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"Among 27 member nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, U.S. teachers work the longest hours, the Wall Street Journal reports. This seems particularly impressive as the U.S. has long summer vacations, and primary-school teachers only spent 36 weeks a year in the classroom, among the lowest of the countries tracked. Yet the educators spent 1,097 hours a year teaching, in the most recent numbers from 2008. New Zealand, in second place at 985 hours, had schools open for 39 weeks a year. The OECD average is 786 hours."

The claim that Chicago public school teachers aren't working enough hours during the school day are unwarranted at best and intellectually dishonest at worst, according to research from a University of Illinois labor expert. The contentious debate between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis over the length of the school day has focused on Chicago public schools having the shortest official day of any major city - five hours and 45 minutes for elementary school students, and six hours and 45 minutes for high school students. But Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois, says when you account for time outside of the contractually obligated instruction, a teacher's day is almost twice as long.

"With prime testing time upon us, PARCC's newly released guidance to schools (see below) calls for: 9¾  hours testing time for third grade, 10 hours for grades 4-5 , 10¾ hours for grades 6-8 and 11 to 11¼ hours for grades 9-12."

Seventeen-year-old Kevin Fish has won international mountain bike races, has ridden alongside Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong and hopes to become a professional cyclist when he turns 19. To do that, he trains 20 hours a week: four-hour bicycle rides, long runs and practice on a stationary bike. Spending seven hours a day in traditional private or public schools would leave Kevin riding in the evenings - or not at all, depending on homework. Then his family read about Star Charter School on the Web. The campus, which received the highest academic rating under the state accountability system, offers small classes and four-hour days. And as an open-enrollment charter school, it is public and tuition-free.

It has been a challenging week for many third- through eighth-grade public school students in New York City, as they have started their days on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with the federally mandated English Language Arts exams. But as Gotham Schools reported on Wednesday, the week has been especially challenging for some students with special needs. This year, test-taking time has doubled for all students. For those students with disabilities who are given more time to complete the tests, "testing can stretch as long as three hours on each day of testing. That means the students could spend more than half of the school day - and more than 18 hours total - on state exams this week and next," Jessica Campbell reports for Gotham.

New York's chief testing and data guru has been forced out after prematurely releasing details of the state's plans to lengthen tests in grades 3 to 8, sources told The Post. David Abrams, the longtime assistant commissioner in the Office of Standards, Assessment and Reporting, resigned just days after sending a memo to principals across the state announcing that annual reading tests would nearly double in length - topping four hours in each grade. Math tests would take roughly three hours over two testing days. The proposal to lengthen the exams, including for kids as young as 8, immediately raised hackles among parents and educators who already feel that kids are over-tested in public schools.

New York State math and language arts tests for elementary and middle school students will each be lengthened to about three hours beginning this April.

"Editor's note: The author of this piece is an urban high school teacher who is writing under a pseudonym in order to protect the privacy of his students and his colleagues. Since I'm a public school teacher, everybody always asks me what I think about charter schools. They usually ask it with a certain expression, their eyes alert and their head poised at an angle, as if they are readying themselves for an explosion, or at least a case of spontaneous combustion. I usually respond with some variation of this: It's complicated. You got an hour?"

"This is a preview of a new hour-long documentary about the fight to keep New York's DeWitt Clinton High School alive. Based in the Bronx, home of the NY Yankees, "The Bronx Bombers" It has educated more than 200,000 students over a hundred years. It is now being faced with plans by "Educational Reformers" to scale it back in a threat to it's tradition of excellence. Help us get the word out. See our Facebook page, Facebook.com/dwcfilm for how you can order and help distribute the whole film by Clinton grad Danny Schechter "The News Dissector." Help us save DeWitt Clinton and public education."

"Kyle Hunsberger, a math teacher at Johnny Cochran Middle school in Los Angeles, works 60-hour weeks, makes every minute count in class and gets high praise from his principal and students. Yet, according to a key measure of teacher effectiveness used by LAUSD, Hunsberger is average."

Those dreaded state tests are here again. All third-to eighth-graders in New York began Tuesday the first of three consecutive days of English Language Arts assessment, to be followed next week by three days of math tests. And those state tests have never been longer. A typical third-grader last year spent 150 minutes over three days taking the ELA test and 100 minutes over two days on the Math exam. This year, all students will spend 270 minutes in the ELA exam and 270 minutes in the Math test - 90 minutes over each of six days. The stakes also have never been higher, not for the pupils who take the tests or the teachers whose evaluations will be based on their students' performance or the schools that could face closure if pupil scores drop.

New York State education officials and the state teachers' union reached an agreement on a new teacher evaluation system on Thursday, just hours before a deadline imposed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who had threatened to break the impasse by imposing his own way to judge the quality of a teacher's work, according to a number of people directly involved. The agreement allows school districts to base up to 40 percent of a teacher's annual review on student performance on state standardized tests, as long as half of that portion is used to analyze the progress of specific groups of students, like those who are not proficient in English or have special needs. The remaining 60 percent is to be based on subjective measures, like classroom observations and professional development projects.

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.

The honeymoon's over. Not even 24 hours after officials toasted the deal on a statewide framework for new teacher evaluations, Mayor Bloomberg and teachers' union president Michael Mulgrew made it clear the city has anything but smooth sailing ahead.

Yesterday the Huffington Post ran an op/ed piece by Wendy Kopp, the founder of TFA. The title was In Defense of Optimism.  I read it, tweeted it, and moved on, but it has been rattling in my head for 24 hours now, so here are some thoughts in response.

Journalists play an essential role in our society. They are charged with informing the public, a vital function in a representative democracy. Yet, year after year, large pockets of the electorate remain poorly-informed on both foreign and domestic affairs. For a long time, commentators have blamed any number of different culprits for this problem, including poverty, education, increasing work hours and the rapid proliferation of entertainment media. There is no doubt that these and other factors matter a great deal. Recently, however, there is growing evidence that the factors shaping the degree to which people are informed about current events include not only social and economic conditions, but journalist quality as well. Put simply, better journalists produce better stories, which in turn attract more readers. On the whole, the U.S. journalist community is world class. But there is, as always, a tremendous amount of underlying variation. It's likely that improving the overall quality of reporters would not only result in higher quality information, but it would also bring in more readers. Both outcomes would contribute to a better-informed, more active electorate. We at the Shanker Institute feel that it is time to start a public conversation about this issue. We have requested and received datasets documenting the story-by-story readership of the websites of U.S. newspapers, large and small. We are using these data in statistical models that we call "Readers-Added Models," or "RAMs."

I noted in my blog last week that the visionaries of the charter school idea-Raymond Budde of the University of Massachusetts and Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers-never intended that charter schools would compete with public schools. Budde saw charters as a way to reorganize public school districts and to provide more freedom for teachers. He envisioned teams of teachers asking for a charter for three to five years, during which time they would operate with full autonomy over curriculum and instruction, with no interference from the superintendent or the principal. Shanker thought that charter schools should be created by teams of teachers who would explore new ways to reach unmotivated students. He envisioned charter schools as self-governing, as schools that encouraged faculty decisionmaking and participatory governance. He imagined schools that taught by coaching rather than lecturing, that strived for creativity and problem-solving rather than mastery of standardized tests or regurgitation of facts. He never thought of charters as non-union schools where teachers would work 70-hour weeks and be subject to dismissal based on the scores of their students. Today, charter schools are very far from the original visions of Budde and Shanker.

Technical problems erupted as soon as Wyoming switched to online testing in 2010. Students were unable to submit their tests after spending hours taking them. At times the questions wouldn't load on the screen. And ultimately the scores were deemed unreliable. "We had so many poor kids who had to take the test again," said Gordon Knopp, technology director of Laramie County School District No. 1, the largest school district in Wyoming.

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that students cheat more in online than in face-to-face classes. The article tells the story of Bob Smith (not his real name, obviously), who was a student in an online science course.  Bob logged in once a week for half an hour in order to take a quiz. He didn't read a word of his textbook, didn't participate in discussions, and still he got an A. Bob pulled this off, he explained, with the help of a collaborative cheating effort. Interestingly, Bob is enrolled at a public university in the U.S., and claims to work diligently in all his other (classroom) courses. He doesn't cheat in those courses, he explains, but with a busy work and school schedule, the easy A is too tempting to pass up. Bob's online cheating methods deserve some attention. He is representative of a population of students that have striven to keep up with their instructor's efforts to prevent cheating online. The tests were designed in a way that made cheating more difficult, including limited time to take the test, and randomized questions from a large test bank (so that no two students took the exact same test). But the design of the test had two potential flaws

"The organization that was launched to serve public schools so poor or dysfunctional they couldn't attract qualified teachers now sends fully a third of its recruits to privately run charter schools, many with stellar academic reputations, flush budgets and wealthy donors. TFA also sends its rookies, who typically have just 15 to 20 hours of teaching experience, to districts that have recently laid off scores of more seasoned teachers."