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Ever since New York City's Education Department released 18,000 public-school teachers' performance rankings, generating news coverage about the lowest and highest scorers, there has been talk in Albany of preventing a repeat. Increasingly, lawmakers say they are open to the idea of changing state law to allow parents to see the evaluations of their own children's teachers but to block the general public from having access to those reports. With the Legislature preparing to go into session next week, the question of how much privacy teachers are granted could soon be resolved.

As advocates for public education, The Learning Community has grave concerns about the RI-CAN school report cards that evaluate every Rhode Island public school based on faulty methodology. RI-CAN claims that their report cards "are designed to help families in Rhode Island access online information about their local schools" when in truth the report cards spread misinformation to concerned citizens. Instead of providing access to accurate data, RI-CAN summarizes a school's performance by using only one grade level's achievement on state standardized tests and mathematically incorrect calculations.  No efforts at holding schools accountable will succeed unless the measures used are fair and accurate. It is worth mentioning that we are expressing our strong opposition to the report cards despite the fact that The Learning Community ranked in the Top 10 schools in Rhode Island on 7 of the 14 indicators. The methodological deficiencies of the RI-CAN report cards render them at best useless and, at worst, harmful to our state's efforts to support the education of every child.

As the movement to overhaul teacher evaluation marches onward, an emerging question is splitting the swath of advocates who support the new tools used to gauge teacher performance: Who should get access to the resulting information?

This post is about a for-profit charter management organization, Imagine Schools, and real estate/facilities. I'm using the dataset ImagineSchools posted here. Imagine is one of the largest charter operators in the country. The company currently operates 70-something schools. A common challenge for charter schools is access to facilities. Some districts give charters access to entire schools, some allow district schools and charter schools to operate out of the same building ("co-location"), and some charters secure facilities through non-profit or for-profit organization in the private sector. To the best of my knowledge, Imagine does not have any schools in district facilities. Instead, Imagine either owns the schools through the company's real estate arm, SchoolHouse Finance, LLC, or partners with one of two real estate investment trusts ("REITs"), Entertainment Properties Trust and Inland Public Properties Development. As of right now, EPT owns 27 facilities used by Imagine and IPPD owns seven facilities used by Imagine. To gather financial information I collected data from IRS 990 forms for the years 2008 through 20101. I pulled the following information

I did a post a short while back about the fact that there are persistent inequities in state school finance formulas and that those  persistent inequities have real consequences for students' access to key resources in schools - specifically their access to a rich array of programs, services, courses and other opportunities.  In that post I referred to the post school funding equity era as this perceived time in which we live. Been there, done that. Funding equity? No problem. We all know funding doesn't matter anyway. Funding can't buy a better education. It's all about reform. Not funding. And we all know that the really good reformy strategies can, in fact, achieve greater output with even less funding. Hey, just look at all of those high flying, no excuses charter schools. Wait… aw crap… it seems that many of them actually do spend quite a bit. But, back to my point. Alexander Russo put up a good post today about those pesky school funding gaps, asking whatever happened to them?

Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual utility. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Our information treatment doubles the fraction of employees using the website, with the vast majority of new users accessing data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. We find an asymmetric response to the information treatment: workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. Our findings indicate that utility depends directly on relative pay comparisons, and that this relationship is non-linear.

Authors such as Henry Levin have explained on numerous occasions that for a choice model to yield equitable distribution of opportunity, consumers must have equitable access to information on schools and equitable mobility among options. Clearly, equitable geographic access is out the window in Post-Katrina New Orleans.

ProPublica analyzed new data from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights along with other federal education data to examine whether states provide students equal access to programs - such as Advanced Placement or higher-level math and sciences classes - that researchers say will help them later in life. We found that in some states, high-poverty schools are less likely than wealthier schools to have students enrolled those programs.

While the number of charter schools is growing rapidly, questions have been raised about whether charter schools are appropriately serving students with disabilities. GAO was asked: (1) How do enrollment levels of students with disabilities in charter schools and  traditional public schools compare, and what is known about the factors that may contribute to any differences? (2) How do charter schools reach out to students with disabilities and what special education services do charter schools provide? (3) What role do  Education, state educational agencies, and other entities that oversee charter schools play in ensuring students with disabilities have access to charter schools? GAO analyzed federal data on the number and characteristics of students with disabilities; visited  charter schools and school districts int hree states selected on the basis of the number of charter schools in the state, among other things; and interviewed representatives of federal, state, and other agencies that oversee charter schools.

"This brief describes the prevalence of highest-performing teachers in ten purposely selected districts across seven states. The overall patterns indicate that low-income students have unequal access, on average, to the district's highest-performing teachers at the middle school level but not at the elementary level. However, there is evidence of variation in the distribution of highest-performing teachers within and among the ten districts studied. Some have an under-representation of the highest-performing teachers in high-poverty elementary and middle schools. Others have such under-representation only at the middle school level, and one district has a disproportionate share of the district's highest-performing teachers in its high-poverty elementary schools."

New federal statistics shared Thursday about thousands of schools and districts show that students across the country don't have equal access to a rigorous education, experienced teachers, early education, and school counselors.

"In the debate over charter schools, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools are hailed by charter advocates as illustrative of what these alternatives to public schools can produce. With KIPP, poverty need not impede academic success. Enroll students from economically impoverished backgrounds in a "no excuses" school like KIPP and their chances of attaining academic success would soar markedly. There, neither hunger, poor health, relentless stress, lack of access to the material sustenance and cultural experiences available to students from more affluent homes, nor other adverse effects of poverty are impediments to learning and the attainment of good test scores. If only poor youngsters were not in the nothing-but-excuses public schools where they are taught by nothing-but-excuses teachers. So the story goes and so it was conveyed to me by a KIPP schools manager who, in an oped exchange, presented what the chain considers its best supporting evidence. Whether this evidence actually makes the case for KIPP I will discuss below"

"Once upon a time, our society decided that all children should be educated through 12th grade at public expense. But completion of 12th grade does not mean what it once did. If that is so, does our society not need to adjust its ambitions and make college as accessible an element of public education as completion of high school used to be? We need to attend not only to post-12th grade educational opportunities, but also to preschool programs of the kind that President Obama endorsed in his inaugural address in January. This is the only way we can begin to move toward genuine equality of opportunity. Without that emphasis, K-3 students from low-income families start their education with an often crippling educational deficit. This is not fanciful rhetoric; it is well-established fact: Know how to read by the end of third grade, and your prospects are bright; don't know, and you are doomed."

"We show that the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university. This is despite the fact that selective institutions would often cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the resource poor two-year and non-selective four-year institutions to which they actually apply. Moreover, high-achieving, low-income students who do apply to selective institutions are admitted and graduate at high rates. We demonstrate that these low-income students' application behavior differs greatly from that of their high-income counterparts who have similar achievement. The latter group generally follows the advice to apply to a few "par" colleges, a few "reach" colleges, and a couple of "safety" schools. We separate the low-income, high-achieving students into those whose application behavior is similar to that of their high-income counterparts ("achievement-typical" behavior) and those whose apply to no selective institutions ("income-typical" behavior). We show that income-typical students do not come from families or neighborhoods that are more disadvantaged than those of achievement-typical students. However, in contrast to the achievement-typical students, the income-typical students come from districts too small to support selective public high schools, are not in a critical mass of fellow high achievers, and are unlikely to encounter a teacher or schoolmate from an older cohort who attended a selective college. We demonstrate that widely-used policies-college admissions staff recruiting, college campus visits, college access programs-are likely to be ineffective with income-typical students, and we suggest policies that will be effective must depend less on geographic concentration of high achievers."

"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed on December 10, 1948, and ratified by the United States, declares that, "Everyone has the right to education" and declares higher education "shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit." The purpose of education is broader than creating workers for big business; it is to "be directed to the full development of the human personality." Unfortunately, rather than treating education as a right, the United States has moved in the opposite direction to treat it as a commodity."

"With the election behind us, it is time for the Obama administration to step back from its education policy and access whether its foundation is sound and supported by evidence. It is a moment to summon the courage to change course."

"A new set of rules for private and parochial schools in Louisiana eligible for state tax dollars looks set to be approved by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, several months after the state adopted a plan to expand access to private school using public money, the Associated Press reported."

Over the objections of teachers' unions and many Democrats, Louisiana's Republican governor and GOP-controlled legislature have crafted one of the most exhaustive education overhauls of any state in the country, through measures that will dramatically expand families' access to public money to cover the costs of both private school tuition and individual courses offered by a menu of providers. A pair of bills championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, which he is expected to sign into law, will expand a state-run private-school-voucher program beyond New Orleans to other academically struggling schools around the state, give superintendents and principals direct control over personnel decisions, and set much higher standards for awarding teachers tenure.

Perhaps most importantly, one of the best ways to improve public education would be to work to alleviate those factors beyond teachers' control that affect students' ability to learn. They are some of the same factors that lead to Louisiana's dismal Kids COUNT rating-unemployment, poverty, violence, crime rates, family instability, childhood hunger, access to health care. No, no, and no, according to the politicians. What do teachers know about education, anyway? Public-school teachers, according to most of the Senate members who testified, are obviously part of the problem, not the solution, so it's better to follow noneducators' recommendations when improving schools. The philosophies behind the legislation passed last week echo the pro-charter, pro-private philosophies of distinctly non-local figures as diverse as the anti-union former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee (who now finds her former district embroiled in a cheating scandal), the deep-pocket GOP puppetmasters the Koch Brothers and, most significantly, the American Legislative Exchange Council. (ALEC, a conservative think tank that prizes small government and free markets, hosts large meetings at which it gives politicians dummy legislation that they can personalize and file in their home states; its influence is clear in some of Louisiana's education bills.) Similar legislation has been proposed in other states across the country, particularly in legislatures that, like Louisiana's, are overwhelmingly Republican, and teachers and others with an interest in public education would do well to pay attention to what's going on here.

The head of the state teachers union signaled for the first time Friday a willingness to let parents see teacher evaluations - but nobody else. New York State United Teachers President Dick Iannuzzi said the union could accept parents having limited access to teacher evaluations, if it were done to help individual students and not shame teachers. He steadfastly opposed the widespread release of the teacher report cards, a position favored by Mayor Bloomberg.