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Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the Foundation for Excellence in Education have embarked on a well-funded campaign to spread selected Florida education reforms to other states. These reforms include assigning letter grades to schools, high-stakes testing, promotion and graduation requirements, bonus pay, a wide variety of alternative teacher credentialing policies, and various types of school choice mechanisms. This policy potpourri was recently presented by Gov. Bush in Michigan, and the documents used allow for a concrete consideration and review. Regrettably, Bush's Michigan speech relies on a selective misrepresentation of test score data. Further, he offers no evidence that the purported test score gains were caused by the recommended reforms. Other viable explanations, such as a major investment in class-size reduction and a statewide reading program, receive no or little attention. Moreover, the presentation ignores less favorable findings, while evidence showing limited or negative effects of the proposed strategies is omitted. Considering the overwhelming evidence that retention is ineffective (if not harmful), it is troubling to see Mr. Bush endorse such an approach. Finally, Florida's real problems of inequitable and inadequate education remain unaddressed.

"Many believe that current teacher evaluation systems are a formality, a bureaucratic process that tells us little about how to improve classroom instruction. In New York, for example, 40 percent of all teacher evaluations must consist of student achievement data by 2013. Additionally, some are proposing the inclusion of alternative measures, such as "independent outside observations" or "student surveys" among others. Here, I focus on the latter."

Summer vacation has a way of making the fall opening of schools seem years away. Yet for parents who are disaffected for one reason or another with the education their children are receiving from neighborhood schools, it's a time to make some hard decisions. Should they keep their children where they are or should they seek alternatives?

The administration has proposed a 20 percent reduction in its fiscal 2012 budget for career and technical education, to a little more than $1 billion, even as it seeks to increase overall education funding by 11 percent. The only real alternative to public schools for career training is profit-making colleges and trade schools, many of which have been harshly criticized for sending students deeply into debt without improving their job prospects. A little more than one in 10 students in higher education attend a profit-making institution.

On Oct. 1, 650 people attended the 4th annual Northwest Teachers for Social Justice conference in Seattle.  Rethinking Schools editor Stan Karp gave a well-received talk on "Challenging Corporate Ed Reform." He ended on an uplifting note with " 10 hopeful, tangible signs of organizing resistance and alternatives to the corporate reform agenda."    The following is an excerpt from that presentation.

Charter schools are largely viewed as a major innovation in the public school landscape, as they receive more independence from state laws and regulations than do traditional public schools, and are therefore more able to experiment with alternative curricula, pedagogical methods, and different ways of hiring and training teachers. Unlike traditional public schools, charters may be shut down by their authorizers for poor performance. But how is charter school performance measured? What are the effects of charter schools on student achievement?

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.

"Why have those defending public education had such an uphill fight in crafting a compelling counter to the mainstream message that "public education is broken"? How can we break through this monotonous monopoly of thinking with an alternative message? As Noam Chomsky points out, the mainstream political discourse in America is largely shaped by media outlets under complete corporate control."

On September 8, 2011 Teachers College Record published a book review of Douglas N. Harris's recent book Value-Added Measures in Education. In this commentary the author takes issue with not necessarily the book's What Every Educator Needs to Know content but the author's overall endorsement of value-added, and his and others' imprudent adoption of some highly complex assumptions.

Noam Chomsky discusses the purpose of education, indoctrination, conformity, and imagination. What do you think of the current educational system? What practical things can be transformed in today's systems?

This was written by George Wood, superintendent and secondary school principal at the Federal Hocking Local School District in Stewart, Ohio.  He is also the executive director of the Forum for Education and Democracy and chair of the board for the Coalition of Essential Schools.

Several times a year, Chariho School Supt. Barry J. Ricci invites a student into his office for a difficult conversation. In each case, the student, after turning 16 or older, has decided to drop out of high school, but Ricci asks to meet with the student and his or her parents before he will sign the final paperwork.

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.

Of all the states that have taken steps to rethink systems for preparing teachers, New York appears to be experimenting with the greatest variety of approaches.

n times of great uncertainty for U.S. teachers, who speaks for them? The question is almost axiomatic in its simplicity, but the answer is far less clear-cut. The teachers' unions remain the most visible, powerful, and probably the most important advocates for teachers. But over the past few years, a number of new efforts have sprung up purporting to give teachers a say in policy, and their emergence is extending discussions about "teacher voice" in unexpected ways.

The charter bill is modeled almost entirely on the House's just-passed charter bill, except that it will also allow charter management organizations to compete directly for federal funds. Right now, only states or districts can compete for those funds; under this provision, a CMO like KIPP could compete for direct federal grants.

A growing number of school districts from Boston to Western Massachusetts are embracing a new kind of school to pursue educational innovations and compete more aggressively with charter schools.

In light of the problem in New Jersey and in other states as well, perhaps it's time to consider what is known as weighted student funding. The Summer 2011 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management contains a study by Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske titled "Weighted Student Funding in the Netherlands: A Model for the U.S.?" For the past quarter of a century, the Netherlands has been using a version of WSF for all its elementary schools serving children from ages 4 to 12.