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Perhaps the greatest current impediment to better schools is our meager understanding of the most high-leverage actions and elements that ensure large, swift improvements to learning. If implemented, they would have an immediate effect on student learning and on college and career preparation.

In the final days of the session, lawmakers stripped more than $500,000 from the proposed budget that was intended to help implement Senate Bill 7, a sweeping education overhaul that would streamline the process of firing poorly rated teachers. By eliminating the money at the end of May, lawmakers put a crimp in the bill they had approved overwhelmingly a few weeks earlier and which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had praised as a national model.

The Indiana State Teachers Association filed suit against the state on Friday, asking a court to block implementation of the country's largest private school voucher program.

Recent federal investments in teacher "residency" programs are illuminating both promising developments and growing pains for the schools of education implementing the more hands-on approach to training.

Over just the past decade, online learning at the K-12 level has grown from a novelty to a movement. Often using the authority and mechanism of state charters, and in league with home schoolers and other allies, private companies and some state entities are now providing full-time online schooling to a rapidly increasing number of students in the U.S. Yet little or no research is available on the outcomes of such full-time virtual schooling. The rapid growth of virtual schooling raises several immediate, critical questions for legislators regarding matters such as cost, funding, and quality. This policy brief offers recommendations in these and other areas, and the accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement the recommendations.

The Panel for Education Policy (or PEP), enacts policy for the New York City Dept. of Education. The PEP replaced the Board of Education when Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002. It is intended to be a democratic forum where people voice concerns, prior to the panel's vote on educational policy. Today the panel is convening to discuss new standards being implemented in schools. 200 parents, teachers staff and students are in attendance.

[Jeff's note: Both authors of this article are members of this group.] The way to turn schools around and transform the education of at-risk students is to invest in the professional ability of the faculty, making its members a mission-driven, skilled force for change. This strategy necessitates a reorganization built around faculty collaboration, intensive and embedded professional development, and personalized instruction. Working from this premise, the Jefferson County, Ky., public school system, which includes the city of Louisville, designed and implemented a fifth model that was fully operational by the 2010-2011 school year-a model not set forth by the Education Department, yet funded through a federal Investing in Innovation, or i3, grant.

"John King is leaving his job as commissioner of New York State schools commissioner to become a senior adviser to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with the "roles and responsibilities of the deputy secretary," according to the Education Department, which issued a statement giving King high praise for his work in New York. Some in New York think otherwise. Here's a piece by award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, who was named New York's 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010, tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. Burris has been exposing on this blog King's troubling record in implementing school reform program in New York."

"Here's my quick run-down on a) the purposes of testing in schools, b) how to implement testing to best address those purposes, c) the right and wrong uses of testing with respect to civil rights concerns, and d) the role of common standards in all of this."

In the Republican Party, presidential debates candidates like Mitt Romney and Herman Cain tout their business executive experience and claim expertise at job creation. Former Governors Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman promote their management experience as the CEO of state governments. Whatever you may think of their proposals for stimulating the economy and ending unemployment, there is no question that these candidates believe, and they believe their audience believes, that knowledge and experience are important leadership qualities. However, when it comes to educational leadership, it seems that knowledge and experience do not count for very much, certainly not to the Obama-Duncan team, the Cuomo-King-Tisch team that establishes educational policy in New York State, or the Bloomberg-Walcott team that runs the schools in New York City.

V. Darleen Opfer has six months under her belt as head of RAND Corp.'s education division, and she's pushing to make sure the education research giant's studies actually make a difference in the field. Opfer, who replaced former director Susan J. Bodilly, said RAND is moving its focus from "pure research" to collaborating with districts and state education agencies. The group has expanded its research reviewers to beyond other researchers to gauge whether a study's methodology is sound, but also to include policymakers and practitioners to weigh in on whether and how a study's results could be relevant.

This is a fantastic overview of the literature and issues on value-added (includes paper summaries in appendix) put out by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.

Principals tend to prefer working in schools with higher-achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals often use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments. District leadership can also exacerbate principal turnover by implementing policies aimed at improving low-performing schools such as rotating school leaders. Using longitudinal data from one large urban school district we find principal turnover is detrimental to school performance. Frequent turnover results in lower teacher retention and lower student achievement gains, which are particularly detrimental to students in high-poverty and failing school

Reform advocates and policymakers concerned about the quality and distribution of teachers support proposals of alternative compensation for teachers in hard-to-hire subject areas, hard-to-staff schools, and with special knowledge and skills. The successful implementation of such proposals depends in large part on teacher attitudes. The current body of research on teacher attitudes toward compensation reform paints an inconsistent picture of teachers views, largely ignoring the influence of individual and workplace characteristics on teacher attitudes. Results from a 2006 survey of teachers in Washington State linked to school and district data confirm earlier findings that teacher opinion about pay reform is not uniform, and further illustrates teacher preferences for different pay structures vary substantially by individual and workplace characteristics. Nearly three quarters of teachers favored higher pay for hard to-staff schools. In contrast, only 17% favored merit pay. Teachers with a high

In this final post, we propose strategies for tackling the compliance rules that interfere with good educational programming. As we explored this week, these rules shape the culture of education organizations because they create compliance fears that discourage effective spending. This makes little sense, especially in an era where every dollar matters.