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Imagine trying to determine international rankings for tennis players or soccer teams entirely by a) determining how they rank relative to the average team or player in their country, then b) having only the average team or player from each country play each other in a tournament, then c) estimating how the top teams would rank when compared with each other based only on how their country's average teams did when they played each other and how much better we think the individual teams or players are when compared to the average team or player in their country? Probably not that precise or even accurate, ya' think?

The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism. Though Klein's book provides much evidence of the Shock Doctrine, the Disaster Capitalists rarely come out and acknowledge their strategy. That's why Watkins' outburst of candor, buried in this front-page New York Times article yesterday, is so important: It shows that the recession and its corresponding shock to school budgets is being  used by corporations to maximize revenues, all under the gauzy banner of "reform."

If you read the news magazines or watch TV, you might get the impression that American education is deep in a crisis of historic proportions. The media tell you that other nations have higher test scores than ours and that they are shooting past us in the race for global competitiveness. The pundits say it's because our public schools are overrun with incompetent, lazy teachers who can't be fired and have a soft job for life. Don't believe it. It's not true.

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.

Project VoiceScape, led by the documentary program POV, paired middle- and high-school artists nationwide with experienced filmmakers to tell the stories these teens see influencing the lives around them. The following short films were among the top teen documentaries and grant winners in a 2011 competition. Project VoiceScape is a project of Adobe Youth Voices, Adobe Foundation's global signature philanthropy program; POV, public television's award-winning showcase for independent nonfiction films; and PBS.

"The video below is a short preview of the 34-minute video "School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias."  Private schools receiving funding through "school choice" programs are using A Beka Book, Bob Jones University Press, and other Protestant fundamentalist curricula.  The textbooks in these series teach that dinosaurs lived on earth with humans; deny global warming; promote hostility toward other religions and other sectors of Christianity (particularly Roman Catholicism); provide a biased and often factually incorrect version of history; and teach extreme laissez-faire economics, claimed to be biblically-based."

"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."

The city wants to give one third of a formerly-struggling Cobble Hill high school to a high-performing charter school - but parents are already fighting the co-location plan. Under the plan, the Baltic and Court street school - which is home to Brooklyn School for Global Studies and the School for International Studies - would house grades kindergarten through fourth of Success Charter Network's school, run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

"Public education in the United States is in a state of crisis. We know this because we have heard the warning from government officials of both political parties over the past 30 years. We have also heard that if we don't fix this crisis, the United States and the "American way of life" is in jeopardy of losing its global economic competitiveness and superiority."

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.

A review by William J. Mathis of Something in Common: The Common Core State Standards by Robert Rothman.

GIA announces the release of a comprehensive US report on the Charter Schools market. The proportion of students attending charter schools is on the rise. Over 30% of public school students attend charter schools in the four urban districts of Washington DC, Kansas City, New Orleans, and Detroit in the US. Following a marginal setback during the recession, which was instigated by reduced funding, the charter school market bounced back in 2009 with government support and revival in financing options. Growth in enrollment is expected to increase in the following years, given the increasing importance given by the Obama administration to charter schools.

I am a special education teacher. My students have learning disabilities ranging from autism and attention-deficit disorder to cerebral palsy and emotional disturbances. I love these kids, but they can be a handful. Almost without exception, they struggle on standardized tests, frustrate their teachers and find it hard to connect with their peers. What's more, these are high school students, so their disabilities are compounded by raging hormones and social pressure. As you might imagine, my job can be extremely difficult. Beyond the challenges posed by my students, budget cuts and changes to special-education policy have increased my workload drastically even over just the past 18 months. While my class sizes have grown, support staff members have been laid off. Students with increasingly severe disabilities are being pushed into more mainstream classrooms like mine, where they receive less individual attention and struggle to adapt to a curriculum driven by state-designed high-stakes tests. On top of all that, I'm a bad teacher. That's not my opinion; it's how I'm labeled by the city's Education Department.

There is much to admire in the schools that lead international assessment results. Finland, Singapore, and South Korea have nurtured a teaching profession that encourages the most able college students to consider teaching as a rewarding and noble career (Darling-Hammond, 2010). China, home to world-leading Shanghai, hosts a thousand-year tradition of reverence for teaching (Reeves, 2011).