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"Where can 12 billionaires turn if they want education laws changed? That's right, their checkbooks. Between late September and Election Day, a dozen hedge funders donated a combined $4.4 million to New York State politics, mainly to ensure that Governor Andrew Cuomo and his slimy associates will help publicly-funded, privately-run charter schools seep deeper into the state. Led by the likes Paul Tudor Jones II, who recently hosted an education "summit" featuring Cuomo and other corpses, the billionaires see charters as investment windfalls. After all, those pesky teachers unions and their due process rights won't be around to challenge every test and technology tonic sold to New York's taxpayers once the metastasis of charters quickens. "

"Value Added Models (VAMs) are irresistible. Purportedly they can ascertain a teacher's effectiveness by predicting the impact of a teacher on a student's test scores. Because test scores are the sin qua non of our education system, VAMs are alluring. They link a teacher directly to the most emphasized output in education today. What more can we want from an evaluative tool, especially in our pursuit of improving schools in the name of social justice? Taking this a step further, many see VAMs as the panacea for improving teacher quality. The theory seems straightforward. VAMs provide statistical predictions regarding a teacher's impact that can be compared to actual results. If a teacher cannot improve a student's test score in relatively positive ways, then they are ineffective. If they are ineffective, they can (and should) be dismissed (See, for instance, Hanushek, 2010). Consequently, state legislatures have rushed to codify VAMs into their statutes and regulations governing teacher evaluation. (See, for example, Florida General Laws, 2014). That has been a mistake. This paper argues for a complete reversal in policy course. To wit, state regulations that connect a teacher's continued employment to VAMs should be overhauled to eliminate the connection between evaluation and student test scores. The reasoning is largely legal, rather than educational. In sum, the legal costs of any use of VAMs in a performance-based termination far outweigh any value they may add.1 These risks are directly a function of the well-documented statistical flaws associated with VAMs (See, for example, Rothstein, 2010). The "value added" of VAMs in supporting a termination is limited, if it exists at all."

"Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham University law professor who ran against Governor Andrew Cuomo in the recent gubernatorial election, released  a powerful and shocking-but well documented-report on the powerful hedge funds that seek to gain control of education in New York state. They are very, very rich. They have no particular expertise in education, nor are they accountable to anyone. Yet they are attempting to privatize one of the most important public institutions of our society. Teachout's co-author was Mohammad Khan. His contact information is listed below."

"Republicans are hatching an ambitious plan to rewrite No Child Left Behind this year - one that could end up dramatically rolling back the federal role in education and trigger national blowouts over standardized tests and teacher training. NCLB cleared Congress in 2002 with massive bipartisan support but has since become a political catastrophe: The law's strategy for prodding and shaming schools into improvement proved deeply flawed over time, and its unintended failures have eclipsed its bright spots. Today, NCLB is despised by some parents who blame it for schools "teaching to the test," protested by some on the left for promoting education reform and reviled by Republicans in Congress who say the law represents aggressive federal overreach."

"Beverley Holden Johns, a nationally recognized expert in the field of disabilities, strongly disagrees with Arne Duncan. Duncan wants children with disabilities to be able to perform on the highest level of NAEP tests. She points out that NAEP was not designed for this purpose. Duncan unilaterally changed the requirements of the IDEA act, without Congressional authorization. Having changed NCLB without Congressional authorization, he must think that ignoring the law is routine. In Néw York, we learned how students with disabilities do when they took the Common Core test: 95% failed."

"It was determined at trial that between 1 percent and 3 percent-roughly 8,200-of California's 275,000 teachers are grossly ineffective. Yet, only 2.2 teachers, on the average, are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance per year. Although intended to support the case against tenure laws, these statistics are actually an indictment against those responsible for evaluating teachers effectively."

"The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel obituary on longtime state legislator Annette Polly Williams portrayed her as the "mother of school choice," who made common cause with conservatives to create this program. The story completely left out her change of heart - her increasing disenchantment with the school voucher movement."

"This essay briefly traces the history of testing in public schools from its beginnings in the 1920s, through the counter-productive No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal law, to passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in December 2015. It then discusses the recent and rapid emergence of the testing resistance and reform movement."

The Obama administration is urging the U.S. Supreme Court not to take up an appeal from a school district ordered to provide compensatory tutoring because it failed to identify a student's disability.

A federal appeals court has upheld a Pennsylvania school district's attendance-zone plan that took neighborhood racial demographics into account but did not assign individual students based on race.

The new regulations also allow for the disclosure of PII, without student or parent consent, where institutions have contracted with organizations to conduct studies or audits of the effectiveness of education programs.

In recognition of the 10th anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act, Education Week Commentary asked leaders in the K-12 community to consider the law's impact.

If want to read something that will make you gasp out loud, check out the American Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit filed last week against Michigan's Highland Park School District and the state entities that support it. ACLU sued the district and the state for failing to teach kids in the Detroit-area district to read.

"The Wall Street Journal this morning failed to report ties between the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and controversial "parent-trigger" legislation that would allow parents to take over and convert public schools to charter schools. They also failed to report that the Journal's parent company, News Corp, is a member of ALEC. The Journal's treatment of the legislation also cited no criticism of the proposal, which has been described as an effort "to manipulate parents into letting [the charter school lobby] privatize more public schools."

The Department of Education released a final installment of Teacher Data Reports today, for teachers in charter schools and schools for the most severely disabled students. Last week, the city released the underlying data from about 53,000 reports for about 18,000 teachers who received them during the project's three-year lifespan. Teachers received the reports between 2008 and 2010 if they taught reading or math in grades 4 through 8. When the department first announced that it would be releasing the data in response to several news organizations' Freedom of Information Law requests, it indicated that ratings for teachers in charter schools would not be made public. It reversed that decision late last week and today released "value-added" data for 217 charter school teachers.

Is the system Colorado uses to pay for its schools constitutional?

Students who have signed up for Indiana's broad new school voucher program could be jerked out of private schools midsemester or forced to scramble to re-enroll in public school unless it's allowed to proceed pending the outcome of a legal challenge, state officials argued Thursday.

A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit filed by the mother of a 7-year-old autistic child who was repeatedly locked in a dark isolation room at his school for misbehavior.

Congressman Jared Polis, D-Colo., said Tuesday he will soon introduce a bill that would eventually require the federal government to pay for 40 percent of the cost of educating students with disabilities. The money would come from cuts to defense spending.

There's no question that NCLB and RttT have marked an unprecedented level of federal involvement in education. In response to the sweeping and unproven reforms that these laws have brought to our nation's schools, there is an increasing call for the federal government to stay out of what has traditionally been regarded as a local issue.