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Over the past decade I have served as a mentor teacher to more than a dozen beginning teachers in the challenging schools of Oakland. Most of them have been interns, fresh out of college, with just a few weeks of summer training, and a "bag of tricks" that they were given by their only slightly more experienced trainers. They are trained to focus on the data. Start testing early, and make sure the students understand how important those scores are. Set BIG goals, such as that 80% of your students will score well. Track progress using big graphs on the wall with each student's name or number. Develop reward systems to manage behavior. Step into one of these classrooms, and you will find elaborate systems that are designed to "incent" good behavior, and impose costs on bad. You may even find a whole economy, complete with currency - the "behavior bucks," handed out in $100 bills prepared on the school photocopier.

More states than ever before have considered school vouchers this year, driven by resurgent Republicans who see the lagging economy as an opportunity for a fresh push on one of their most contentious education policies.

While all this debt ceiling junk was going on, Mary Filardo, Ross Eisenbrey, and I were developing the FAST! idea-Fix America's Schools Today.

For all the talk about balancing the budget for the sake of our children, keeping classrooms closed is a perverse way of giving them a brighter future. What's needed is more time in classrooms, not less. Our school calendar, with its six-and-a-half-hour day and 180-day year, was designed for yesterday's farm economy, not today's high-tech one.  While many middle-class families now invest in tutoring and extra learning time, less-privileged children are left on the sidelines, which only widens gaps in achievement and opportunity.

The coming education cutbacks have alarmed some regional leaders, including Richard W. Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Board. He noted in the board's quarterly publication Southwest Economy that a recent study ranked Texas "dead last in the percent of the population age 25 and older that graduated from high school, 37th in percent of population enrolled in degree-granting institutions, 35th in academic research and development, and 41st in science and engineering degrees awarded. We can't be happy that we are lagging behind in education," he wrote. 

The "standards-based" K-12 educational reform movement began in the late 1980s and continues today. The original goals of most sets of content standards included an altered form of classroom practice. Educational researchers devoted great effort to developing inquiry-oriented instructional materials and professional development models to support the reform efforts. Although there have been pockets of reform success in some schools and districts, large-scale evaluations of reform efforts indicate that the influence of these efforts on classroom practice and student achievement have been uneven at best. It is our contention that reformers' focus on changing classroom practice is misguided. The standards movement has been hijacked by a "business-scientific" view of schooling that assumes the purpose of education is to prepare students to compete in the global economy. The concepts of assessment and accountability associated with this purpose in the business-scientific view inhibit reform. Researchers committed to reform need to recognize the inherently political nature of reform and work toward a renegotiation of the overarching purpose of education. This also means attending to the consequences of that purpose for school governance, assessment, and accountability.

At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. This is the second study of student achievement in global perspective prepared under the auspices of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). In the 2010 PEPG report, "U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective," the focus was on the percentage of U.S. public and private school students performing at the advanced level in mathematics. The current study continues this work by reporting the percentage of public and private school students identified as at or above the proficient level (a considerably lower standard of performance than the advanced level) in mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.

The wish we all have. To find a crystal ball. To see if what we're doing now will pay off tomorrow. Where we go to college. Whom we marry. Where we buy a house. How we raise our kids. We think about it in the big picture, too. In our economy. Our politics. So it is with our public schools. They always seem like a playground for experimentation. Some proved to be bad ideas, like open-classroom school buildings. Most have been replaced. Or the brilliant idea when I was in high school. English and history taught as electives. Let the students choose what interests them. I'm still paying the price for that scattershot experience. And the "new math" roller coaster. We all paid the price for that one. But, they were bumps in the road compared to what is playing out now. The experimentation is on such a grand scale and so many are convinced it is the "right and only" way to go, there may be no path to recovery if it all turns out to be misguided. I've been glimpsing a crystal ball. And what I see in it frightens me.

To anyone concerned with the state of America's schools, one of the more alarming experiences of the past few decades has been the sight of waves of innovative reforms crashing upon the rocks of our education system. Charter schools have popped up all over the landscape; vouchers are being implemented in more and more places; massive federal initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have invested billions of dollars in fixing our schools. And yet the results remain dismal: Millions of children still cannot read satisfactorily, do math at an acceptable level, or perform the other skills needed for jobs in the modern economy.

Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.

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.

Some people must have been startled by President Obama's decision to draw a line in the sand on collective bargaining in his jobs speech to the Congress last week. Specifically, the President said: "I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy." Given the current anti-union tenor of many prominent Republicans, started by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, it seems pretty clear that worker rights is shaping up to be a hot-button issue in the 2012 campaign. Collective bargaining rights as presidential campaign plank? It wasn't that long ago that anything to do with unions was considered to be an historic anachronism - hardly worth a major Republican presidential candidate's trouble to bash. Times have changed.

The party line for advocates of online learning is that virtual and brick-and-mortar schools should work collaboratively to find the best learning solutions for every student, which may or may not look like a traditional classroom experience. But in many places, the fiscal realities of state policy in a down economy can pit potential collaborators against each other.

Real education reform takes a significant step forward today as the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of School Administrators launch a groundbreaking partnership based on their commitment to ensure a skilled teacher workforce for the knowledge-based economy.

"Policy makers and business leaders often point to our K-16 education system as the cause of our economic ills. The oft-heard refrain is that a reformed system of education will lead America into economic health during this age of global economic competition. The author questions this great faith in the transformative power of education given the realities facing youngsters today. Growing income inequality, unaffordable higher education, and paltry growth in jobs that pay a living wage conspire to rob education of its promise for too many of today's children."

Most governors are fond of talking about education-why it needs to be improved, how they're going to improve it, the consequences of not improving it, and so on. But when governors attempt to use the bully pulpit to sell their ideas about education to the public, what are their favored rhetorical themes? A new analysis examines that question, and finds that governors overwhelmingly choose to frame education as important for economic reasons, rather than for the development of individual abilities, or as a matter of civic responsibility. And that political strategy has implications for society and its schools, the researchers say.

"We hear the same refrain across the nation: public sector pensions are destroying our economy. The modest pensions paid to teachers, police officers, firefighters, and social workers are a threat to our future."

"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. "

Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A leading philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.