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"In summary, then, the status fallacy is not just some innocent, isolated nitpick. It plays a highly consequential role in our national policy and debate about education. That is why, in this single speech, the fallacy could be found underlying several pretty substantial misinterpretations, and these misinterpretations seem to have influenced several of the cornerstones of the governor's education reform proposals going forward. Granted, it is very important to acknowledge here that Governor Cuomo is absolutely not the only person who makes these mistakes - they are endemic (the governor is, perhaps, more forceful in his expression of them, and more drastic in his policy reactions). Moreover, belief in the status fallacy does not necessarily mean that one's policy proposals are wrong or misguided. It does, however, put one at risk of misdiagnosing problems and making poor decisions about solutions, while also perpetuating the flawed measurement that was institutionalized under NCLB, and continues to pollute our education debate and policymaking."

"Laura Chapman investigated the charter investors' conference on March 10. And this is what she learned: The US Department of Education will be at the charter school "investors" conference, representing you, dear taxpayer, in a scheme to subsidize the financing of charter school facilities that LISC is marketing, along with the Gates and Walton Foundations and a long list of profit seekers investors who get tax credits for doing deals, among other perks."

"As with the Vergara case in California, a central claim of the New York City Parents Union is that the presence of statutory tenure protections in New York State leads to a persistent and systematic deprivation of a sound basic education which falls disproportionately on the state's low income and minority children. Let's review again the basic structure of this argument."

"As with the Vergara case in California, a central claim of the New York City Parents Union is that the presence of statutory tenure protections in New York State leads to a persistent and systematic deprivation of a sound basic education which falls disproportionately on the state's low income and minority children. Let's review again the basic structure of this argument."

"This post is another in my series on data issues in education policy. The point of this post is to encourage readers of education policy research to pay closer attention to the fact that any measure of "per pupil spending" contains two parts - a measure of "spending" in the numerator and a measure of "pupils" in the denominator. Put simply, both measures matter, and matching the right numerator to the right denominator matters."

"A few weeks ago, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published teacher evaluation results for the district's public school teachers in 2013-14. This decision generated a fair amount of controversy, but it's worth noting that the Tribune, unlike the Los Angeles Times and New York City newspapers a few years ago, did not publish scores for individual teachers, only totals by school. The data once again provide an opportunity to take a look at how results vary by student characteristics. This was indeed the focus of the Tribune's story, which included the following headline: "Minneapolis' worst teachers are in the poorest schools, data show." These types of conclusions, which simply take the results of new evaluations at face value, have characterized the discussion since the first new systems came online. Though understandable, they are also frustrating and a potential impediment to the policy process."

"I'm no-longer surprised these days by the belligerent wrongness of rhetoric around school funding equity and adequacy. Arguably, much of the supporting rationale for the current (and other recent) education reforms is built on the house of cards that when it comes to financing equitably and adequately our public school systems - especially those serving our neediest children, we've been there and done that. In fact, we've been there and done that for decades."

"As I've pointed out over, and over and over again on this blog, NY State maintains one of the least equitable educational systems in the nation."

"In this research note, we estimate a series of models using publicly available school level data to address the following question: Q: Did students in Newark (combined district and charter) make gains on statewide averages (non-Newark) on state assessments, controlling for demographics? Specifically, we evaluate changes in mean scale scores on state assessments (NJASK) for language arts and math grades 6 to 8."

"Why would Moskowitz feel the need to lay down a gauntlet in opposition to a president and two secretaries of education who have all been vigorous charter school supporters? For that matter, why take on the entire civil rights community? To answer these questions, I decided to take a look at the data on suspensions from New York City schools, both public and charter."