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"A good teacher is the most important factor in a child's academic learning" Every time I hear this statement, my blood pressure goes up. I usually respond by saying that yes, a child's teacher is very important. But teachers have a relatively small effect on children's academic success when compared to the effect of out-of-school factors like economic insecurity, poor health care, unhealthy diet, homelessness and all the other ills of society. Educational "reforms" that ignore these factors are tarnished silver bullets, doomed to fail. Years of this type of wishful thinking has diverted Americans from having the undistorted, fact-based conversation we must have before educational outcomes can improve.

In a weekend interview with GRADEBOOK's Jeffrey Solochek, Michael Kooi, the executive director of Florida's Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice. Kooi played the interview close to the vest and effectively explained how the state's new initiatives would work. The interview would have been  innocuous had it not for the way he decided  to answer the offer to make an additional comment choice at the end of the interview. Kooi chose to spin the fact that 15 of 31 failures in Florida last year were from charter schools - including the one where his boss, Governor Rick Scott signed SB736

Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. We explore student-level and school-level explanations for these differences using a large sample of Massachusetts charter schools. Our results show that urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond ambient non-charter levels (that is, the average achievement level for urban non-charter students), and beyond non-urban achievement in math. Student demographics explain some of these gains since urban charters are most effective for non-whites and low-baseline achievers. At the same time, non-urban charter schools are uniformly ineffective. Our estimates also reveal important school-level heterogeneity in the urban charter sample. A non-lottery analysis suggests that urban schools with binding, well-documented admissions lotteries generate larger score gains than under-subscribed urban charter schools with poor lottery records. We link the magnitude of charter impacts to distinctive pedagogical features of urban charters such as the length of the school day and school philosophy. The relative effectiveness of urban lottery-sample charters is accounted for by over-subscribed urban schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to education.

Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. We explore student-level and school-level explanations for these differences using a large sample of Massachusetts charter schools. Our results show that urban charter schools boost achievement well beyond ambient non-charter levels (that is, the average achievement level for urban non-charter students), and beyond non-urban achievement in math. Student demographics explain some of these gains since urban charters are most effective for non-whites and low-baseline achievers. At the same time, non-urban charter schools are uniformly ineffective. Our estimates also reveal important school-level heterogeneity in the urban charter sample. A non-lottery analysis suggests that urban schools with binding, well-documented admissions lotteries generate larger score gains than under-subscribed urban charter schools with poor lottery records. We link the magnitude of charter impacts to distinctive pedagogical features of urban charters such as the length of the school day and school philosophy. The relative effectiveness of urban lottery-sample charters is accounted for by over-subscribed urban schools' embrace of the No Excuses approach to education.

Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade is a new report from Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank. The report aims to convince parents, taxpayers and policymakers that they should be as concerned about middle-class schools not making the grade as they are about the failures of the nation's large, poor, urban school districts. But, the report suffers from egregious methodological flaws invalidating nearly every bold conclusion drawn by its authors. First, the report classifies as middle class any school or district where the share of children qualifying for free or reduced-priced lunch falls between 25% and 75%. Seemingly unknown to the authors, this classification includes as middle class some of the poorest urban centers in the country, such as Detroit and Philadelphia. But, even setting aside the crude classification of middle class, none of the report's major conclusions are actually supported by the data tables provided. The report concludes, for instance, that middle-class schools perform much less well than the general public, parents and taxpayers believe they do. But, the tables throughout the report invariably show that the schools they classify as "middle class" fall precisely where one would expect them to-in the middle-between higher- and lower-income schools. 

Former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings recently published an essay titled "We Aren't Serious."  Spellings calls our nation's public school teachers "non-believers."  The non-believers, she claims, don't believe poor and minority kids can learn.  Further, she accuses our nation's teachers of being the single biggest obstacle to student's success.  Ms. Spellings, your shameless attempt to slander and discredit the nation's teachers will not stand.  We aren't "non-believers."  I do believe, Ms. Spellings.  Let me count the ways.

For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers. Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores. People like Jim Knight think we should push coaching.

Nearly one million American youth have participated in service programs such as Peace Corps and Teach For America. This paper provides the first causal estimate of the impact of service programs on those who serve, using data from a web-based survey of former Teach For America applicants. We estimate the effect of voluntary youth service using a sharp discontinuity in the Teach For America application process. Participating in Teach For America increases racial tolerance, makes individuals more optimistic about the life chances of poor children, and makes them more likely to work in education. We argue that these facts are broadly consistent with the "Contact Hypothesis," which states that, under appropriate conditions, interpersonal contact can reduce prejudice.

Here's a thought experiment: if teachers unions disappeared tomorrow, how would American public education change? And would kids - especially poor kids - do better as a result?

Public education was built on the philosophy articulated by Horace Mann, the Massachusetts reformer who pioneered the Common School: a system "one and the same for both rich and poor" with "all citizens on the same footing of equality before the law of land." Today, that vision of equality is in jeopardy.

Class Warfare: that's the title Steven Brill gave to his recent book on the state of American education. With such a title, one might think that that Brill's book would investigate how the deep class divisions between America's wealthy class and our poor and working class, a gap that has grown immensely over the last four decades, has harmed our schools and our students. After all, educational research has shown that greatest challenge our schools face is the grinding effect of poverty on so many of the students we teach.

As for the poor academic performance of low-income and minority students in the U.S., there are many reasons for this -- most beyond the control of schools. There is no doubt that children from troubled communities and families, in which few people have completed high school, much less college, are a challenge to educate. So let's be clear: parents and family background matter -- a lot! So much so that today, sadly, demography is destiny for most children.

New York State already outspends the rest of the nation on education, and a group of education experts at Teachers College at Columbia University is calling for it to spend even more. At a conference on Tuesday, the Campaign for Educational Equity, an institute of the college, will make the case that the state, which spends an average of $18,126 annually per student, should also pay for an array of support services outside the classroom that would cost an additional $4,750 annually for every poor student, or millions more every year.

"...The black-white gap was closing because, thanks in part to Johnson's War on Poverty, segregation was decreasing in the United States. The progress stopped because neo-liberal approaches to policy focused on school and market variables and not any longer on social and civil variables. Segregation increased. Today, many policy makers and educators do not see pooling or unpooling poverty as "reading variables" like phonemic awareness or comprehension strategies. But the truth of the matter -- and it is an expensive truth to ignore -- is that school is not separate from society, and that ceasing to pool poverty is the key variable to undoing the black-white gap, as well as the gap between rich and poor children more generally. "

This report examines our pervasive and longstanding failure to recognize and respond to variations in the effectiveness of our teachers. At the heart of the matter are teacher evaluation systems, which in theory should serve as the primary mechanism for assessing such variations, but in practice tell us little about how one teacher differs from any other, except teachers whose performance is so egregiously poor as to warrant dismissal.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, prodded by the Washington Teachers' Union, has relaxed teacher evaluation rules so that some veterans who receive two consecutive poor appraisals can keep their jobs.

The District fired 206 teachers for poor performance Friday, the second year in a row it has dismissed significant numbers of educators for sub-par work in the classroom.

The report, released January 4, details the observations of investigators from the Office of Charter Schools on six of the city's charter schools, and its recommendations to the Regents (all of which were followed). The report shows that most of the schools are neglecting basic elements of decent education, yet in no case were they punished for this, or pressured to change their ways. One thing is clear from this document: the Office of Charter Schools knows what good education looks like, but just doesn't think poor, black kids need to have it.

In the early days of the education-reform movement, a decade or so ago, you'd often hear from reformers a powerful rallying cry: "No excuses." For too long, they said, poverty had been used as an excuse by complacent educators and bureaucrats who refused to believe that poor students could achieve at high levels.