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The word "policy" makes us think of politicians and bureaucrats. But what happens when powerful policy-makers aren't elected or appointed? Today, billionaires are shaping education policy in the United States. Buying political influence--even legally--feels dirty, so let me try again: Philanthropists are saving our schools! See what happened when I replaced "political influence" with "philanthropy"?

A company run by a former city schools boss is in line for a nearly $10 million no-bid contract to track student test scores - and critics are giving the move a big fat "F." City Controller John Liu slammed the Education Department's move to hand the contract to ex- Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's Wireless Generation company. The firm is an affiliate of News Corp., which is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Klein is a close confidant. Klein's company is getting the contract under a little-used legal maneuver.

Monday's announcements that all three charter schools in the Believe Network would likely have their charters revoked at the end of the school year were no surprise to those who have been following recent news about these schools and the network which runs them. From security camera footage that showed Believe students were being forced to attend classes in factory space to the photo of Believe CEO Eddie Calderon-Melendez charging a New York Post photographer, evidence suggested that both the state's investigation into the Network's finances and the DOE's review of the school's management would find multiple egregious violations of the school leaders' legal responsibilities.

Ensuring that all students in America's public schools are taught by good teachers is an educational and moral imperative. The teacher is the most important school-based influence on student achievement, and poor children and those of color are less likely to be taught by well-qualified, experienced, and effective teachers than other students. Yet teacher incentive proposals - including those promoted by President Obama's Race to the Top program - are rarely grounded on what high-quality research indicates are the kinds of teacher incentives that lead to school excellence and equity. Few of the current approaches to creating teacher incentives take into account how specific conditions influence whether or not effective teachers will work in high-need schools and will be able to teach effectively in them. This review of research finds little support for a simplistic system of measuring value-added growth, evaluating teachers more "rigorously", and granting bonuses. Instead, the brief supports four recommendations: use the current federal Teacher Incentive Fund to attract qualified, effective teachers to high-needs schools, expand incentives by creating strategic compensation, create working conditions that allow teachers to teach effectively, and more aggressively promote the best practices and policies that spur school excellence and equity. The accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement these recommendations.

The UFT has filed legal papers with the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to declare impasse in the negotiations between the UFT and the NYC Department of Education (DOE) over a teacher evaluation system for schools that had been placed in the Transformation and Restart models of school improvement. We have charged the DOE with walking away from the negotiations that they were required to complete in good faith by the agreement they had signed with the UFT last June. Further, since the DOE has explicitly refused to negotiate an appeals system, with repeated statements to the UFT in negotiations that they would never overturn a supervisor's rating on an issue of substance - a stance confirmed by the 99.5% rate at which they currently turn down U rating appeals - they are in direct violation of state education law which requires a substantive appeals process. If PERB declares impasse, as we have reason to believe they will, the NYC DOE will be forced back to the negotiations table to complete the process they agreed to undertake last June.

If you wanted to reform the legal system, you would probably want to speak to attorneys. If you wanted to reform the way that sports leagues address the problem of concussions, you would want to speak to coaches and players. If you were interested in reforming medicine, you'd probably want to speak to doctors and nurses. But those who want to change the education system want nothing to do with teachers. Pretend-reform governors such as Chris Christie (NJ), Scott Walker (WI) and Rick Scott (FL), entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and politicians including President Obama all believe that they know more about how to improve the public education system in the United States than professional educators who are working with students on a day-to-day basis to educate them and provide them with life skills.

The Christie administration's argument for its powers to unilaterally order the overhaul of lower-performing schools comes about 30 pages into its 365-page application for a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Thanks to good ol' Mike Petrilli, much of this week's education policy debate has centered on the relevance of local school boards and the age old tug-of-war between state and local authority over the operation and financing of local public school districts. Much of the debate has been framed in terms of "democracy," and much of it has been rather fun and interesting to watch.  That is, until Mike and the crew at Fordham decided to let Bob Bowdon (of Cartel fame) join in the conversation, and inject his usual bizarre understanding of the world as we know it. This time, jumping in where Petrilli had left off, Bowdon opined about how teachers unions and their advocates repeatedly cry for respecting democracy while consistently thwarting democratic efforts through legal action. The layers of absurdity in Bowdon's  logic are truly astounding, and perhaps best illustrated by walking through one of the examples he chooses.

As New York City parents and teachers struggled Monday to make sense of recently published schoolteacher rankings, education officials considered making future releases illegal to protect a fragile truce on a new statewide system. Legal experts said a series of court rulings have made it increasingly clear that statistics-based portions of teacher evaluations are public information, unlike those of police officers, firefighters and other public workers specifically protected under state law. Only a change in law, experts said, would change that. Shielding teacher rankings from public view is likely to become a new pressure point in the debate over how to measure the effectiveness of teachers, lawmakers and officials said Monday. Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, which sets education policy, said that while she backs using tests scores to hold teachers accountable, she would support changing state law to hide their rankings from public view.

Late yesterday, the New Jersey Department of Education Released its long awaited report on the state school finance formula. For a little context, the formula was adopted in 2008 and upheld by the court as meeting the state constitutional standard for providing a thorough and efficient system of public schooling. But, court acceptance of the plan came with a requirement of a review of the formula after three years of implementation. After a change in administration, with additional legal battles over cuts in aid in the interim, we now have that report.  The idea was that the report would suggest any adjustments that may need to be made to the formula to make the distributions of aid across districts more appropriate/more adequate (more constitutional?). I laid out my series of proposed minor adjustments in a previous post. Reduced to its simplest form, the current report argues that New Jersey's biggest problem in public education is its achievement gap - the gap between poor and minority students and between non-poor and non-minority students.  And the obvious proposed fix? To reduce funding to high poverty, predominantly minority school districts and increase funding to less poor districts with fewer minorities. Why? Because money and class size simply don't matter. Instead, teacher quality and strategies like those  used in Harlem Childrens' Zone do! Here's my quick, day-after, critique

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.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday announced the first lawsuit of its "Don't Filter Me" campaign, which will be filed against Missouri's 4,100-student Camdenton R-III School District for alleged improper Web filtering practices toward educational lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual content.

In his new book, Class Warfare, Steven Brill confirms that Michelle Rhee is being funded by Rupert Murdoch.  Murdoch,  CEO of News Corp., is currently embroiled in a growing cell phone hacking scandal. Rhee's mentor, Joel Klein, serves as Murdoch's chief legal counsel.   News Corp is the  parent company of far-right FoxNews.

Steven Brill is a graduate of Yale Law School and the founder of Court TV, and in his new book, "Class Warfare," he brings a sharp legal mind to the world of education reform. Like a dogged prosecutor, he mounts a zealous case against America's teachers' unions. From more than 200 interviews, he collects the testimony of idealistic educators, charter school founders, policy gurus, crusading school superintendents and billionaire philanthropists. Through their vivid vignettes, which he pieces together in short chapters with titles like " 'Colorado Says Half of You Won't Graduate' " and "A Shriek on Park Avenue," Brill conveys the epiphanies, setbacks and triumphs of a national reform movement.

The union representing nearly 700 public school employees who were laid off at the end of the school day on Friday held a last-minute lunchtime rally on the steps of City Hall, calling the layoffs a political vendetta and threatening possible legal action. But for all of the chanting and sign waving by District Council 37, the layoffs went through as planned. At the end of the day, Sungmi Kang, 47, a school aide at Stuyvesant High School, was out of work, along with 638 other school aides, parent coordinators, community associates, and other school support staff. They are the city's lowest paid employees and the latest victims of budget cuts.

One of the most important guiding principles in education is in loco parentis - we are morally and legally obliged to act "in place of the parent" when children are in our care.  That principle is the main reason for the sharply negative and visceral reaction I had when I read about John F. Kennedy High School using color-coded identification cards based on student test scores, and then a later article describing a similar program at Cypress High School (both in Orange County, California).  According to the Orange County Register, the different cards also led to different privileges around school, discounts on various purchases, and even led an administrator to insult a group of students in an assembly.  The policy has sparked  debate and quite a bit of criticism online (and in rather short order, the district announced that most of the discriminatory practices would be ended).  Anthony Cody wrote about it in his blog and I left some comments there and on Twitter, and the topic has been actively discussed on Huffington Post as well.

A Philadelphia charter school fighting a unionizing effort is trying to break legal ground by contending that it is not a public school-even though it's funded entirely by taxpayers.

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.

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.

"In the charter-school sector, this arrangement is known as a "sweeps" contract because nearly all of a school's public dollars 2013 anywhere from 95 to 100 percent 2013 is "swept" into a charter-management company. The contracts are an example of how the charter schools sometimes cede control of public dollars to private companies that have no legal obligation to act in the best interests of the schools or taxpayers."