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The Institute on Race and Poverty's 2008 analysis of charter schools in the Twin Cities metro found that charter schools have failed to deliver on the promises made by charter school proponents. The study showed that charter schools were far more segregated than traditional public schools in the metro, even in school districts where traditional public schools already have high levels of racial segregation. The analysis also showed that charter schools performed worse than traditional public schools. The findings made it clear that, at that time, charter schools offered a poor choice to low-income students and students of color-one between low-performing public schools and charters that fared even worse. Compared to charter schools, other public school choice programs such as the Choice is Yours program offered much better schools to low-income students and students of color. Finally, the report found that charter schools hurt public education in the metro by encouraging racial segregation in the traditional public school system.  This work updates the 2008 study with more recent data-updating the work from the 2007-08 school year to 2010-11 in most cases. The results show that, despite significant changes to the state's charter law during the period, little has changed in the comparison between charters and traditional schools. Charter school students of all races are still much more likely to be attending a segregated school than traditional school students and the trends are largely negative. Charter schools are also still outperformed by their traditional equivalents. Analysis of 2010-11 test score data which controls for other school characteristics shows that charters still lag behind traditional schools, including especially the schools available to Choice is Yours participants.  

Newt Gingrich has some unconventional ideas about education reform. He wants every state to open a work-study college where students work 20 hours a week during the school year and full-time in the summer and then graduate debt-free. In poverty stricken K-12 districts, Mr. Gingrich said that schools should enlist students as young as 9 to14 to mop hallways and bathrooms, and pay them a wage. Currently child-labor laws and unions keep poor students from bootstrapping their way into middle class, Mr. Gingrich said.

"Last night I attended a screening of the controversial new film, "Won't Back Down" about a parent and a teacher who take over their "failing" public school.  I have written a FAQ about the movie which is posted here.  The film was produced by Walden Media, owned by right-wing billionaire Phillip Anschutz, who also co-produced "Waiting for 'Superman.'"  Advance screenings have been held around the country, organized by Michelle Rhee's Students First and other pro-charter lobbying organizations, to promote the "Parent Trigger," which allows a school to be turned over to a charter operator if 51% of the parents sign a petition calling for this. Here is a good analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy.   The movie itself is badly written, poorly acted, and full of exaggerated characterizations and unconvincing plot twists. Its message, transmitted with sledgehammer subtlety, is that the only reason that schools in poor communities are failing is because of incompetent lazy teachers who are protected by the union. "

"This report shows that segregation has increased seriously across the country for Latino students, who are attending more intensely segregated and impoverished schools than they have for generations.  The segregation increases have been the most dramatic in the West. The typical Latino student in the region attends a school where less than a quarter of their classmates are white; nearly two-thirds are other Latinos; and two-thirds are poor. California, New York and Texas, all states that have been profoundly altered by immigration trends over the last half-century, are among the most segregated states for Latino students along multiple dimensions."

"Teachers working in charters in an unnamed poor, rural Texas charter school district reported holding higher expectations of students and enjoying a more supportive teaching environment than colleagues who were working in traditional schools in the neighboring district. But the charter teachers had fewer opportunities for professional development and generally felt that the evaluation process was less fair, according to a new study that attempts to correct some of the problems with the existing research on differences between teachers in charters and traditional schools. "

"We were cautioned our test scores would go down. We were told not to worry. We were told not to take these lower scores on our 2013 state assessments...personally. You'll have to excuse me, but I do. It's a bit personal when I work with students who cry because they're worried about their score on state assessments or teachers...good teachers...who worry day and night that the state assessments will make them look as if they are poor teachers."

"For a dozen years, big philanthropy has been funding a massive crusade to remake public education for low-income and minority children in the image of the private sector. If schools were run like businesses competing in the market-so the argument goes-the achievement gap that separates poor and minority students from middle-class and affluent students would disappear. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation have taken the lead, but other mega-foundations have joined in to underwrite the self-proclaimed "education reform movement." Some of them are the Laura and John Arnold, Anschutz, Annie E. Casey, Michael and Susan Dell, William and Flora Hewlett, and Joyce foundations."

THERE is widespread alarm in the United States about the state of our math education. The anxiety can be traced to the poor performance of American students on various international tests, and it is now embodied in George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which requires public school students to pass standardized math tests by the year 2014 and punishes their schools or their teachers if they do not.

Abstract: The expansion of charter schools-publicly funded, yet in direct competition with traditional public schools-has emerged as a favored response to poor performance in the education sector. While a large and growing literature has sought to estimate the impact of these schools on student achievement, comparatively little is known about demand for the policy itself. Using election returns from three consecutive referenda on charter schools in Washington State, we weigh the relative importance of school quality, community and school demographics, and partisanship in explaining voter support for greater school choice. We find that low school quality-as measured by standardized tests-is a consistent and modestly strong predictor of support for charters. However, variation in performance between school districts is more predictive of charter support than variation within them. At the local precinct level, school resources, union membership, student heterogeneity, and the Republican vote share are often stronger predictors of charter support than standardized test results.

"We have a heritage of disrespect for the poor. Either they don't know what they're doing or they deserve what they get. (While we insist on bragging about our rags-to-riches family histories to prove the latter.)"

"The New Jersey Supreme Court has rebuked Gov. Chris Christie and ordered the state to increase spending on poor schools by an estimated $500 million. "

"When I say that poor kids should have the same school advantages as rich kids, I am not referring to unstructured classes and open classrooms, to balanced literacy or constructivist math..."

"In her most recent HuffPost piece, Michelle Rhee poses the rhetorical question, "How can I ask parents to accept less than I'd want for my kids?" She then goes on to make the same old tired arguments for school vouchers, most of which are simply different iterations of this shallow emotional ploy: "If public schools are lousy we must give the poor families the same opportunities that the rich folks in private schools have. It's only fair." And Ms. Rhee is not alone in this voucher resurgence; Indiana just passed what will arguably be the nation's most comprehensive voucher program."

"Class Size: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy argues that increasing average class size by one student will save about 2% of total education spending with negligible impact on academic achievement. It justifies this conclusion on the basis that Class-Size Reduction (CSR) is not particularly effective and is not as cost-effective as other reforms. However, this conclusion is based on a misleading review of the CSR research literature. The report puts too much emphasis on studies that are of poor quality or that do not focus on settings that are particularly relevant to the debate on class-size policy in the United States. It argues that class-size reduction is less cost-effective than other reform policies, but it bases this contention on an incomplete accounting of the benefits of smaller classes and an uncritical, unexamined list of alternative policies. The report's estimates of the potential cost savings are flawed as, in reality, schools cannot structurally reduce class size by only one student. Well-documented and long-term non-academic gains from CSR are not addressed. Likewise, the recommendation for releasing the ―least effective‖ teachers assumes a valid way of making such determinations is available. "

More than one out of every five principals leaves their school each year. In some cases, these career changes are driven by the choices of district leadership. In other cases, principals initiate the move, often demonstrating preferences to work in schools with higher achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals often use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments. We use longitudinal data from one large urban school district to study the relationship between principal turnover and school outcomes. We find that principal turnover is, on average, detrimental to school performance. Frequent turnover of school leadership results in lower teacher retention and lower student achievement gains. Leadership changes are particularly harmful for high poverty schools, low-achieving schools, and schools with many inexperienced teachers. These schools not only suffer from high rates of principal turnover but are also unable to attract experienced successors. The negative effect of leadership changes can be mitigated when vacancies are filled by individuals with prior experience leading other schools. However, the majority of new principals in high poverty and low-performing schools lack prior leadership experience and leave when more attractive positions become available in other schools.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about our schools' "secret success." Simply stated, poor and minority students are achieving at dramatically higher levels today than they were two decades ago-in some cases two or three grade levels higher. And while we can't be sure what led to this academic acceleration, test-based accountability was probably the most important factor. Or so I argued.

This paper presents a dynamic model of the decision to pursue a college education in which students face uncertainty about their future income stream after graduation due to unobserved heterogeneity in their innate scholastic ability. After students matriculate and start taking exams, they reevaluate their expectations about succeeding in college and may find it optimal to drop out and join the workforce without completing an undergraduate degree. The model shows that, in accordance with the data, poorer students are less likely to graduate and are more apt to drop out earlier than are wealthier students. Our model generates these results without introducing credit constraints. Conditioning on measures of innate ability, in the data we find that poor students are at least 27 percent more likely to drop out of college and they do so sooner than wealthier students. 

Ruling can be read at http://www.scribd.com/doc/60600507/Mulgrew-v-BOE-2 In a defeat for the city's teachers' union, a judge ruled on Thursday that the Education Department could proceed with plans to close 22 schools because of poor performance and place 15 charter schools in the buildings of traditional schools in September.

Gonzalez has touted initiatives to increase literacy and parental involvement to school community members throughout District 7, which is largely poor and low-performing. Now he is trying to turn District 7's attention toward arts education, at a time when many schools are facing cuts to their art and music teaching positions. He is asking a handful of local principals to help him write a large grant to fund after school and summer school arts education at multiple schools in future years.

As The Associated Press reported, the poorest school districts lost, on average, $581 per student to the budget ax, significantly more than the wealthiest 150 school districts that lost an average of $214 per student. Some poor districts lost more than 10 times more than some wealthier districts.