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Gov. John Kasich signed a two-year budget that imposes a performance-based salary schedule on school districts that receive Race to the Top money, raising questions about the impact on individual union agreements that were negotiated to win the $400 million federal grant-and also on the state's eligibility for the money.

Some Utah teachers worry that the Ogden School District is setting a precedent for other districts by skipping negotiations with its teachers union and phasing out pay based on experience.

Florida has long been a testing ground for private-school voucher programs and-no surprise-has also hosted a number of high-profile political and legal battles over the separation of church and state.

The foundation of the late Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton donated nearly $12 million to Southern California charter schools and reform-minded education outfits last year, as part of a $150-million investment in education nationwide, the organization announced Tuesday.

Mike Feinberg is co-founder of the KIPP Academies and superintendent of KIPP Houston, which serves more than 6,000 students in 18 schools. In 2007, KIPP Houston announced its "KIPP Turbo" plan, under which it aims to grow into a Pre-K to 12 network of 42 schools. The goal is to enroll 10 percent of the students in Houston, making KIPP Houston by far the largest network of charter schools in one city. As part of this effort, Mike recently announced that he'd be shifting roles to focus on fundraising, advocacy, and external relations, while handing the superintendency of KIPP Houston off to a successor. If you're not familiar with Mike's story, you can check out Jay Mathews' KIPP book, Work Hard, Be Nice for an immensely readable, if pretty syrupy, account. Anyway, with Mike changing roles and with KIPP Houston well into its ambitious growth plan, I thought it'd be interesting to chat with Mike about looming challenges and lessons learned.

The Republican-led Michigan Legislature on Thursday approved changes to the state's teacher tenure system that supporters say would make it easier to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom.

Two groups representing elementary and secondary principals announced a joint plan on Thursday to help states and districts create principal-evaluation tools that will provide trustworthy feedback and opportunities for professional development.

Inci Akpinar, the vice president of a company called Atlas Texas Construction & Trading, sat down with an official from the Louisiana Department of Education a little more than a year ago and made him an offer.

There has been much chatter - on both the local and national level - about charter schools. There is also a lot of misinformation out there, too. Unlike their public counterparts, privately run charter schools often don't offer nearly enough value relative to what they take away from traditional public schools, state and national budgets, and the public.

"Investing in public eduation initiatives, from quality pre-kindergarten programs to lowering class size in elementary schools, pays big dividends for the state's economic and social welfare, according to a report from the Education Law Center and Penn State University Professor Dana Mitra. "

"Private voucher schools are failing Milwaukee children with disabilities. When these voucher schools ignore their obligations to educate and accommodate children with disabilities, they force Milwaukee Public Schools to pick up the slack - while giving MPS fewer resources to do so. Voucher schools' large-scale exclusion of children with disabilities has led to a segregated environment with a disproportionate share of children with disabilities attending MPS."

Today the Walton Family Foundation announced investments totaling more than $157 million in education reform initiatives for 2010 - a $23 million increase over 2009, in which education reform grants totaled $134 million. Grants were made to organizations and programs that empower parents, particularly in low-income communities, to choose among quality, publicly funded schools for their children.

If you are a public school parent and you're worried about the way standardized testing increasingly dominates our children's education, brace yourself. Things are about to get a lot worse.

...Thus explains how Nauiokas became principal at the Haven Academy Charter School, where a third of students are in foster care. Another third are in families receiving preventive services to diminish the need for foster care. The rest are from the Mott Haven community, which is in a Congressional district where a soaring poverty rate keeps a third of residents on public assistance.

"Korea's phenomenal educational performance has little to do with teachers. It is entirely about parents. Parents who were weaned on a Confucian ethic which echoed for centuries ― education is the route to success and status. "

"Local charter schools serving middle and high school students are losing about half their teachers every year, according to a study of the Los Angeles Unified School District released Tuesday. The rate of turnover is nearly three times that of other public schools, although they also are seeing high rates of departures."

Since 2008, the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation's largest educational publishers, has financed free international trips - some have called them junkets - for education commissioners whose states do business with the company. When the state commissioners are asked about these trips - to Rio de Janeiro; London; Singapore; and Helsinki, Finland - they emphasize the time they spend with educators from around the world to get ideas for improving American public schools.

California Gov. Jerry Brown wrote a tough indictment of data-based school reform in a message he wrote vetoing a bill that would have changed the state's accountability system for public schools.

Jerry Brown is perhaps the most powerful leader in our country who actually understands what has happened to our schools as a result of standards-based data-driven reform. In a move that signals exactly what should be done with the moribund No Child Left Behind in Congress, Brown has issued a veto of a California law, SB 547, that revamped the state's similarly flawed accountability system.

When Hector Leon arrived at Urban Assembly Academy of History and Citizenship for Young Men four years ago to be the high school's college advisor, he found himself in an "emergency" situation. "When I got there, there was no college office in place," said Leon, 41. "It's a difficult position, because you have a lot of need in the population. I mean, you become a brother, father, uncle." Last week, Leon became one of the nearly 700 school employees laid off in a sweeping single-agency cut, the largest since Mayor Bloomberg took office. His position was eliminated during a crucial time when students start working on their college applications and financial aid packages. Leon was helping one student apply to Harvard and Yale.