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During a hearing in June, as the city's Panel for Educational Policy prepared to move on a plan to "co-locate" 22 charter schools in public-school buildings, most of the audience knew what would happen: Parents would yell, teachers would plead and union members would attack the Bloomberg administration. And then, after hours of testimony in the tightly packed auditorium of a Prospect Heights high school, the plan would pass as expected.

A good seven miles from Gov. Rick Perry's much-anticipated prayer rally, an even larger crowd of Houstonians gathered in preparation for another sacred event: the first day of school. Some families camped out for hours to gain admittance into Houston's first-ever, citywide back-to-school event at George R. Brown Convention Center, where free backpacks, school supplies, uniforms, haircut vouchers, immunizations and fresh produce were provided.

As students prepare to begin another school year, their teachers are hopping mad. They're facing layoffs and deep budget cuts and many say they're tired of being blamed unfairly for just about everything that's wrong in public education. They're so mad that many are bypassing their unions and mounting a campaign of their own to restore the public's faith in their profession.

"Some states currently are preparing proposals to engage in another round of Race to the Trough [otherwise known as Race to the Top]. They are seeking a share of the $700 million federal dollars allocated for early learning in the 2011 education budget. States can get this money if they design, develop, and administer pre-kindergarten assessments and kindergarten readiness tests. Common sense and research both suggest that this is really dumb!"

Four out of 10 new public school teachers hired since 2005 came through alternative teacher-preparation programs, according to a survey just released by the National Center for Education Information. That's up from 22 percent of new teachers hired between 2000 and 2004.

Of all the states that have taken steps to rethink systems for preparing teachers, New York appears to be experimenting with the greatest variety of approaches.

Once again, as the country faces severe economic distress and uncertainty, students are seemingly assuming economic significance for long-term growth and stability. Similar to previous economic downturns, schools are being targeted to be transformed from financial liabilities to laboratories of excellence representing the hope for our nation's economic future. Of course, educational reformers who are looking for structural changes during a cyclical downturn argue that schools are not adequately preparing the nation's future workforce. In an effort to develop a highly skilled workforce for the future, educational reformers claim that the push to eliminate tenure, evaluate teachers based on standardized test scores and favor charter schools over traditional pubic schools will in the end produce better students. However, educational reformers have made a significant mistake in targeting public school resources and teachers' incentives and punishments over teaching and learning processes. As a result, these efforts have failed to take into account the political economy of public schools.

Five months after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg outlined a plan to give principals more autonomy to run their schools, the city imposed what would be the first of five consecutive cuts to the schools' budgets. To make ends meet, principals have trimmed after-school programs, shrunk their support staffs and tightened their schools' use of things like printing paper, markers and Post-it notes. They have dismissed coaches who used to help teachers prepare for their lessons, and teachers whose salaries they could no longer pay.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a plan Monday to award merit pay to Chicago Public Schools principals who perform well on a new set of evaluative metrics as critics questioned whether the program will lead to gains in student achievement. The performance rewards-which may be based on student test scores, school climate and leadership skills, among other factors - are part of an overhaul of principal preparation and evaluation at CPS. They will be paid for over the next four years by a new $5 million fund created through charitable donations, Emanuel said. The district plans to implement a similar incentive program for teachers, he said.

As public school students and educators throughout Florida prepared to return to schools that have fewer teachers, larger classes and smaller budgets, a for-profit charter school company, Charter Schools USA, paid for 2,000 employees to attend a pep rally. The rally included controversial charter schools proponent Michelle Rhee and Gov. Rick Scott - the man who pushed for $1.35 billion in cuts for public schools and increased funding for charter and virtual schools.

Nearly three-quarters of New Jersey school superintendents said the state Education Department did not play an important role in helping districts raise students' achievement or prepare graduates for college and careers, according to a survey the department released Monday.

A prep course designed to help low income middle school students prepare for the city's elite specialized high schools will be cut from 16 months to three beginning in 2012, sources tell Insideschools. The program is falling victim to "budget constraints" which will "change the structure" of the Specialized High School Institute, according to a letter written by City lawyers obtained by Insideschools. Eligible students would begin the intensive SHSI program in the spring of 7th grade, rather than the summer after 6th grade, according to the proposed changes.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard offered up more details Monday about their plans to hold principals to strict performance standards, award principals bonuses and work to create better principal preparation programs.

Charter schools in Hempstead and Roosevelt are preparing major expansions, with officials in both schools citing increased parent demand.

In a previous post, I lamented the scarcity of survey data measuring what teachers think of different education policy reforms. A couple of weeks ago, the National Center for Education Information (NCEI) released the results of their teacher survey (conducted every five years), which provides a useful snapshot of teachers' opinions toward different policies (albeit not at the level of detail that one might wish).

The "standards-based" K-12 educational reform movement began in the late 1980s and continues today. The original goals of most sets of content standards included an altered form of classroom practice. Educational researchers devoted great effort to developing inquiry-oriented instructional materials and professional development models to support the reform efforts. Although there have been pockets of reform success in some schools and districts, large-scale evaluations of reform efforts indicate that the influence of these efforts on classroom practice and student achievement have been uneven at best. It is our contention that reformers' focus on changing classroom practice is misguided. The standards movement has been hijacked by a "business-scientific" view of schooling that assumes the purpose of education is to prepare students to compete in the global economy. The concepts of assessment and accountability associated with this purpose in the business-scientific view inhibit reform. Researchers committed to reform need to recognize the inherently political nature of reform and work toward a renegotiation of the overarching purpose of education. This also means attending to the consequences of that purpose for school governance, assessment, and accountability.

In a New York City middle school, the principal asked teachers to spend fifteen minutes a day with students practicing how to answer multiple-choice math questions in preparation for the state-mandated test. One teacher protested, explaining she taught Italian and English, not math. But the principal insisted, and she followed his directive. As you might suspect, the plan failed, and in the end, fewer than one in four New York City middle schoolers passed the exam. While the importance of the test dominated the formal curriculum, the lessons learned through the hidden curriculum were no less powerful. Students learned that test scores mattered more than English or Italian, and that teachers did not make the key instructional decisions. In fact once the test was over, one-third of the students in her class stopped attending school, skipping the last five weeks of the school year.

Tests used to be just for evaluating students, but now the testing of students is used to evaluate teachers and, in fact, the entire educational system.  On an individual level, some students and parents have noticed a change - more standardized tests and more classroom and homework time devoted to preparation for them. So what exactly do test scores tell us?

President Obama is poised to broaden federal influence in local schools by scrapping key elements of No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration's signature education law, and substituting his own brand of school reform.

The roughly 65,000 students who have entered eighth grade in New York City public schools will face a formidable task in the coming months. In addition to completing homework assignments and taking tests, preparing for the dreaded state exams and meeting the city's multiple promotion requirements, all eighth-grade students who wish to attend public (non-charter) high schools in New York city must also submit applications in which they rank up to 12 programs or schools from among nearly 700 possibilities citywide.