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"Our earnest Secretary of Education, who famously (and bizarrely) promised Congress a billion-dollar edu-bonus if it reauthorized NCLB by the administration's deadline and to the President's satisfaction, was back at it on Friday. Exhibiting the administration's patented disinterest in the niceties of the U.S. Constitution, he announced that he's getting ready to waive NCLB requirements for states if they agree, as the New York Times put it, "to embrace President Obama's education priorities, a formula the administration used last year in its signature education initiative, the Race to the Top grant competition.""

"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!"

"The Broader Bolder Approach to Education is a national campaign that acknowledges the impact of social and economic disadvantage on schools and students and proposes evidence-based policies to improve schools and remedy conditions that limit many children's readiness to learn."

Chicago Public School officials today announced plans to extend the shortest school day in the nation by an additional 90 minutes and two weeks to provide the critical instructional time needed to boost student achievement and ensure students graduate college and career-ready.

As you are getting ready to go back to school, you may be feeling pleased that your child is going to a school with high test ratings. Before you decide if that's a good thing or not, read this story. You may be shocked at the lengths many schools and districts will go to, to raise their test scores.  After reading, go to your child's school and start asking some hard questions. Need help with the questions. Contact me.

The goal of our recent report "Incomplete: How Middle-Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade" was to jumpstart a national conversation around the state of middle-class schools. Given the response, it looks like we're off to a good start. We've received a wide range of feedback from educators, policymakers, and thought leaders who share a common purpose-getting our kids ready to succeed in the 21st century. Since a portion of the response has focused on our definition of "middle-class" or our approach to school-by-school data, we wanted to take a moment to tackle some of the issues that have been raised.

In remarks last week to the right-wing Manhattan Institute, Gov. Walker finally allowed us to peek behind the curtain to discover what he was REALLY trying to accomplish by using the nuclear option on the Wisconsin Education Association Council. By curbing collective bargaining for public school teachers, Walker told the crowd, public schools in the land of Fighting Bob LaFollette were able to drastically reduce their costs so that they could...get ready for this one...hire a boatload of more teachers in order to significantly reduce class sizes!

Before relocating to Austin, I had spent eight years teaching math and/or science in Egypt, Mexico and Honduras at elite private schools that used American textbooks, American curriculum and were accredited by American institutions.  The majority of my students were not Americans, but graduated with a combination of diplomas: local, American and/or IB (International Baccalaureate). After graduation, nearly all attended college, mostly in the US, Canada and England, and a few remained in their own country for higher education. I proudly returned to the US, toting my international bag of creative, engaging teaching tricks, especially curriculum-based projects that I had created, ready to dazzle my American students. So, imagine my utter shock when resettling into American life, teaching at an Austin public high school, and discovering that the standards were actually lower. Moreover, my teaching creativity was all but stifled for the sake of "standardization" in the most controlling environment I had ever taught.

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.

It's the kind of meeting educators hate: a hundred angry parents packed into a stuffy school auditorium and squeezed into seats built for third-graders. This is Park Slope, Brooklyn, an enclave of urban, liberal-leaning professionals who push their babies around in $800 strollers while pondering whether or not the new artificial grass in the park will give their kids cancer. These parents obsess over every detail of their children's lives-especially their education. And tonight they are angry. Shael Polakow-Suransky '94, the chief academic officer and senior deputy chancellor of New York City's school system, stands before them, ready to receive their ire.

Amazing that, in the midst of getting ready for school, I had enough time to get in an important policy panel today. Before it started, there was already lots of controversy, primarily with the preliminary list lacking teachers of any variety. Eventually, rumor had it that education professor Diane Ravitch declined her invitation to the panel because of the lack of teacher voice. After including Leo Casey and Stephen Lazar, there was further discussion about Educators for Excellence's Sydney Morris' presence, drawing attention to what many of us feel is a right-of-center lean for Gotham Schools. Others saw the panel as a way for City Hall News to put themselves at the center of the debate for NYC education. As for me, I came in hoping not to say a word, as I've probably said far too much this summer and didn't get to listen enough.

New York State Education Commissioner John B. King has posted a Back to School message for educators, with a transcript included. The message for educators is that all adults in schools should constantly be asking, "Who is proficient? How do I know and how do I increase those levels of proficiency?" From the district superintendent, to the superintendent, to the principal, to the teacher, to the office staff, everyone has to be continuously asking, "Where are we? Where are we in terms of our goals and where are we in terms of our students' college and career readiness and how do we get there?"

For months-no, years-the ESEA discussion has been nothing short of maddening. While many pundits decry the lack of a "clear route to reauthorization," an obvious bipartisan solution has been sitting there, ready for the picking. It goes something like this: Step away from federal heavy-handedness around states' accountability and teacher credentialing systems; keep plenty of transparency of results in place, especially test scores disaggregated by racial and other subgroups; offer incentives for embracing promising reforms instead of mandates; and give school districts a lot more flexibility to move their federal dollars around as they see fit.

After nearly two decades of magic on the tennis court, Andre Agassi is ready to tackle his next big challenge: giving large numbers of underprivileged children a chance to succeed through charter schools.

Once touted as a solution to Detroit's public school woes, charter high schools are often doing just about as poorly - and in many cases worse - at educating students and getting them ready for college, a Detroit News analysis of recent test data shows.

State Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. told school superintendents from across the state that the education reforms adopted by the New York State Board of Regents will help make high school graduates in New York "college- and career- ready."  King, speaking at the New York State Council of School Superintendents 2011 Fall Leadership Summit in Saratoga Springs, said too many of New York State public high school graduates are not prepared for college and work.  He noted that roughly 40 percent of students entering community colleges across the state have to take remedial classes.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other state authorities are pushing a plan to evaluate all kindergartners as they enter school, to determine their readiness for the classroom. The proposed new requirement, which would take effect in the 2014-15 school year, aims in part at helping the state win an estimated $100 million in grants offered by the Obama administration to upgrade early-childhood education.

"Plans are under way for investment corporations to execute the biggest conversion - some call it theft - of public schools property in U.S. history. That is not hyperbole. Investment bankers themselves estimate that their taking over public schools is going to result in hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, if they can pull it off."

"In a move seen by some activists as a concession to Chicago's strong anti-testing movement, Chicago Public Schools won't administer the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a test required by federal mandate as part of the new Common Core curriculum. Instead, the district will test only 10 percent of its 664 schools."

"Every year, around this time, the College Board publicizes its SAT results, and hundreds of newspapers, blogs, and television stations run stories suggesting that trends in the aggregate scores are, by themselves, a meaningful indicator of U.S. school quality. They're not."