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Three years after Barack Obama's election signaled a seeming resurgence for America's unions, the landscape looks very different. Republican governors in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio have limited the reach of collective bargaining for public employees. The moves, especially in Wisconsin, set off a national furor that has all but obscured the underlying debate as it relates to schooling: Should public-employee collective bargaining be reined in or expanded in education? Is the public interest served by public-sector collective bargaining? If so, how and in what ways? Arguing in this forum for more expansive collective bargaining for teachers is Richard D. Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and author of Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy. Responding that public-employee collective bargaining is destructive to schooling and needs to be reined in is Jay P. Greene, chair of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and author of Education Myths.

Yesterday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel carries a feature on the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.The Bradleys were the main source of support for Gov. Walker's assault on Wisconsin's teachers and public employee unions. Indiana's T-Party Gov. Mitch Daniels sat on Bradley's board of directors. His teacher-bashing, anti-union school "reform" initiative was recently embraced by Ed Sec. Arne Duncan.  They also provided support for the Milwaukee school voucher program and its main proponent in the African-American community, Howard Fuller and his Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) . They funded Charles Murray, author of racist book, "The Bell Curve," which argues that intelligence is predicated on race, and Dinesh D'Souza, author of "The End of Racism," which attempts to absolve Whites from discrimination against Blacks during slavery, claiming that Blacks were too uncivilized to be a part of society anyway.

The GAO report's authors are very careful to note that their findings merely describe what you might call the "service gap" - i.e., the proportion of special education students served by charters versus regular public schools - but that they do not indicate the reasons for this disparity. This is an important point, but I would take the warning a step further:  The national- and state-level gaps themselves should be interpreted with the most extreme caution. Although there are plenty of interesting data contained in the report, and its authors do point out many of the limitations of their analyses, the GAO's approach (and virtually all the press coverage) seems to gloss over the fact that charter schools are disproportionately located in urban, lower-income areas, where special education rates of all schools tend to be higher. To understand why this matters, consider an analogous example: On average, U.S. charter schools serve a considerably larger proportion of minority students than regular public schools. Does this mean that minority students are underrepresented in regular public schools?

Coherence is the core principle underlying standards-based educational reforms. Assessments aligned with content standards are designed to guide instruction and raise achievement. The authors investigate the coherence of standards-based reform's key instruments using the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum. Analyzing 138 standards-assessment pairs spread across grades and the three No Child Left Behind tested subjects, the authors find that roughly half of standards content is tested on the corresponding test and roughly half of test content corresponds to the standards. A moderate proportion of test content is at the wrong level of cognitive demand as compared to the corresponding standards, and vice versa. Between 17% and 27% of content on a typical test covers topics not mentioned in the corresponding standards. Policy and research implications are discussed.

Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade is a new report from Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank. The report aims to convince parents, taxpayers and policymakers that they should be as concerned about middle-class schools not making the grade as they are about the failures of the nation's large, poor, urban school districts. But, the report suffers from egregious methodological flaws invalidating nearly every bold conclusion drawn by its authors. First, the report classifies as middle class any school or district where the share of children qualifying for free or reduced-priced lunch falls between 25% and 75%. Seemingly unknown to the authors, this classification includes as middle class some of the poorest urban centers in the country, such as Detroit and Philadelphia. But, even setting aside the crude classification of middle class, none of the report's major conclusions are actually supported by the data tables provided. The report concludes, for instance, that middle-class schools perform much less well than the general public, parents and taxpayers believe they do. But, the tables throughout the report invariably show that the schools they classify as "middle class" fall precisely where one would expect them to-in the middle-between higher- and lower-income schools. 

Authors:    Craig R. Barrett, Former CEO and Chairman, Intel Corporation Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education, New York University Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers Steven Brill, Author and Entrepreneur Interviewer(s):    Jayshree Bajoria, Senior Staff Writer

Here is the story of Karen Sprowal and her son Matthew, that Mike Winerip of the NY Times writes about here. While charter schools have advertised themselves as open to all students through random lotteries, many have been shown to enroll relatively few numbers of special needs children and English language learners, and to have high rates of student attrition.  The charter school described below is a member of the Success Academy chain, the fastest growing chain in NYC.  Its rapid expansion has been enthusiastically supported by the DOE, and by their authorizer, the NY State University Board of Trustees, whose charter committee is headed  by Prof. Pedro Noguera.  There are currently seven Success Academies, all co-located in NYC public school buildings, with two more planned for the fall, and three more authorized by SUNY to open in NYC in 2012.

I've commented in the past about the difficulties of obtaining reconcilable data on finances of New Jersey Charter Schools. What do I mean by reconcilable? Well, when I'm looking at financial data on charter schools in particular, I like to be able to see some relationship between expenditure and revenue data reported on IRS 990 filings (Tax returns of the non-profit boards/foundations/agencies that operate the charters) and state government (department of ed) reported expenditures and/or any annual financial report documents that might be required by charter authorizers. This really is an authorizer/accountability issue. A financial reporting requirement issue.

"Beverley Holden Johns, a nationally recognized expert in the field of disabilities, strongly disagrees with Arne Duncan. Duncan wants children with disabilities to be able to perform on the highest level of NAEP tests. She points out that NAEP was not designed for this purpose. Duncan unilaterally changed the requirements of the IDEA act, without Congressional authorization. Having changed NCLB without Congressional authorization, he must think that ignoring the law is routine. In Néw York, we learned how students with disabilities do when they took the Common Core test: 95% failed."

"Education Secretary Arne Duncan is seen as the most powerful education secretary ever, given his use of federal funding and No Child Left Behind waivers to get states to follow school reform policies that he supported.  Many of his critics argue that his federal overreach is excessive and has encroached on local and state authority to run public school districts as they see fit. The author of the following posts asks whether there has been too much federal overreach, or whether the administration has used its executive power in education in the wrong ways. This was written by Arthur H. Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone and do not represent Stevens Institute."

Teachers who give standardized tests are required to sign affidavits swearing they will not copy the tests, or divulge their contents. Thus teachers are forbidden from airing concerns they might have about the contents of the tests. The tests have become the ultimate authorities in our schools, and the test publishers are virtually unquestionable. The standardized testing technocracy has convinced our policy makers that the only way we will be competitive in the world is if everyone learns the same information, and has that learning measured in ever-finer increments. We are not supposed to look behind the curtain to see the way this data is arrived at.

Political wrestling matches over the right to shape school policy play out in state capitals just about every year. But in 2011, one group of policymakers in particular-state boards of education-have faced unusually intense challenges to their authority. Legislation has emerged in at least 14 states this year to change or strip the power afforded to those boards, according to the National Association of State Boards of Education, which is fighting many of those efforts.

"A seventeen year-old high school student from New York named Nikhil Goyal has been speaking out on education reform. In addition to several high profile television appearances, he has authored a book, One Size Does Not Fit All, A Student's Assessment of School. I asked him to explain his critique this week."

In this report we provide some context to these policy responses to special education enrollment in charter schools by describing the distribution of students with disabilities in New York State charter and district-run schools. We show that different levels of comparison-state level, school type, district level, and authorizer level-yield different results, and comparisons at high levels of aggregation (such as those made at the state level) mask important information and variation. Whether, and in what ways, charter schools appear to systemically underserve students with disabilities depends on how you answer the question, "Compared to what?" 

"Some people, not surprisingly, weren't thrilled with my post titled "Welfare for the rich? Private school tax credit programs expanding." Here Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, looks at the criticism and gives us a primer on private school tax credit programs, which he calls "neovouchers." He's the author of the 2008 book "NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling.""

"The author infiltrated ALEC's inner sanctum -- and what she saw was chilling."

"A big part of successful policy making is unyielding attention to detail (an argument that regular readers of this blog hear often). Choices about design and implementation that may seem unimportant can play a substantial role in determining how policies play out in practice. A new paper, co-authored by Elizabeth Davidson, Randall Reback, Jonah Rockoff and Heather Schwartz, and presented at last month's annual conference of The Association for Education Finance and Policy, illustrates this principle vividly, and on a grand scale: With an analysis of outcomes in all 50 states during the early years of NCLB."

"Editor's note: The author of this piece is an urban high school teacher who is writing under a pseudonym in order to protect the privacy of his students and his colleagues. Since I'm a public school teacher, everybody always asks me what I think about charter schools. They usually ask it with a certain expression, their eyes alert and their head poised at an angle, as if they are readying themselves for an explosion, or at least a case of spontaneous combustion. I usually respond with some variation of this: It's complicated. You got an hour?"

"A few weeks ago, Students First NY (SFNY) released a report, in which they presented a very simple analysis of the distribution of "unsatisfactory" teacher evaluation ratings ("U-ratings") across New York City schools in the 2011-12 school year. The report finds that U-ratings are distributed unequally. In particular, they are more common in schools with higher poverty, more minorities, and lower proficiency rates. Thus, the authors conclude, the students who are most in need of help are getting the worst teachers. There is good reason to believe that schools serving larger proportions of disadvantaged students have a tougher time attracting, developing and retaining good teachers, and there is evidence of this, even based on value-added estimates, which adjust for these characteristics (also see here). However, the assumptions upon which this Students First analysis is based are better seen as empirical questions, and, perhaps more importantly, the recommendations they offer are a rather crude, narrow manifestation of market-based reform principles."

"critical pedagogy "…draws attention to questions concerning who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge, values, and skills, and it illuminates how knowledge, identities, and authority are constructed within particular sets of social relations""