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The public debate about the success and expansion of charter schools often seems to gravitate toward a tiny handful of empirical studies, when there is, in fact, a relatively well-developed literature focused on whether these schools generate larger testing gains among their students relative to their counterparts in comparable regular public schools. This brief reviews this body of evidence, with a focus on high-quality state- and district-level analyses that address, directly or indirectly, three questions: Do charter schools produce larger testing gains overall? What policies and practices seem to be associated with better performance? Can charter schools expand successfully within the same location?

Walk through the doors of Bergen Arts & Science Charter School in Garfield and you'll see a computer kiosk that lets parents see all their kids' test mistakes so they can practice more at home. The database also gives information on the day's quizzes, homework and any demerits for misbehavior. For live updates, parents can tap into a "student database app" on their cellphones. At a time when many parents and teachers worry that schools have gone overboard in testing children and lament the time spent on test preparation, families here embrace the school's intensely data-driven approach.

In the United States, a corporate model of schooling has overtaken educational policy, practice, curriculum and nearly all aspects of educational reform.

After reading the New York times op-ed on school choice in DC, I asked some folks close to what's happening in education there for their thoughts. Mary Levy sent me what is written below and (with her permission), I decided to use it as a guest post. Mary Levy has analyzed DC Public School staffing, budget and expenditures, and monitored the progress of education reform for thirty years. She is a major source for fiscal, statistical and general information on DCPS for the media, government officials and non-profit, business and civic groups. She directed the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs for 19 years, during which she played a major role in developing the District of Columbia's school funding systems, wrote numerous reports on DCPS, and participated in every major reform planning initiative. Previously, in private practice with Rauh, Lichtman, Levy & Turner, she did civil litigation in civil rights, labor law, and school finance, including major litigations in New York  and Maryland.

I have been a teacher in four distinct decades, each with its own  policy slogans, public perceptions and real problems. We've been "at a turning point" more times than I can count. We have surfed the rising tide of mediocrity and been embarrassed by the soft bigotry of our low expectations.  But what has really changed in classrooms? What's the net impact on actual practice?

Congratulations to the 6000-plus teachers who achieved National Board Certification recently. In this Era of Bad Feelings about teacher effectiveness, National Board-Certified teachers are the real deal. A significant slice of them will receive some kind of annual bonus, from a modest $1K to a percentage salary increase, for their recognition as exemplary practitioners--and I say bully for them. They deserve it for demonstrating, via the best available standards-based measure, their commitment to student learning and a willingness to critically examine and fine-tune their own practice.

This paper examines the challenges and potential solutions to evaluating high school teachers, looking first at practice-based evaluation and then turning to student performance as the basis for evaluation. In each case the stage is first set with a brief discussion of the overarching, across-grade issues that accompany each method.

Articles are written every year bemoaning the fact that young Americans are woefully ignorant about civics. Here's a radical theory to consider: Young people don't know civics because we don't teach them civics! We made a decision in that moment with those twelve boys that practice with writing a brief constructed response was of higher value than becoming competent, prepared, participatory citizens. Does that decision mesh with your own values?

In his recent State of the State address, Governor Cuomo said he wants to be an advocate for children. Let him lobby to protect their natural curiosity and love of learning from the onslaught of anti-intellectual, ends-oriented teaching practices forced on our educators by over-emphasis on standardized tests.

Achievement First's zero tolerance or "no excuses" model uses shunning and isolation to discipline its students. AF Brownsville describes this practice as being "put in the Den" by which it is, "in essence, isolating students from the rest of the school." The Achievement First Brownsville Family Handbook (included as an exemplar in the charter management organization's application to the RI Department of Education) describes how the school employs ostracism and isolation to manage student behavior.

In this weeks' program we look at the attempt by education reformers to impose value added measures on teacher evaluation as an example of how neoliberal forces have used the economic crisis to blackmail schools into practices that do not serve teaching and learning, but do serve the corporate profiteers as they work to privatize public education and limit the goals of education to vocational training for corporate hegemony. These processes constrict possibilities for educational experiences that are critical, relational and transformative. We see that in naming these processes and taking risks both individually and collectively we can begin to speak back to and overcome these forces. In this program we speak with Sean Feeney, principal from Long Island New York, about the stance he and other principals have taken against the imposition of value added measures in the new Annual Professional Performance Review in New York State. We also speak with Celia Oyler, professor of education at Teachers College Columbia University, and Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, about the impact of value added measures on teacher education and the corporate powers behind these measures.

As schools are trying to engage students through the use of 21st century skills there are others schools that are still practicing the art of banning books, and Tucson is not the only one. As astonishing as it may seem as we negotiate our way through 2012, there are numerous books that are being banned, or considered for banning, every year.

The general Finnish educational method is a Dewey-esque learning-then-doing approach, theory then practice model. Teachers are highly professional and professionalized. You need a Master's degree to teach at a higher level than kindergarten. There is great respect for teacher judgment as well as respect and decent wages for teachers as the best people to determine what metrics best account for learning success. They work with principals at coming up with the best ways to determine how to measure success, engage kids and communities, and how to both keep national norms and address local conditions. In immigrant communities, kids are taught all subjects in their first language (including Finnish instruction).

...what makes us a society is a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most clearly in public institutions - public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.  Public institutions are supported by all of us as taxpayers, and they are available to all. If the tax system is progressive, those of us who better off (and who, presumably, have benefitted from many of these same public institutions) help pay for everyone else.  "Privatiize" means pay-for-it-yourself. In an economy whose wealth and income are more concentrated than any time in 90 years, the practical consequences is availability to fewer and fewer. The story of our time is a decline of the public good. 

Ensuring that all students in America's public schools are taught by good teachers is an educational and moral imperative. The teacher is the most important school-based influence on student achievement, and poor children and those of color are less likely to be taught by well-qualified, experienced, and effective teachers than other students. Yet teacher incentive proposals - including those promoted by President Obama's Race to the Top program - are rarely grounded on what high-quality research indicates are the kinds of teacher incentives that lead to school excellence and equity. Few of the current approaches to creating teacher incentives take into account how specific conditions influence whether or not effective teachers will work in high-need schools and will be able to teach effectively in them. This review of research finds little support for a simplistic system of measuring value-added growth, evaluating teachers more "rigorously", and granting bonuses. Instead, the brief supports four recommendations: use the current federal Teacher Incentive Fund to attract qualified, effective teachers to high-needs schools, expand incentives by creating strategic compensation, create working conditions that allow teachers to teach effectively, and more aggressively promote the best practices and policies that spur school excellence and equity. The accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement these recommendations.

In yesterday's State of the City, Mayor Bloomberg said he would encourage Eva Moskowitz' Success Academy charter chain and KIPP to accelerate their expansion.  He may have a fight on his hands. First, see the stickers being pasted all over the glossy recruiting ads in the Williamsburg subways and bus stops for her new charter, to be co-located in MS 50.  (thanks to GothamSchools for the photo to the right.) According to many observers, Eva Moskowitz is recruiting almost exclusively in the northern, primarily white sections of Williamsburg.  (This is a practice she followed  with  the Upper West Success charter on the Upper West side, holding recruiting sessions in the Trump hi-rise condos and at the Jewish center, and producing thousands of glossy promotional flyers in English and almost none in Spanish -- despite the charter law which requires the recruitment of English language learners.)    In Williamsburg, a new coalition, called the Southside Community Schools Coalition has emerged to fight the charter, and its openly racist tactics,  including long-time educational leaders and activists like Luis Garden Acosta, founder of El Puente,  Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, CM Diana Reyna, several local churches, and the District 14 Community Education Council.  An excerpt from their message is below

On the positive side, the Austin Inde­pen­dent School District's agreement to bring the IDEA Public Schools charter program into the Eastside certainly gave its students an instant education in local politics - of the grimly practical sort not generally available in classrooms. That may be the only good news to come out of the controversy, which featured the most spectacularly bungled adoption and public outreach process managed by a local government in quite some time. By the time the board of trustees made its formal adoption vote after midnight Monday, the board majority and Superintendent Meria Carstarphen had succeeded in alienating virtually everyone with some interest in the matter - most particularly those Eastside parents and students to be directly affected by IDEA's arrival at Allan Elementary next fall. Had the district been trying to intentionally undermine IDEA's potential relationships with the community, they couldn't have done a better job.

Our current system has to do with money more than it has to do with good educational practices. Most of those in power do not know about education and research and buy-in...yes BUY-in to what large wealthy publishing companies sell. If our school systems are not failing yet, they will be by the time state and federal education departments, and some of the politicians who surround us, are done. Education clearly cannot go back to the way it used to be because there were too many inequities. Too many inequalities. Unfortunately, those inequities and inequalities still exist today and high stakes testing has done very little to change that. Education cannot keep going in the present direction. There must be a balance between the good ole days where teachers and students could be do whatever they wanted and the present situation where educators share a unified curriculum.

he Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study conducted in the Metropolitan Nashville School System from 2006-07 through 2008-09, in which middle school mathematics teachers voluntarily participated in a controlled experiment to assess the effect of financial rewards for teachers whose students showed unusually large gains on standardized tests. The experiment was intended to test the notion that rewarding teachers for improved scores would cause scores to rise. It was up to participating teachers to decide what, if anything, they needed to do to raise student performance: participate in more professional development, seek coaching, collaborate with other teachers, or simply reflect on their practices. Thus, POINT was focused on the notion that a significant problem in American education is the absence of appropriate incentives, and that correcting the incentive structure would, in and of itself, constitute an efective intervention that improved student outcomes.By and large, results did not confirm this hypothesis

A common thread runs through opposition to desegregation and advocacy for charter schools: the rhetoric of choice. This rhetoric emphasizes the power of individual action and decision-making and veils the deep influences of policy and politics. Examining the gap between the rhetoric and the reality clarifies the history of desegregation and contributes to a respectfully critical look at school "choice" in practice today.