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A federal district court in Florida has ruled that parents of a student with autism have stated a valid claim that charter school employees' use of excessive force constituted a violation of the student's substantive due process rights. The court concluded that the parents had alleged facts sufficient to show: (1) use of excessive force that "shocks the conscience;" and (2) the charter school employees acted under color of state law. It found, however, that the parents' allegations of emotional injuries and psychological harm were insufficient to rise to the level of conduct that shocks the conscience.

When the La Cima Elementary Charter School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, gave out its family survey in February, administrators were thrilled that about 95 percent of families who responded were satisfied or highly satisfied with the three-year-old school. But that survey was not counted by the Department of Education in its annual progress report. The city uses a standardized environment survey that it distributes to parents and teachers every March, and La Cima refused to use it.

Our family gets a close-up look of how big money has taken over politics -- even at the local level

Pearson is a London-based mega-corporation that owns everything from the Financial Times to Penguin Books, and also dominates the business of educating American children. The company promotes its many education-related products on a website that features an idyllic, make-believe town. It's called Pearsonville, and it looks like the international conglomerate version of SimCity. In this virtual town, school buses whizz through tree-lined streets, and the city center features skyscrapers and a tram. Tabs pop up to show you just how many Pearson products are available. A red schoolhouse features young kids using Pearson products to learn math (with Pearson's enVision Math) and take standardized tests online. Nearby, at the Pearsonville high school, students use the company's online instructional materials to study science. The high school also features online testing. Pearson online courses are available at the town library. At the model home, parents can use Pearson's student information system to track their children's grades. The "test centre," not shockingly, provides even more testing options. It's a beautiful little town. A Las Vegas-style sign welcomes you, while a biplane flies through the sky trailing a Pearson banner behind it.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg made quite a splash last year when he donated $100 million to help fix Newark's troubled schools not only because of the size of the gift but its promise of involving Newark residents in deciding how the money would be spent-funds that the city would match.  According to Joan Whitlow of the Star-Ledger's NJ.com, that promise of "citizen-centered" involvement has fallen by the wayside with the announcement that the Foundation for Newark's Future will be dispensing Zuckerberg funds.  Whitlow reports that the foundation's board has three voting and one nonvoting members, only one of whom is from Newark, and that's Mayor Cory Booker.  The only way to get on the board, according to Gregory Taylor, the foundation's president and CEO, is to donate at least $10 million because the foundation has to "raise enough to match the original $100 million."  

Charter schools across Oregon learned three weeks before school started that they would not receive up to $225,000 each in grants from the state. From Portland to Bandon, school directors scrambled to fill the void, cutting supplies, counselors, computers, library materials and turning to parents for more donations. In a few cases, the loss of start-up funds may postpone schools opening until next year. Charter school leaders want to know why they lost the expected funds and why they weren't told sooner. The state says the federal government is at fault; the federal government put the onus back on the state. Either way, it could have a long-lasting impact on the schools.

Emily Sirota, candidate for Denver Public School Board District 1, appeared on MSNBC's Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell to discuss the unprecedented amounts of corporate cash flowing into the school board race to try to defeat her. Emily supports reinvesting in our neighborhood schools and opposes vouchers - and that's why Huge Money is trying to defeat her.

School board elections are supposed to be quintessential America contests. Moms and Main Street small-business owners and retired teachers campaign by knocking on doors, writing letters to the editor and debating at elementary schools. Then friends and neighbors troop to the polls and make their choices. But what happens when all the pathologies of national politics-over-the-top spending by wealthy elites and corporate interests, partisan consultants jetting in to shape big-lie messaging, media outlets that cover spin rather than substance-are visited on a local school board contest? Emily Sirota is finding out.

You will find things supportive of the administration's educational policy at least in part, and things at least implicitly critical of the administration's policy.   That may make it difficult to get the entire proposal as written accepted for a platform for a sitting President.

While some of the changes to the No Child Left Behind law proposed Tuesday are widely considered to be improvements, others could prove disastrous for students with disabilities and other groups of students. One of the bill's most striking features is its elimination of specific achievement targets for individual groups of students. For students with disabilities and students learning English, that portion of NCLB-the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act-was groundbreaking.

In a repudiation of the segregationist policies that have caused turmoil in Wake County, NC for the past two years, voters have returned a pro-diversity majority that we can only hope will vote to restore the most successful socioeconomic integration plan in the U. S.  

Wake County school board members seem poised to approve sweeping changes to the county's student-assignment plan - changes designed to let parents choose which schools their children would attend.

Senate education chairman Tom Harkin has finally released his committee's bill for renewing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (now known as No Child Left Behind.) Here's a look at the key pieces with respect to teacher-quality policy

Another hedge-funder is going to prison for insider trading. Only this time, the imprisonment of convicted Wall Street crook Raj Rajaratnam could be costly to some corporate school reforms and charter school privateers.

In the 2007 case Morse v. Frederick, when the court upheld the discipline of a student who had unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at a school-related event, Justice Thomas joined the majority's opinion. But he wrote a separate concurrence, for himself only, explaining that he would go further and overrule the landmark 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. That case, involving students who wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War, has been a fundamental guarantee of student speech rights in school.

Some public charter schools do wonderful work. Some don't. This is what can happen when officials who allow charter schools to open don't pay enough attention to what happens after the doors open to students

'We're from the government, and we're here to help." Those words strike fear in just about any situation but they sound particularly ominous when the subject of the government's help is Florida's university system, and the ones doing the helping are Gov. Rick Scott and the state Legislature, backed by Big Business. Their assistance, to take form during the spring legislative session, will be a push to replace subjects such as music, psychology and French literature with the study of science, technology, engineering and math.

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.

As the few regular readers of this blog know, I am working on a report that focuses on Texas charter schools. Many of the myths surrounding charter schools-especially the so-called high-performing charter schools-will be examined and some debunked. In doing this research, I found something very, very curious. The Texas Education Agency lists a number of schools with the KIPP name. Yet, KIPP does not claim all of these schools on their national website. Kipp does not use the same names to identify schools with the Texas Education Agency and on the national KIPP website.

President Obama's decision to separate his jobs bill into individual pieces and push for funds to hire teachers and first responders first has so far failed to convince any Republicans lawmakers of its efficacy. And in large part, the pushback from the GOP has been fairly straightforward. As House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office argued in an email on Monday, the administration has already asked for and received billions of dollars in direct aid to states for the purposes of retaining teachers and putting firefighters and cops back to work -- and it hasn't made a lick of difference.