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Rocketship schools have made it their mission to close the achievement gap that holds back students in under-served communities. They practice what they call the "Rocketship Hybrid School Model," which combines traditional classroom instruction with individualized instruction through online technology and tutors in a "Learning Lab."

Next week (August 11-12), Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker and Michelle Rhee will speak at the Global Leadership Summit. Started in 1996 by Bill Hybels-guru at Willow Creek Community Church, the chief branch of the multi-church Willow Creek Association -the summit takes place just outside of Chicago in a $75 million auditorium and will be beamed via satellite to hundreds of churches in the U.S. and seventy countries, with an expected audience of 165,000.

I went to the Save Our Schools march in Washington last Saturday with my son, Matt Damon, and thousands of citizens who are worried about the harm corporate education reform is causing to children, teachers, and communities. The only reporting of this march in The Boston Globe was in the "Names'' section in a trivial little item called "Damon loves teachers,'' that made no mention of the importance of this march and its goals.

Gonzalez has touted initiatives to increase literacy and parental involvement to school community members throughout District 7, which is largely poor and low-performing. Now he is trying to turn District 7's attention toward arts education, at a time when many schools are facing cuts to their art and music teaching positions. He is asking a handful of local principals to help him write a large grant to fund after school and summer school arts education at multiple schools in future years.

Smiley & West take to the road on a 15-city nationwide tour to highlight an invisible issue in Washington's halls of power - poverty in America. The Great Recession has left 1 in 7 Americans living in poverty with unemployment in many communities still on the rise. The war on poverty is the greatest policy failure in our society. Smiley & West will share the stories of real Americans, free of punditry and spin, in the hopes of changing government policy in the direction of justice and equality.

After thousands of striking Verizon workers and city teachers held a rally in Lower Manhattan, the mostly mayor-appointed Panel for Educational Policy voted 9-4 on the Department of Education's $120 million contract with the wireless communications giant.

Below is an update sent to Manhattan Community Education Councils this morning

A substantial body of evidence reveals that past reforms have largely failed to improve schools in urban areas. The authors contend that prior efforts failed because they did not address the numerous ways that past research has shown poverty influences student academic outcomes and school performance (Coleman et al., 1966; Rothstein, 2004). The author's call for a new approach to school improvement, one that draws upon the principles advocated by the Broader and Bolder Approach, and includes: evidence-based instruction, community engagement, and the strategies that have been pursued by the Harlem Children's Zone, the Children's Aid Society, and a small number of similar efforts that attempt to mitigate the effects of poverty.

PERHAPS THE VERY best thing about Steven Brill's new book is its title. The phrase "class warfare" has a double meaning, of course, and the book paints very clearly the deep economic cleavages that underlie the fierce education debates within the Democratic Party over such policy issues as charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and the role of poverty in achievement outcomes. In Brill's telling, the education class war pits a heroic group of entrepreneurial philanthropists, highly successful hedge fund billionaires, and idealistic Ivy Leaguers who join Teach for America against somewhat grubby and grasping rank-and-file public school teachers and their union leaders, who often put their own selfish interests above those of the children. In looking out for what is best for low-income and minority students, Brill contends, Wall Street hedge fund managers are a much more reliable ally than the middle-class teachers who educate schoolchildren every day. Brill's worldview is important to understand because it is typical of the outlook of the education "reform" community, including leaders of the Obama administration, and the president himself.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the federal Department of Education has given school districts rather broad permission to cut special education spending and never restore it. The move alarmed some in the special education community. But one group of objectors broke the new guidance from the Education Department down into the simplest terms I've read on this somewhat complex topic.

A year ago yesterday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to announce he was making an unprecedented $100 million donation to help reform Newark's struggling school system. A year later, the spending of the "Facebook money" - as it's become known in Newark - has gotten mixed reviews. The process got off to a bad start when the first $1 million was spent on a public survey that critics called a waste of money. That was followed by months of political missteps and public-relations debacles related to politically linked firms hired to help spend the donation. But in recent months, the Newark-Facebook team seems to have gotten its act together, according to interviews with community leaders and education experts inside and outside of New Jersey. With a new Newark schools superintendent on board and a new head for the nonprofit group overseeing the project, the first Facebook dollars are showing up in Newark classrooms.

For decades, policymakers have promulgated legislation that requires schools to hire effective teachers in all classrooms. Simultaneously, the education research community has attempted to define what effective teachers do in the classroom. A decade ago, No Child Left Behind provided a framework for defining effective teachers as "highly qualified," which required schools to ensure all of their teachers fit the new standard. This standard, however, is no longer appropriate, as continued evidence indicates that the relationship between credentials and achievement is tenuous. Therefore, policymakers and researchers need to revise the term "highly qualified," and, by utilizing the advances in educational accountability over the previous decade, replace it with a term grounded in practice and directly connected to achievement and effectiveness.

Everyone knows that today every American's job is on the line, and that better schools mean better jobs. Schools and jobs are alike in this sense: Washington can't create good jobs, and Washington can't create good schools. What Washington can do, though, is shape an environment in which businesses and entrepreneurs can create jobs. It can do the same thing in education, by creating an environment in which teachers, parents and communities can build better schools. Last week President Obama, citing a failure by Congress to act, announced a procedure for handing out waivers for the federal mandates under the No Child Left Behind law. Unfortunately, these waivers come with a series of new federal rules, this time without congressional approval, and would make the secretary of education the equivalent of a national school board.

In a transparent attempt to punish teachers for organizing union efforts, Michigan Republicans are pushing a bill through the legislature that would prohibit public employees from sending political messages through their work emails. The bill is an attempt to stifle any union-related communication between teachers and other public employees, imposing ridiculously harsh penalties for teachers who send "political" messages

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.

In this article, Kristen L. Buras examines educational policy formation in New Orleans and the racial, economic, and spatial dynamics shaping the city's reconstruction since 2005. More specifically, Buras draws on the critical theories of whiteness as property, accumulation by dispossession, and urban space economy to describe the strategic assault on black communities by education entrepreneurs. Based on data collected from an array of stakeholders on the ground, she argues that policy actors at the federal, state, and local levels have contributed to a process of privatization and an inequitable racial-spatial redistribution of resources while acting under the banner of "conscious capitalism." She challenges the market-based reforms currently offered as a panacea for education in New Orleans, particularly charter schools, and instead offers principles of educational reform rooted in a more democratic and critically conscious tradition.

Enough debating No Child Left Behind and charter schools, writes guest columnist Rudy Crew. He argues politicians should put forth a sustainable vision that stimulates business, arts, philanthropic and university communities to influence math and literacy skills improvement

The disparate nature of the cuts - the biggest layoffs at any agency in the Bloomberg era - became apparent yesterday, when officials gave Local 372, which represents nonprofessional school employees, a detailed hit list. Under the plan, District 5 in Harlem and District 6 in Washington Heights will lose almost 8% of their school aides, parent coordinators and community workers - 77 out of a total of 998. At the same time, only five of 942 similar workers in Staten Island's District 31 - less than 1% - will get pink slips.

A new Massachusetts study suggests that charter schools located in urban communities there significantly improved their students' mathematics and language arts performance on state assessments, while nonurban charter schools did not, and, in some cases, even appeared to hurt students academically.

It should surprise no one that only 34 percent of New Yorkers approve of Michael Bloomberg's education policies, the policy area within which the Mayor most hoped to create a legacy. The Mayor not only introduced numerous questionable initiatives- ranging from school closings, to preferential treatment of charter schools, to attempts to rate teacher performance based on student test scores-he did so with an arrogant disregard not only for the most experienced teachers and administrators in the system, but of parents and community leaders and elected officials who tried to make their voices heard in matters of educational policy.