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The justification for charter schools is that they provide parents with a wide range of choices at public expense. But what is increasingly happening in Los Angeles, which has more charter schools than any other city in the nation, serves as a warning that all is not well with the movement.

Thousands of people from all over Spain demonstrated Saturday October 22nd in Madrid against severe austerity measures affecting public education in several Spanish regions. The march on Madrid, which attracted more than 100,000 protesters - huge by Spanish standards - was jointly organized by national education unions and the national parents' association, CEAPA. Taking part in the protest, a somewhat unprecedented coalition: educators, parents, and students.

Parents at a struggling Bedford-Stuyvesant public school say the city is playing favorites - pushing their children out so a charter school that's already in the building can expand.

Teacher bonuses will hinge on how well they engage parents in some south-central Idaho schools.

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 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.

""This is one of the big insights for me. I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn't seem to work in a choice environment for education. I've studied competitive markets for much of my career. That's my academic focus for my work. And it's [education] the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn't work. I think it's not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. I think there are other supports that are needed. Frankly parents have not been really well educated in the mechanisms of choice.… I think the policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we've had for the 20 years of the charter school movement. I think we need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools, but I also think we have to have some oversight of the overseers.""

"RTI raises many concerns. Some parents worry that RTI winds up denying children with learning disabilities services. One fear is that some parents don't think they can request an evaluation, or they are led to believe it isn't necessary."

Louisiana is poised to establish the nation's most expansive system of school choice by adopting a package of vouchers and other tools that would give many parents control over the use of tax dollars to educate their children. The initiative would effectively redefine vouchers, which have typically helped lower-income public-school students pay for private schools. Vouchers could now also be used by students to pay for state-approved apprenticeships at local businesses, as well as college courses and private online classes, while they are still in public schools.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday he wanted all parts of public schoolteachers' evaluations to be open for all to see-not restricted to parents, as some in Albany are suggesting.

On paper, the argument in favor of school choice is impeccable: Parents will be able to enroll their children in a school that best meets their needs and interests, bad schools will be forced to improve or close, and society will benefit from better educated graduates. But the reality is different.

But a review of the best evidence on teachers' sentiments shows that educators are not unhappy because they resent the new emphasis on teacher evaluations, a key element of President Obama's Race to the Top program; in fact, according to a separate survey of 10,000 public school teachers from Scholastic and the Gates Foundation, the majority support using measures of student learning to assess teachers, and the mean number of years teachers believe they should devote to the classroom before being assessed for tenure is 5.4, a significant increase from the current national average of 3.1 years. But polling shows teachers are depressed by the increasing reliance on standardized tests to measure student learning-the "high stakes" testing regime that the standards and accountability movement has put in place across the country and that Race to the Top has reinforced in some states and districts. Teachers are also concerned that growing numbers of parents are not able to play an active role in their children's education, and they are angry about the climate of austerity that has invaded the nation's schools, with state and local budget cuts threatening key programs that help students learn and overcome the disadvantages of poverty.

Here's Helen Gym's letter to Philadelphia Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen, who recently announced a plan that will radically restructure the city's public schools by closing 40 schools next year and more after that, and replacing the central office with "achievement networks" run by outsiders who would bid for contracts.

Our school no longer represents our surrounding community.  This is a problem.  When I began teaching nine years ago we enjoyed enthusiastic support from members of our community, including local businesses and organizations.  Each year these relationships have dwindled; there is less and less of a connection between students and adults in the community.  Bluntly and sadly put, the feeling is these aren't our kids.  If a student decides to skip school and hang out at the local deli, there is little chance that they will be spotted an adult who will recognize them - an adult who will relay the message to the student's parent.  It is difficult for students to take pride in a place that is not home.

President Obama, you do appear to be a thoughtful man. If you disagree with what Romney said, you should rein in your own Education Secretary and ask him to take back his erroneous statements on the subject.  Even more importantly, if you respect the priorities of parents and teachers as well as the best education research, you will immediately restore the $620 million in your budget that districts can use for class size reduction.

"Though the film "Won't Back Down," starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal, is not being released in theaters until the end of September, its backers are already drumming up support for it and its subject: the controversial "parent trigger" laws that have passed in a few states and are being considered by many others."

"As a former union teacher and present union staff member, what struck me most profoundly while watching Won't Back Down was the stark disconnect between the way people and schools were characterized in the film and the way they are in the real world. That isn't surprising given that it's a Hollywood film, but it is harmful -- precisely because these kinds of stereotypes often fuel destructive and unnecessary divisions and tensions among parents, teachers and students in real life. Those divisions often stop people from working together to find effective, win-win solutions to problems that affect all of us."

Much controversy has been aroused and much ink has been expended about the way in which Eva Moskowitz is now defying the original stated purpose of charter schools, and marketing her chain of Success Academies to white middle class families in Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side.  Her glossy flyers, sent to households by the truckload, with many families having already received five or six, increasingly feature the faces of little white children. There has also been much debate about the problems of NYC's demanding school "choice" process -- but not much said about how school choice may further segregate  our public schools, especially in many areas of Brownstone Brooklyn, where the last ten years or more of gradual gentrification have led to more diversity in neighborhood schools.  While the UCLA Civil Rights project has shown how charter schools contributes to more segregation nationwide, here are the observations of one Brooklyn parent who is also a high school teacher, Cindy Black, about what happened when a new elementary school of "choice" -- though not a charter -- opened up  in her community

As expected, the Panel for Educational Policy (otherwise known as the Panel of Eight Puppets) rubberstamped two new , very controversial charter co-locations of Eva Moskowitz's expanding chain of Success Academy last night, despite huge community opposition, and hundreds of raucous and vociferous parents and teachers who turned out.  Perhaps DOE should be renamed Department of Eva. Before the meeting began, the audience voted no-confidence in the PEP, with a show of hands; and the public comment period featured a very funny interview of "Eva" played by Gloria Brandman.  (Here are some news clips:  Times, NY1, Daily News.) There was even more police presence than usual and signs up everywhere that people disrupting the meeting would be ejected; clearly DOE is very spooked by the growing militancy of protesters.