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As students across the country stage a national day of action to defend public education, we look at the nation's largest school systems - Chicago and New York City - and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In Chicago, the city's unelected school board voted last week to shut down seven schools and fire all of the teachers at 10 other schools. In New York City, many educators are criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration after the release of the names of 18,000 city teachers, along with a ranking system that claims to quantify each teacher's impact on the reading and math scores of their pupils on statewide tests. "The danger is that if teachers and schools are held accountable just for relatively narrow measures of what it is students are doing in class, that will become what drives the education system," says Columbia University's Aaron Pallas, who studies the efficiency of teacher-evaluation systems. "The effects of school closings in [New York City] is one of the great untold stories today," says Democracy Now! education correspondent Jaisal Noor. "The bedrock of these communities [has been] neighborhood schools and now they're being destroyed." Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union says, "When you have a CEO in charge of a school system as opposed to a superintendent - a real educator - what ends up happening is that they literally have no clue how to run the schools." Lewis recounts a meeting where she says Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel told her that, "25 percent of these kids are never going to amount to anything."

Within hours of the publication of the Teacher Data Reports (TDRs) last Friday, the UFT began to hear stories of teachers and their families being hounded by news reporters from the New York Post. On Friday evening, New York Post reporters appeared at the door of the father of Pascale Mauclair, a sixth grade teacher at P.S. 11, the Kathryn Phelan School, which is located in the Woodside section of Queens. They told Mauclair's father that his daughter was one of the worst teachers in New York City, based solely on the TDR reports, and that they were looking to  interview her. They then made their way to Mauclair's home, where she told them that she did not want to comment on the matter. The Post reporters rang Mauclair's bell and knocked on her window all Saturday morning. She finally called the police, who told the reporters that since they were inside her private housing development, they were on private property and had to leave. The reporters rang the bell again, leading to a second visit from the police and a final warning to leave. Later, Mauclair's neighbors told her that that the Post reporters had been asking them questions about her.

John P. Reilly, KIPP Tech Valley Charter School board chairman, in his commentary ("A truce in the city school wars," Feb. 21) suggests that the Albany School District be viewed as a "portfolio" district with district-operated and charter schools being treated more equally. This idea is without merit, as it ignores the substantial differences between public and charter schools. Charter schools are privately run and may exercise discretion regarding the children they educate. This makes them more akin to private schools despite their public funding.

Scott Walker is now waging his war on public education by coming up with accountability standards that favor charter and private schools. His School and District Accountability Design Team consists of thirty business and education professionals from across the state.

You'd think that privateers would turn to their heavy guns now that anger and frustration about school reform seemingly have reached a crescendo. But they've learned that a head-on approach can backfire after voters handily defeated vouchers or their variants in state after state between 1967 and 2007. As a result, they've decided instead to take more incremental steps. I'm talking now about the use of educational technology.

Philadelphia is about to take a fateful step. Thomas Knudsen, the recently retired chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Gas Works and now temporary CEO of the school system, has released a plan that will lead to the dismantling of public education in Philadelphia. The plan, or "blueprint," was written by a business strategy organization called Boston Consulting; it recommends the closing of 40 of the city's 249 schools in the coming year, with additional school closings in the years to come. The goal is to have a school district where the central district is phased out and a large portion of the students are enrolled in privately managed charter schools.

"Rooted in the gospel tradition, the song "We Shall Overcome" became an anthem of the African‑American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and then an assertion of struggle and solidarity worldwide. Solidarity is at the heart of both the song and the phrase "we shall overcome." Given that history, it's both perverse and predictable that Philanthropy magazine titled its spring 2013 cover story "They Shall Overcome." The long article-written by then editor-in-chief Christopher Levenick-profiles five of the wealthiest backers of free-market K-12 public education reform (publicly funded but privately run charter schools, publicly funded vouchers for private schools, evaluating teachers and schools based on students' standardized test scores, closing large numbers of schools based on test scores or to save money, and the like)."

"It is all the rage among the pseudo-reformers to dismiss the importance of poverty. Although most of the pseudo-reformers grew up in affluence, attended elite private school, and send their own children to equally splendid private schools, they feel certain in their hearts that poverty is a state of mind that can be easily overcome. All it takes is one great teacher. Or three effective teachers in a row. Or lots of grit. Or a no-excuses school where children dress for success, follow rules without questioning, and act like little test-taking machines. One by one, the pseudo-reformers insist, they will end poverty."

"Gov. Chris Christie proposed Thursday that private companies play an unprecedented role in public education, managing some schools and creating others from the ashes of dysfunctional ones."

This week, a Denver District court temporarily halted Douglas County's attempt to use vouchers to divert already-depleted public school resources into private schools. In the decision, the judge derided "The prospect of having millions of dollars of public school funding diverted to private schools, many of which are religious and lie outside of the Douglas County School District."

When it comes to applying to private schools, New Yorkers often have to learn to live with rejection. Some who were accepted early at Avenues, the new for-profit school set to open in Chelsea in 2012, face a different problem: They are being actively pursued.

Three fired public school principals claim a state-run school district is "arbitrarily and capriciously convert(ing) an indefinite number of public schools to charter schools to be controlled by quasi-private boards without protecting the statutory employment rights of public school employees."      The complaint involves the Recovery School District, a special district administered by the Louisiana Department of Education. According to the district's website, "the RSD is designed to take underperforming schools and transform them into successful places for children to learn." It was created by legislation in 2003.

At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. This is the second study of student achievement in global perspective prepared under the auspices of Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). In the 2010 PEPG report, "U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective," the focus was on the percentage of U.S. public and private school students performing at the advanced level in mathematics. The current study continues this work by reporting the percentage of public and private school students identified as at or above the proficient level (a considerably lower standard of performance than the advanced level) in mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.

TERRY MOE MADE his name in the early 1990s when, with John Chubb, he co-authored a much-discussed book arguing for a system of publicly-funded private school vouchers. The central thesis of Politics, Markets and America's Schools was that "direct democratic control" of public education was "incompatible with effective schooling." Chubb and Moe argued that private school vouchers would create efficient markets in education, and that "choice is a panacea."

Attorney and whistleblower Kathleen Carroll was fired by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing CTC in September 2010 after she began to expose the systemic corruption and cronyism at the agency. The commission plays a critical role in education in California certifying teachers and also approving education training programs. Carroll discovered that Agency officials and the board members were also involved in planning the systemic destruction of public education in California and how this agency operated to carry out this role. They were involved in spending millions of dollars on private charter schools that some staff had personal interests in. The commission managers also bullied the staff and created a reign of terror at the agency. This commission is also under the direct control of the Executive and Governor Jerry Brown but he has remained silent about the scandal.

An increasingly nasty fight over private school vouchers in Oklahoma is playing out in the courts-and via social media. The furor stems from a lawsuit filed by a pair of Oklahoma school districts that challenges a law that provides private-school aid to students with disabilities, a measure the districts say violates the state's constitution.

Privatization of Michigan's public education system is a "very real" threat,  and a change that could make education about the bottom line versus what's best for students, a state lawmaker said Monday at town-hall forum held in Kalamazoo.

After years of consistently low graduation and attendance rates at its two main high schools, the Camden School District is turning to a private company for help.

[Passed by the House 9/13/11 365-54] This legislation would amend the section of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that governs federal financial support for charter schools, creating a program that would award grants to charter school developers via state educational agencies, state charter school boards, or governors to open new charter schools and expand and replicate existing charter schools. Priority funding would go to states that take specific steps in support of charter schools, including removing limitations on the number or percentage of charter schools that may exist or the number or percentage of students that may attend charter schools, and ensuring equitable financing for charter schools when compared to funding for public schools. The bill creates a "credit enhancement grant program" that would provide funds to public and private nonprofit entities to help charter schools secure private sector capital to buy, construct, renovate, or lease appropriate school facilities. The legislation also allows charter schools to serve prekindergarten or postsecondary school students.

Dominic Randolph can seem a little out of place at Riverdale Country School - which is odd, because he's the headmaster. Riverdale is one of New York City's most prestigious private schools, with a 104-year-old campus that looks down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park from the top of a steep hill in the richest part of the Bronx. On the discussion boards of UrbanBaby.com, worked-up moms from the Upper East Side argue over whether Riverdale sends enough seniors to Harvard, Yale and Princeton to be considered truly "TT" (top-tier, in UrbanBabyese), or whether it is more accurately labeled "2T" (second-tier), but it is, certainly, part of the city's private-school elite, a place members of the establishment send their kids to learn to be members of the establishment. Tuition starts at $38,500 a year, and that's for prekindergarten.