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he race for City Hall starts in the classrooms Mayor Michael Bloomberg may not be running for reelection next year, but he will undoubtedly be playing a starring role in the race to replace him. The six Democrats expected to run next year are all supportive of the mayor's efforts to take control of the school system, but differ with Bloomberg on most everything else-whether it's school closures, co-locations with charter schools, relations with the teachers union or standardized test scores. So if next year's race is for the right to be the next education mayor, how do the candidates stack up? What are their qualifications, their accomplishments and their thoughts on some of the more controversial policies of the Bloomberg administration? David Bloomfield, a professor of education at CUNY and an expert on education policy in New York, was kind enough to offer his analysis of each candidate's qualifications.

I don't know about you, but I am growing convinced that President Barack Obama doesn't know what Race to the Top is. I don't think he really understands what his own administration is doing to education. In his State of the Union address last week, he said that he wanted teachers to "stop teaching to the test." He also said that teachers should teach with "creativity and passion." And he said that schools should reward the best teachers and replace those who weren't doing a good job. To "reward the best" and "fire the worst," states and districts are relying on test scores. The Race to the Top says they must. Deconstruct this. Teachers would love to "stop teaching to the test," but Race to the Top makes test scores the measure of every teacher. If teachers take the President's advice (and they would love to!), their students might not get higher test scores every year, and teachers might be fired, and their schools might be closed. Why does President Obama think that teachers can "stop teaching to the test" when their livelihood, their reputation, and the survival of their school depends on the outcome of those all-important standardized tests?

With ever-declining budgets, education administrators across the nation have been struggling for years with an increasing teacher turnover rate. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found that race may play a role in teacher turnover. Lael Keiser, an associate professor at the Truman School of Public Affairs and an associate professor in the department of political science in the College of Arts and Science, and Jason Grissom, who is now an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, found that turnover rates are lower among teachers who are of the same race as their school principals.

Opening a new phase for the Obama administration's role in education reform, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa signaled interest in applying for the revamped, district-level Race to the Top competition. "The idea ... that districts will now be allowed to compete for Race to the Top in states like mine, where they haven't really wanted to have a competitive bid, is really heartening," Villaraigosa said, speaking on a Friday morning panel with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Emanuel and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "We will now, on our own, be able to put our performance, our reforms, our changes with an idea toward a set of results ... and not be tied to what goes on at the state level," Emanuel said, who went on to describe the district-level competition as "a significant change."

In a country where white students vastly outperform black and Hispanic students on national standardized tests, one education innovator says the performance gap can be eliminated on a school-by-school basis by having honest discussions with teachers about race.

Public education has never been so divided, between those like Dr. Tisch, Commissioner John B. King Jr. and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who support the Obama administration's signature Race to the Top initiative and its emphasis on standardized tests and charter schools; and dissenters on the board, who call it a Race to the Bottom and put their faith in teachers as well as traditional public schools. The Race to the Bottom folks warn that the supposedly free fellows come at a stiff political price.

Hawaii is already in big trouble with the U.S. Department of Education for failing to hit key milestones the state promised to deliver as part of its $75 million Race to the Top prize. At stake is roughly $72 million that's left of the state's award, which federal officials are threatening to take back. Things were looking up in the Aloha State, when earlier this month the state and its teachers' union reached a tentative contract deal to end the stalemate and put in place a new teacher-evaluation system based in part on student growth-a key component of its Race to the Top plan. Hawaii's rank-and-file teachers had other ideas.

New York State's educational community has come together in an unprecedented show of support for the broad education reforms detailed in the State's Race to the Top application.  Thanks to the leadership of the Governor, the State legislature, and the Board of Regents, New York State passed new legislation in May 2010 that will usher in a new era of educational excellence in the State and ensure that we are able to fully execute the innovative, coherent reform agenda outlined in our Race to the Top application. The new laws: (1) establish a new teacher and principal evaluation system that makes student achievement data a substantial component of how educators are assessed and supported; (2) raise our charter school cap from 200 to 460; (3) enable school districts to enter contracts with Educational Partnership Organizations for the management of their persistently lowest‐achieving schools and schools under registration review; and (4) appropriate more than $20 million to the State Education Department to implement its P‐20 longitudinal data system.

"Today institutions of higher education, public and private, remain largely segregated by race, religion and economic condition. White colleges and universities remain primarily white, Black institutions remain primarily black, and denominational institutions remain even more religiously identifiable. Such segregation is sanctified with tons of federal and state money in the forms of tuition vouchers, tax credits and government subsidized loans. The Obama administration has been largely foreclosed from remedying the situation for fear of offending powerful political forces representing the investors and private institutions. The higher education voucher/loan dilemma portends a probable scenario for the future of tuition vouchers and charter schools at the primary and secondary levels. Stiglitz quotes Alexis de Tocqueville who said that the main element of the "peculiar genius of American society" is "self-interest properly understood." The last two words, "properly understood," are the key, says Stiglitz. According to Stiglitz, everyone possesses self-interest in the "narrow sense." This "narrow sense" with regard to educational choice is usually exercised for reasons other than educational quality, the chief reasons being race, religion, economic and social status, and similarity with persons with comparable information, biases and prejudices. But Stiglitz interprets Tocqueville's "properly understood" to mean a much broader and more desirable and moral objective, that of "appreciating" and paying attention to everyone else's self-interest. In other words, the common welfare is, in fact, "a precondition for one's own ultimate well being."17 Such commonality in the advancement of the public good is lost by the narrow self-interest. School tuition vouchers and charter schools are the operational models for implementation of the "narrow self-interest." It is easy to recognize, but difficult to justify. "

But a review of the best evidence on teachers' sentiments shows that educators are not unhappy because they resent the new emphasis on teacher evaluations, a key element of President Obama's Race to the Top program; in fact, according to a separate survey of 10,000 public school teachers from Scholastic and the Gates Foundation, the majority support using measures of student learning to assess teachers, and the mean number of years teachers believe they should devote to the classroom before being assessed for tenure is 5.4, a significant increase from the current national average of 3.1 years. But polling shows teachers are depressed by the increasing reliance on standardized tests to measure student learning-the "high stakes" testing regime that the standards and accountability movement has put in place across the country and that Race to the Top has reinforced in some states and districts. Teachers are also concerned that growing numbers of parents are not able to play an active role in their children's education, and they are angry about the climate of austerity that has invaded the nation's schools, with state and local budget cuts threatening key programs that help students learn and overcome the disadvantages of poverty.

Part 1 of our documentary, A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLS: Race and Education on Long Island, was produced for ERASE Racism by award-winning filmmaker David Van Taylor, Vice President of Lumiere Productions. It follows three high school senior boys: one African American student from a black district and an interracial pair of friends from a diverse, majority-white district. The film shows, in vivid human terms, how context determines educational experiences and outcomes-irrespective of the student's motivation and aptitude.

A federal appeals court has upheld a Pennsylvania school district's attendance-zone plan that took neighborhood racial demographics into account but did not assign individual students based on race.

School districts across Long Island say the cost of implementing the federal Race to the Top initiative outstrips the monetary awards. Some are opting out, rejecting the funding to free themselves of the obligation.

Race to the Top is marketed as a "solution" for states and districts in search of reform.  The catch - as with all federal money - is the cash comes with strings that will continue the emphasis on high-stakes testing and the top-down management theories that were the basis of No Child Left Behind. The U.S. Education Department wants teacher evaluations tied to student test scores regardless of how it is done, and they want it done quickly.  Asked about the lack of research during a presentation to school administrators from Georgia, Education Department Assistant Superintendent Teresa MacCartney replied, "We are hoping the research will catch up with us in a few years."  I admire her optimism, but deplore the fact that $400 million will be spent on the development and integration of a teacher evaluation method with no evidence whatsoever to support a positive effect on student achievement.  That's not a string; it's a rope.

Consider us optimists, but we think the high-stakes test movement has reached its apex and started its decline. It won't happen quickly given the powerful political forces aligned to promote the testing regime, but the test obsessed "accountability" package for education reform won't continue indefinitely. There are too many bad policies (NCLB, Race to the Top), bad performance reports (NAEP, CREDO, last week's Mathematica study), and corruption/cheating/score inflation scandals (ATL, DC, NY, and more). If you need hope, look back at how Diane Ravitch drove an intellectual stake into the heart of the education reform movement on the Daily Show. She asked the audience how they felt about tests. When the crowd booed, Jon Stewart complained that it couldn't be that simple. Tell that to Michelle Rhee now that her reforms have faced the scrutiny of the voting public (in the DC Mayoral race but again this past Tuesday). In a democracy, eventually, the people have their say.

The Institute on Race and Poverty's 2008 analysis of charter schools in the Twin Cities metro found that charter schools have failed to deliver on the promises made by charter school proponents. The study showed that charter schools were far more segregated than traditional public schools in the metro, even in school districts where traditional public schools already have high levels of racial segregation. The analysis also showed that charter schools performed worse than traditional public schools. The findings made it clear that, at that time, charter schools offered a poor choice to low-income students and students of color-one between low-performing public schools and charters that fared even worse. Compared to charter schools, other public school choice programs such as the Choice is Yours program offered much better schools to low-income students and students of color. Finally, the report found that charter schools hurt public education in the metro by encouraging racial segregation in the traditional public school system.  This work updates the 2008 study with more recent data-updating the work from the 2007-08 school year to 2010-11 in most cases. The results show that, despite significant changes to the state's charter law during the period, little has changed in the comparison between charters and traditional schools. Charter school students of all races are still much more likely to be attending a segregated school than traditional school students and the trends are largely negative. Charter schools are also still outperformed by their traditional equivalents. Analysis of 2010-11 test score data which controls for other school characteristics shows that charters still lag behind traditional schools, including especially the schools available to Choice is Yours participants.  

"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!"

A school district that is a finalist for the soon-to-be announced $1 million 2011 Broad Prize for Urban Education is embarking on a public relations effort - funded with U.S. government and Gates Foundation money - to end public opposition to its school reform program, which includes a slew of new standardized tests. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina is using Race to the Top money - which wasn't intended to fund public relations efforts - and $200,000 in Gates Foundation money for the campaign.

U.S. public education: A race to the bottom? Education Historian Diane Ravitch tells Christine Romans that the U.S. should learn from top-ranked education systems and stop focusing on student testing.

School boards typically control massive amounts of money and assets that can be dished out through contracts for services, purchases of land, and diverted into charter schools and voucher programs. Despite school boards' power, however, until now board elections around the country have typically been fueled by door-to-door canvassing rather than high dollar fundraising. But increasingly, large donations from wealthy individuals and corporations are pouring into schools board races around the country to enact an agenda that attacks collective bargaining rights of teachers unions and increases the privatization of public education through charter schools and vouchers. The Denver Public School Board race, which took place yesterday, is a prime example of outside money from wealthy individuals and corporate funded groups flooding elections. That money proved to have a significant effect on last night's election for the union-back candidates opposed to the so-called "reform slate."