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"Since the first charter school was established in 1992 in St. Paul, Minn., the model has rapidly taken hold in cities across the United States. As of December 2011, about 5 percent of U.S. students attended the nation's 5,300 charter schools. A charter school is a public school governed by a nonprofit organization under a contract-or charter-with a state or local government. This charter exempts the school from selected rules and regulations. In return for funding and autonomy, the charter school must meet the accountability standards as defined by its charter. There are as many types of charter schools as there are educational approaches. But a common difference between charter schools and traditional schools is that charter school teachers are not typically unionized. Another is that their day-to-day administration is sometimes managed by a for-profit corporation."

"There is no doubt that teacher evaluation systems in the U.S. are broken: Teachers, administrators, parents, and policymakers agree that most districts fail to measure teaching well, help teachers improve, or dismiss those who are failing. Most teachers are tenured without a rigorous examination of their competence, and those who are struggling are often left to struggle indefinitely, while their students suffer. The vast majority of teachers, who are working hard and want to continue to improve, get little help to do so."

"...In a recent report on Democracy Now, Juan Gonzalez turned up an obscure tax credit that was passed by Congress at the end of the Clinton administration in 2000, called a New Markets tax credit. It provides an enormous federal tax credit to banks and equity funds that invest in community projects in underserved communities. The credit has been heavily used in recent years for charter schools..."

"...The leader of this rear-guard action is Diane Ravitch, a professor at New York University who was an assistant secretary of education in the administration of George H.W. Bush. She's the education world's very own Whittaker Chambers, the famous communist turned strident anti-communist of the 1940s. Ravitch moved the other way, from right to left, where she now uses phony empiricism to rationalize almost every tired argument offered by teachers unions..."

"Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made it clear that one of the first educational priorities of his administration is to stop shortchanging kids, and to provide them with the quality instruction they deserve. The only way to do this is to lengthen what is currently one of the shortest school days and years in this nation."

"The education reform debate that has developed during the Barack Obama administration has entered an Ouroboros stage-public debate about the public debate. While the symbolism of the snake eating its own tail can have positive implications, I fear that this self-consuming debate about education reform is likely to keep everyone entertained by words-as-sideshow while our education system and the children that it serves remain ignored and outside the tent with the teachers."

"...For those involved in policy matters, this book will, if you let it, unsettle you. Most involved in policy are addressing matters around the edges, even if they do confront matters of poverty and background. Perhaps you will find yourself disagreeing with some of what the authors present. Fair enough, but can you then as a reader and a policy maker come up with reasons for not addressing the issues with which they challenge you? Do not all of us-teachers, parents, administrators, policy makers-owe our children, our students, a willingness to think beyond our current practices so that we can do the best job possible of preparing them to take responsibility for the world which we will leave them?..."

"Most teachers and principals will tell you that non-instructional school staff can make a big difference in school performance. Although we may all know this, it's always useful to have empirical research to confirm it, and to examine the size and nature of the effects. In this paper, economists Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra put forth one of the first rigorous tests of how one particular group of employees - school counselors - affect both discipline and achievement outcomes. The authors use a unique administrative dataset of third, fourth, and fifth graders in Alachua County, Florida, a diverse district that serves over 30,000 students. Their approach exploits year-to-year variation in the number of counselors in each school - i.e., whether the outcomes of a given school change from the previous year when a counselor is added to the staff."

"In the intensifying debate over the future of education, two camps seem to be emerging. On one side, there are people like New York University professor/former Deputy U.S. Education Secretary Diane Ravitch who argue that larger social ills such as poverty, joblessness, economic despair and lack of health coverage negatively affect educational achievement, and that until those problems are addressed, schools will never be able to produce the results we want. On the other side, there are so-called "reformers" who want to radically change (read: charterize and/or privatize) public education under the premise that the primary problems are bad/lazy teachers and "unaccountable" school administrators."

"For the last year, Central Falls High School in Rhode Island has been under a microscope. Long considered one of the poorest-performing high schools in the state, administrators abandoned a proposal to fire all the teachers as long as they agreed to a so-called "transformation" plan. Now, as the school year winds down, that plan is in shambles. "

"Our earnest Secretary of Education, who famously (and bizarrely) promised Congress a billion-dollar edu-bonus if it reauthorized NCLB by the administration's deadline and to the President's satisfaction, was back at it on Friday. Exhibiting the administration's patented disinterest in the niceties of the U.S. Constitution, he announced that he's getting ready to waive NCLB requirements for states if they agree, as the New York Times put it, "to embrace President Obama's education priorities, a formula the administration used last year in its signature education initiative, the Race to the Top grant competition.""

Long before the Bloomberg administration, districts offered school choice. But in recent years the process has intensified. The reform movement has created an educational marketplace that presses schools to compete for students. This is good for the students selected for the strongest schools but not so good for children left behind and grouped as the weakest.

By the numbers, it's a paltry handful. Of more than 100,000 public schools in the United States, about 300 recently have faced suspicions, allegations and, in some cases hard proof, that teachers and administrators cheated to inflate standardized test scores. But the impact of revelations in Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington and other cities extends beyond those modest numbers. Questions raised in these incidents have sent tremors through the movement to hold schools and teachers accountable for student achievement through annual testing.

Some may be put off by Superintendant John Kuhn of Texas calling out politicians directly, and flipping the notion of "failure" on its head. But he is right, and his conviction is inspiring.  (See the VIDEO of his speech BELOW.) His points reveal in a timely way an inconvenient truth in education and politics right now. NCLB, Race to the Top, and other policies that use high stakes tests to assign value to students, teachers and administrators do one thing really well: they create an even stronger disincentive for teaching in high needs schools than do the difficult working conditions that have always existed in underresourced schools--the imminent threat of being labelled unacceptable or ineffective by one narrow standradized test given on one day in a year, the results of which correspond more closely nation-wide to socio-economic status than any other factor. They create the same disincentive to learn for such students.

Steve Whitten has had two careers - the first as a non-certified special-education teacher, the second as an administrator and counselor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Now, he is embarking on a third profession as an English and special-education teacher in a public school. Typically, Whitten would have to complete a two-year certificate program at an education school. Instead, he has enrolled in an intensive, six-week program run by the Rhode Island Teaching Fellows that promises to prepare him to fly solo this fall.

In capping superintendent salaries, the Christie administration seems to have forgotten the basic rule of supply and demand

Stanford University Education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond helped Barack Obama draft his educational plan when he was a presidential candidate, and advised him on education issues during the transition between Obama's 2008 election and 2009 inauguration. Since then, she has opposed the standardized test-based school reform policies of the Obama administration. Her speech at last Saturday's Save Our Schools March in Washington D.C. explains the extent of the trouble public education is in. Here it is.

Who should read this book? Anyone who is touched by public education - teachers, administrators, teacher-educators, students, parents, politicians, pundits, and citizens - ought to read this book. It will speak to educators, policymakers and citizens who are concerned about the future of education and its relation to a robust, participatory democracy. The perspectives offered by a wonderfully diverse collection of contributors provide a glimpse into the complex, multilayered factors that shape, and are shaped by, institutions of schooling today. The analyses presented in this text are critical of how globalization and neoliberalism exert increasing levels of control over the public institutions meant to support the common good. Readers of this book will be well prepared to participate in the dialogue that will influence the future of public education in this nation - a dialogue that must seek the kind of change that represents hope for all students.

Stand For Children plans to mount a drive for a 2012 ballot law that would force schools to prioritize teacher effectiveness over seniority when it comes to hiring, placement, layoff and transfer policies, an effort that appears likely to encounter resistance from teachers unions and a skeptical Patrick administration.

Increased spending and decreased student performance have been attributed in part to teachers' unions and to the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) they negotiate with school boards. However, only recently have researchers begun to examine impacts of specific aspects of CBAs on student and district outcomes. This article uses a unique measure of contract restrictiveness generated through the use of a partial independence item response model to examine the relationships between CBA strength and district spending on multiple areas and district-level student performance in California. I find that districts with more restrictive contracts have higher spending overall, but that this spending appears not to be driven by greater compensation for teachers but by greater expenditures on administrators' compensation and instruction-related spending. Although districts with stronger CBAs spend more overall and on these categories, they spend less on books and supplies and on school board-related expenditures. In addition, I find that contract restrictiveness is associated with lower average student performance, although not with decreased achievement growth.