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A bombshell report by the Nutter administration on the backroom political dealings of State Rep. Dwight Evans and former School Reform Commission Chairman Robert L. Archie Jr. over a school contract fell flat Friday with City Council members, who called the men's behavior the stuff of everyday politics in Philadelphia.

When talk-show host Oprah Winfrey handed a $1 million check last September to the principal of New Orleans Charter Science and Math Academy, 200 students watched the broadcast from a church and celebrated with a brass band.

The U.S. Supreme Court's recently concluded term generated significant rulings for the rights of children, school board members, school employees, and litigants seeking to challenge aid to private schools. I have this overview in the July 13 print edition of Education Week. Below are my Top Ten decisions of the Supreme Court term of interest to educators.

A federal appeals court on Friday invalidated a Michigan ballot initiative that barred racial preferences in admissions at state colleges and universities.

Check out this letter sent Wednesday to NY State Education Commissioner King, from the UFT, Class Size Matters,  NAACP & AQE, pointing out the numerous legal flaws as regards this year's Contracts for Excellence (C4E) process.

As education lawyers who work with states and school districts on federal education programs, part of our job is to advise clients on those programs' fiscal and administrative compliance rules. For the most part these compliance rules are largely unknown and rarely discussed among the education policy crowd and other important stakeholders, like parents and teachers. Federal compliance requirements like supplement not supplant or time distribution (also known as time and effort) are not exactly hot topics of conversation. They should be.

In our last post, we introduced the idea that federal compliance rules can have an unintended effect on what goes on in the classroom by encouraging defensive spending, discouraging comprehensive programs, and creating administrative burdens that take away resources from students. Over the next two days we will give examples of how two seemingly unrelated rules - supplement not supplant, and time and effort - interfere with comprehensive school improvement.

"A judge said the state discriminates against poor and minority students by protecting the jobs of ineffective instructors. What will this mean for education?"