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...I stopped worrying as much about defending progressive school allies (and the schools to which I had given so many years) from the onslaught, but grew more concerned about the fundamental underpinning of what public'ness means in a democracy. I attributed some of my differences with the foundation/corporate reforms to simply being one of their ignorance about the pace of change possible in an essentially conservative institution with many constituents. I misunderstood. They had their eyes on something different. In the name of equality-and our survival as a nation-they decided we had to get rid of our sentimental attachment to public space, public life, and so much more that we "foolishly" associated with our nation's democratic history. Suddenly I, and others working in "the trenches," were an obstacle to reform! We were blocking the 2lst century, aiding America's enemies, etc. There was indeed a substantial group amongst our founding white fathers who distrusted democracy-deeply. Our opponents' nostalgia goes back in part to those olden days.

Ever since the debacle of Pineapplegate, it is widely recognized by everyone other than the publishing giant Pearson that its tentacles have grown too long and too aggressive. It is difficult to remember what part of American education has not been invaded by Pearson's corporate grasp. It receives billions of dollars to test millions of students. Its scores will be used to calculate the value of teachers. It has a deal with the Gates Foundation to store all the student-level data collected at the behest of Race to the Top. It recently purchased Connections Academy, thus giving it a foothold in the online charter industry. And it recently added the GED to its portfolio. With the U.S. Department of Education now pressing schools to test children in second grade, first grade, kindergarten - and possibly earlier - and with the same agency demanding that schools of education be evaluated by the test scores of the students of their graduates (whew!), the picture grows clear. Pearson will control every aspect of our education system.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a powerful corporate front group that works to pass Big Business-written laws in state legislatures. Following the outcry over the group pushing "Stand Your Ground" laws, at least fifteen major corporations, foundations, and other organizations have decided to end their funding commitments to ALEC. But ALEC has another way of financing itself that doesn't involve private corporations at all. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) is one of ALEC's members at least through 2009 and may well still be a member. NACSA's president and CEO Greg Richmond joined ALEC's Education Task Force around 2009.

Sixteen years ago, Charlotte Danielson, an Oxford-trained economist, developed a description of good teaching that became the foundation for attempts by federal and state officials and school districts to quantify teacher performance. The Danielson method - articulated in her book, "Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching" (ASCD, 1996) - describes good teaching using numerous criteria within four broad areas of performance: the quality of questions and discussion techniques; a knowledge of students' special needs; the expectations set for learning and achievement; and the teacher's involvement in professional development activities. "If all you do is judge teachers by test results," Ms. Danielson told Ginia Bellafante in an interview for a Big City column in the Metropolitan section of The New York Times last month, "it doesn't tell you what you should do differently."

Children in New York City who learned to read using an experimental curriculum that emphasized nonfiction texts outperformed those at other schools that used methods that have been encouraged since the Bloomberg administration's early days, according to a new study to be released Monday. For three years, a pilot program tracked the reading ability of approximately 1,000 students at 20 New York City schools, following them from kindergarten through second grade. Half of the schools adopted a curriculum designed by the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Core Knowledge Foundation. The other 10 used a variety of methods, but most fell under the definition of "balanced literacy," an approach that was spread citywide by former Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, beginning in 2003.

As demonstrated by recent survey data, job satisfaction within the profession is at its lowest since the Reagan years. What's at stake is the future of an entire generation, one that's growing up to face a new economic reality that requires a new set of skills. But because of circumstances the students don't control, they might have disaffected teachers carrying them there. According to MetLife, which interviewed 1,000 K-12 teachers by phone, the number of teachers who reported they were "very satisfied" dropped by 15 points between 2009 and 2011, from 59 to 44 percent. Two surveys that gauged teacher sentiment were commissioned by MetLife and Scholastic/The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, respectively.

One of the leading criticisms of voucher programs-and charter and virtual schools for that matter-is that they undermine traditional public schools' finances by sucking away their per-pupil funding and resources. A new paper published by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which supports public and private school choice, challenges that assertion.

This week Teach For America founder CEO Wendy Kopp became the latest advocate of VAM to denounce the publication of scores in the press, and the associated public scorning of the "bad teachers" they supposedly revealed. In taking this stand, she joined one of her chief sponsors, Bill Gates. His foundation has spent millions on developing and advocating for the use of VAM in teacher evaluations. Why are these advocates of VAM so disturbed?

"What they're focusing on is high-stakes testing, which is a political way of saying that "We just don't like testing. Let's be real clear." - Florida Education Commissioner Robinson I agree. Let's be real clear.This is not an anti-testing resolution. To state that the resolution opposes testing and accountability is disingenuous and silly. If the Commissioner, his staff, or their chief consultants at Florida's Foundation for Excellence in Education actually read the 'Resolution Opposing Over-Reliance on High Stakes Tests,' they'd understand that, as its title states, it opposes the over-reliance of this one test taken on this one day. It is not testing we oppose. Rather, it is what this one test has morphed into that we oppose. It is not accountability we oppose. Rather, it is the irrational and costly accountability built into this one test we oppose.

Nearly six decades after Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that ushered in an era of efforts to integrate public schools, charter school advocates and researchers are shining a light on a number of those independent public schools that are integrated by design. Two new reports-one from the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, another from the Century Foundation and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council-examine charter schools that have racially and socioeconomically diverse enrollments as part of their school missions. Researchers and advocates say that there is increasing demand for such schools, but that national educational priorities and policies are not necessarily stacked in their favor.

Many of us have not heard of of the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) Formula, Connecticut's system for allocating money to our public schools. As one father admitted at the ECS Task Force Meeting on Thursday in Bridgeport, he never gave it any thought until his child started kindergarten. Roughly, this is how the formula works. It starts with a foundation amount, which is supposed to represent how much money it takes to educate one child with no special needs. Then the amount is adjusted based on the number and needs of students in a particular district. Students living in poverty, students learning English and students with disabilities all need more resources to learn, and those resources cost money - up to four times the cost of educating a child with no needs. The formula is also supposed to consider a municipality's ability to pay. If one of these components is inaccurate, then the state is not giving the proper amount of money to a municipality for its schools. In Connecticut, all of these components are grossly inadequate.

"The education reform debate is fueled by a seemingly endless and even fruitless point-counterpoint among the corporate reformers-typically advocates for and from the Gates Foundation (GF), Teach for America (TFA), and charter chains such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)-and educators/scholars of education. Since the political and public machines have embraced the corporate reformers, GF, TFA, and KIPP have acquired the bully pulpit of the debate and thus are afforded most often the ability to frame the point, leaving educators and scholars to be in a constant state of generating counter-points. This pattern disproportionately benefits corporate reformers, but it also exposes how those corporate reformers manage to maintain the focus of the debate on data. The statistical thread running through most of the point-counterpoint is not only misleading (the claims coming from the corporate reformers are invariably distorted, while the counter-points of educators and scholars remain ignored among politicians, advocates, the public, and the media), but also a distraction. Since the metrics debate (test scores, graduation rates, attrition, populations of students served, causation/correlation) appears both enduring and stagnant, I want to make a clear statement with some elaboration that I reject the "ends-justify-the-means" assumptions and practices-the broader "no excuses" ideology-underneath the numbers, and thus, we must stop focusing on the outcomes of programs endorsed by the GF or TFA and KIPP. Instead, we must unmask the racist and classist policies and practices hiding beneath the metrics debate surrounding GF, TFA, and KIPP (as prominent examples of practices all across the country and types of schools)."

"Brookings recently released an evaluation of New York City's voucher program, called the School Choice Scholarship Foundation Program (SCSF), which was implemented in the late 1990s. Voucher offers were randomized, and the authors looked at the impact of being offered/accepting them on a very important medium-term outcome - college enrollment (they were also able to follow an unusually high proportion of the original voucher recipients to check this outcome). The short version of the story is that, overall, the vouchers didn't have any statistically discernible impact on college enrollment. But, as is often the case, there was some underlying variation in the results, including positive estimated impacts among African-American students, which certainly merit discussion.* Unfortunately, such nuance was not always evident in the coverage of and reaction to the report, with some voucher supporters (strangely, given the results) exclaiming that the program was an unqualified success, and some opponents questioning the affiliations of the researchers. For my part, I'd like to make a quick, not-particularly-original point about voucher studies in general: Even the best of them don't necessarily tell us much about whether "vouchers work.""

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made school choice a foundation of his education agenda, and since he took office in 2002, the city opened more than 500 new schools; closed, or is in the process of closing, more than 100 ailing ones; and created an environment in which more than 130 charter schools could flourish. No neighborhood has been as transformed by that agenda as Harlem. When classes resume on Thursday, many of its students will be showing up in schools that did not exist a decade ago. The idea, one that became a model for school reform nationwide, was to let parents shop for schools the same way they would for housing or a cellphone plan, and that eventually, the competition would lift all boats. But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform."

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation is pleased to share its latest annual Sponsorship Accountability Report, Two Steps Forward, One Step Back. The sixth of its kind, the report reflects on Ohio's charter school policy environment and the performance of Fordham sponsored charter schools - in terms of absolute achievement, growth, and adherence to goals set forth in our authorizing contract - as well as developments in state law over the year. Despite some tough battles during the state budget as it relates to holding authorizers (and operators) accountable, overall Fordham and its schools had an encouraging year, with Fordham sponsored-charters making achievement gains and positioning themselves to do even better in the future.

Charter schools in Chicago would get easier access to facilities and a likely increase in per-pupil funding under a proposed district-charter compact that would also make charters subject to some of the same testing and accountability standards as traditional schools. The draft agreement between CPS and its charters was handed out at a Tuesday conference for participants in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative called "District-Charter Collaboration Compacts." Chicago Public Schools and Spring Branch Independent School District, outside of Houston, are joining the 12 districts across the country that already signed on.

The American Federation of Teachers, vilified by critics as an obstacle to school reform, is leading an unusual effort to turn around a floundering school system in a place where deprivation is layered on heartache. The AFT, which typically represents teachers in urban settings, wants to improve education deep in the heart of Appalachia by simultaneously tackling the social and economic troubles of McDowell County. The union has gathered about 40 partners, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cisco Systems, IBM, Save the Children, foundations, utility companies, housing specialists, community colleges, and state and federal governments, which have committed to a five-year plan to try to lift McDowell out of its depths.

Having opined a good bit about "innovation" (check out Ed Unbound for much of my current thinking), I'm sometimes asked about why it's so hard to scale promising programs, models, pilots, and notions. On that note, I just had the chance to spend a few days with a bunch of terrific folks discussing just this topic at a Kauffman Foundation retreat. Kaufmann will be issuing a synthesis with the collected wisdom that emerged. Meanwhile, I figured I'd share my own thinking with you.

NYC Parents Union, a public-education advocacy organization strongly, condemned Governor Andrew Cuomo's education remarks that invoked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s memory. "Yesterday, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo violated the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by exploiting and manipulating Dr. King's legacy of empowerment to promote a cynical political agenda that victimizes public school students, their parents and the teachers who are the foundation of public education," the Parents Union's statement began, calling on the Governor immediately change course on the issue.

Last week saw the announcement of an important initiative.  Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, Senators Manchin and Rockefeller, Randi Weingarten and the AFT and over 40 partners from business, foundations, non-profits and labor announced that they will lead an effort to bring educational improvement and brighter economic prospects to McDowell County, WV, one of the poorest areas in Appalachia.