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The cumulative effect of four consecutive years of lagging revenues has led to budget-cutting of historic proportions. An analysis of newly enacted state budgets shows that budget cuts will hit education, health care, and other state-funded services harder in the 2012 fiscal year - which started July 1, 2011 - than in any year since the recession began.

A slew of organizations representing colleges and universities have lined up to oppose a recently introduced federal teacher- and principal-training bill, urging the the chairman and ranking Republican on the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee not to support the proposal.

Not surprisingly, given Brill's history of interest in only the most controversial school reform issues, the book is filled with misleading discussions of complex education research, most notably a total elision of the fact that "nonschool" factors-family income, nutrition, health, English-language proficiency and the like-affect children's academic performance, no matter how great their teachers are.

"A good teacher is the most important factor in a child's academic learning" Every time I hear this statement, my blood pressure goes up. I usually respond by saying that yes, a child's teacher is very important. But teachers have a relatively small effect on children's academic success when compared to the effect of out-of-school factors like economic insecurity, poor health care, unhealthy diet, homelessness and all the other ills of society. Educational "reforms" that ignore these factors are tarnished silver bullets, doomed to fail. Years of this type of wishful thinking has diverted Americans from having the undistorted, fact-based conversation we must have before educational outcomes can improve.

It's become a mantra of reformers that the quality of teachers is the single most important in-school factor in student performance. If so, is the quality of doctors the single most important in-office factor in patient health? This question passed my mind after I read a letter to the editor written by Richard Amerling, M.D., director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, that was published in The Wall Street Journal ("Better Use of Medical Records Is Good as Far as It Goes," Sept. 26).

Our educational system, historically a major engine for equal opportunity and a pathway to the American Dream, is under severe stress. Along with it, the working- and middle-class and immigrant dream of rising out of economic anxiety is evaporating, as our public education system, from preschools through public universities, has lost broad support. This is evidenced by declining state commitments to public education-relative to health-care and prison expenditure-by property-tax caps in communities and states that affect the quality of schools, and by expenditure cuts rather than tax increases at the federal level of the kind we just witnessed in the debt-ceiling agreements. We make decisions and deals like these at our peril.

Now another Michigan lawmaker has doubled down on the GOP attack on public school teachers. In an interview with the Gongwer News Service, state Sen. Randy Richardville, the majority leader, slammed the MEA-the state's main teachers' union-as focused on "big-paid, high-honcho people." Then he claimed that teachers are "more than greedy," presumably for demanding health insurance, retirement benefits, and modest increases in their even more modest salaries. (The average teacher in Michigan made $54,088 a year in 2009, the highest in the nation.)

The ring of the last school bell on Friday could be heralding the beginning of unemployment and uncertainty for more than 700 employees in 347 city schools - school aides, parent coordinators, health aides and other support staff to whom pink slips went out two weeks ago.

"As high school seniors all across the country graduated this week, history was quietly being made in Washington, D.C. at the Department of Education for 23 D.C. public school students with developmental and intellectual disabilities. They, like their peers across the country, were graduating too. They all participated in a program called Project SEARCH. The 15-year-old program now operates in 39 states and four foreign countries, but this is the first year that the federal government has hosted the project in three agencies including the Departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services."

"Policy makers and business leaders often point to our K-16 education system as the cause of our economic ills. The oft-heard refrain is that a reformed system of education will lead America into economic health during this age of global economic competition. The author questions this great faith in the transformative power of education given the realities facing youngsters today. Growing income inequality, unaffordable higher education, and paltry growth in jobs that pay a living wage conspire to rob education of its promise for too many of today's children."

Governor Chris Christie, who just recently signed the Pension and Health Care Reform Bill that would cost 500,000 state workers thousands of additional dollars of out of pocket expenses each year, just cut almost $1 billion from the budget proposal handed to him by Democratic lawmakers.  This all occurred Thursday when Christie used his line-item veto power to slash funding for programs that help New Jersey's poorest while vetoing another millionaires tax bill. 

The UFT is a vital part of a national movement for education reform. Since its early days, the union has advocated for the conditions that are best for student learning and that help teachers to be most effective. This includes a broad range of initiatives, such as smaller class size, adequate funding for schools, school-based health clinics, mentoring for new teachers and professional development for all teachers, to name just a few.

The accountability system at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act would be completely reinvented under a draft reauthorization proposal released today by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

No, the headline is not a typo. It's the conclusion of a new study "Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers" by Jason Richwine, senior policy analyst in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation, and Andrew Biggs, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They attempt to show that public school teachers receive compensation far more generous than is widely believed. They cite summers off, job security, and fringe benefits (health insurance etc.) that make "total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels, equivalent to more than $120 billion overcharged to taxpayers each year." Ordinarily, I wouldn't bother to comment about the study because none of it says anything that is really new. But because the media is giving it big play, I can't let the facts cited slide by.

Can public-sector pensions be reformed, particularly for teachers? Everyone knows that unfunded and underfunded pension systems of the traditional kind ("defined benefit"), plus ancillary health care costs and related benefits for retirees, are burdening state and local education budgets across the land, particularly at a time of broader economic frailty. But few communities and states have yet demonstrated the wisdom, fortitude, capacity, and imagination to devise workable alternatives and put them into place. We're at a point in time where a major public-policy (and public-finance) problem has been defined and measured, debated and deliberated, but not yet solved.

"Wayne Au, editor of Rethinking Schools and co-editor of Pencils Down: Rethinking High-Stakes Testing and Accountability in Public Schools, writes of the book, Badass Teachers Unite: "In this powerful collection of essays, education activist and historian Mark Naison offers teachers, parents, students and anyone else concerned with the health of public schools in this country some invaluable tools in the fight against corporate education 'reform.' Badass Teachers Unite is a clarion call for all of us to reclaim public education in the name of social justice.""

"Filmmaker Michael Elliot stirringly documents special education teacher Jia Lee's historic testimony on the dangers of standardized tests before Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken and other members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. "