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State education officials ripped Mayor Bloomberg's reforms of the city's school system Tuesday, calling failed public schools "warehouses" for thousands of unlucky students. Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, blasted the mayor's long-standing policy of closing troubled schools and replacing them with new ones at a meeting with the editorial board of the Daily News.

Over a third of the city's public schools are failing their students, according to new state standards that paint a much bleaker picture than the one offered by the city. The New York State Education Department added some 350 city schools on Thursday to its annual bulletin of "schools in need of improvement" - but 180 of those schools earned A's or B's on their latest progress reports from the city. State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said the state's new list of troubled schools offers more proof of the city school system's dismal performance.

The New England Common Assessment Program is on its way out in New Hampshire. The state Department of Education is planning to implement a new standardized test system to measure reading and math proficiency starting in 2013-14, said Paul Leather, deputy commissioner of education. The state will discontinue using the NECAP for reading and math after one more round of testing in October, and then roll out the Smarter Balanced Assessment the next school year. Leather described the new test a stronger assessment with no increased cost.

"In the past few weeks, two major reports on teacher turnover and retention have been released. One was rolled out with extensive media coverage, and has been the subject of much discussion among policymakers and education commentators. The other was written by me, along with Teachers College doctoral student Clare Buckley. The first report, "The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America's Urban Schools," was prepared by TNTP, an organization formerly known as The New Teacher Project that prepares and provides support for teachers in urban districts, and that advocates for changes in teacher policy. The second, "Thoughts of Leaving: An Exploration of Why New York City Middle School Teachers Consider Leaving Their Classrooms," was released by the Research Alliance for New York City Schools (RANYCS), a nonprofit research group based at New York University. (RANYCS published a report by Will Marinell in February 2011 that examined detailed patterns of teacher turnover in New York City middle schools apparent through the district's human-resources office.)"

The recent agreement to clarify and refine the New York teacher evaluation law took up an issue that has a special importance for New York City public school educators- the appeals process for ineffective ratings on end-of-the-year summative evaluations. Readers of Edwize know that last December the ship of teacher evaluation negotiations for the 34 Transformation and Restart schools sunk on the rocky shoals of this very issue, when Mayor Bloomberg and the NYC Department of Education refused to negotiate a meaningful and substantive appeals process. For there to be renewed progress on those negotiations, as well as on the negotiations for the evaluations of all New York City public school educators, the issue of the appeal process had to be resolved. The agreement settled the issue of the appeals process for New York City by guaranteeing vital and indispensable due process rights in the teacher evaluation process. With these rights, the educational integrity and fairness of the teacher evaluation process are secure. To understand the importance of the appeals process, and why the agreement secured what New York public school teachers need from due process in such a process, we must first examine the background and context of this issue.

"New scores from standardized tests   aligned with the Common Core State Standards were released earlier this month in New York, and, as expected, the number of students who did well plummeted. This decline was predicted by New York State officials. How did they know? Here to explain in an eye-opening piece is award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, who has for more than a year chronicled on the test-driven reform in her state"

Most say the hardest job in Michigan doesn't belong to the governor, not even Detroit's mayor, but the new emergency manager for Detroit Public Schools. So far, Roy Roberts has asked teachers, students and parents to share in some deep cuts, but tonight Action News Investigator Ross Jones has details on a costly new perk that's raising eyebrows

Florida school districts are flooded with applications for new charter schools, motivated by several new laws that make it easier to start traditional and virtual charters. Nearly 100 more new charter school applications have been filed for the 2012-13 school year than were filed at the same time last year -- a 38 percent increase, according to statistics from the Department of Education.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced the award of two charter school grants, totaling $49 million, to increase public school options in Florida and New York. The Florida Department of Education and the New York State Education Department will each receive five-year grants under the Charter School Program state educational agency (SEA) competition, which provides funds to states to create new high-quality charter schools and disseminate information about existing charters.

The national media consensus is that New Orleans has discovered the miracle cure for urban education.  Their conclusion is largely drawn from data provided by the Louisiana Department of Education, which obviously has a vested interest in emphasizing the good and ignoring the bad in the post-Katrina education changes.  New Orleans is important in the national education debate, but not for the reasons we commonly hear; it is important because it is the beachhead for a national movement to remove schools from local democratic control and accountability.  The privatization trade-off is that the public sacrifices control of schools for a privatized system that delivers better education for the same tax dollar.  While the citizens of New Orleans certainly lost control of their schools, it cannot be said that they have received a better education, if that also means an equitable education, nor can it be said that it came at the same cost.

As you may have heard, the big news in Wisconsin is that a new Walker rule allowing school districts to cut teacher pay by approximately 30% is at the tipping point of becoming big news in Wisconsin.

The sticking point had been the appeals process for teachers who receive negative performance ratings. Under the new agreement, teachers who are rated ineffective by their principal will be monitored during the next year by an independent educator, according to a source. If the principal still finds the teacher ineffective after a second year and the independent monitor agrees, then the burden of proof will be on the teacher to fight the firing, the source said. If the monitor disagrees, the city will be responsible for proving that the teacher should be canned. This new system is modeled after the much-hyped teacher evaluation plan in New Haven, CT.

Children in New York City who learned to read using an experimental curriculum that emphasized nonfiction texts outperformed those at other schools that used methods that have been encouraged since the Bloomberg administration's early days, according to a new study to be released Monday. For three years, a pilot program tracked the reading ability of approximately 1,000 students at 20 New York City schools, following them from kindergarten through second grade. Half of the schools adopted a curriculum designed by the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Core Knowledge Foundation. The other 10 used a variety of methods, but most fell under the definition of "balanced literacy," an approach that was spread citywide by former Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, beginning in 2003.

We all know just how much Governor Christie values education, but if you thought that numbnuts, idiot and drug mule stretched the governor's vocabulary, then take heart. Over the past week, Chris Christie has added valuable new terms to his, and New Jersey's, political dictionary. Below is a guide to new terms, and old standbys, that the governor has brought back through sheer will, repetition and exasperation.

Principals who object to the new state system to evaluate teachers and principals based on student testing have begun circulating a petition against it. In his On Education column in The New York Times Monday, Michael Winerip reported that more than 650 principals from around the state - 18 from New York City schools - had signed. Here, a few of the principals who signed give their reasons.

They're everywhere: The superintendent of the state's Recovery School District. Two of his top deputies. The head of a local nonprofit that acts as gatekeeper for millions in federal dollars earmarked to start new charter schools. And when a new state school board is seated in January, the board member who will represent most of New Orleans. At every corner of the city's education establishment, you'll find alumni of Teach for America, a group founded two decades ago to channel some of the country's most promising and ambitious college students into underserved urban classrooms.

New York has the most effective school-choice system of any of the nation's largest school districts, allowing students and parents the most freedom and providing them with the most relevant information on educational performance, according to a new Brookings Institution report scheduled for publication online Wednesday. But even New York got a B under the report's A-to-F grading system, with Brookings saying the city provided the least useful online information for comparing schools and giving it low scores in several other categories.

The New York City reform model is centered upon closing 'failing' schools and opening new ones. Some of these 'failing' schools have been pillars of their communities for decades. One such school I read about in The New York Times is Jamaica High School in Jamaica, Queens. This large high school opened in 1925. But it is in the process, now, of being shut down. New York City rates schools on an A to F scale and if a school gets an 'F' or a 'D' or three consecutive 'C's, then it runs the risk of getting shut down. I thought I'd take a look at the last Jamaica High School progress report to see if there was anything 'interesting.' What I found is that Jamaica High School, in the 2009 to 2010 school year did very well on the regents component of their 'progress' score. They ranked, in fact, 164th out of 424 schools. In this post, I'll explain how the 'Weighted Regents Pass Grades' are calculated and how Jamaica High School fared quite well on this metric.  Below is from Jamaica High's 2009-2010 progress report.  The left bar graph is the comparison to their peer group and the right graph is the comparison to all city schools.  Click on the image to enlarge it.

A new well-financed player has jumped into the debate over education reform in New York State, and already the sparks have begun to fly. The New York Campaign for Achievement Now, or NYCAN, has launched its Web site, and its executive director, Christine Grant, said it has raised $1.2 million from such entities as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

The following open letter from UFT President Michael Mulgrew to New York City parents ran as a full-page ad in the New York Daily News on Jan. 9.