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I knew that if I had enough patience the corporate reformers would eventually let slip some data which would prove, once and for all, how unscientific are the metrics they've been using to shut down schools. That day came earlier this week. I'll encourage anyone to recheck my calculations, just in case, but if I've found what I think I've found, it will be the 'death blow' to the New York City 'value-added' model they use to rate and close down schools.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is making a new run at revamping how the district hires, evaluates, trains and pays teachers. Last year, performance pay and a surge of new student tests used to rate teachers brought protests from teachers and parents.

Tweeters and education writers the other day were  all abuzz with talk by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan of the need to crack down on those god-awful schools of education that keep churning out teachers who don't get sufficient value-added out of their students.

This policy paper explores the role of charter schools in turning around the nation's lowest-performing high schools. Based on conversations with charter school operators, school district staff, researchers, and education reform experts, it examines how some pioneering cities-Los Angeles and Philadelphia in particular-are partnering with local charter operators to turn around some of their dropout factories and improve college readiness and graduation rates.

For over a decade, Ohio law has dictated where charter schools can open. Expansion was unlimited in Lucas County (the "pilot district" for charters) and in the "Ohio 8" urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown). But, in any given year, charters could open up in any other district that was classified as a "challenged district," as measured by whether the district received a state "report card" rating of "academic watch" or "academic emergency." This is a performance-based standard.

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.

This week, the Daily News published yet another editorial taking an unjustly negative view of district schools in comparison to the charter sector - in this case, arguing that the relatively high proficiency levels in upper grades at schools in the Harlem Success and Harlem Village charter chains are primarily due to those schools' extended days and school years. However, the latest available official data indicates that the schools in these two chains are also characterized by lower proportions of high-needs students than local district schools, and by extremely high rates of student attrition over time - in one case, a 68% drop in cohort size between 5th and 8th grades.

In several posts, I've complained about how, in our public discourse, we misinterpret changes in proficiency rates (or actual test scores) as "gains" or "progress," when they actually represent cohort changes-that is, they are performance snapshots for different groups of students who are potentially quite dissimilar.

It should surprise no one that only 34 percent of New Yorkers approve of Michael Bloomberg's education policies, the policy area within which the Mayor most hoped to create a legacy. The Mayor not only introduced numerous questionable initiatives- ranging from school closings, to preferential treatment of charter schools, to attempts to rate teacher performance based on student test scores-he did so with an arrogant disregard not only for the most experienced teachers and administrators in the system, but of parents and community leaders and elected officials who tried to make their voices heard in matters of educational policy.

These are some of the 17 new principals - 11 of them under age 40, 7 from outside Newark - recruited this year to run nearly a quarter of the city's schools. They were hired by Cami Anderson, the new schools superintendent, as part of an ambitious plan to rebuild the 39,000-student district, which has long been crippled by low achievement and high dropout rates, but now is flush with up to $200 million from prominent donors, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

If you watch the documentary "Waiting for Superman" or read Steven Brill's "Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools," you will learn that many advocates of school reform think they know how to increase teacher productivity: Rate teachers according to their students' performance on standardized tests and fire those who don't make the grade. But economic theory suggests several reasons why this approach will probably backfire.

More highly rated teachers in D.C. Public Schools are accepting performance-based bonuses than in the past, American University Radio WAMU reports. Of the 670 teachers eligible for bonuses, 70 percent accepted -- a 10 percentage point increase over the previous year, in which 60 percent of the 636 eligible teachers took the offer, according to WAMU.

Here is the story of Karen Sprowal and her son Matthew, that Mike Winerip of the NY Times writes about here. While charter schools have advertised themselves as open to all students through random lotteries, many have been shown to enroll relatively few numbers of special needs children and English language learners, and to have high rates of student attrition.  The charter school described below is a member of the Success Academy chain, the fastest growing chain in NYC.  Its rapid expansion has been enthusiastically supported by the DOE, and by their authorizer, the NY State University Board of Trustees, whose charter committee is headed  by Prof. Pedro Noguera.  There are currently seven Success Academies, all co-located in NYC public school buildings, with two more planned for the fall, and three more authorized by SUNY to open in NYC in 2012.

I spent some time the other day, while out running, pondering the usefulness of student growth percentile estimates and value added estimates of teacher effectiveness for the average school or district level practitioner. How would they use them? What would they see in them? How might these performance snapshots inform practice?

Seventeen-year-old Kevin Fish has won international mountain bike races, has ridden alongside Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong and hopes to become a professional cyclist when he turns 19. To do that, he trains 20 hours a week: four-hour bicycle rides, long runs and practice on a stationary bike. Spending seven hours a day in traditional private or public schools would leave Kevin riding in the evenings - or not at all, depending on homework. Then his family read about Star Charter School on the Web. The campus, which received the highest academic rating under the state accountability system, offers small classes and four-hour days. And as an open-enrollment charter school, it is public and tuition-free.

Educational reforms enacted through federal policies are directly impacting the voice of children, teachers, and teacher educators. The recently introduced bi partisan bill "Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies for Teachers and Principals Act" frames a plan for state accreditation for teacher training academies based on student achievement. The newly introduced Race to the Top (RTT) competition, focused on early childhood, includes motivating states to receive some of the $500 million allotted to create ratings systems to score early childhood programs, write standards and related standardized tests, and expectations of what an early childhood teachers should know. Both the proposed bill and RTT competition are positioned to regulate with market driven ideology, reinforcing and reproducing social injustice and undermining democratic ideals.

Do charter schools draw good teachers from traditional, mainstream public schools? Using an eleven‐year panel of North Carolina public school teachers, the author finds nuanced patterns of teacher quality flowing into charter schools. High rates of inexperienced and unlicensed teachers moved to charter schools, but among regularly licensed teachers changing schools, charter movers had higher licensure test scores than other moving teachers, and they were more likely to be highly experienced. I estimate measures of value added for a subset of elementary teachers and show that charter movers were less effective than other mobile teachers and colleagues within their sending schools, by 3 to 4 percent of a student‐level standard deviation in achievement.

In the final days of the session, lawmakers stripped more than $500,000 from the proposed budget that was intended to help implement Senate Bill 7, a sweeping education overhaul that would streamline the process of firing poorly rated teachers. By eliminating the money at the end of May, lawmakers put a crimp in the bill they had approved overwhelmingly a few weeks earlier and which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had praised as a national model.

State Secretary of Education Melody Schopp announced via conference call to superintendents today that South Dakota will hold its goals for proficiency in reading and math at 2009-10 levels, rather than bumping up those targets as previously anticipated. In addition, the state will reduce its graduation rate goal to 80 percent from the current target of 85 percent.

For five years running, the District of Columbia has failed to uphold parts of the federal law that governs the education of students with disabilities, according to the federal Department of Education's ratings of the district and other states and territories.