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As children around the country settle in for the new school year, millions of them are sharing more than desks, sandwiches and sniffles. Chances are good that they are being taught by teachers with little or no experience.

Another education film I've seen recently (well, in the past year ) is The Class featuring Francois Begaudeau as high school English teacher, Mr. Marin. The film is based on his memoir which chronicles his experience teaching in inner-city Paris. It wasn't a documentary, but it almost could have been; I felt like a fly on the wall in Mr. Marin's classroom. It was so real, in fact, that I had a hard time watching it. It's not that the students were so tough (not at all--as a side thought, I wonder if the experience would have been different in the Paris banlieues or suburbs--some are comparable to U.S. inner city neighborhoods and more recently some inner-loop suburbs). Rather, I had a hard time because although according to the movie he was a three-year veteran, he seemed to be making some rookie mistakes. Some are the same mistakes I made as a rookie, mistakes which were thankfully pointed out to me by veteran mentors.

"NPE is proud to share this interactive infographic detailing the last 15 years of Bill Gates's public education experiments. It contains links to 13 reports from 12 of the nation's leading pro-public education advocates (which you will also find in the "Around the States" entries below.) Hover your cursor over the green, yellow, and red entries to reveal links to the reports. You'll also find a video of Gates embedded in the center quote. Please share widely to let others know the full extent of the destructive influence Bill and Melinda Gates have had, and continue to have, on the democratic institution of public education."

Percentage of public school districts that had salary schedules for teachers and among those that had salary schedules, the average yearly teacher base salary, by various levels of degrees and experience and state: 2007-08

"The conventional wisdom has always been that schools and students need experienced teachers committed to a career in education. But many charter networks are depending on young, inexperienced teachers who quit after only two to five years. Officials of the schools believe the young teachers remain motivated and energetic, unlike more experienced teachers at many public schools who might stay on even after they've burned out. Are they onto something?"

Covington is a product of the Broad Superintendents Academy. Bill Gates wrote a commentary last March in which he argued: What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. This appears to be the inspiration for Superintendent Covington's experiment.

The racial achievement gap in education is an important social problem to which decades of research have yielded no scalable solutions. Recent evidence from "No Excuses" charter schools - which demonstrates that some combination of school inputs can educate the poorest minority children - offers a guiding light. In the 2010-2011 school year, we implemented five strategies gleaned from best practices in "No Excuses" charter schools - increased instructional time, a more rigorous approach to building human capital, more student-level differentiation, frequent use of data to inform instruction, and a culture of high expectations - in nine of the lowest performing middle and high schools in Houston, Texas. We show that the average impact of these changes on student achievement is 0.276 standard deviations in math and 0.059 standard deviations in reading, which is strikingly similar to reported impacts of attending the Harlem Children's Zone and Knowledge is Power Program schools - two strict "No Excuses" adherents. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of the scalability of the experiment.

We examine the link between math skills and labor-market outcomes using a resume-based field experiment.

"In the debate over charter schools, KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools are hailed by charter advocates as illustrative of what these alternatives to public schools can produce. With KIPP, poverty need not impede academic success. Enroll students from economically impoverished backgrounds in a "no excuses" school like KIPP and their chances of attaining academic success would soar markedly. There, neither hunger, poor health, relentless stress, lack of access to the material sustenance and cultural experiences available to students from more affluent homes, nor other adverse effects of poverty are impediments to learning and the attainment of good test scores. If only poor youngsters were not in the nothing-but-excuses public schools where they are taught by nothing-but-excuses teachers. So the story goes and so it was conveyed to me by a KIPP schools manager who, in an oped exchange, presented what the chain considers its best supporting evidence. Whether this evidence actually makes the case for KIPP I will discuss below"

"Let's be clear. The education of public school students is critical to a democracy and important to resume, even in the wake of a natural disaster. Yet, no public official quoted in the news reports expressed concern about students' education and how it would be situated in any ethic of caring, given what students and teachers endured. No one spoke of the problematic learning environments or the effects of the trauma students would experience when they returned to some of the schools. Instead, their quotes expressed concern about students and teachers doing time, reflecting neoliberalism's ongoing hollow conceptualizations of education. Whether this is a function of the media's errors in reporting or the public officials' limited understanding of education is irrelevant. Their comments, or lack thereof, reflect a broader crisis of public misunderstandings of education in a democratic society."

"In all the conflicting accounts between the city and the UFT about the collapse of the teacher evaluation negotiations, there is one clear point of agreement: the Mayor refused to accept a two year sunset for the plan. In this, he was deeply wrong for disallowing the city to pilot what is essentially an experiment that could go badly, for both teachers and children. Meanwhile, 90 percent of the districts in the rest of the state, appropriately, have a one year sunset on their teacher evaluation systems. "

"With news of the Indiana Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in favor of that state's expansive voucher program - one in which interested families send their children to private schools with public dollars - it's only a matter of time before more states follow suit and widen a central front in the ongoing battle to expand our national experiment in school choice. In the end, is this a good or a bad development for American families? And will it help or hinder our ongoing efforts to guarantee every child a high-quality public education?"

"In this study, we test the idea that new charters hit their mark early in their operations and do not vary much after that. The notion originated from time spent in young charter schools studying their experience as new organizations and as agents of education reform. Interviews with school staff along with our own observations of school activities and operations have formed the impression that the "rules" of a school get set early on in the life of the school. By rules, we mean the adult and student cultures, the formal and informal procedures for identifying and addressing problems, and the school community's commitment to student learning as the primary focus of the school. These are obviously richly nuances facets of a school with myriad potential interactions among them, just as with any social organization. Yet, however they come about, we have observed that they are shaped quickly in new schools. Moreover, these norms and behaviors are sturdy and difficult (though not impossible) to change later on."

"Initially, charter schools were embraced as a strategy to enrich what many viewed as an increasingly sterile public school landscape. Early promoters included most famously Albert Shanker, President of both the United Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers. The first charter school opened in Minnesota, one of the nation's most liberal states. "Groups of teachers and administrators who wanted to innovate and try new things would band together and little laboratories of education would emerge," Dr. Gary Miron Professor of Evaluation, Management and Research at Western Michigan University recalls, "The idea was simple: anything valuable culled from these experiments could be copied by the district…" Within a decade the goals of experimentation and innovation were replaced by a focus on kudzu-like growth. Charter schools were less and less viewed as a way of improving public schools and more and more seen as a direct competitor and eventual replacement for them."

"The Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET) is the Gates Foundation's flagship effort to fill what they believe is a huge void in the teaching profession. According to them, up until this project, there was no way to know how effective any given teacher is. Their goal has been to develop scientifically accurate means to accomplish this. I would have no problem with the Gates Foundation's Measuring Effective Teaching process if it was conducted as pure research. The MET's Tom Kane, in "Capturing the Dimensions of Effective Teaching," illustrates the good that could have come from the experiment had "reformers" considered evidence before imposing their theories on teachers across the nation."

Recent studies have examined the relationship between principals and student outcomes, and attempted to identify what characteristics and qualifications are needed to be an effective principal, whether that's providing staff with the resources and support they need, hiring and retaining the best talent, setting expectations for instruction, or simply gaining more experience. So what has the research found out? Let's take a look.

If your child's teacher seems a little bit on edge this year, it might not be your imagination. Education reforms now going into effect in Indiana, and similar ones sweeping the nation, are targeting something many Americans consider to be strictly off-limits: their paychecks. The laws passed in 2011 and being implemented over the next two or three years were partly based on the principle of merit pay. Under Indiana's new law, the state will ask that test performance of students be factored into pay raises for the first time. That is a major shift away from the rigid pay tables in most school districts that awarded raises primarily based on a teacher's years of experience and the academic degrees they earned.

"It is, for example, quite common for charter schools to lead to an increase in inequality based on culture, race or socio-economic status," says Professor of Teacher Education, John O'Neill. "The evidence overall is that while a few highly motivated individuals and families may benefit, charter schools do not provide more choice for most families," he says. "Also, they often promote greater inequality of educational outcomes for disadvantaged students, and fail to eliminate the long tail of underachievement that the Government is rightly concerned about."

State lawmakers have introduced legislation that would repeal mayoral control of the city school system - a move that would undo one of Mayor Bloomberg's crowning achievements, The Post has learned. Sen. Velmanette Montgomery (D-Brooklyn) and Assemblyman Keith Wright (D-Harlem) claim that the 10-year experiment giving City Hall sole power over educational matters has been a failure. And Montgomery has won the support of the ranking Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, Suzi Oppenheimer (D-Westchester), who has signed on as co-sponsor to the measure.

Charter schools were created to change things. A bold and controversial concept when they came to New York City in 1999, charter schools have had remarkable success in creating choices for families, raising students' academic achievement, and experimenting with innovative ideas for education. Today, New York City's charter school sector is higher-performing and more vibrant than any in the United States, and has grown from two schools in 1999 to 136 schools educating 47,000 students today. The accomplishments reflect the hard work of dedicated school founders and educators, the support of public officials, and, of course, the commitment and trust of the families who have chosen to enroll in these independent and autonomous public schools.