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This session, Bush and his nonprofit organization, the Foundation for Florida's Future, have helped to fast-track a stream of legislation that could reset the education equation in Florida. The bills, moving steadily through both the House and Senate, could gradually shift the financial and competitive advantage away from traditional public schools to private schools and charter schools, which are often managed by for-profit companies. Other proposals push virtual-learning initiatives.

Principals new to their schools face a variety of challenges that can influence their likelihood of improving their schools' performance and their likelihood of remaining the principal. Understanding the actions that principals take and the working conditions they face in the first year can inform efforts to promote school improvement and principal retention, but the research on first-year principals' experiences is limited. This report examines the actions and perceived working conditions of first-year principals, relating information on those factors to subsequent school achievement and principal retention. This report presents findings from an analysis of schools led by principals who were in their first year at their schools. Throughout this report, we define first-year principals as principals in their first year at a given school including those principals with previous experience as principals at other schools. The study is based on data that were collected to support the RAND Corporation's seven-year formative and summative evaluation of New Leaders. New Leaders is an organization that is dedicated to promoting student achievement by developing outstanding school leaders to serve in urban schools. The findings will be of interest to policymakers in school districts, charter management organizations (CMOs), state education agencies, and principal preparation programs, in addition to principals themselves and teachers. This research was conducted in RAND Education, a unit of the RAND Corporation, under a contract with New Leaders.

Readers of my blog know I'm both a data geek and a skeptic of the usefulness of Value-added data specifically as a human resource management tool for schools and districts. There's been much talk this week about the release of the New York City teacher ratings to the media, and subsequent publication of those data by various news outlets. Most of the talk about the ratings has focused on the error rates in the ratings, and reporters from each news outlet have spent a great deal of time hiding behind their supposed ultra-responsibleness of being sure to inform the public that these ratings are not absolute, that they have significant error ranges, etc.  Matt Di Carlo over at Shanker Blog has already provided a very solid explanatory piece on the error ranges and how those ranges affect classification of teachers as either good or bad. But, the imprecision - as represented by error ranges - of each teacher's effectiveness estimate is but one small piece of this puzzle. And in my view, the various other issues involved go much further in undermining the usefulness of the value added measures which have been presented by the media as necessarily accurate albeit lacking in precision.

Gov. Jindal has submitted a legislative proposal that would offer vouchers to more than half the students in the state; vastly expand the number of privately managed charter schools by giving the state board of education the power to create up to 40 new charter authorizing agencies; introduce academic standards and letter grades for pre-schoolers; and end seniority and tenure for teachers. Under his plan, the local superintendent could immediately fire any teacher-tenured or not-who was rated "ineffective" by the state evaluation program. If the teacher re-applied to teach, she would have to be rated "highly effective" for five years in a row to regain tenure. Tenure, needless to say, becomes a meaningless term, since due process no longer is required for termination. The bill is as punitive as possible with respect to public education and teachers. It says nothing about helping to improve or support them. It's all about enabling students to leave public schools and creating the tools to intimidate and fire teachers. This "reform" is not conservative. I would say it is radical and reactionary. But it is in no way unique to Louisiana.

John Mooney at NJ Spotlight provided a reasonable overview of the NJDOE waiver proposal to "reward" successful schools and sanction and/or takeover "failing" ones. The NJDOE waiver proposal includes explanation of a new classification system for identifying which schools should be subject to state intervention, ultimately to be managed by regional offices throughout the state. This new targeted intervention system classifies districts in need of intervention as "priority" districts, with specific emphasis on "focus" districts.

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.

Seeking to address complaints about the makeup of his new education reform commission, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has added five additional members to the panel in advance of its first meeting later this month. The new appointees include a parent advocate from Rochester, a newly elected school board member from the Adirondacks and a district superintendent from Central New York - three constituencies that the governor was criticized for not including on the panel when he announced it in April. The commission, which is being led by the former Citigroup chairman Richard D. Parsons, has also gained two more well-known names from Wall Street: Sanford I. Weill, another former Citigroup chairman, and Stanley F. Druckenmiller, a billionaire hedge fund manager.

Philadelphia is about to take a fateful step. Thomas Knudsen, the recently retired chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Gas Works and now temporary CEO of the school system, has released a plan that will lead to the dismantling of public education in Philadelphia. The plan, or "blueprint," was written by a business strategy organization called Boston Consulting; it recommends the closing of 40 of the city's 249 schools in the coming year, with additional school closings in the years to come. The goal is to have a school district where the central district is phased out and a large portion of the students are enrolled in privately managed charter schools.

An often quoted 'statistic' by various 'reformers' is that an effective teacher is three times as good as an ineffective one.  Sometimes it is said that the ineffective teacher gets a half year of progress while the effective teacher gets one and a half years of progress. I don't doubt that there are a small percent of teachers who have little classroom control, mostly new teachers, who only manage to get a half a year of progress.  I also can imagine a rare 'super-teacher' who somehow gets one and a half years of progress.  (I think I'm a pretty good teacher, but I doubt I get a year and a half worth of progress.)  I don't think there is a very accurate way to measure this nebulous 'progress' aside from test scores, but I could still imagine that there is a 'true' number, even if we will never be able to accurately calculate it. As this statistic has been quoted by Melinda Gates recently on PBS and by Michelle Rhee in various places, including the StudentsFirst website I thought, in response to a recent post on Diane Ravitch's blog I would investigate the source of this claim.

"When our schools are run for profit, there are disastrous consequences for both students and teachers. Teachers are "managed" through the "outcomes" they produce, meaning their students' test scores. This makes teachers focus not on their students strengths, not on their students' needs or interests, but rather on their deficits, on the skills and concepts the students must master to pass the next test. Students who are, for whatever reasons unable to produce test score gains (perhaps they might be uninterested, alienated, traumatized, hungry, special education, new to the English language, or a hundred other reasons) become a liability for the teacher and the school. Under the pressure to produce "profits" is the form of higher test scores, schools begin to systematically reject students like these, as we are already seeing among some charter schools. Schools care less about nurturing students or teachers. The environment becomes less humane. Turnover increases among teachers, and attrition rises for students. Residual public schools become a dumping ground for students too difficult to educate."

"Billionaires like privately managed schools. Parents are lured with glittering promises of getting their kids a sure ticket to college. Politicians want to appear to be champions of "school reform" with charters. But charters will not end the poverty at the root of low academic performance or transform our nation's schools into a high-performing system. The world's top-performing systems - Finland and Korea, for example - do not have charter schools. They have strong public school programs with well-prepared, experienced teachers and administrators. Charters and that other faux reform, vouchers, transform schooling into a consumer good, in which choice is the highest value."

"Municipal finance analysts at Moody's recently took a look at the impact of charter school growth on public finances, finding "while the vast majority of traditional public districts are managing through the rise of charter schools without a negative credit impact, a small but growing number face financial stress due to the movement of students to charters.""

"Since the first charter school was established in 1992 in St. Paul, Minn., the model has rapidly taken hold in cities across the United States. As of December 2011, about 5 percent of U.S. students attended the nation's 5,300 charter schools. A charter school is a public school governed by a nonprofit organization under a contract-or charter-with a state or local government. This charter exempts the school from selected rules and regulations. In return for funding and autonomy, the charter school must meet the accountability standards as defined by its charter. There are as many types of charter schools as there are educational approaches. But a common difference between charter schools and traditional schools is that charter school teachers are not typically unionized. Another is that their day-to-day administration is sometimes managed by a for-profit corporation."

"If you have heard the phrase "no excuses" charter schools but don't really know what they mean, here is an informative post about  them and the controversial philosophy under which they approach student discipline and achievement.  Joan Goodman, a professor in the Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania and director of the school's Teach For America program, explains her research on these charter schools to freelance journalist and public education advocate Jennifer Berkshire, who worked for six years editing a newspaper for the American Federation of Teachers in Massachusetts and who authors the EduShyster blog, where this Q * A originally appeared. Goodman is a former school psychologist whose article "Charter Management Organizations and the Regulated Environment: Is It Worth the Price?" appeared in the March 2013 issue of Educational Researcher."

"For decades, principals have been recognized as important contributors to the effectiveness of schools. In an era of school accountability reform and shared decisionmaking and management in schools, leadership matters. Principals constitute the core of the leadership team in schools."

Over the past decade I have served as a mentor teacher to more than a dozen beginning teachers in the challenging schools of Oakland. Most of them have been interns, fresh out of college, with just a few weeks of summer training, and a "bag of tricks" that they were given by their only slightly more experienced trainers. They are trained to focus on the data. Start testing early, and make sure the students understand how important those scores are. Set BIG goals, such as that 80% of your students will score well. Track progress using big graphs on the wall with each student's name or number. Develop reward systems to manage behavior. Step into one of these classrooms, and you will find elaborate systems that are designed to "incent" good behavior, and impose costs on bad. You may even find a whole economy, complete with currency - the "behavior bucks," handed out in $100 bills prepared on the school photocopier.

From managing our nation's finances to designing policies that create more jobs for America's workers and graduates, federal leaders are consumed by capital related decisions.

As a growing number of states move toward legislation that would institute teacher merit pay, the debate around whether and how to use student test scores in high-stakes staffing decisions has become even more hotly contested. The majority of merit pay initiatives, such as those recently proposed in Ohio and Florida, rely to some extent on value-added estimation, the method of measuring a teacher's impact by tracking student growth on test scores from year to year. We recently exchanged e-mails with Steven Glazerman, a Senior Fellow at the policy research group Mathematica. Glazerman specializes in teacher recruitment, performance management, professional development, and compensation. According to Glazerman, a strong understanding of the constructive uses and limitations of value-added data can prove beneficial for district-level human resources practitioners.

The pace at which the highest-performing charter-management organizations are "scaling up" is being determined largely by how rapidly they can develop and hire strong leaders and acquire physical space, and by the level of support they receive for growth from city or state policies, say leaders from some charter organizations viewed by advocates as successful.

Ever wonder how a hedge fund manager ended up on the board of directors of your local charter school?