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Seven years after the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was renewed with a provision allowing response to intervention to be used when deciding if a child has a specific learning disability, a new study shows 71 percent of school districts use the strategy in at least one school.

John Merrow Gets It Wrong on Testing: Any education reporter or editorialist worth his salt has to admire the work of broadcaster John Merrow. But in his interview last week with Mother Jones, Merrow ended up embracing the wrongheaded view of so many education traditionalists when it comes to standardized testing. Argues Merrow: "No Child Left Behind has done a great deal of damage… Testing is largely punitive. It's a "gotcha" game. We are disempowering teachers."

While all this debt ceiling junk was going on, Mary Filardo, Ross Eisenbrey, and I were developing the FAST! idea-Fix America's Schools Today.

Tim Eller, spokesman for the state Department of Education, said the state is engaging schools in a three-part pilot program of a teacher evaluation system that relies heavily on value-added measures -- a controversial yardstick that uses student test scores to determine the "value" teachers add to student knowledge over the course of a year. The idea has grown in popularity since President Barack Obama expressed his support for the system during the federal Race to the Top education funding competition last year.

One of America's most prolific, provocative, and persuasive writers on education, Frederick M. Hess has published over a dozen tomes on schooling. Today we talk with Rick about his magnum opus, published by Harvard University Press: The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas. In it, he provides the long view of education reform, detailing the history of the familiar institutions we take for granted today, and arguing for much more flexibility in our thinking and educational delivery.

The Tapestry Project seeks to unite two powerful ideas in American education: school choice and integration.  We believe that charter schools can be models of both academic excellence and of economic and racial integration.

Along comes neo-liberal education reform, built around the idea that the invisible hand of markets and competition can solve educational problems.  A whole raft of activity follows.  Reformers talk about billions spent each year compensating teachers for master's degrees that are disconnected from student outcomes.  Municipalities and school boards balk at funding automatic step raises on the grounds that longevity does not equal quality.  The linchpins of tenure and seniority come under assault on the somewhat contradictory grounds that tenure protects bad teachers and seniority encourages the mal-distribution of good teachers.

ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve "model" bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) They fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations-without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a "unique," "unparalleled" and "unmatched" organization. It might be right. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door. Learn more at ALECexposed.org

The idea behind a poverty rate is that we set an income line below which people's resources are deemed insufficient for a minimally decent standard of living. The poverty rate is the share of people in households with income below that line. Because it's a binary measure, it's a crude one.

The state's new teacher merit pay law kicks in this school year and the idea behind it sounds simple: the better students perform, the more teachers can earn. But in areas such as art, music and physical education, it's raising more questions than answers. The law mandates up to half of a teacher's raise be based on how well students do on standardized tests, but there is no state criteria to evaluate specialty teachers. Districts will have to come up with that this year.

If you step back from day to day vitriol that characterizes the current education-policy "debate," and glimpse the larger picture, two worldviews on education reform emerge. One, articulated by the likes of Linda Darling-Hammond, Marc Tucker, David Cohen, and others, obsesses about curricular "coherence," and the lack thereof in our nation's schools. The other, envisioned by Rick Hess, Tom Vander Ark, Paul Hill, and many more, seeks to unleash America's trademark dynamism inside our K-12 education system. Though these ideas appear to pull in opposite directions, they might best work in concert.

One columnist's idea of a good principal

A year ago, the Los Angeles Times created a media sensation when it obtained the names and test scores of thousands of teachers, then commissioned a researcher to rate them in relation to their "effectiveness" in raising test scores. The Times then published online the names and ratings of those thousands of teachers. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan saluted the Times for rating teachers and naming names, but the overwhelming majority of testing and evaluation experts thought it was a terrible idea.

The National Bureau of Economic Research just published "School Choice, School Quality and Postsecondary Attainment" by David J. Deming, Justine S. Hastings, Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger. Tom Kane, of course, heads the Gates Foundation's $400 million dollar "Measuring Effective Teaching" experiment, and yet his work provides little or no support for the policies preferred by Gates and other "reformers." In fact, the study confirms the judgments of teachers and education researchers who the accountability hawks condemn as the "status quo." If Gates and Kane had had any idea that their research would yield the results reported in this and other recent papers, it is hard to believe they would have started down their market-driven path.

Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.

It sounds so democratic, a very American idea: break down the walls of "remedial," "average" and "advanced" classes so that all students in each grade can learn together, with lessons that teachers "differentiate" to challenge each individual. Proponents of this approach often stress that it benefits average and lagging students, but a new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute suggests that the upsides may come at a cost to top students - and to the international competitiveness of the United States. By trying to teach children of varying abilities in one classroom, is American society underdeveloping some of its brightest young people?

As recently as 25 years ago, Finnish students were below the international average in mathematics and science. There also were large learning differences between schools, with urban or affluent students typically outperforming their rural or low-income peers. Today, as the most recent PISA study proves, Finland is one of the few nations that have accomplished both a high quality of learning and equity in learning at the same time. The best school systems are the most equitable - students do well regardless of their socio-economic background. Finally, Finland should interest US educators because Finns have employed very distinct ideas and policies in reforming education, many the exact opposite of what's being tried in the United States.

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.

In a Sunday WaPo op-ed, Jay Mathews suggests that the Common Core State Standards Initiative is doomed to failure, and isn't a good idea anyway

A central idea in Change Matters: Critical Essays on Moving Social Justice from Theory to Policy, edited by sj Miller and David E. Kirkland, is that teaching for social justice cannot simply be an intellectual endeavor. Rather, it is a fundamentally practical action having a real and noticeable impact on the lives of children. In an era dominated by a policy discourse obsessed with testing, accountability, and even recrimination, it is refreshing to envision a different set of policy questions and practices through the prism of the concerns posed by a social justice worldview. In this sense, the essays that comprise sj Miller and David Kirkland's collection issue an important call to action for those engaged in social justice work in education.