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Special education teacher Pam Emerson sent me this as an introduction to her Forget the Label blog. It hooked me, and I think will do the same to you. - Jay Mathews

A day after the Tucson Unified School District board votes to suspend Mexican American studies classes to avoid losing state aid, students are angry, sad and confused, a teacher says.

In response to low take-up, many public schools have experimented with moving breakfast from the cafeteria to the classroom. We examine whether such a program increases performance as measured by standardized test scores, grades and attendance rates. We exploit quasi-random timing of program implementation that allows for a difference-in-differences identification strategy. Our main identification assumption is that schools where the program was introduced earlier would have evolved similarly to those where the program was introduced later. We find that in-class breakfast increases both math and reading achievement by about one-tenth of a standard deviation relative to providing breakfast in the cafeteria. Moreover, we find that these effects are most pronounced for low performing, free-lunch eligible, Hispanic, and low BMI students. We also find some improvements in attendance for high achieving students but no impact on grades.

At the very least, I have to rethink my views of Darling-Hammond and the ill-considered labels thrown around in school policy battles, because I know the Hillsdale story is real. I attended Hillsdale and have visited often since graduating. Former Hillsdale principal Don Leydig, one of the most influential participants in its changes, has been my friend since third grade.

A cooperative effort of the New York City Department of Education, the Chancellor's office, and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) resulted in a specially designed educational program under which all elementary and middle schools in the Chancellor's District would operate. The program included five components: a research-based curriculum focused heavily on literacy and mathematics; a staffing model designed to ensure a qualified teacher in every classroom; a strong principal for every school; high quality professional development for teachers and administrators; and smaller classes with added dollars for materials and supplies.

The children of the wealthy are pulling away from their lower-class peers -- the same way their parents are pulling away from their peers' parents. When it comes to college completion rates, the rich-poor gulf has grown by 50% since the 1980s. Upper income families are also spending vastly more on their children compared to the poor than they did 40 years ago, and spending more time as parents cultivating their intellectual development. It may not simply be a matter of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer -- although that certainly is a part of it. The growing differences in student achievement don't strictly mimic the way income inequality has skyrocketed since the middle of the 20th century. It's actually worse than that. Today, there's a much stronger connection between income and a child's academic success than in the past. Having money is simply more important than it used to be when it comes to getting a good education.

The deliberate pepper-spraying by campus police of nonviolent protesters at UC Davis on Friday has provoked national outrage. But the horrific incident must not cloud the real question: What led comfortable, bright, middle-class students to join the Occupy protest movement against income inequality and big-money politics in the first place?

I gotta admit that my favorite part of the Third Way memo responding to my critique of their "Middle Class" report is the end of the memo.

Our educational system, historically a major engine for equal opportunity and a pathway to the American Dream, is under severe stress. Along with it, the working- and middle-class and immigrant dream of rising out of economic anxiety is evaporating, as our public education system, from preschools through public universities, has lost broad support. This is evidenced by declining state commitments to public education-relative to health-care and prison expenditure-by property-tax caps in communities and states that affect the quality of schools, and by expenditure cuts rather than tax increases at the federal level of the kind we just witnessed in the debt-ceiling agreements. We make decisions and deals like these at our peril.

The Broad Residency in Urban Education announced today that it has placed its largest class to-date of 46 early career executives into 28 public education systems and public charter school organizations across the country, including the largest number yet of residents in state departments of education, where they will be supporting school districts in improving student achievement.

There are dangerous education deform templates in America that run the risk of establishing a horrific precedent for others all over the world.

Check out this letter sent Wednesday to NY State Education Commissioner King, from the UFT, Class Size Matters,  NAACP & AQE, pointing out the numerous legal flaws as regards this year's Contracts for Excellence (C4E) process.

"The underlying conservative foundation of the charter school movement today has resulted in a variety of deep tensions linked to questions of racism and education, particularly with respect to the education of working-class students of color."

"Be afraid. Be very afraid. Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters in New York City has prepared the following report about threats to the privacy of children, families, and teachers."

"Here's a fact that may not surprise you: the children of the rich perform better in school, on average, than children from middle-class or poor families. Students growing up in richer families have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students; they also have higher rates of participation in extracurricular activities and school leadership positions, higher graduation rates and higher rates of college enrollment and completion. Whether you think it deeply unjust, lamentable but inevitable, or obvious and unproblematic, this is hardly news. It is true in most societies and has been true in the United States for at least as long as we have thought to ask the question and had sufficient data to verify the answer. What is news is that in the United States over the last few decades these differences in educational success between high- and lower-income students have grown substantially."

"Kyle Hunsberger, a math teacher at Johnny Cochran Middle school in Los Angeles, works 60-hour weeks, makes every minute count in class and gets high praise from his principal and students. Yet, according to a key measure of teacher effectiveness used by LAUSD, Hunsberger is average."

"Academic tracking in secondary education appears to confound an increasingly common method for gauging differences in teacher quality, according to two recently released studies. Failing to account for how students are sorted into more- or less-rigorous classes-as well as the effect different tracks have on student learning-can lead to biased "value added" estimates of middle and high school teachers' ability to boost their students' standardized-test scores, the papers conclude."

"The following is an excerpt of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York. Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: "How do we teach it?" In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it's time to crack that shell. It's time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab's Human Dynamics group."

Yesterday, the NY State Assembly Education Committee held a rare hearing in NYC on the state and city's implementation of the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, the so-called "turnaround" schools, and how the entire program is in complete disarray.    The big news is that the city is determined to go ahead with turnaround model for 26 Persistently Low Achieving schools even if they receive any of the federal funds to do so. Turnaround  is an euphemism for closing these schools, firing much of the staff and reopening them in the fall with new names  There is massive confusion and no public input about the plans for these schools, and yet the city seems determined to close and reconstitute them, like lemmings going over a cliff, even at the city's taxpayers' expense.  Why?  Because they can. See Two Years In, Federal Grant Program To Improve Struggling City Schools Has Derailed (NY1); Plans to Close 26 Schools Will Proceed Regardless of Financing, City Says (Schoolbook) and Chancellor: Plan to Close, Reopen Schools Was Not Act of 'Revenge' (WNYC) and Walcott: Turnaround will happen even without federal funding (GothamSchools).  My testimony is here on how many these schools and their students have been systematically disadvantaged by overcrowding and extremely large class sizes; with no plans by the city or the state to do anything to address these deplorable conditions.

Louisiana is poised to establish the nation's most expansive system of school choice by adopting a package of vouchers and other tools that would give many parents control over the use of tax dollars to educate their children. The initiative would effectively redefine vouchers, which have typically helped lower-income public-school students pay for private schools. Vouchers could now also be used by students to pay for state-approved apprenticeships at local businesses, as well as college courses and private online classes, while they are still in public schools.