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It's been two decades since the first charter schools took hold within the American education system. Ember Reichgott Junge was there at the day of creation. Reichgott Junge, as a Minnesota state senator in the early 1990s, was one of the chief sponsors of the nation's first charter school law, a legislative victory that presaged the expansion of charters across the country. Today, there are about 5,700 charters in operation in the United States, according to the Center for Education Reform. Reichgott Junge, a Democrat, has written an account of her experience trying to marshal support for the charter school measure, published by the Charter Schools Development Corporation and Beaver's Pond Press, to be released next month. The book is titled "Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story," a reference to one Minnesota lawmaker's assessment of the proposal's chances. The book's release is meant to coincide with National Charter Schools Week, next month, which marks the 20th anniversary of charters.

The fundamental problem with Common Core, the latest educational miracle solution that is being promoted by the National Governors Association and Pearson Educational, the publishing conglomerate, is that it is conceptually backwards. Instead of motivating students to learn by presenting them with challenging questions and interesting content rooted in their interests and experiences, Common Core is a bore. It removes substance from learning. Skills are decontextualized, which means they taught and practiced divorced from meaning. Common Core offers students no reason to learn.

For three years of my K-8 schooling, from 7:40 a.m. until 3:05 p.m., I was black and invisible. I was bused across town to integrate a white school in Southeast Portland, Ore. We arrived at school promptly at 7:30 and had 10 full minutes before the white children arrived. We spent that time roaming the halls - happy, free, normal. Once the white children arrived, we became black and invisible. We were separated, so that no more than two of us were in a class at a time. I never saw black people in our textbooks unless they were in shackles or standing with Martin Luther King Jr. Most of us rarely interacted with a black adult outside of the aide who rode the bus with us. I liked school and I loved learning. But I never quite felt right or good. I felt very black and obvious because I knew that my experience was different from that of my peers. But I also felt invisible because this was never acknowledged in any meaningful way. I became visible again at 3:05 when I got back on the bus with the other brown faces to make our journey home.

In August 2008, many teachers in America and this one in particular were thrilled about Barak Obama's nomination. Linda Darling-Hammond was a leading spokesperson articulating the Obama campaigns' education positions. Darling-Hammond had pushed for professional education standards for teachers and had presented data showing the importance of teacher training. Yet, by November Alexander Russo of the Huffington Post was reporting "The possibility of Darling-Hammond being named Secretary has emerged as an especially worrisome possibility among a small but vocal group of younger, reform-minded advocates who supported Obama because he seemed reform-minded on education issues like charter schools, performance pay, and accountability. These reformists seem to perceive Darling-Hammond as a touchy-feely anti-accountability figure who will destroy any chances that Obama will follow through on any of these initiatives." In December, Obama tapped Chicago's Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Because Duncan had no real education experience it was considered highly likely that Darling-Hammond would be the Deputy Secretary of Education. On February 19, 2009 the New Republic reported, "Darling-Hammond was a key education adviser during the election and chaired Obama's transition education policy team. She has been berated heavily by the education reform community, which views her as favoring the status quo in Democratic education policy for her criticisms of alternative teacher certification programs like Teach for America and her ties with teachers' unions." They reported that she was going home to California to work on other priorities and would not be a part of the new administration.

The charter school movement has been a major political success, but it has been a civil rights failure. As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates, the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools. The Civil Rights Project has been issuing annual reports on the spread of segregation in public schools and its impact on educational opportunity for 14 years. We know that choice programs can either offer quality educational options with racially and economically diverse schooling to children who otherwise have few opportunities, or choice programs can actually increase stratification and inequality depending on how they are designed. The charter effort, which has largely ignored the segregation issue, has been justified by claims about superior educational performance, which simply are not sustained by the research. Though there are some remarkable and diverse charter schools, most are neither. The lessons of what is needed to make choice work have usually been ignored in charter school policy. Magnet schools are the striking example of and offer a great deal of experience in how to create educationally successful and integrated choice options.

Maybe the reason TFA members burn out so quickly (data showing the retention rate is declining will be forthcoming) is that they put in 16 hour days, work through weekends, skip meals, etc., and can do so because they don't have children of their own. And the burnout is a genuine problem because, as noted by the portal report that Stuart is parading, the children who have teachers with more than four years of experience do better on standardized tests than those who do not.

Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards-not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states-the study foresees little to no impact on student learning. That conclusion is based on analyzing states' past experience with standards and examining several years of scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

It cannot be accidental that the sharp drop in teacher morale coincides with the efforts of people such as Michelle Rhee and organizations such as Education Reform Now and Stand for Children to end teacher tenure and seniority. Millions have been spent to end what is called "LIFO" (last in, first out) and to make the case that teachers should not have job security. Many states led by very conservative governors have responded to this campaign by wiping out any job security for teachers. So, if teachers feel less secure in their jobs, they are reacting quite legitimately to the legislation that is now sweeping the country to remove any and all job protections. Their futures will depend on their students' test scores (thanks to Arne Duncan), even though there is no experience from any district or state in which this strategy has actually improved education. Its main effect, as we see in the survey, is to demoralize teachers and make them feel less professional and less respected. Yes, there will be more teaching to the test: Both NCLB and the Race to the Top demand it. And yes, there will be teachers who are wrongly fired. And yes, teachers will leave for other lines of work that are less stressful.

Last year I published A Chance To Make History to share my reflections on what I've learned from our teachers, alumni, and colleagues in urban and rural communities since launching Teach For America twenty years ago. My determination to end educational inequality and optimism that it can be done has only grown stronger over the years as we've seen more examples of what is possible. But my experiences have also deepened my appreciation of the magnitude of the problem and led to a nuanced vision for change. It was disappointing to see the views expressed in the book flagrantly misrepresented in a recent article in the New York Review of Books by Diane Ravitch. I want to take this opportunity to set the record straight and clarify what I believe and don't believe.

Eric Hanushek testifies in school finance cases. Again, and again, and again. Thirty-some years ago in the Maryland (Hornbeck) case and most recently in the Colorado (Lobato) case. And each time, Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution, testifies to the same position: increased funding for K-12 schools will not improve their effectiveness; court-ordered remedies that cost money will not improve the lot of poor students or English Language Learners or anyone else for that matter. Hanushek is nothing if not a believer in the unconditional truth emanating from his regression equations. But of course, those equations have not always been as clear cut in their implications as some might believe. In 1997, Hanushek published an article in which he argued that a summary of dozens and dozens of correlation studies proved that teacher experience is unrelated to their students' achievement-the financial implications being obvious.

Note that the four dissenters on the Council on Foreign Relations' task force are never quoted in the news reports. Their dissent needs to be read. But what struck me, aside from the make-up of the committee, was the sponsor. Would they publish a task force report on Russian/U.S. relations written by people who had no background experience or expertise on the subject? Someone like me-although I suspect I know as much about that subject as their experts do on American public schooling. (I follow it.) But why is it that they think education belongs on their plate? I suppose that it's seen as one of our weapons for defeating our foreign enemies. Besides, as Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy, points out: "Everything the report recommends is already being done ... It's Joel Klein beating the same old drums in a different forum.'" Klein's reported rejoinder: "But it's not happening at the level we're needing ... we need to do it in a much more accelerated way." That sounds like a prescription for dismissing the democratic process-which is deliberative and thoughtful-conducted at the level appropriate to changing the way young people are raised-close to home. Or at least no further away than the Constitution permits. That's bad enough. After all, nearly all of the states adopted the several hundreds of pages of the new Common Core curriculum. How many do you believe read ANY of it?

A few months ago, Class Size Matters met with a former KIPP student who lives in the Bronx and her mother to hear about their experiences at the celebrated charter school. What follows are excerpts from this interview.  The girl's name has been changed to protect her privacy.

This was written by Gary Miron, professor of education at Western Michigan University who has extensive experience evaluating school reforms and education policies. Over the past two decades he has conducted several studies of school choice programs in Europe and in the United States, including nine state evaluations of charter school reforms. Before coming to Western Michigan University, he worked for 10 years at Stockholm University in Sweden.

Blatant forms of discrimination against women in academia have diminished since the Equal Pay Act and Title IX became law in 1964 and 1972, respectively. Yet gender differences in salary, tenure status, and leadership roles still persist among men and women in higher education. In particular, wage differences among male and female professors have not been fully explained, even when productivity, teaching experience, institutional size and prestige, disciplinary fields, type of appointment, and family-related responsibilities are controlled for statistically (see here).

We should note that there are not many studies out there regarding the use of electronic textbooks, but those that exist show mixed results. A consistent finding is that, given the choice, students prefer traditional textbooks. That's true regardless of their experience with ebooks, so it's not because students are unfamiliar with them (Woody, Daniel & Baker, 2010). Further, some data indicate that reading electronic textbooks, although it leads to comparable comprehension, takes longer (e.g., Dillon, 1992; Woody et al, 2010). Why don't students like electronic textbooks if they like ebooks? The two differ. Ebooks typically often have a narrative structure,  they are usually pretty easy to read, and we read them for pleasure. Textbooks in contrast, have a hierarchical structure, the material is difficult and unfamiliar, and we read them for learning and retention. Students likely interact with textbooks differently than books they read for pleasure.

...In light of current controversies around testing and teacher evaluation, let's do a little thought experiment. How would Miss Snug have handled this lesson if it were occurring just before a round of standardized testing? Would she not have had to interrupt the children's speculations and instructed them that actual circumstances in word problems must be completely disregarded, because the point is to arrive at the answer the test designers have in mind? After all, how could test designers anticipate the lines of thought that spontaneously erupted in her classroom? Real life, and real thought, are too complicated to be foreseen - and so need to be put aside at testing time.

AMID the  ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we've turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court's ruling that racially segregated schools were "inherently unequal" shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned "Black Monday" and vowed "massive resistance." But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.

We use North Carolina data to explore the extent to which teachers in the lower grades (K-2) of elementary school are lower quality than in the upper grades (3-5) and to examine the hypothesis that accountability contributes to a shortfall in teacher quality in the lower grades. Our concern with early elementary grades arises from recent studies that have highlighted that children's experiences in the early school years have long lasting effects on their outcomes, including college going and earnings. Using licensure test scores as the primary measure of teacher quality, we find that concern about teacher quality in the lower elementary grades is warranted. Teachers in those grades are of lower quality than teachers in the upper grades. Moreover, we find that accountability, especially the form required by the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, increases the relative shortfalls of teacher quality in the lower grades and increases the tendency of schools to move teachers of higher quality from lower to upper grades and teachers of lower quality from upper to lower grades. These findings support the conclusion that accountability pressure induces schools to pursue actions that work to the disadvantage of the children in the lower grades. 

The Philadelphia school system announced in late April that it was on the brink of insolvency and would be turned over to private operators, dissolving most remnants of democratic governance. Specifically, if the city's leaders have their way, 64 of the city's neighbourhood public schools will close over the next five years, and by 2017, 40 per cent of the city's children will attend charter schools. These are are privately run schools that use public funds. Perhaps most disturbingly to those who value democracy and doubt the wisdom of corporate elites, the city will have no oversight of its own school system. Schools will instead be governed by "networks", control of which will be auctioned off through a bidding process, and could be bestowed on anyone - including a CEO of a for-profit education company. The situation in Philadelphia, which has received amazingly little attention from the national media in the US, offers a disturbing window onto what the US elite is planning for the rest of our public schools - disturbing because Philadelphia's experience has already demonstrated that turning public education over to private entities will ultimately lead to its destruction.

I have been hanging around charter school operators for the past few days, and the experience has left me with some complicated - and perhaps contradictory - thoughts about a movement that I have been following since 1988. I love the energy, intelligence and dedication of the people I spent time with, but I left the annual meeting of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in Minneapolis with some concerns. I think they need to do a better job of choosing their friends and of refining their message, among other issues. For what it's worth, here's my thinking.