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The conventional wisdom among many education commentators is that U.S. public school teachers "come from the bottom third" of their classes. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took this talking point a step further, and asserted at a press conference last week that teachers are drawn from the bottom 20 percent of graduates. All of this is supposed to imply that the U.S. has a serious problem with the "quality" of applicants to the profession. Despite the ubiquity of the "bottom third" and similar arguments (which are sometimes phrased as massive generalizations, with no reference to actual proportions), it's unclear how many of those who offer them know what specifically they refer to (e.g., GPA, SAT/ACT, college rank, etc.). This is especially important since so many of these measurable characteristics are not associated with future test-based effectiveness in the classroom, while those that are are only modestly so. Still, given how often it is used, as well as the fact that it is always useful to understand and examine the characteristics of the teacher labor supply, it's worth taking a quick look at where the "bottom third" claim comes from and what it might or might not mean.

Bloomberg acknowledged that his strategy would result in much larger class size, but he refused to back down. "The best thing you can do is put the best teacher you can possibly find and afford in front of the classroom and if you have to have fewer because there's only a certain number of dollars to go around, I'm in favor of that." I thought at first that the mayor's comments were meant to be taken in the same way as Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." But then I realized he was dead serious because he obviously believes in Social Darwinism.

It's been a busy and bruising few years for Earl Kim *93, the superintendent of schools in Montgomery Township, just north of Princeton. Like other schools chiefs during the recession, he has had to steer the district through budget cuts that forced layoffs, larger classes, and program reductions. He has coped with a hurricane that left district schools flooded and teachers unable to get into their classrooms. He has managed all the sensitive issues that crop up in any fast-growing, affluent school system with high-achieving students and demanding parents. But on top of all that, Kim increasingly finds himself a major player in the battle over public education that is raging across the United States but is especially potent in New Jersey because of Gov. Chris Christie's pitched struggles with the teachers union.

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.

Diane Ravitch has again done the seemingly impossible. She prompted Education Sector's Kevin Carey to take a glance at the history of education. Even so, Carey's piece in The New Republic, "The Dissenter," indicates that he did not read carefully. Carey wrote that Ravitch "left a polarized history profession in her wake," as if she did not enter the field at a time when traditional historians were under siege. During the sixties, history was dominated by class-based analyses of theories on the oppressiveness of various power structures. History was dominated by genres, ranging from the New Social History to the various Marxist schools of thought, that sought evidence for or against ideological orthodoxies. Too many fell under the umbrella of "history with the people left out."

If a well-heeled neighborhood of Los Angeles wanted better police protection, would it be OK for the residents to donate money to their local police station so it could assign an extra patrol car to their streets? Most people would rightly say no. Law enforcement is a public service; taxpayers support it for the safety of all, to be deployed as needed to provide the best protection for the city. Residents might hire a private security guard for their neighborhood, but they cannot reshape public allocations of resources to benefit themselves through private donations. So is it all right, then, for parents to lavish donations on one school, providing it with art and music classes, instructional aides and extra library hours, while a neighboring school in the same district might have none of those?

Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg and Chancellor Stephen Spahn of the Dwight School in Manhattan have big dreams for education. Sahlberg, the celebrated global reformer and author of newly released (and already in reprint) Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, spent the day at Spahn's school in Manhattan. Sahlberg discussed with faculty and students not just how and why Finland built their phenomenal, world-class education systems, but even more importantly, what needs to be done to maintain its educational excellence as this century progresses.

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.

Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and author, had a simple question for the high school seniors he was speaking to one morning last week in Manhattan: "Who here wants to be a teacher?" Out of a class of 15, two hands went up - one a little reluctantly. "In my country, that would be 25 percent of people," Dr. Sahlberg said. "And," he added, thrusting his hand in the air with enthusiasm, "it would be more like this."

Much controversy has been aroused and much ink has been expended about the way in which Eva Moskowitz is now defying the original stated purpose of charter schools, and marketing her chain of Success Academies to white middle class families in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side.  Her glossy flyers, sent to households by the truckload, with many families having already received five or six, increasingly feature the faces of little white children. There has also been much debate about the problems of NYC's demanding school "choice" process -- but not much said about how school choice may further segregate  our public schools, especially in many areas of Brownstone Brooklyn, where the last ten years or more of gradual gentrification have led to more diversity in neighborhood schools.  While the UCLA Civil Rights project has shown how charter schools contributes to more segregation nationwide, here are the observations of one Brooklyn parent who is also a high school teacher, Cindy Black, about what happened when a new elementary school of "choice" -- though not a charter -- opened up  in her community

The most famous teacher in the United States right now is Salman Khan, creator of Khan Academy.  Khan Academy is a collection of nearly 3,000 online youtube tutorials mainly about math and science.  Bill Gates watches the videos with his kids, and has made Khan a household name.  Because of Khan, a new buzz-word in education is the 'flipped' classroom where kids are expected to watch videos the night before and then do their 'homework' in class, supervised by the teacher.

In a New York Times op-ed article on Monday, Natalie Hopkinson writes that school choice in her neighborhood in Washington has destroyed community-based education for working-class families. With New York ranked No. 1 in the nation in giving parents and students choices, according to one study last week, Amy Stuart Wells, a parent of an eighth grader and a professor at Teachers College, has her own take on New York's system.

In response to the question, 'Are teachers activists?' my answer is: No. Not inherently. Teaching brown kids math, helping recent immigrants master English, or even making an occupational commitment to public education, are none of them inherently radical acts, though they are often characterized as such. This is not to say that choosing education as a profession is in dissonance with struggling for social justice. It is when we believe that it is enough-that simply being a teacher by trade is activism-that we enter into dangerous territory. For this belief is complicit with a plethora of assumptions detrimental to justice, including the notion that learning is inevitably about competition, class mobility and community escape.

Controversial charter school founder Eva Moskowitz could be expanding her education empire into the upper East Side and Chelsea. The former city councilwoman has plans to open half a dozen more Success Academy charters in fall 2013, with two slated for a wealthy district that already has its share high-performing schools. By planning to open the schools in Manhattan's District 2 - which extends from Park Ave. over to Chelsea and the Village - Moskowitz continues her drive into upper-middle class areas.

I have never been asked by an administrator how the work in my class will help to create informed and powerful citizens that can boost the health of our democracy. But isn't that the point of public education? If not that, then what? Shouldn't we come to some consensus about the goal before we create the means towards that end?

Regarding teachers' unions with a certain distaste, maintaining the belief that they exist to champion inadequacy, is now virtually required for membership in the affluent, competitive classes, no matter an affiliation on the right or left. Over the past two weeks, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have aggressively pushed for phasing in a new, more rigorous teacher evaluation process - with tens of millions of dollars in state and federal aid to schools at stake - they have deployed a rhetoric of enmity, one meant to suggest that the state's teachers' unions are committed to keeping talentless hacks in jobs they can't handle. As the governor put it on Monday, "Our schools are not an employment program." What has been lost in these performances of reproach and imperiousness is the extent to which the city and state, and the related unions (the United Federation of Teachers in the first instance and New York State United Teachers in the second) are generally in agreement over how classroom evaluations ought to be held and what, in fact, constitutes sound teaching. As it happens, the state union was at work devising substantive evaluation reform more than a year before Mr. Cuomo even took office.

Right before the New Year, Judge Feinman ruled against our request for a preliminary injunction against the DOE's provision of free space and services to charter schools, in the lawsuit that Class Size Matters, along with other parents and the NYC Parents Union, filed in July.  His decision, which was publicly disclosed today, is posted here.  Here is a fact sheet about the case. One of the reasons he denied our request is that he determined that the payments of more than $100 million owed by the charter schools  would not necessarily be used by the DOE to benefit our kids in any way or restore the egregious budget cuts their schools have suffered, so it was difficult to prove irreparable harm. Nevertheless in his decision, he fired a shot across the bow to DOE & the charter school industry, saying that they should not take this as any sort of signal that when the case comes to trial, he will necessarily rule in their favor.  Below is the press statement we put out with the NYC Parents Union.

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.

Mayor Bloomberg said today that "The teachers' union represents the employees and the city represents the students."  This comment reflects tremendous chutzpah. He and the Governor in recent days have claimed to be acting in the interests of the children who attend our public schools, yet both have ignored the priorities of parents and their right to have a voice in determining education policies. We parents are the really the ones who speak for our children.  What do New York parents want?  The vast majority want equitable and adequate funding, smaller classes, a well-rounded curriculum, and less emphasis on standardized testing.

As states revamp their early childhood education to grab a slice of federal education dollars, some education experts are urging policymakers to look outside the classroom to improve educational opportunites for the country's youngsters. Just as Obama awarded over $500 million in state grants to improve pre-K, the Brookings Institution released a report arguing more attention paid to family background factors such as poverty and maternal education would help improve educational outcomes for our littlest learners. The report argued that gaps in children's ability to learn begin long before they enter the classroom -- and that those gaps can have lasting effects on class mobility.