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Over the past 2 years, several states have passed legislation to create new teacher evaluation systems linked to student learning, and to require results from those evaluations to be used to inform key personnel decisions--particularly teacher layoffs. (Report can be found at http://bellwethereducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/State-Teacher-Leg-Comparison.pdf)

Money maybe can't buy everything, but it can buy influence. (Which is why some semblance of financial equity is so crucial to democracy.) For example, it can buy the terms of the debate in a way that gives one side a leg up.

"There is growing evidence that the corporate-sponsored education reform project is on its last legs. The crazy patchwork of half-assed solutions on offer for the past decade have one by one failed to deliver, and one by one they are falling. Can the edifice survive once its pillars of support have crumbled?"

Slide presentation by Suffolk County School Superintendents Association and Eastern Suffolk BOCES.

The U.S. House of Representatives took what has become a rare step today: It passed an education bill with broad bipartisan support. The vote, on charter school legislation, was an overwhelming vote of 365 to 54 -but there was still a lot of drama behind the scenes.