. But buoyed by support from corporate reform groups like Stand For Children, the mayor's publicists at CPS, like Becky Carroll and his hand-picked CEO J.C. Brizard, continue to claim that there are studies to validate this obvious political and anti-union agenda.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet with one of the Department of Education's Teaching Ambassador Fellows to give feedback on a not-yet-public draft of the policy proposal before it is offered to schools. While there was much to like about the proposal, it also contained some poorly conceived ideas that would be ineffective at best, and at worst could further damage the nation's education system. Project RESPECT calls for a three-pronged reform of the teaching profession. It envisions a reorganization of schools that would use technology and aides to put more effective teachers in front of more students, coupled with a longer school day to give teachers more time for professional growth. To find more effective teachers, it calls for an expansion of entry points into the profession, with a higher bar for earning a permanent position. Finally, it calls for increased compensation for career teachers who both stay in the classroom and take on various teacher-leader roles.

Alert readers (as Dave Barry likes to say) will have noted that I haven't blogged in a while. The reasons are multiple: heavy travel schedule, writing for the newest book, and full days of work on two large projects. But the key reason is anger. I have been so angry about the head-long rush into untested and poorly-thought-out value-added accountability models of schools and teachers in various states all around the country that I haven't found a calm mental space in which to get words on paper. Let me now try. Forgive me if I sputter. Here's the problem in a nutshell. Value-added Models (VAM) of accountability are now the rage. And it is understandable why this is so. They involve predictions about "appropriate" student gains of performance. If results - almost always measured via state standardized test scores - fall within or above the "expected" gains, then you are a "good" school or teacher. If the gains fall below the expected gains that you are a "bad" school or teacher. Such a system has been in place in Tennessee for over a decade. You may be aware that from that test interesting claims have been made about effective vs. ineffective teachers adding a whole extra year of gain. So, in the last few years, as accountability pressures have been ratcheted up in all states, more and more of such systems have been put in place, most recently in New York State where a truly byzantine formula is being used starting next year to hold principals and teachers accountable. It will surely fail (and be litigated). Let me try to explain why.

KIPP is one of the charter school franchises that's been tossed around in Seattle  by ed reformers as an option if charter schools were to be legalized in our state. I've been following KIPP and several articles that I have come across are listed in the right column of this blog under "KIPP". It could possibly be the worst example of a school experience a child could have but they do market well. I was reading a post by Leonie Haimson that is well worth a read "At KIPP, I would wake up sick, every single day". The post is an interview that Leonie had with a former KIPP parent and the parent's daughter who was a student attending KIPP. At the end of the post was the following comment written by a former KIPP teacher that I wanted to share with you  today

As someone who has famously proclaimed, "I am the government," Gov. Andrew Cuomo must find the governor's limited role in the state's schools particularly galling. So, for the last two weeks, Cuomo has made it clear he no longer will stand on the sidelines while others run education here. In his State of the State speech and in comments on Martin Luther King Day, Cuomo plunged into the school wars and poised himself to take on the state's teachers unions. He is expected to continue this campaign in his budget address today. If the governor, who has a relatively skimpy record on education, gets more involved in schools, what exactly will he do? Who will benefit? And who will lose?

A year substituting in Chicago's public schools made me a radical/"reformer" from Day One. I saw the teachers' union as a force for good-including the individual good. For example, two of my 'children' became teachers and both have had to protect themselves via union-enforced due process at some point in their careers. In the absence of due process, none of us is safe from unjust bosses or benign rulers. (It's one reason I'm also such a fan of the Association for Union Democracy, which protects union members and staff from injustices by their "union bosses.") Perhaps the dividing line on reform has something to do today with our gut reaction to calls for solidarity with our peers-our identification with the powerless. And thus our devotion to due process: "There but for the grace of God goes me." The tension between individualism and solidarity even interacts with a puzzle I've been concerned with of late re. neighborhood schools vs. "schools of choice." Can choice sometimes be good for an individual and bad for the larger community, and if so ...?

Today, the day of the release of the New York City data, I received an email that I did not expect to come for at least a year.  In D.C. the evaluation process is called IMPACT.  About 500 teachers in D.C. belong to something called 'group one' which means that they teach something that can be measured with their value-added formula.  50% of their evaluation is based on their IVA (individual value-added), 35% is on their principal evaluation called their TLF (teaching and learning framework).  5% is on their SVA (school value added) and the remaining 10% on their CSC (commitment to school and community).  I wanted to test my theory that the value-added scores would not correlate with the principal evaluations so I had applied under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) to D.C. schools requesting the principal evaluation scores and the value-added scores for all group one teachers (without their names.)  I fully expected to wait about a year or two and then be denied.  To my surprise, it only took a few months and they did provide a 500 row spreadsheet.

Gov. Chris Christie Thursday unveiled sweeping plans to change the way the state's schools are funded by reducing the amount of money allocated to at-risk kids; tying funds more closely to the number of students in classrooms each day; and cutting funds for districts where enrollment is declining. Christie also released district-by-district state aid figures for the coming year that incorporate the changes. This means a loss of state aid for 97 of the state's roughly 600 school districts. Among those losing aid are 36 districts with declining enrollment - some, like Newark, where charter schools have cut significantly into the "regular" district population.

"To teachers, administrators and parents these may seem like the dark days on the eve of destruction of public education. Indeed, from draconian budget cuts to school closings, from competition for students from private fund-enhanced charter schools to maniacal focus on test scores, from flawed measures of teacher performance to attacks on teacher professionalism, public schooling as a collective good is under siege. These threats are especially ironic and unconscionable because we now know more about teaching, learning and effective change than ever before. So, it is the age of wisdom, light and hope because our knowledge grows and deepens. But it is also the age of foolishness, darkness and despair because ignorance and selfishness have prevailed over knowledge and evidence. In each critical area for improvement, foolishness threatens wisdom."

Just 2 days before the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action took place at the Ellipse on the US Capitol Grounds, Bill Gates was speaking in front of the National Urban League's annual conference on July 28, 2011.  His topic was "Education As a Civil Right".  In his speech he promoted the brave new world's philosophy of  CHOICE through the privatization of public schools.  

In a New York City middle school, the principal asked teachers to spend fifteen minutes a day with students practicing how to answer multiple-choice math questions in preparation for the state-mandated test. One teacher protested, explaining she taught Italian and English, not math. But the principal insisted, and she followed his directive. As you might suspect, the plan failed, and in the end, fewer than one in four New York City middle schoolers passed the exam. While the importance of the test dominated the formal curriculum, the lessons learned through the hidden curriculum were no less powerful. Students learned that test scores mattered more than English or Italian, and that teachers did not make the key instructional decisions. In fact once the test was over, one-third of the students in her class stopped attending school, skipping the last five weeks of the school year.