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"Just seven months after his surprising expansion into reading, writing and arithmetic with the $360-million acquisition of Wireless Generation, News Corp.'s chairman and CEO seems intent on making the grade in what could be the future of education -- economized, customized, data-driven digitized instruction. "

I just read an insightful article in Stateline Weekly this morning. While teachers and parents grow increasingly concerned about falling revenues for public schools, many legislatures and governors, of both political stripes, are seizing the moment to shift toward business-inspired, performance-based models and "outsourcing" the traditional classroom to privately managed, publicly funded charter schools and on-line instruction. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and state chambers are advocating for this shift and getting their talking points from education-reform theorists, or ideologues depending on your perspective, like Richard Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.

There is widespread awareness that there is a very substantial gap between the educational achievement of the White and the Black population in our nation, and that the gap is as old as the nation itself. This report is about changes in the size of that gap, beginning with the first signs of a narrowing that occurred at the start of the last century, and continuing on to the end of the first decade of the present century. In tracking the gap in test scores, the report begins with the 1970s and 1980s, when the new National Assessment of Educational Progress began to give us our first national data on student achievement. That period is important because it witnessed a substantial narrowing of the gap in the subjects of reading and mathematics. This period of progress in closing the achievement gap received much attention from some of the nation's top researchers, driven by the idea that perhaps we could learn some lessons that could be repeated.

This report takes an important first step in assessing the consequences of relying on state tests versus study-administered tests for general, student-level measures of reading and math achievement in evaluations of educational effectiveness.

In the 2007 case Morse v. Frederick, when the court upheld the discipline of a student who had unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at a school-related event, Justice Thomas joined the majority's opinion. But he wrote a separate concurrence, for himself only, explaining that he would go further and overrule the landmark 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. That case, involving students who wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War, has been a fundamental guarantee of student speech rights in school.

With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents research examining the variation between and impact that individual teacher training institutions in Washington state have on the effectiveness of teachers they train. Using administrative data linking teachers' initial endorsements to student achievement on state reading and math tests, we find the majority of teacher training programs produce teachers who are no more or less effective than teachers who trained out-of-state. However, we do find a number of cases where there are statistically significant differences between estimates of training program effects for teachers who were credentialed at various in-state programs. These findings are robust to a variety of different model specifications.

"Shut it down" sounds like a logical, if extreme, option when all else has failed, but a study by John Engberg from RAND and his colleagues presented some disturbing data about school closure. They found that students in schools that are closed due to poor performance actually do substantially worse on reading and math tests in the new school to which they are sent for at least a year, and then recover and end up doing about as well as they were doing at their original school. In other words, after all the expense, acrimony, and heartache involved in closing a school, the students involved do not benefit.

As I predicted, there was no miracle in DC under Michelle Rhee's reign. At least not one you can see on the NAEP scores for fourth or eighth grade students in reading and math.

Here's what the newly released scores for the 2011 administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress show for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math, on a 500-point scale

Tomorrow, the education world will get the results of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as the "nation's report card." The findings - reading and math scores among a representative sample of fourth and eighth graders - will drive at least part of the debate for the next two years, when the next round comes out. I'm going to make a prediction, one that is definitely a generalization, but is hardly uncommon in policy debates: People on all "sides" will interpret the results favorably no matter how they turn out.

Imagine you're a parent of a seven-year-old who has just come home from school with her end-of-year report card. And the report card provides marks for only two subjects, and for children who are in grade-levels different from hers. Furthermore, there's nothing on the report card to indicate how well these children have been progressing throughout the year. There are no teacher comments, like "great participation in class" or "needs to turn in homework on time." And to top it off, the report gives a far harsher assessment of academic performance than reports you've gotten from other sources. That's just the sort of "report card" that was handed to America yesterday in the form of the National Assessment of Education Progress. And while the NAEP is all well and good for what it is -- a biennial norm-referenced, diagnostic assessment of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading -- the results of the NAEP invariably get distorted into all kinds of completely unfounded "conclusions" about the state of America's public education system.

If you follow education research - or quantitative work in any field - you'll often hear the term "significant effect." For example, you will frequently read research papers saying that a given intervention, such as charter school attendance or participation in a tutoring program, had "significant effects," positive or negative, on achievement outcomes. This term by itself is usually sufficient to get people who support the policy in question extremely excited, and to compel them to announce boldly that their policy "works." They're often overinterpreting the results, but there's a good reason for this. The problem is that "significant effect" is a statistical term, and it doesn't always mean what it appears to mean. As most people understand the words, "significant effects" are often neither significant nor necessarily effects. Let's very quickly clear this up, one word at a time, working backwards.

"There is a serious flaw in the national Common Core English/Language Arts reading standards and it is the result of the ideological point of view about literacy and learning of those who developed it. I am not sure if it was done intentionally or if they are actually unaware of it. The flaw is uncertainty about how we know what a document really means."

"This may be the most important article you read this week, this month, or this year. It was published last year, and I missed it. But, wow, Bruce Baker nails what is wrong with "education reform.""

"Ms. Goldstein's book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic. A hate-read is nigh impossible. (Trust me, I tried.) While Ms. Goldstein is sympathetic to the unionized public-school teacher, she also thinks the profession is hamstrung by a defensive selfishness, harboring too fine a memory for ancient wounds. The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. "

"On March 3, the New York Times published one of their "Room for Debate" features, in which panelists were asked "How To Ensure and Improve Teacher Quality?" When I read through the various perspectives, my first reaction was: "Is that it?" It's not that I don't think there is value in many of the ideas presented -- I actually do. The problem is that there are important aspects of teacher quality that continue to be ignored in policy discussions, despite compelling evidence suggesting that they matter in the quality equation. In other words, I wasn't disappointed with what was said but, rather, what wasn't. Let's take a look at the panelists' responses after making a couple of observations on the actual question and issue at hand."

"President Barack Obama pretends to be a friend of public education, but it just is not so. Sure, the White House offers a decorative promotional on K12 education; however, if one reads it closely, one sees that the Obama administration believes education (and, by extension, those educated) should serve the economy; that "higher standards and better assessments" and "turning around our lowest achieving schools" is No Child Left Behind (NCLB) leftover casserole, and that "keeping teachers in the classroom" can only elicit prolonged stares from those of us who know better. All of these anti-public-education truths noted, the deeper story in what the Obama administration values regarding American education lay in its selection of US Department of Education (USDOE) appointees. Their backgrounds tell the story, and it isn't a good one for the public school student, the community school and the career K12 teacher. In this post, I examine the backgrounds and priorities of eight key USDOE appointees. "

The city's annual A-through-F grading system for its public schools should be interpreted with caution, according to a report by the Independent Budget Office released Thursday. But overall the system is a "significant improvement" over simply looking at student test scores alone.

Let's talk about talking pineapples. Actually (spoiler alert!) I'm going to use the pineapple as a sneaky way to introduce the topic of privatization of public education. I was driven to this. Do you know how difficult it is to get anybody to read about "privatization of education?" It's hell. A pineapple, on the other hand, is something everybody likes. It's a symbol of hospitality. Its juice is said to remove warts. And you really cannot beat the talking-fruit angle.

Citizens for Public Schools (CPS) believes the compromise reached by the Massachusetts Teachers Association and corporate-funded Stand for Children would avoid the worst aspects of Stand's proposed ballot question, which was a deceptive and destructive proposal that failed to address real obstacles to educational quality and equity. The compromise was passed by the legislature and signed into law by Gov. Deval Patrick today, June 29. In exchange, Stand said it would drop the ballot measure it proposed to put on the November ballot. "Stand for Children has become a vehicle for a few billionaires who want to control how we run our public schools," said CPS President Ann O'Halloran, who was the 2007 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year. "I'm relieved that Stand was blocked from achieving its full agenda, but CPS and our allies must be prepared to resist similar efforts down the road. We need to raise awareness of this as a national problem, not just a Massachusetts issue."