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A new study commissioned by D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray recommends that the city turn around or close more than three dozen traditional public schools in its poorest neighborhoods and expand the number of high-performing charter schools.

Just this week, Florida announced its new district grading system. These systems have been popping up all over the nation, and given the fact that designing one is a requirement of states applying for No Child Left Behind waivers, we are sure to see more. I acknowledge that the designers of these schemes have the difficult job of balancing accessibility and accuracy. Moreover, the latter requirement - accuracy - cannot be directly tested, since we cannot know "true" school quality. As a result, to whatever degree it can be partially approximated using test scores, disagreements over what specific measures to include and how to include them are inevitable (see these brief analyses of Ohio and California). As I've discussed before, there are two general types of test-based measures that typically comprise these systems: absolute performance and growth. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Florida's attempt to balance these components is a near total failure, and it shows in the results.

A broad coalition of 38 civil rights, education reform and business groups sent House education chairman John Kline a scathing letter Wednesday, describing his No Child Left Behind legislation as potentially racist. "It undermines the core American value of equal opportunity in education embodied in Brown v. Board of Education," the groups wrote.

Americans are tragically bound to our ideals-such as our faith in free markets, rugged individualism, and our contemporary tandem of royalty, wealth and fame-and we fear pulling aside those curtains because we don't want to confront that those ideals may be wrong. Thus, our leaders are allowed and even encouraged to do the same thing over and over, while lamenting that things never change (or worse, while never even acknowledging that our so-called "crises" are not unique to our time but persistent realities we in fact maintain by the very cures we prescribe). And such is the case with the drop-out crisis redux (Obama's 2012 incarnation).

The education debate in New Jersey is increasingly becoming a debate about local control of schools. Governor Christie and ACTING Education Commissioner Cerf's emphasis on standardized testing, charter schools, and tenure reform are top-down policy edicts that take more and more authority away from local districts and put it into the hands of Trenton. What's emerged over the last year in response is a true grassroots resistance to the imposition of corporate "reform." Boards of education, parents, teachers, and concerned citizens are coming together in an effort to stop the destruction of New Jersey's outstanding public school system through state-wide fiat.

It's time to put the entire issue of rankings in proper perspective. They distort educational quality, leading taxpayers to make flawed judgments about how young people are educated. This plays right into the hands of privateers who want to undermine confidence in public schools.

There is so much hot air in education reform, and it's extremely frustrating when one's arguments and supporting research are misconstrued. 

It's to Steven Brill's credit that near the conclusion of his new book Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools (Simon & Schuster 2011) he reluctantly acknowledges that without the support of teachers unions systematic reform is impossible. I think what happened is Brill began to realize as he delved deeper into the subject that reform is far harder than he initially thought. As a result, teachers need unions to represent them as demands for results escalate. In fact, if unions were to disappear tomorrow, school outcomes would not significantly change for the better. Nevertheless, we are incessantly confronted with claims made by theoreticians about the causes of the undeniable failures of so many schools and what needs to be done to turn them around.

If want to read something that will make you gasp out loud, check out the American Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit filed last week against Michigan's Highland Park School District and the state entities that support it. ACLU sued the district and the state for failing to teach kids in the Detroit-area district to read.

Will a new set of standards and more tests help students?

Mayor Bloomberg turned the announcement of the 2012 state test results into a promotional event for his "reforms" on Tuesday, despite the fact that an honest appraisal of the scores showed that city students as a group made only modest progress in both math and ELA.  The mayor's presentation ignored or downplayed results that didn't fit in with his triumphal narrative, including the fact that the racial achievement gap widened last year in a number of categories. State officials, by contrast, didn't even hold a press conference, and said publicly only that the statewide results (which mirrored the city's) showed "some positive momentum" but left too many students unprepared. The mayor, however, orchestrated a big press function and handed out a shameless PowerPoint that reported highly selective numbers and featured a comparison of charters and new schools founded during his tenure with "traditional" city schools - i.e. the vast majority of schools in the city system. But the numbers are there for all to see. "His" charters and new schools combined underperform the average school, in fact (see especially slide 6), and they gained only one to two points more than the "traditional" schools in percentages of students meeting standards in math and less than a percentage point in students meeting standards in English. That, according to the mayor, was conclusive evidence for the success of his reforms. 

Tomorrow, ACTING NJ Education Commissioner Cerf will finally have his long-overdue confirmation hearing. In anticipation, I've put out a good deal of reporting this week about Cerf's career and his reign at the NJDOE. For me, it all comes down to three things (click through each link for all the details):

"Below Dov Rosenberg lists what he considers the 10 most inaccurate and damaging statements that some school reformers toss around. Rosenberg, who loves to help teachers use technology, has been serving North Carolina public school students and teachers for 11 years as a teacher and instructional technology facilitator."

"A while back, I argued that Florida's school grading system, due mostly to its choice of measures, does a poor job of gauging school performance per se. The short version is that the ratings are, to a degree unsurpassed by most other states' systems, driven by absolute performance measures (how highly students score), rather than growth (whether students make progress). Since more advantaged students tend to score more highly on tests when they enter the school system, schools are largely being judged not on the quality of instruction they provide, but rather on the characteristics of the students they serve."

"A few days ago, CNN interviewed former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee about American education. Rhee, predictably, said that American education is terrible, that test scores are flat, and that we are way behind other nations on international tests. I disagree with Rhee. She constantly bashes American education, which is one of the pillars of our democratic society. Our public schools educate 90% of the population, and we should give the public schools some of the credit for our nation's accomplishments as the largest economy and the greatest engine of technological innovation in the world. It's time to set the record straight."

"Whither Opportunity? is a powerful statement from some of the best scholars in the country that popular bipartisan slogans like "no excuses" are backed by little to no research. The nature of educational inequality is shifting, from race to class, and if we want to make a difference in schools, we cannot ignore what goes on outside them."

The problem with education in Connecticut is income inequality, not teacher quality. Unfortunately, the plans Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has outlined for education reform - for the most part - take us in entirely the wrong direction. Education in Connecticut is a paradox. Though the National Assessment of Educational Progress consistently ranks the state among the highest scoring for student achievement, we also suffer from the highest black/white and poor/non-poor achievement gaps in the country.

The leaders of one of the most economically depressed and racially segregated cities in the nation have decided that the answer to its problems is to fire teachers, close public schools, expand the number of charters, and possibly to expand the voucher program as well. In the eyes of Ohio's elected officials, evidence about the past performance of charters and vouchers means nothing.

Across OECD countries, almost one in every five students does not reach a basic minimum level of skills. In addition, students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds are twice as likely to be low performers. Lack of fairness and inclusion can lead to school failure and this means that one in every five young adults on average drop out before completing upper secondary education. Reducing school failure pays off for both society and individuals. The highest performing education systems across OECD countries combine quality with equity. This report presents policy recommendations for education systems to help all children succeed in their schooling.

Remember Bizarro World from the comics? Where everything is opposite from the way it is on Earth? Such is the world I entered listening to the hearing on Governor Malloy's education "reform" bill, S.B. 24. In order to get the topsy-turvy experience, let's review facts about education in Connecticut.