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"Three years ago, in a New York Times article detailing her bid to become head of the American Federation of Teachers union, Randi Weingarten boasted that despite my calls for "radical reform" to New York City's school system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and I had achieved only "incremental" change. It seemed like a strange thing to crow about, but she did have something of a point. New York over the past nine years has experienced what Robert Schwartz, the dean of Harvard's education school, has described as "the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country," resulting in gains such as a nearly 20-point jump in graduation rates. But the city's school system is still not remotely where it needs to be. "

It must feel empowering for teachers upset by current developments to hold big rallies with thousands of union members chanting slogans.  They must finally feel like their voice is being heard, as Diane Ravitch, Valerie Strauss, and the new breed of teacher union advocates make their case.

In New Jersey, more than half of the public schools don't meet the federal standards now, according to the state. Some predicted a failure rate as high as 80 percent nationwide in the next few years.

Joel Klein's take on the public education system, "The Failure of American Schools" (June), received more letters than any other article so far this year. Union leaders, teachers, parents, and students alike wrote in. Many attacked Klein; a few praised him; others offered their own theories about what's plaguing U.S. education.

This study found that schools fail to make AYP most often because of the students with disabilities subgroup. The failure of the special education subgroup to make AYP occurs mainly because the students with disabilities subgroup is expected to maintain the exact same proficiency levels as their general education peers-a standard that has proved to be problematic because special education students often start out with lower average test scores than general education students. In addition, the students with disabilities subgroup is the only subgroup in which actual limitations on ability to learn might come into play. The existence of these limitations calls into question the wisdom of trying to close the general education-special education "achievement gap" at the same pace as the race- or class-based achievement gaps. In addition to quantitative methods, this study also used legal research techniques to examine the legal impact that the two laws are having on students with disabilities.

Bill Gates says that his $5 billion experiment in education has not failed. Gates also claims that he trusts in science. That prompted me to reread the National Academy of Sciences' analysis of the failure of test-driven accountability.

Never before have so many had so much reason to cheat. Students' scores are now used to determine whether teachers and principals are good or bad, whether teachers should get a bonus or be fired, whether a school is a success or failure.

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.

It was bound to happen. Sooner or later, the worst law since prohibition was destined to swallow my school. It was like watching a slow, stupid goat thoughtfully and systematically eating the neighbor's zinnias. And now it's finally happened; the fun and games are over: my school failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress.

In a weekend interview with GRADEBOOK's Jeffrey Solochek, Michael Kooi, the executive director of Florida's Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice. Kooi played the interview close to the vest and effectively explained how the state's new initiatives would work. The interview would have been  innocuous had it not for the way he decided  to answer the offer to make an additional comment choice at the end of the interview. Kooi chose to spin the fact that 15 of 31 failures in Florida last year were from charter schools - including the one where his boss, Governor Rick Scott signed SB736

Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors, a new book about a Los Angeles school turnaround by education journalist Alexander Russo, is refreshingly void of any mythical figures. The book tracks the events leading up to, and a couple of years following, the takeover of troubled Locke High School by start-up charter management organization Green Dot Schools. Because of the history of violence and failure in and around Locke (located in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles), a majority of Locke teachers and administrators petitioned in 2007 to be released from the Los Angeles Unified School District and placed under Green Dot's management.

The story in Atlanta is about race, gender, poverty, social class, and, of course, power. It's about fairness and integrity, about leadership and about failures of leadership, and it's also about social responsibility and the abdication of that responsibility.

Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade is a new report from Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank. The report aims to convince parents, taxpayers and policymakers that they should be as concerned about middle-class schools not making the grade as they are about the failures of the nation's large, poor, urban school districts. But, the report suffers from egregious methodological flaws invalidating nearly every bold conclusion drawn by its authors. First, the report classifies as middle class any school or district where the share of children qualifying for free or reduced-priced lunch falls between 25% and 75%. Seemingly unknown to the authors, this classification includes as middle class some of the poorest urban centers in the country, such as Detroit and Philadelphia. But, even setting aside the crude classification of middle class, none of the report's major conclusions are actually supported by the data tables provided. The report concludes, for instance, that middle-class schools perform much less well than the general public, parents and taxpayers believe they do. But, the tables throughout the report invariably show that the schools they classify as "middle class" fall precisely where one would expect them to-in the middle-between higher- and lower-income schools. 

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.

The school reform movement is obsessed with quantifying outcomes. Whether through standardized test scores, dropout rates or college acceptance rates, the coin of the realm is measurement. Yet there is another side of the story that is largely overlooked. It was highlighted in a cover piece in The New York Times Magazine on Sept. 18. In "What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?," Paul Tough focuses on the importance of developing character. He quite correctly recognizes that without it, students are shortchanged.

The beliefs of star teachers are compared with those of quitter/failures. Twelve of these beliefs are explained, and examples are given of how they are demonstrated in terms of actual teacher practices. The argument is presented that the strength of these belief systems makes teacher selection more important than training.

In a Sunday WaPo op-ed, Jay Mathews suggests that the Common Core State Standards Initiative is doomed to failure, and isn't a good idea anyway

Today it seems that Boss Bluster's management style, tossing money at the problems and blaming other people for your failures, is alive and well in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New York City Department of education. Maybe Steinbrenner's ghost is running the New York City school system.

They, too, are not 'well-grounded,' so to speak, because the authors of the standards have failed to factor in some crucial elements or aspects of instruction. This failure of foresight and insight will surely cause the standards to 'sink' - to become ineffective, inappropriate, and intolerable. The biggest problem with this 'sinking' that is sure to happen is that the students, teachers, and indeed, whole school systems that will labor under these burdensome 'goals and expectations' will sink right along with them.