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The Department of Education will replicate other cities' parent training programs and start measuring how well schools engage families, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced tonight.

After an Oct. 14 evening panel featuring UFT President Michael Mulgrew, celebrated educator Deborah Meier, Green Dot founder Steve Barr and parent advocate Mona Davids, the more than 100 charter school educators in attendance returned to UFT headquarters on Oct. 15 for a full day of workshops and panels on "building a progressive charter school movement."

In another victory for the UFT's effort to organize New York City charter schools, educators at Fahari Academy Charter School in Brooklyn announced on Oct. 4 that they have organized a union at the school and intend to join the UFT.

A substantial literature documents large variation in teacher effectiveness at raising student achievement, providing motivation to identify highly effective and ineffective teachers early in their careers. Using data from New York City public schools, we estimate whether subjective evaluations of teacher effectiveness have predictive power for the achievement gains made by teachers' future students. We find that these subjective evaluations have substantial power, comparable with and complementary to objective measures of teacher effectiveness taken from a teacher's first year in the classroom.

If charter school advocates had any concern that Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries wasn't on their side, he lay their worries to rest last night. Jeffries, a U.S. House of Representatives hopeful who has not always supported charter schools in his district, pledged his full-fledged support to charter school parents and backers at a town hall event hosted by the New York City Charter Center.

Waving signs and shouting out questions, parents from local schools interrupted an information session held Saturday by a charter school planning to move into Cobble Hill. The meeting, held at the Carroll Gardens library, broke up before head of Success Academy charter schools, former Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, could deliver her planned presentation.

The DOE would have us believe that the high school progress reports it released last week are a neutral evaluation tool where any school can do well irrespective of student demographics and characteristics. As proof it would point to its peer index metric which sorts schools into peer groups based on student characteristics and their eighth grade standardized test scores - the concept being that schools are compared to schools with similar students. Unfortunately the system doesn't work the way it was intended.

Students, teachers and advocates say they are watching once-respectable schools corrode before their eyes as the facilities are swamped with more high-needs students, and teachers have fewer incentives to stay.

The city wants to give one third of a formerly-struggling Cobble Hill high school to a high-performing charter school - but parents are already fighting the co-location plan. Under the plan, the Baltic and Court street school - which is home to Brooklyn School for Global Studies and the School for International Studies - would house grades kindergarten through fourth of Success Charter Network's school, run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.

"A data analyst who worked for the past several years in the New York City Department of Education wrote the following about Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy charter chain. Most of the data he cites comes from public records maintained by the city or state education departments. His footnotes are at the bottom of the post."

"The biggest threat to education today is the corporate education reform movement-what many of us call "Ed Deform." It is also the biggest threat to teachers' working conditions."

"This commentary traces the transition of education policy from the Bloomberg-Klein years to the current administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina a year into their tenure."