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The Post-High School Outcomes of Young Adults With Disabilities up to 6 Years After High School: Key Findings From the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 is a report that uses data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 dataset to provide a national picture of post-high school outcomes for students with disabilities. The report includes postsecondary enrollment rates; employment rates; engagement in employment, education, and/or job training activities; household circumstances (e.g., residential independence, parenting status); and social and community involvement.

In 1968, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) went on strike over the involuntary transfer of 19 teachers by a newly empowered community-controlled school board in New York City's Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood. The controversies at the heart of that bitter struggle live on in current debates over the methods of teacher selection, the role of seniority and due process in teacher assignment, and the appropriateness of affirmative action in the composition of urban teaching corps. Then, as now, the role of educators of color in urban school districts was an issue that sparked controversy. In recounting how rules for teacher selection evolved in New York, Christina Collins' book, "Ethnically Qualified", Race, Merit and the Selection of Urban Teachers, 1920-1980, illuminates the failure of the city's teachers' unions to effectively challenge the exclusion and marginalization of African American teachers.

New York State Education Law requires that when a district provides space or services to a charter school it shall do so " at cost", and yet the NYC Department of Education provides free space and services for nearly one hundred co-located charter schools. Using figures from the Independent Budget Office, we estimate that the space and services they currently receive is worth more than $100 million annually, and that this practice contributes to the fact that these schools receive about $3,000 more per student in public funds annually than traditional public schools.   Our lawsuit seeks to stop the New York City Department of Education from violating the law.  Their illegal provision of free space and services has created a separate and unequal school system across the city, sparked divisive battles between parents and community members, and encouraged rapid charter school expansion at the expense of our public schools. 

As for the poor academic performance of low-income and minority students in the U.S., there are many reasons for this -- most beyond the control of schools. There is no doubt that children from troubled communities and families, in which few people have completed high school, much less college, are a challenge to educate. So let's be clear: parents and family background matter -- a lot! So much so that today, sadly, demography is destiny for most children.

The union representing nearly 700 public school employees who were laid off at the end of the school day on Friday held a last-minute lunchtime rally on the steps of City Hall, calling the layoffs a political vendetta and threatening possible legal action. But for all of the chanting and sign waving by District Council 37, the layoffs went through as planned. At the end of the day, Sungmi Kang, 47, a school aide at Stuyvesant High School, was out of work, along with 638 other school aides, parent coordinators, community associates, and other school support staff. They are the city's lowest paid employees and the latest victims of budget cuts.

The Woonsocket Education Department believes that Rhode Island's new formula for funding education does not go far enough to meet the challenges of the state's urban communities and is joined by Pawtucket in a lawsuit to address the system.

I have been wary of Geoffrey Canada as a social commentator ever since he published a book called "Fist,Knife, Stick Gun" whose first section describes the Morrisania section of the South Bronx in the 1950's and 1960's as a hell hole, a place plagued with violence and negativity. Violence and negativity there certainly was, but there were also great neighborhood sports programs, vibrant churches, great music and arts programs in the public schools, and many mentors and "old heads" who helped guide young people away from trouble. Canada's grim vision of this predominantly Black section of the Bronx, contradicted by liiterally scores of interviews I did with people who lived in the same community, was a disturbing example of literary "tunnel vision"- an author's propensity to make his personal experience universal.

The Civil Rights data simply sheds more light on what those of us advocating for equity in the states have known for decades: the enormous disparities in the opportunity to learn for students in low wealth, high poverty communities as compared to their more advantaged peers in more affluent public schools and districts.

Today the Walton Family Foundation announced investments totaling more than $157 million in education reform initiatives for 2010 - a $23 million increase over 2009, in which education reform grants totaled $134 million. Grants were made to organizations and programs that empower parents, particularly in low-income communities, to choose among quality, publicly funded schools for their children.

...Thus explains how Nauiokas became principal at the Haven Academy Charter School, where a third of students are in foster care. Another third are in families receiving preventive services to diminish the need for foster care. The rest are from the Mott Haven community, which is in a Congressional district where a soaring poverty rate keeps a third of residents on public assistance.

National Education Association delegates blasted Education Secretary Arne Duncan, passing a resolution that orders the NEA president to "communicate aggressively, forcefully, and immediately" to President Obama that the teachers union "is appalled" by a number of things Duncan has said and done in the name of school reform. The resolution of the country's largest union (see below) includes a list of Duncan's actions and statements with which the NEA disagrees, including his standardized test-driven reform policies.

In their original conception, charter schools were to be innovative public schools, freed from the stifling bureaucracy of school districts, professionally led and directed by their teachers and organically connected to the communities they served. Charter schools would be laboratories of educational experimentation, expanding our repertoire of best educational practices. This was the vision put forward by the late UFT and AFT President Al Shanker, when he became one of the very first advocates for charter schools, and it is the vision we relied upon when we started our own UFT Charter School in East New York and partnered with Green Dot to establish a charter school in the South Bronx.

State Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. told school superintendents from across the state that the education reforms adopted by the New York State Board of Regents will help make high school graduates in New York "college- and career- ready."  King, speaking at the New York State Council of School Superintendents 2011 Fall Leadership Summit in Saratoga Springs, said too many of New York State public high school graduates are not prepared for college and work.  He noted that roughly 40 percent of students entering community colleges across the state have to take remedial classes.

Randi Weingarten talked about possible impact of the $30 billion for schools included in President Obama's jobs bill, and she responded to telephone calls and electronic communications. Other topics included the No Child Left Behind waiver proposed by the Obama administration, the Occupy Wall Street protests, and the role education could play in the 2012 elections.

In the 2007 case Morse v. Frederick, when the court upheld the discipline of a student who had unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at a school-related event, Justice Thomas joined the majority's opinion. But he wrote a separate concurrence, for himself only, explaining that he would go further and overrule the landmark 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. That case, involving students who wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War, has been a fundamental guarantee of student speech rights in school.

A public school offers a free education to every child in the community - that's what makes it public. A private school charges tuition and accepts students through a competitive selection process. Larchmont was bridging public and private by exploiting a loophole. Under federal guidelines, charter schools can give admissions priority to "founding parents." That's why these parents were being asked to "found" a school that had opened in 2004.

Critics of America's public schools always seem to start from the premise that the pre-kindergarten-through-12th-grade public education system in this country is failing or in crisis. This crisis mentality is in stark contrast to years of survey research showing that Americans generally give high marks to their local schools. Phi Delta Kappa International and Gallup surveys have found that the populace holds their neighborhood schools in high regard; in fact, this year's survey found that "Americans, and parents in particular, evaluate their community schools more positively than in any year since" the survey started.

Can public-sector pensions be reformed, particularly for teachers? Everyone knows that unfunded and underfunded pension systems of the traditional kind ("defined benefit"), plus ancillary health care costs and related benefits for retirees, are burdening state and local education budgets across the land, particularly at a time of broader economic frailty. But few communities and states have yet demonstrated the wisdom, fortitude, capacity, and imagination to devise workable alternatives and put them into place. We're at a point in time where a major public-policy (and public-finance) problem has been defined and measured, debated and deliberated, but not yet solved.

For as long as I've been mayor of this township, I have been clear and absolute with regard to my feelings about charter schools in Cherry Hill. In 2006, when the Department of Education approved an application for a charter school in our community, I stood against its opening, which would have funneled local taxpayer dollars away from our award-winning public schools.

"President Barack Obama pretends to be a friend of public education, but it just is not so. Sure, the White House offers a decorative promotional on K12 education; however, if one reads it closely, one sees that the Obama administration believes education (and, by extension, those educated) should serve the economy; that "higher standards and better assessments" and "turning around our lowest achieving schools" is No Child Left Behind (NCLB) leftover casserole, and that "keeping teachers in the classroom" can only elicit prolonged stares from those of us who know better. All of these anti-public-education truths noted, the deeper story in what the Obama administration values regarding American education lay in its selection of US Department of Education (USDOE) appointees. Their backgrounds tell the story, and it isn't a good one for the public school student, the community school and the career K12 teacher. In this post, I examine the backgrounds and priorities of eight key USDOE appointees. "