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The podcast kicks off the new year in style, with special guest commentary from Diane Ravitch on what 2012 will bring.

The nation's lawmakers have frequently voiced the basic principle that important policy decisions should be evidence based. In this commentary, the authors describe the approach the U.S. Department of Education has taken in its Increasing Educational Productivity project. The authors argue that the department's actual practice in this instance has fallen short of the rhetorical embrace of evidence-based decision making, and they explain the potential harm done when leaders do not heed the importance of grounding policy in high-quality research.

This Commentary from NEPC Director Kevin Welner is a version of a piece that was published as part of series called "America the Fixable" at the Atlantic.com.  The edits made for the Atlantic.com version change the framing (no cupcakes!) and remove most of the links to research.

It's not often that intellectual heavyweights disagree so fundamentally about the same issue in commentaries published days apart in the nation's two most respected newspapers. I'm referring to Paul Krugman, whose column "Wasting Our Minds" appeared on Apr. 29 in The New York Times, and to George P. Schultz and Eric A. Hanushek, whose essay "Education Is the Key to a Healthy Economy" appeared in The Wall Street Journal on May 1. The subject was the relationship between educational outcomes and economic growth.

This week I engaged in another online debate with one of Arne Duncan's press secretaries, Justin Hamilton, who readers may recall asked me to "correct" my commentary a year ago after President Obama inadvertently criticized our over-reliance on standardized tests. This time Mr. Hamilton took issue with a question I posed in advance of Duncan's latest Twitter Town Hall. I asked, "How can you say that we should not teach to test while NCLB waivers tie teacher & principal evaluations to test scores?" To this, Hamilton (@edpresssec) replied: "False. Waiver states using multiple measure not testing only."

On September 8, 2011 Teachers College Record published a book review of Douglas N. Harris's recent book Value-Added Measures in Education. In this commentary the author takes issue with not necessarily the book's What Every Educator Needs to Know content but the author's overall endorsement of value-added, and his and others' imprudent adoption of some highly complex assumptions.

Three of Connecticut's "Big City" mayors had a commentary piece published in today's CTNewsjunkie.  They should have remembered the quote "It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt" before they put their names on to today's piece entitled "Small Investment, Big Payoff".   (also linked below as well) Unless of course what they are referring to the price whoever wrote this piece paid to get them to sign it. It would be far better to believe that this piece was ghost written by the charter school lobbyists and the mayors didn't read it before they signed it than to think they would ever be so dismissive and insulting to the needs of their constituents.

In this issue, we present a series of short essays by eleven leading American educators. We invited each contributor to submit what we envisioned as expressions of concern, conviction, passion, and even anger over the discourses currently at play and the impact of the teacher accountability movement on the future of education. We hope that readers will share our excitement about reading the commentaries of these educators who agreed to write this issue with us. This contains the next 4 essays in the series.

"I must wonder how my public commentary and scholarship have come to be seen as "hostile rhetoric," how the working poor and working class in the U.S. have come to be characterized as lazy, and how we justify telling children trapped in poverty to suck it up, work twice as hard, and above all else, do as you are told."

A commentary on the op-ed by Frederick Hess and Linda Darling-Hammond from @teacherken.

Dear Michelle Rhee, former D.C. schools chancellor and current leader of StudentsFirst: I just wanted to dash off a quick note about that commentary you wrote in Education Week about the big value-added teacher evaluation study that made headlines this month.

There has certainly been a lot of traffic about Teach For America (TFA) in the cyberworld lately. It all started with the audacious nerve of Dennis Van Roekel, President of the National Education Association, and Wendy Kopp, CEO of Teach for America, daring to appear together with Secretary Duncan to support his new blueprint for teacher preparation. Then of all things, they penned together a commentary for USA Today. As a result, many of my fellow bloggers have launched a storm of criticism. I respectfully ask them to "cool their jets" on that and to look more carefully at the possibilities raised by this new open dialogue of TFA and NEA.

In recognition of the 10th anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act, Education Week Commentary asked leaders in the K-12 community to consider the law's impact.

It's probably too early to say whether Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a "tsunami" or a "seismic shift," but, continuing with the natural disaster theme, the last few months have seen a massive "avalanche" of press commentary about them, especially within the last few days. Also getting lots of press attention (though not as much right now) is Adaptive/Personalized Learning. Both innovations seem to fascinate us, but probably for different reasons, since they are so fundamentally different at their cores. Personalized Learning, like more traditional concepts of education, places the individual at the center. With MOOCs, groups and social interaction take center stage and learning becomes a collective enterprise. This post elaborates on this distinction, but also points to a recent blurring of the lines between the two - a development that could be troubling.

...reminds me of what I have come to call the Rush Limbaugh strategy from posing an argument: Present a quick and compelling premise, and then argue within or against that premise. In popular and political discourse, this strategy is highly effective even though, as with the church sign noted above, the argument and conclusions depend entirely on whether or not the premise is accurate. In other words, start with a false premise and you have only false arguments and conclusions. The current discourse about education suffers under this paradigm; for example, two recent commentaries highlight just how pervasive and misleading the Rush Limbaugh strategy can be: Sol Stern's rambling endorsement of Common Core State Standards (CCSS), as a thinly veiled front for endorsing E. D. Hirsch and bashing "liberal" educators, and Joel Klein's praising of Success charters schools in New York. Vigorous and informed debate is an essential element in a democracy, just as I believe a vibrant universal public education is. Yet, when that debate becomes deformed, the results of public and political debate are also deformed. How, then, should all stakeholders in public education approach the many and varied claims and conclusions being offered about public schools and the need to reform that institution?

Every two years, the release of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) generates a wave of research and commentary trying to explain short- and long-term trends. For instance, there have been a bunch of recent attempts to "explain" an increase in aggregate NAEP scores during the late 1990s and 2000s. Some analyses postulate that the accountability provisions of NCLB were responsible, while more recent arguments have focused on the "effect" (or lack thereof) of newer market-based reforms - for example, looking to NAEP data to "prove" or "disprove" the idea that changes in teacher personnel and other policies have (or have not) generated "gains" in student test scores. The basic idea here is that, for every increase or decrease in cross-sectional NAEP scores over a given period of time (both for all students and especially for subgroups such as minority and low-income students), there must be "something" in our education system that explains it. In many (but not all) cases, these discussions consist of little more than speculation.

In this issue, we present a series of short essays by eleven leading American educators. We invited each contributor to submit what we envisioned as expressions of concern, conviction, passion, and even anger over the discourses currently at play and the impact of the teacher accountability movement on the future of education. We hope that readers will share our excitement about reading the commentaries of these educators who agreed to write this issue with us. This contains the introduction and the first four essays.

John P. Reilly, KIPP Tech Valley Charter School board chairman, in his commentary ("A truce in the city school wars," Feb. 21) suggests that the Albany School District be viewed as a "portfolio" district with district-operated and charter schools being treated more equally. This idea is without merit, as it ignores the substantial differences between public and charter schools. Charter schools are privately run and may exercise discretion regarding the children they educate. This makes them more akin to private schools despite their public funding.

The big "reform" trucks have been rollin' down the education highway for nearly a decade now. Public school educators are used to faux reform's inconvenience and injustice by now--and some even accept endless testing, lockstep standards and curriculum, and systematic destruction of public schools as necessary for positive change. Parents and grandparents may like their children's schools and teachers, but have absorbed the incessant media drumbeat: public education has failed. Out with the old! Something Must Be Done! If--like me--you still believe that public education is a civic good, an idea perfectly resonant with democratic equality, you're probably wondering if there's anything that can stop the big "reform" trucks. Those massive, exceptionally well-funded "reform" trucks with their professional media budgets, paid commentary and slick political arms. I can tell you this: it won't be teachers alone who turn back the tide of "reform." Teachers have been backed into a corner, painted as unionists bent on their own security (whether they pay dues or not), unwilling to be "accountable." They have been replaced, willy-nilly, by untrained temps--without retaliatory strike-back from their national union leaders. They have been publicly humiliated by their own cities and media outlets, not to mention the Secretary of Education.