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In Silicon Valley, Bullis elementary school accepts one in six kindergarten applicants, offers Chinese and asks families to donate $5,000 per child each year. Parents include Ken Moore, son of Intel Corp.'s co-founder, and Steven Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse. Bullis isn't a high-end private school. It's a taxpayer- funded, privately run public school, part of the charter-school movement that educates 1.8 million U.S. children. While charters are heralded for offering underprivileged kids an alternative to failing U.S. districts, Bullis gives an admissions edge to residents of parts of Los Altos Hills, where the median home is worth $1 million and household income is $219,000, four times the state average.

"Backing Governor Chris Christie and Commissioner Chris Cerf's unrelenting push for more "high-quality school options" in New Jersey, the Department of Education recently approved nine charter schools to open in September, bringing the total number of charter schools in New Jersey to 86. This move is part of a broader trend toward the marketization of education policy - the incorporation of market principles into the management and structure of public schools, as well as voucher programs to subsidize alternatives to public schools. These market principles include deregulation, competition, and the unqualified celebration of "choice," all of which are embodied in the charter school movement. Despite claims of greater efficiency, innovativeness, and responsiveness, however, the growing rhetoric around choice needs to be more closely scrutinized before we wholeheartedly jump on the charter school bandwagon."

"This week Rhode Island got a bit of attention when education historian Diane Ravitch posted an email on her blog that she'd received from Theresa Laperche, a former participant in the Rhode Island Teaching Fellows program. This program, a partnership between RIDE and Michelle Rhee's New Teacher Project (TNTP), is a Teach For America-like alternative teacher certification program that recruits individuals with no education experience, gives them five weeks of training, and places them in a high-need urban school. This is a model that I've long questioned, but I had no idea just how problematic the program was until I read Theresa's account of her time as a Teaching Fellow. I decided to call her up myself to learn more about her perspective on the program."

All states rely on the GED test as a primary pathway to a high school equivalency diploma, and New York is among those now considering alternatives in the wake of a decision by an educational services company to revamp the exams and increase their cost. New York is one of 16 states considering joining to create a similar comprehensive test with questions taken from their own end-of-year exams, like the Regents exam in New York. Others are considering putting out a request to different vendors to create a new, cheaper exam.

Although much has been written about the importance of leadership in the determination of organizational success, there is little quantitative evidence due to the difficulty of separating the impact of leaders from other organizational components - particularly in the public sector. Schools provide an especially rich environment for studying the impact of public sector management, not only because of the hypothesized importance of leadership but also because of the plentiful achievement data that provide information on institutional outcomes. Outcome-based estimates of principal value-added to student achievement reveal significant variation in principal quality that appears to be larger for high-poverty schools. Alternate lower-bound estimates based on direct estimation of the variance yield smaller estimates of the variation in principal productivity but ones that are still important, particularly for high poverty schools. Patterns of teacher exits by principal quality validate the notion that a primary channel for principal influence is the management of the teacher force. Finally, looking at principal transitions by quality reveals little systematic evidence that more effective leaders have a higher probability of exiting high poverty schools.

The apparent inference here? Either poverty itself really isn't that important a factor in determining student success rates on state assessments, or, alternatively, free and reduced lunch simply isn't a very good measure of poverty even if poverty is a good predictor. Either way, something's clearly amiss if we have so many higher poverty schools outperforming lower poverty ones. In fact, the only dots included in the graph are high poverty districts outperforming lower poverty ones. There can't be much of a pattern between these two variables at all, can there? If anything, the trendline must be sloped up hill? (that is, higher poverty leads to higher outcomes!)

Pau Hill and Marguerite Roza's response to my recent report - with Kevin Welner - and series of blog posts seems to offer as its central argument that we're simply a curmudgeons, offering lots of complaints about the rigor of their arguments and their suggestions for improving schooling productivity and efficiency, but providing no creative or immediately useful ideas or solutions for school districts or states in these tough economic times. My first response would be that bad ideas are bad ideas, even in the absence of alternatives. The fact that budgets are tight and many schools are underperforming is not an argument for implementing unproven, ill-considered policy solutions. That said, my second response is that Kevin Welner and I did in fact offer our own solutions, both in our policy brief and elsewhere.

Teachers in Louisiana have found themselves on the frontlines of austerity. First, in an unprecedented vote, the Jefferson Parish School Board voted 8-1 to close seven campuses, four of them traditional elementary schools and the rest alternative programs for students struggling academically. The board issued more bad news when it announced it was dropping plans to add an art instruction wing at Lincoln Elementary School for the Arts due to cost concerns. Construction of the wing is a hot-button issue in the area because the proposal to convert Lincoln into a magnet school that would draw students from across the parish was a result of the deliberations leading up to the system's settling a forty-seven-year-old desegregation lawsuit last year.

"The concentration of adult-supported students in charter schools and voucher-funded private schools will virtually ensure their success - and enable advocates of these alternative schools to tout their superiority. On this path, we will, indeed, end up with two school systems."

"...there seems to be little alternative thinking in the approach to school reform itself. And both elite and mainstream media have pretty much fallen in line with the reigning policy talk about the problems with our schools and how to fix them. As well, no one in power is asking the more fundamental questions like: What is the purpose of education in a democracy, and are our reforms enhancing-or possibly restricting-that purpose?"

"Class Size: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy argues that increasing average class size by one student will save about 2% of total education spending with negligible impact on academic achievement. It justifies this conclusion on the basis that Class-Size Reduction (CSR) is not particularly effective and is not as cost-effective as other reforms. However, this conclusion is based on a misleading review of the CSR research literature. The report puts too much emphasis on studies that are of poor quality or that do not focus on settings that are particularly relevant to the debate on class-size policy in the United States. It argues that class-size reduction is less cost-effective than other reform policies, but it bases this contention on an incomplete accounting of the benefits of smaller classes and an uncritical, unexamined list of alternative policies. The report's estimates of the potential cost savings are flawed as, in reality, schools cannot structurally reduce class size by only one student. Well-documented and long-term non-academic gains from CSR are not addressed. Likewise, the recommendation for releasing the ―least effective‖ teachers assumes a valid way of making such determinations is available. "

Given the rise of neoliberalism over the last twenty years-the extension of the market into every sphere of life-it's no surprise that civil society has begun to receive the same attention. Large parts of politics and government, health care and education, knowledge production and the media have already been overtaken, but civil society, one could argue, is a more important case because it's the ground from which alternatives can grow.

During the recent SOS March & National Call to Action event in DC, Mike Klonsky presented the idea of an SOS think/do tank. This is a fantastic idea--we need to present both policy critiques and alternatives, in addition to taking political action.

But cheating also means that public schools finally care enough about student performance that some ethically challenged educators have chosen to cheat. This is far better than the alternative, where learning is so incidental and non-transparent that people of low character can't be bothered to lie about it. Blaming cheating on the test amounts to infantilizing teachers, moving teaching 180 degrees away from the kind of professionalization that teacher advocates often profess to support.

The current teacher salary scale has come under increasing fire, and for a reason. Systems where people are treated more or less the same suffer from two basic problems. First, there will always be a number of "free riders." Second, and relatedly, some people may feel their contributions aren't sufficiently recognized. So, what are good alternatives? I am not sure; but based on decades worth of economic and psychological research, measures such as merit pay are not it.

Now, the implication that "anything is better than the status quo" is a rather massive fallacy in public policy, as it assumes that the costs of alternatives will outweigh benefits, and that there is no chance the replacement policy will have a negative impact (almost always an unsafe assumption). But, in the case of teacher evaluations, the "status quo" is no longer what people seem to think.

If you don't have the time or inclination to read Steve Brill's book on education reform, then his bombastic op-ed on the subject is a pretty good alternative. And similarly, if you didn't read Diane Ravitch's 4,400-word review of "Waiting for Superman" in the NYRB, then her 1,000-word response to Brill captures the heart of her argument. Reading them side by side, the conclusion I come to is that Brill protests far too much.

Forty charter schools have seen their licenses revoked, denied or surrendered since the much vaunted alternative education program began more than a decade ago.

Last week, New York State's Supreme Court issued an important ruling on the state's teacher evaluations. The aspect of the ruling that got the most attention was the proportion of evaluations - or "weight" - that could be assigned to measures based on state assessments (in the form of estimates from value-added models). Specifically, the Court ruled that these measures can only comprise 20 percent of a teacher's evaluation, compared with the option of up to 40 percent for which Governor Cuomo and others were pushing. Under the decision, the other 20 percent must consist entirely of alternative test-based measures (e.g., local assessments). Joe Williams, head of Democrats for Education Reform, one of the flagship organizations of the market-based reform movement, called the ruling "a slap in the face" and "a huge win for the teachers unions." He characterized the policy impact as follows: "A mediocre teacher evaluation just got even weaker." This statement illustrates perfectly the strange reasoning that seems to be driving our debate about evaluations.

This policy brief documents how removing students from classrooms for minor disciplinary issues harms overall achievement goals and does not improve education for the remaining students. An accompanying brief offers statutory code changes to improve data collection and advance discipline alternatives that can be adopted by state and federal policymakers.