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The most interesting part of the new Condoleezza Rice-Joel Klein report, which bemoans how American national security is threatened by the poor state of public education, is not in the body of the document itself. The real story is in the dissents at the end of the report. You can read the report here, and then find out all of the many problems with it in the dissenting views attached at the end of the report, which was written by several members of the Council of Foreign Relations task force. Some of the dissenters - including Linda Darling-Hammond and Randi Weingarten - express such broad disagreement with the actual thesis that national security is threatened by our public schools, as well as with some of the recommended solutions, that one could wonder why they agreed to stay on the commission and put their names to the document. Here's why: To ensure that their viewpoint was at least included somewhere in the document.

It cannot be accidental that the sharp drop in teacher morale coincides with the efforts of people such as Michelle Rhee and organizations such as Education Reform Now and Stand for Children to end teacher tenure and seniority. Millions have been spent to end what is called "LIFO" (last in, first out) and to make the case that teachers should not have job security. Many states led by very conservative governors have responded to this campaign by wiping out any job security for teachers. So, if teachers feel less secure in their jobs, they are reacting quite legitimately to the legislation that is now sweeping the country to remove any and all job protections. Their futures will depend on their students' test scores (thanks to Arne Duncan), even though there is no experience from any district or state in which this strategy has actually improved education. Its main effect, as we see in the survey, is to demoralize teachers and make them feel less professional and less respected. Yes, there will be more teaching to the test: Both NCLB and the Race to the Top demand it. And yes, there will be teachers who are wrongly fired. And yes, teachers will leave for other lines of work that are less stressful.

Thirty years ago, a Reagan administration report warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people." The report, "A Nation at Risk," tied that mediocrity to the alleged failure of America's schools. Fast forward to 2012, and the story hasn't changed, former New York City schools chief Joel Klein and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in a report provided to The Huffington Post slated to be released Tuesday. "The sad fact is that the rising tide of mediocrity is not something that belongs in history books," said the report produced by a Council on Foreign Relations task force they co-chaired. The report, called the U.S. Education Reform and National Security report, argues for treating education as a national-security issue, noting that deficiencies in areas like foreign languages hold back America's capacity to produce soldiers, diplomats and spies. It calls for increased standards, accountability and school choice -- charter schools and vouchers -- to increase America's international educational standing.

In confronting any other national security threat, the U.S. wouldn't trust unreliable and unproven solutions. We would go with what works. Why, then, do some in the education sector insist we gamble on the privatization of our public schools? A new report from the Council on Foreign Relations, written by Joel I. Klein and Condoleezza Rice, rightly identifies a problem in our nation's education system, namely, that we are not educating our students well enough to maintain our country's economic vitality, international competitiveness or vibrant democracy. The report argues that this, in turn, poses a national security risk. But simply encouraging more competition, choice, and privatization within our nation's schools, as Klein and Rice advocate, does not constitute the systemic, scalable or sustainable solution that our country needs or that the report claims to present. The dissenting opinions included with the report criticize the authors' policy recommendations for promoting a reform agenda that is based on inconclusive evidence and that fails to address the serious issue of inequity in education funding and opportunity.

"The answer here is very simple, you just have a culture of integrity and you have better security measures in place," said Secretary Arne Duncan in response to the Atlanta cheating scandal. Other testing proponents offered similar suggestions. "A culture of integrity" is not easy because of the corruptive power of test-driven accountability as I have discussed in previous posts and "better security measures" will only incur more costs to tax payers without stop cheating.

Sometime soon we can expect a report from the Council on Foreign Relations' Independent Task Force on U.S. Education Reform and National Security, chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice. The panel started its work in April 2011 and was charged, according to the council's Web site, with "evaluating the U.S. public education system within the context of national security." Can you guess what the report - which may be released next week - will say? In fact, knowing who headed the commission means that we can do better than just guess.

Diane Ravitch reviews: US Education Reform and National Security by Joel I. Klein, Condoleezza Rice, and others

The recent agreement to clarify and refine the New York teacher evaluation law took up an issue that has a special importance for New York City public school educators- the appeals process for ineffective ratings on end-of-the-year summative evaluations. Readers of Edwize know that last December the ship of teacher evaluation negotiations for the 34 Transformation and Restart schools sunk on the rocky shoals of this very issue, when Mayor Bloomberg and the NYC Department of Education refused to negotiate a meaningful and substantive appeals process. For there to be renewed progress on those negotiations, as well as on the negotiations for the evaluations of all New York City public school educators, the issue of the appeal process had to be resolved. The agreement settled the issue of the appeals process for New York City by guaranteeing vital and indispensable due process rights in the teacher evaluation process. With these rights, the educational integrity and fairness of the teacher evaluation process are secure. To understand the importance of the appeals process, and why the agreement secured what New York public school teachers need from due process in such a process, we must first examine the background and context of this issue.

Elementary, middle, and high schools with large minority populations-but not necessarily higher crime rates-are far more likely than others to require students and visitors to pass through metal detectors, according to new research to be presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. In fact, the study finds that rates of student misbehavior and crime are only weakly and inconsistently related to school security measures.

We have read about all of the "cheating scandals" across our nation and how the tests need to be made more "secure." I want to take a moment of your time and tell you about a lesson that a handful of students taught me two years ago and it is a lesson that I believe can absolutely destroy the push toward using student standardized test scores to evaluate schools and individual educators because it shows that the test can never be truly "secure."

New York Board of Regents Chancellor Meryl Tisch recently announced that beginning next year, the state Education Department will institute a test-security unit that will look for cheating on standardized tests. The chancellor stated that, "This was not done in response to a widespread epidemic. This is about preventing rare and unfortunate cases and ensuring systemwide we have a testing system that works." In other words, the state Education Department will now spend at least $1 million a year to solve a problem that does not exist.

Investment money is pouring into Florida from wealthy Chinese who find that Florida has exactly what they are looking for - and what they need to secure US green cards. Chinese investors are taking advantage of the EB-5 investment visa program, the so-called "green card via red carpet," by putting millions into Florida's charter schools and an aquaculture farm in Central Florida.

Education policies focusing on equity in education may be a particularly useful way for countries to increase earnings mobility between generations and reduce income inequality over time. Countries can work towards this goal by giving equal opportunities to both disadvantaged and advantaged students to achieve strong academic outcomes - laying a pathway for them to continue on to higher levels of education and eventually secure good jobs.

The recent Pineapple and the Hare fiasco does more than identify a daft reading passage on New York State's 8th grade English Language Arts test. Education Commissioner John King scrapped the selection and its six multiple-choice items, admitting they were "ambiguous," when the questions became public last week. The episode opens the door to discussing how the 2012 exams were put together. The State Education Department signed a five-year, $32 million agreement with NCS Pearson to develop English Language Arts and math assessments in grades three to eight. In fact, math testing was administered over three days this week for 1.2 million students. Pearson has grown immensely over the last decade, securing contracts with many states required to test students under the No Child Left Behind Act. This year it succeeded CTB/McGraw-Hill as New York's test vendor.

From the outside, it looks like a single school, with one main door, one security guard, one principal greeting students. But on paper, the Charter School of Excellence at Tamarac is actually two schools in one - a bookkeeping strategy allowing the school to collect an extra $250,000 in grant money from the state. The grant money is intended to help new charter schools get started. But several South Florida charter school operators have tapped into this money by creating new "schools" within existing schools. In many cases, the two schools are indistinguishable, sharing the same building, equipment and administrators. The practice is perfectly legal, state and federal education officials say. But some critics say this allows existing schools to collect extra money instead of promoting new start-ups.

This NBER report concludes that teachers whose students tend to show high gains on their test scores (called "high value-added teachers") also contribute to later student success in young adulthood, as indicated by outcomes such as college attendance and future earnings. To support this claim, it is not sufficient for researchers to show an observed association between teacher value-added and later outcomes in young adulthood. It is also necessary to rule out plausible alternative explanations-for example, that parents who did the most to promote their offspring's long-term success also endeavored to secure high value-added teachers for their children. This review explains that, for the most part, the evidence needed to rule out these alternatives is missing from the report. Thus, policy-makers should tread cautiously in their reaction: the case has not been proved.

The breakthrough experiment in New Haven offers a glimpse of an education future that is less rancorous. It's a tribute to the savvy of Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and as shrewd a union leader as any I've seen. She realized that the unions were alienating their allies, and she is trying to change the narrative. New Haven may be home to Yale University, but this is a gritty, low-income school district in which four out of five kids qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Eighty-four percent of students are black or Hispanic, and graduation rates have been low. A couple of years ago, the school district reached a revolutionary contract with teachers. Pay and benefits would rise, but teachers would embrace reform - including sacrificing job security. With a stronger evaluation system, tenure no longer mattered and weak teachers could be pushed out. Roughly half of a teacher's evaluation would depend on the performance of his or her students - including on standardized tests and other measures of learning. Teachers were protected by a transparent process, and by accountability for principals. But if outside evaluators agreed with administrators that a teacher was failing, the teacher would be out at the end of the school year.

By now, you have seen the latest Metlife Survey of the American Teacher. It shows that teachers' satisfaction with their job has plummeted since 2009, from 59 percent to 44 percent. It is the lowest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of teachers who are likely to leave the profession has grown from 17 percent to 29 percent since 2009. The reasons are obvious: The most satisfied teachers feel their jobs are secure, and they are treated as professionals by the community. Compared with dissatisfied teachers, they are more likely to have opportunities for professional development, time to collaborate with other teachers, and greater parental involvement in their schools. These are teachers working in an atmosphere of professionalism and collaboration.

Value-added has been getting a lot of media attention lately but, unfortunately, most stories are missing the point.  In Gotham Schools I read about a teacher who got a low score but it was because her score was based on students who were not assigned to her.  In The New York Times I read about three teachers who were rated in the single digits, but it was because they had high performing students and a few of their scores went down.  In The Washington Post I read about a teacher who was fired for getting low value-added on her IMPACT report, but it was because her students had inflated pretest scores because it is possible that the teachers from the year before cheated. Each of these stories makes it sound like there are very fixable flaws in value-added.  Get the student data more accurate, make some kind of curve for teachers of high performing students, get better test security so cheating can't affect the next year's teacher's score.  But the flaws in value-added go WAY beyond that, which is what I've been trying to show in my posts - not just some exceptional scenarios, but how it affects the majority of teachers.

This post is about a for-profit charter management organization, Imagine Schools, and real estate/facilities. I'm using the dataset ImagineSchools posted here. Imagine is one of the largest charter operators in the country. The company currently operates 70-something schools. A common challenge for charter schools is access to facilities. Some districts give charters access to entire schools, some allow district schools and charter schools to operate out of the same building ("co-location"), and some charters secure facilities through non-profit or for-profit organization in the private sector. To the best of my knowledge, Imagine does not have any schools in district facilities. Instead, Imagine either owns the schools through the company's real estate arm, SchoolHouse Finance, LLC, or partners with one of two real estate investment trusts ("REITs"), Entertainment Properties Trust and Inland Public Properties Development. As of right now, EPT owns 27 facilities used by Imagine and IPPD owns seven facilities used by Imagine. To gather financial information I collected data from IRS 990 forms for the years 2008 through 20101. I pulled the following information