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HSA2 seeks to amend its student admissions policy by eliminating an absolute at-risk admissions priority for students zoned to attend New York City public schools

Diane Ravitch's brilliant, must-read blog, Bobby Jindal vs. Public Education, caused me to pull out an e-mail I got from a teacher buddy in Louisiana a few weeks back. My friend is a National Board Certified Teacher, with a long and distinguished career in education. She wasn't invited to Bobby Jindal's education summit--but a Teach for America corps member she's mentoring was, and urged her to attend, saying that she'd learn about the exciting innovations planned for public education in Louisiana. So my friend took a day away from the classroom and drove up to the Capitol with her mentee. She took notes all day, and sent the following dismayed message

Lamenting that millions of American children receive "a third world education," Mitt Romney on Wednesday called for poor and disabled students to be able to use federal funds to attend any public, private or online school they choose.

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has been mulling some big changes to federal K-12 policy if elected, including allowing federal funding to follow students-even if they want to attend private schools-according to a campaign document obtained by Politics K-12. Disadvantaged families and parents of students in special education could choose to spend federal funds at any district or charter public school, tutoring provider, or online course, according to the document circulated over the weekend. It outlines a series of ideas that have been considered by Romney and his advisers, which could be announced as early as this week. Under the proposal, students could also federal money at a private school, as long as that was consistent with state guidelines.

The Philadelphia school system announced in late April that it was on the brink of insolvency and would be turned over to private operators, dissolving most remnants of democratic governance. Specifically, if the city's leaders have their way, 64 of the city's neighbourhood public schools will close over the next five years, and by 2017, 40 per cent of the city's children will attend charter schools. These are are privately run schools that use public funds. Perhaps most disturbingly to those who value democracy and doubt the wisdom of corporate elites, the city will have no oversight of its own school system. Schools will instead be governed by "networks", control of which will be auctioned off through a bidding process, and could be bestowed on anyone - including a CEO of a for-profit education company. The situation in Philadelphia, which has received amazingly little attention from the national media in the US, offers a disturbing window onto what the US elite is planning for the rest of our public schools - disturbing because Philadelphia's experience has already demonstrated that turning public education over to private entities will ultimately lead to its destruction.

Butts said that the staff plans to use the school to find new and different ways to make STEM education both exciting and feasible for young people, and looks forward to sharing those findings with other educators. "This is not a selfish kind of venture: This is something that we hope will be able strengthen STEM [education] across the Island," said Butts. During the question and answer period, many of the residents in attendance were skeptical. Some questioned the need for a charter school when Jericho High School, as well as several other nearby districts, produces great results in math and science.

"Most research on educational interventions, including school vouchers, focuses on impacts on short-term outcomes such as students' scores on standardized tests. Few studies are able to track longer-term outcomes, and even fewer are able to do so in the context of a randomized experiment. In the first study using a randomized experiment to measure the impact of school vouchers on college enrollment, we examine the college-going behavior through 2011 of students who participated in a voucher experiment as elementary school students in the late 1990s. We find no overall impacts on college enrollments but we do find large, statistically significant positive impacts on the college going of African American students who participated in the study. Our estimates indicate that using a voucher to attend private school increased the overall college enrollment rate among African Americans by 24 percent."

"Attendance: up. Dropout rates: plummeting. College acceptance: through the roof. My mind-blowing year inside a "low-performing" school."

"Here's my quick response to the Brookings report released yesterday on the long term effects of vouchers on a randomized pool of participants in New York City."

Maybe New York City should fire half the teachers and double class size in its public schools? His proposal made me curious. What kind of education did Mayor Mike choose for his daughters, now adults, before he became mayor and was only an ordinary multi-billionaire living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan? Michael Bloomberg has two daughters, Emma, now aged thirty-two, and Georgina, twenty-eight. Both girls attended the prestigious private all-girls Spence School in New York City.

Three West Harlem secondary schools are on the chopping block for poor performance and in danger of being closed. All three schools are, or will soon be, sharing buildings with charter schools belonging to the Success Academy Network. Some in the community think their schools are being sacrificed to allow for the expansion of the well-funded and politically potent Success Academy Network. They say the DOE has not done enough to support the struggling schools. The DOE is "starving these schools so they have an excuse to shut them down," said Noah Gotbaum, a representative for Community Education Council 3 who attended public hearings about the future of all three schools.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, The New York Times reported that criminal charges have been filed against 20 students in an affluent New York suburb for allegedly cheating on the SAT. Some are accused of paying stand-ins up to $3,500 per test to take the exam for them; others accepted payment to take the test. Bernard Kaplan, the principal of Great Neck North High School, which five of the accused students attended, suggested that the experience of his community is the tip of an iceberg. "I think it's widespread across the country," he told The Times. "We were the school that stood up to it." We have every reason to believe he's right. While criminal authorities and the Educational Testing Service, which administers the exam, investigate, parents and educators should ask: What have we done to lead teens to such an act of desperation?

A federal appeals court has upheld a Pennsylvania school district's attendance-zone plan that took neighborhood racial demographics into account but did not assign individual students based on race.

Whatever gains the city has made in education under mayoral control and its emphasis on smaller schools and charters are nullified by its callous disregard for those students still stuck in schools the Department of Education has deemed beyond repair. Take Jamaica High School, the storied institution the city has decided to eliminate and replace with four awkwardly named boutique schools. Small classes, new computers, Smart boards - students lucky enough to be attending the new schools are getting all these and more, while others under the same roof are getting the shaft.

A while back, when the NJ Opportunity Scholarship Act was a hotter topic, I wrote a post explaining how, depending on which districts were included in NJOSA and depending on how family income qualifications were set and eligibility for those already enrolled in private schools, the largest share of scholarships could actually end up going to Orthodox schools in Lakewood. After all, Lakewood is home to the largest private schooled population in the state. Not only that, most families in Lakewood whose children attend the Orthodox schools actually have income below the 250% poverty threshold.

For a generation of Newark students, every education decision, including choices on curriculum, spending and superintendent, has been made by state officials in Trenton. That level of state involvement has made the 39,000-student district an attractive laboratory for Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican seen as a national leader on education reform, and for prominent donors, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who have pledged $148 million to remake this city's failing schools. But the influx of money, and the attendant national spotlight, has galvanized a growing movement of parents, educators and elected officials who want the schools returned to local control 16 years after they were taken over amid low test scores, crumbling buildings and charges of mismanagement.

Like freedom, choice is a complicated virtue in society. Yes, freedom unless ... Ditto for choice. Human rights and choices are sometimes comfortable together and sometimes not. If I want my child with a mere 100 I.Q. to attend classes with kids with more-academic smarts, while you with a child who has a 130 I.Q. want to be sure that your child keeps company only with smart peers-well, we can't both win. (Especially if we are typical of most parents.) Then it comes to who has the power to get what they want or to persuade the other side that what they want is good for everyone.

Last week, New York State's education commissioner, John B. King Jr., used perhaps the only leverage he has to compel school districts and their unions to agree on the parameters of an evaluation system for teachers and principals assigned to struggling schools: He shut off the federal grants that were meant to improve them. On Monday, as Dr. King sat on a Board of Regents meeting inside the Education Department offices here, just across from the state's Capitol, protesters convened on the steps outside to decry his decision. The gathering was noticeable not because of its size - there were perhaps 20 people attending - but because it brought together two sides whose disagreements presumably were to blame for the grants' suspension: school officials and teachers' union representatives.

An Indiana judge has upheld the state's ambitious new voucher law, saying it meets the standards of the state's constitution, despite objections about it directing money to religious schools. Superior Court Judge Michael Keele found that whether students choose to use public money to attend sectarian institutions is ultimately "immaterial," because familes are exercising their choice to do so.

Monday's announcements that all three charter schools in the Believe Network would likely have their charters revoked at the end of the school year were no surprise to those who have been following recent news about these schools and the network which runs them. From security camera footage that showed Believe students were being forced to attend classes in factory space to the photo of Believe CEO Eddie Calderon-Melendez charging a New York Post photographer, evidence suggested that both the state's investigation into the Network's finances and the DOE's review of the school's management would find multiple egregious violations of the school leaders' legal responsibilities.